PS4 games will be ‘an awful lot prettier’ on PS4K, says Sony

PS4 games will “play an awful lot prettier” on Sony’s high-end PlayStation Neo, Sony Interactive Entertainment boss Andrew House has said.

Speaking to the BBC, House explained that the Neo “is an addition to the existing line-up” of PlayStation consoles, “not a replacement”. “And perhaps we have an opportunity to move slightly away from just a static console that remains absolutely the same for a period of 6, 7, 8 years,” he said, “and perhaps offer in addition to the current PlayStation 4, something a little extra, particularly – and I should stress this – in the area of graphic fidelity and games that will essentially play an awful lot prettier than games have previously.”

While Sony has yet to announce PlayStation Neo’s specs, rumours suggest it will feature an improved CPU and twice the amount of GCN compute units over the current PS4, along with improved memory bandwidth.

It likely won’t, however, be able to match up to Microsoft’s Project Scorpio, which Microsoft revealed yesterday will have 6 teraflops of GPU processing power and deliver “true 4K gaming”. An in-depth analysis posted by Digital Foundry this morning suggests that Scorpio’s GPU could actually be around 40% faster than the unit intended for Neo.

Neo won’t automatically improve existing PS4 games, however, rumours say. Instead, if developers choose to make use of the additional power, they’ll need to release a patch updating their game to Neo’s spec.

As for why Sony didn’t discuss PlayStation Neo during its press conference last night, House says that “it’s important to show people the new hardware, the new platform when we’ve got the full range of experiences that can take advantage of it.”

A release date for PlayStation Neo has yet to be confirmed, although PS4 games are rumoured to be required to ship with support for the new console from October 2016.

Project Scorpio, meanwhile, goes on sale holiday 2017.

Source: bbc.co.uk