Digital Foundry PS4 Pro Launch Coverage Begins
Apparently there's a staggered embargo and they can post their unboxing today. It's a 30 minute video so I'll update this post if it's significantly more than an unboxing.
Update 1:
Leadbetter says not to get your hopes up regarding SATA III due to the "copying bandwidth" being really low. If SATA II is getting hobbled like that (20 mb/sec), then he would expect SATA III to be hobbled as well.
Update 2:
Originally Posted by Inuhanyou
I watched this already about an hour ago. The most interesting this Richard speaks on is something Cerny brought up called "Geometry upscale rendering".
He said that Cerny said this Geometry rendering technique was very low cost computationally, could be implemented in only several days compared to a few weeks for checkerboard, and virtually eliminated most jaggies.
This is done by the ID buffer and the depth buffer being disassociated from the frame buffer. Essentially the frame buffer still runs at 1080p, but the ID buffer and the depth buffers run at 4K, which essentially gives you the geometry coverage of 4K at 1080p very easily. Now the difference being that because the framebuffer is still 1080p, you don't get the pixel resolution boost and clarity that obviously comes with a framebuffer increase, but it seems like a very useful technique for those developers who want to do the bare minimum at 1080p to provide minimal jaggies compared to the original 1080p PS4 game,yet still have tons of headroom to increase graphical fidelity with the more powerful GPU.
Update 3:
Per Cerny, the new GPU is doubling the standard PS4 GPU. Backward compatibility is accomplished by essentially turning off half of the compute units. They talk about Xbox One S and how the higher clock CPU gave some games a small framerate bump. Leadbetter says he's pretty sure there won't be a difference here with PS4 Pro because it's something Sony was very adamant about. Fundamental difference in approach between Sony and MS. Xbox is now a platform (in his opinion), whereas Sony is still wanting to maintain console generations...and PS4 Pro is not a new generation.
Originally Posted by Inuhanyou
Also, Richard seems adamant that there will be zero differences in games played on PS4 and PS4Pro without a patch, even though according to his notes, Cerny told him that the only thing they did to emulate the original PS4, was to downclock the GPU and CPU to base PS4 clock, and shut off half of the GPU.
Which still doesn't account for the actual architecture differences in the GPU and the PS4 GPU giving better results by default in GPU bound scenarios, let alone speaking of the bandwidth increase that was never actually spoken on.
I think we might have some surprises in store that haven't been talked about, but we'll see.
Update 4:
"Ship has sailed" on people expecting better framerates at every game in 1080p. Seems they're going more in the direction of 30fps with better visuals. Leadbetter says what PS4 Pro does for 1080p is a good question and that you essentially get more "1080p goodness" and supersampling. Tomb Raider and Knack showed big improvements with supersampling. Mostly though, it's about 4k, according to Leadbetter. (EDIT: To be clear here, he's not saying games will never have a better framerate. It's more of "in general," the idea of the PS4 Pro is more focused on better visuals than framerate. As we already know though with Tomb Raider, devs are free to do whatever they like, which may result in higher framerate modes).
