An Upgraded PS4?
When it comes to hardware, things become outdated really fast, what could have been considered to be a high tier gaming console is simply not capable of keeping itself on par with modern games.
Sure developers
could tune down their games and that’s exactly what they’re going to do
but if you believe your current console will become useless then we’ve
got some good news for you, we know for now that games released towards
the end of 2016 will have two different versions or modes, one for the
original PS4 console and for the upgraded NEO, this is because
PlayStation NEO brings several upgrade to the table allowing games to
utilize the hardware, probably increasing the resolution and hopefully,
the FPS.
What sort of upgrades are we talking about?
Well the fact that both Microsoft and Sony launched their systems with support for external hard drives takes one possible upgrade out of the equation, we may still see the NEO having higher storage but it’s not probable, simply because hard drives have become rather… cheap and anyone who’s running low on space can simply pick one up on any electronics shop and use that with their current consoles.NEO itself is going to bring us a much more powerful CPU, GPU as well as RAM. The actual numbers for now are:
| The Original PS4 | PlayStation ‘NEO’ | |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | 8 Jaguar Cores @ 1.6GHz | 8 Jaguar Cores @ 2.1GHz |
| GPU | AMD GCN, 18 CUs @ 800MHz | Improved AMD GCN, 36 CUs @ 911MHz |
| Memory | 8GB GDDR5, 176GB/s | 8GB GDDR5, 218GB/s |
We can expect to see some sort of VR compatible games being released as well, but there have been no indications that owners of the current PS4 will be stripped of their favorite titles anytime soon so you’ll be able to enjoy VR no matter which version of the PS4 you own.
How will this effect future games?
Sony doesn’t have any plans to separate the two user bases, doing so would cost them quite a lot of loyal customers, players who prefer PCs already understand that they’ll have to upgrade to the latest hardware regularly if they wish to play all their favorite games as they’re released.Console users on the other hand would be completely new to the idea that they’ll have to purchase a newer PS4 so soon after picking up the original model. We need to understand that the PlayStation 3 lasted nearly a decade whereas it hasn’t even been five years since the release of PlayStation 4, if this gamble works out we can expect to see a new era in console gaming.
But even after all the hardware upgrades that NEO will receive, it won’t be capable of rendering the same 4K, 60 FPS games that a modern gaming computer can, but that’s not even a fair comparison because the price tag for such a computer is enough to buy a couple of consoles from every manufacturer and still be left with spare cash.
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