Over the past few months, we have been hearing rumours that Sony will be releasing a PS 4.5 soon. Well, gaming website Giantbomb has acquired more details as to what exactly the PS4.5 is, and it should be able to lay to rest some worries that current PlayStation 4 users have about the upgraded console.
As reported before, the PlayStation 4.5, codenamed NEO, will have components that are a bit more powerful than the current PS4. The eight-core CPU found in the original PS4 will have its clockspeed bumped up to 2.1GHz, the amount of RAM on the NEO will remain the same as the original PS4, although its bandwidth has been bumped to 911 MHz. The biggest upgrade to the PlayStation NEO is the GPU as the NEO will sport an improved AMD GCN that comes with 32 compute units clocked at 912 MHz.
This not-insignificant jump in raw power for the PlayStation NEO has lead to many PS4 owners wondering if their current console would be rendered obsolete when the NEO is released. However, according to Sony’s internal documents, the company has stated that the NEO will not be supplanting the PS4. For one, Sony has explicitly stated that there will be no NEO-only games and they will not be letting developers separate NEO users from original PS4 players while playing on PSN. Sony has also reportedly state that developers are not allowed to offer exclusive gameplay options or special unlockables for NEO players, which means that apart from performance improvements or 4K support, games on both the PS4 and NEO will be identical.
For performance, Sony will be giving developers some degree of freedom with how they will implement 4K/Ultra HD resolutions to their games. However, Sony has stated that the framerate of games that have been upscaled to 4K must meet or exceed the frame rate of the game on the original system. Simply put, if the game runs on 30 FPS on the PS4, Sony expects the upscaled game to run at 30 FPS or above, nothing less.
While there is no official release date for the PlayStation NEO just yet, every PS4 game that will be released starting from October will need to support both the original PS4 and the NEO. For games that are released in late September, Sony has made it mandatory for developers to create a day one patch that would update the game to NEO standards. Developers can also create day one patches to games that were released prior to late September, but they aren’t under any obligation to do so.
Sony did not reveal much as to how the PS NEO would work with the PlayStation VR, but rumours have been going around that the NEO will be able to support the PSVR without needing the “breakout box” that the headset ships with. In any case, with E3 just a month away, we fully expect Sony to reveal more about the PlayStation NEO then.
Source: GiantBomb