14 DAY TRIAL // SONY probably hopes to raise interest for 4K high-definition TV sets that will likely sell in the following years. AMD promises the Japan TV maker a powerful GPU that will ensure playability at the likely standard of 30 frames per second.
For SONY, making 4K resolution a standard for the PlayStation 4, will be a wonderful money-making idea. They can thus sell very expensive 4K capable TV sets, re-master and resell old popular movies and sell those too, and, of course, re-master older popular games for some extra money.
When it comes to games, making them run on the new PS4 console might be a problem as it’s really hard to port customized software made for the Cell processor over to a new x86 architecture.
But SONY might rely on the fact that most of the more popular console games are already available in x86 versions and will take way less time and resources to make them run on the new PS4.
The thing is that AMD’s x86 CPU will have to offer a really powerful single-threaded or low-threaded performance and that’s something AMD’s CPUs are lacking and have been lacking for more than half a decade. It may be that the touted x86 CPU might not be AMD’s after all, but that is not very likely.
AMD’s GPUs now are not capable of achieving a stable 30 frames per second even when playing at just 5760x1080 resolution. Driving a new game with a resolution of 4096 × 3112 would require a chip with much more than 200% the performance of today’s Tahiti.
4K resolution has 204% the number of pixels in 5760 x 1080. But a new generation of games will bring heavier and more demanding graphic engines so there are some high requirements for AMD’s future console GPU.