Dive deeper into the rabbit hole with the next iteration of PS4

Who doesn’t enjoy a good Matrix reference? Remember Morpheus? Of course you do, you’re a mere 6 months away from wearing it on your face. In comes the much rumored NEO, also known as PS4K and PS4.5. Let’s stick with NEO shall we?

The story broke today by Giantbomb‘s Austin Walker and was later corroborated by Eurogamer. They seem to be sitting on the same bunch of documents detailing a lot of information about codename NEO, including specs, timeframes for devkits and the rather strict (but good!) demands developers will have to take into consideration when making games for it.

The documents pretty much confirms its existence. There is no timeframe for its release, but devkits are going out right now, and a “second-gen” test kit will follow in June. Apparently a lot of beans will be spilled at DevCon in May. How the thing looks is still a secret, and developers have been told not to share.

	Current PS4	NEO
CPU	8 Jaguar Cores at 1.6 GHz	8 Jaguar Cores at 2.1 GHz
GPU	AMD GCN, 18 CUs at 800 MHz	Improved AMD GCN, 36 CUs at 911 MHz
Memory	8 GB GDDR5, 176 GB/s	8 GB GDDR5, 218 GB/s

 

As you can see there’s a wee bump to the specs here which should help out in reaching that infamous 4k on consoles. Devs are not obligated to develop games in native 4k, but have been giving roadmaps as to how to achieve 4k when developing for the NEO.

Sony has apparently also set some house rules for upcoming games that take advantage of the NEO-specs. The main focus is that every game should work on both versions of the console. This means that every game requires a mode (settings) that works for the base PS4, and one that will utilize whatever goodies they deem useful in NEO. Come October and every developer will have to adhere to these rules.

I suggest you go check out the more detailed and better written reports from both Giantbomb and Eurogamer, and then take a moment to contemplate your purchase plans for what could very well be this fall.