Previously known as the PS4 Neo, the Sony PlayStation 4 Pro has been announced. The new model can display games in Ultra HD as well as offering HDR support. The unit is powered by AMD and is twice as fast as the PS4.
The Ultra HD feature doesn't mean that games are rendered at 3840x2160, games could be rendered at 1080P and the are up-scaled. The Sony PlayStation 4 Pro was developed under Codename NEO and is based upon an upgraded CPU, GPU and RAM. The custom SoC chip that empowers it has 8 CPU cores, running at 2.10 GHz; and an embedded GPU (IGP) featuring 36 compute units based on "Next-generation Graphics CoreNext" architecture from AMD. The 36 next-gen GCN compute units (x 64 stream processors per cluster) sound very familiar and close to Polaris10 "Ellesmere" chip with a stream processor count of 2304, double over the 1152 from the current PlayStation 4.
| Original PS4 | PS4 Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | 8 Jaguar Cores at 1.6 GHz | 8 Jaguar Cores at 2.1 GHz |
| GPU | AMD GCN, 18 CUs at 800 MHz | Next-gen AMD GCN, 36 CUs at 911 MHz |
| Memory | 8 GB GDDR5, 176 GB/s | 8 GB GDDR5, 218 GB/s |
Sony offers suggestions for reaching 4K/UltraHD resolutions for NEO mode game builds, but they're also giving developers a degree of freedom with how to approach this. 4K TV owners can expect the Sony PlayStation 4 Pro to upscale games to fit the format, but one place Sony is unwilling to bend is on frame rate. The PS4 Pro also is fitted with a bigger 1 TB HDD. The Sony PlayStation 4 Pro starts selling at $399.
