New PS4 model "neo"; what the PS4k rumours amounted to
With the current consoles being basically a PC it seems Sony went one step further and delivered us one of the first true console upgrades we have seen in many years. It claims backwards compatibility will be a thing but it remains to be seen whether we will see "we highly suggest the PS4k" in the future. No release date but game developers are seemingly required to support it by October and have patches for games released before then.
There have been all sorts of rumours and speculation happening for months now but it is being widely reported now as more concrete information has come to light via Giantbomb.
It is claimed so called 4k output is supported, though games themselves will not be required to do so. Unknown framerate/frequency but it would be surprising to not see some flavour of 60Hz, especially as Sony is requiring game performance to match or beat the present PS4 model. Alas the VR/headset gaming stuff Sony is working on seems to be a bit absent from the documents obtained, give or take mention of a breakout box, so possibly not 120Hz out of the box. The specs the furryteeth care about see rather more modest increases (still 8 cores but with a jump from 1.6Ghz to 2.1Ghz, slightly faster memory and more "compute units/CUs" which is somewhat analogous to the older concept of shader cores in the graphics cards) and other than a bigger memory allocation/"budget" for games it does not represent a change in the core underlying architecture. Unlike upgrading your PC though you will apparently not see improvements beyond any firmware driven upscaling and such unless the devs release a patch.
Whether we will see the return of 4 player split screen co-op now everybody can have their own 1080p space is also unknown, we can but hope. Apparently online games of a competitive nature are being considered in this with a kind of online mode being required so we hopefully will not see the FOV and increased clarity set appear in consoles.
Official word from Sony is not a lot right now but there are many conferences coming up so we might hear more from one of those. No price has been mentioned but apparently the previous leaks reckon $400 USD (£280, 350 Euros, 43000 yen, $520 Australian, 3250 Sek or 267 Guineas, though users of any of those currencies are probably wary of directly converting like that).
We have not really seen true console upgrades since the days of the Amiga, give or take things like the N64 expansion pack which is hardly in the same league as this. What do you think about all this and what do you hope this leads to?
Thanks to Foxi4 for the sources.