Microsoft made it pretty clear about their new Project Scorpio, due to release in 2017, will be going head to head with Gaming PCs. On the other hand, Sony is also expected to show off their new console, most probably the Neo, Sony’s answer to Project Scorpio.
Microsoft confirmed at E3 2016, that their Project Scorpio will sport 6TFLOPs of power, meanwhile Sony’s PlayStation 4 Neo specs were never confirmed arising the question of how many “TFLOPs” would Sony’s console have. According to the internal documents leaks, EuroGamer speculated that the PlayStation Neo should be able to sport 4.2 TFLOPs of horsepower. With Microsoft confirming the specifications of their Project Scorpio, Sony still has the ability to make any amendments before the final launch.
Although, even if the rumors turn out to be true, we know that the PlayStation 4 Neo is also a part of AMD’s custom SOC family which allowed Digital Foundry to replicate what performance we could expect from the Playstation 4 Neo by underclocking the RX 480, the closest GPU that meets similar specs of the Sony’s Internal Document leaks.
| PS4 | Playstation 4 “NEO” | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | Eight Jaguar cores clocked at 1.6GHz | Eight Jaguar cores clocked at 2.1GHz | 1.3x |
| GPU | 18 Radeon GCN compute units at 800MHz | 36 ‘improved’ GCN compute units at 911MHz | 2.3x FLOPs |
| Memory | 8GB GDDR5 at 176GB/s | 8GB GDDR5 at 218GB/s | 24% more bandwidth, 512MB more useable memory |
Source: EuroGamer
For PC Gamers, the RX 480 is an excellent GPU due to it’s price point. The RX 480 scales very well at 1440p which good framerates at medium to high settings for most games. Although the Playstation 4 Neo seems to be underclocked, the analyzation done by DigitalFoundry could suggest us how the next console by Sony may perform.
The tests done at Digital Foundry revealed the speculated console to have enough horsepower for actual 4k gaming. However, the frame rate takes a big dip under the table considering 4x the resolution of 1080p. Remarkably, just as the RX 480, the underclocked “Neo” also seems to hold its ground well at 1440p.
But with all that aside, there were some pretty strong rumors floating yesterday speculating Sony’s announcement of the Neo, next month on the 7th. Many rumors also speculated that Sony may actually bump the the specs higher to compete with Microsoft’s Project Scorpio as a former Sony Employee confirms.
At last, the Sony Employee also indicated that the next console by Sony to hit the shelves before thanksgiving. Considering that, it’s only a month apart for the release of Playstation’s VR. Anyways, let’s take this with a pinch of salt and set an alarm for “Sony’s Meeting” event next month in NYC which will also be live streamed.
Sources: WCCFTech, EuroGamer/DigitalFoundry
