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Raytracing is a good thing, not so much because of the better graphics, but because it enables produce nice graphics with less sophisticated engines and less artist input. A lot of the lighting etc. is currently baked into textures, hard coded, hand-optimized. This takes a lot of time. With raytracing, a lot of this comes "for free", so smaller / indie dev teams can produce games with AAA level graphics.

At the high cost of performance. As a consumer I am not really concerned with how easy it is to develop for. I'd rather see high frame rates than bleeding edge graphics. It's a good technology, but if we can't even manage 60 FPS minimum in 2020 I will be highly disappointed.

> As a consumer I am not really concerned with how easy it is to develop for.

I don't see how this could possibly be. Ease of development could mean the difference between your next favorite game existing at all. Or having the funds to become your next favorite game instead of cutting scope into a mediocre game that never got to realize its full creative ambition.

All upstream concerns contribute to the end result that you do care about.

Anything that helps people create AAA-quality games without needing the coffers of Electronic Arts is good for gamers.

I don't understand what you are talking about. You don't need AAA-quality graphics or a 2019 AAA-size budget for a game to be great. The boom of indie games has shown that great games can have great gameplay and performance, but without the fancy graphics of an AAA game.

Do you have any examples of the complexity of AAA graphics caused a game to either have its scope cut, or not exist at all? The only one remotely close to that is Destiny 1's devtools making created/editing levels difficult. However, that game had more fundamental problems, like needing to support the PS3 in addition to the PS4.

The point is that with ray tracing the indie game and the AAA game might not look all that different in terms of graphics. Right now AAA games use crazy 40-50 pass shaders and mountains of custom tweaked texture maps to get stuff looking like it does. With ray tracing you can accomplish a lot of that with almost zero effort.

Because when people look to buy something they are judging the end product and not the process. If indie studio A and massive studio B both create a nearly identical game, but studio A spend 100x less on development because of ease of development due to raytracing it still doesn't concern me. I'd expect studios A and B to get similar sales. If studio A used raytracing tech to develop the same game, but it only ran at half the framerate I would go with studio B regardless of whatever processes they used to create the game.

Raytracing democratizes graphics. Indie shops will have to spend less time writing shaders and lighting and can refocus that attention on making the gameplay and overall experience better.

We manage 75+ with ease on PCs larger than toasters.

When they talk about ray-tracing, they don't mean that real-time ray-tracing at 60fps is suddenly possible. We're a decade if not more away from that. They're talking about extremely limited applications for a few effects here and there, in specific scenes. That's what's been demoed so far.

NVidia has a bunch of demos with their newest hard-ware. The "Stormtroopers" demo was rendered in real-time, but on a very high-end >$60k workstation.

you are absolutely right, the systems we have today are not fast enough. But they will get faster with every generation, and the fact that is is available in at least one next-gen console makes it more likely that the industry will indeed go in that direction.

8K output support doesn't really cost much so I wouldn't worry about it. It doesn't matter to most of the GPU internals. Games will internally run at whatever resolution they think results in the best quality/responsiveness/fluidity/development-cost trade-off, supporting 8K doesn't change anything there.

Fair enough. My concerns were more rooted in performance than the cost of the console itself. But the performance gains they reported by switching to an SSD would more than likely trump anything lost by supporting higher resolutions.

there's nothing 'lost' by supporting higher resolutions. It will render internally at (say) 4k, and upsample to 8k.

Agreed! I'd say the SSD is a real, literal, game changer. Extra resolution is just more of the same really.

PS5 will support 8K just like PS3 supported 1080p: it was there but almost no one used it. Nearly every game opted for 720p instead. It's a way to future-proof the generation, allowing for a future enhanced version of the console.

Cautionary tale: the PS4 Pro retroactively dropped support for many early 4K displays, including my own, in a software update. The updates were hardware fused to prevent downgrading, of course.

My plan for 8k is to wait for mass market adoption before buying one and hooking it up to a DRM-box built by a company with foreseeable financial interest in "stimulating" display upgrades during a down quarter.

Wow really? That sucks... just curious: what model of TV do you have?

Lest we forget, Sony also sold PS3s with the advertised feature of Linux support, which was later removed in a firmware update. The same Sony which sold audio CDs with rootkits.

I miss the idealistic days when hackers held grudges. Don't buy Sony. They are the enemy.

I'm assuming that there are basically two reasons to support 8K now. One is that it gets them higher resolution for a potential future VR headset. The other is that it is bigger than 4K and that sounds good in their marketing.

I suspect it's more for VR and 8k bump on output is cheap compared to helping Samsung and LG sell their 8k models.

Another possible reason, now that I think about it more, is future proofing.

If that's the case, then props for forward thinking on their part.

Recently on a whim I decided to plug in my N64 to a 1080p TV, and I was surprised how terribly the graphics scaled to the higher resolution.

My understanding is it's not just the resolution, but CRT vs LCD. N64 looks best on a a CRT.

The N64 is also mainly hampered by it's texture memory. You only have 4KB total to play with for a texture (it's manually managed memory, not a cache) and with mipmaping, that's effectively 2KB. That's one 32x32 picture at 16bit color.

Additionally, developers didn't have a great handle on how the more modern memory hierarchy (read high DRAM latency) affected things yet so a lot of techniques they used sort of fought against the architecture and led to low resolutions, and they used heavy blurring and antialiasing to compensate.

To add to this, this is why GoldenEye N64 has so many grayscale textures... they use less memory.

They took this to the next level with bad fur day. By combining simple textures with plain color filters they could create complex visuals without using more memory. Eg: All the liquids (there are a lot!) look and flow the same, but have different color filters applied to differentiate them. They managed to squeeze in a full voice track too!

Perhaps, but a huge part of this is the shoddy decoding circuitry that most LCD TVs have. You can do a lot better. For example, you could buy a Framemeister, or you could retrofit the N64 with HDMI output.

Many artistic techniques in pre-LCD-era games are designed for the physical effects of composite cables and CRT screens. A simple example is transparency via dithering, where intentional color bleed produces the effect in the display equipment rather than the console: https://i.imgur.com/F6aW3dG.png

The N64 the console with the worse video output and it poor texture quality doesn't help. The only thing that really improves it is an expensive internal HDMI mod.

Both PS4 and Xbox One came out just as 4K was starting to get into market (prob a bit ahead of where 8K will be when PS5 launches), and it was frustrating that we had to wait 4ish years to get 4k support. Committing to 8K early means the same box will serve the early adopters as well as everybody else without a mid-cycle upgrade.

I generally think there will be limited urgency to upgrade to 8K any time soon (benefits over 4K seem incremental and we're not close to done w/ that transition yet) in the home, but love that Sony is making a strong stake for technical leadership.

Regarding 8K... even though 4K TVs are readily available, my guess is most of those TVs don't display 4K content. Netflix will often give you 720p. Game consoles have a difficult time simply pushing 4K pixels down the pipeline. Some games have taken to something akin to interlacing, except with the pixels divided in a checkerboard pattern.

Sony sells TVs. Getting consumers more familiar with the 'next' format helps them down the road. Also bigger is always better, unless it's fractional.

Netflix is actually probably the most common source of 4k home video for most people. Nearly all of the Netflix original content is 4k, increasingly in Dolby Vision. Unfortunately (and bizarrely, to me), you do have to buy the most expensive monthly plan to have access to the 4k content. I don't understand why they would choose to make video quality the main object of price discrimination (it seems like associating Netflix with great video quality would be extremely advantageous to them), but hey, it worked for them to get the extra bucks from me.

Doesn't 4k content both cost them more to deliver and generally go to a demo that is more price insensitive? Seems like an obvious play.

No, most of the money Netflix spends on buying content, servers and network cables are cheap.

I've just googled: Netflix yearly revenue is 16B and Netflix spent 12B on content.

Well, if I could offer content (some of which was unique) to a self-selected audience that has very low price sensitivity, I would absolutely put it at a higher price point. Seems like a no-brainer.

While it is available in 4K, even if you are paying for access to 4K you are not necessarily getting the stream in 4K.

I wonder at that - you can clearly see the difference with an HDR and Dolby Vision image in a way that you can't "downsample", so, do they/can they downsample the HDR image to hit 1080p?

People are mostly concerned about content rather than picture quality. Netflix can deliver 720p and people will pay for it, some people will pay for 4K because of the marketing but don't actually notice that they're getting 720p, and only a small group of people left over actually care enough.

Just like how TVs come with default settings that mangle the picture quite a lot, and only some people will fix them.

I understand that. I was just wondering if the 4k streams (the ones that say 4k|Dolby Vision) are being converted down. I'd guess no.

Oh, are you suggesting that they're just straight up lying? They would need to not just trick me into thinking I'm seeing HDR (which is probably doable), but also trick my TV into thinking it's playing Dolby Vision, and also actually use significantly more bandwidth than a 720p stream would (I've checked at my router).

I'm sure all those things are possible, but it's also pretty likely that they're actually producing and distributing content in 4K and Dolby Vision.

Yeah, I can't see a way to fake Dolby Vision - it's pretty obvious when you're getting the extra dynamic range from the image - I'm surprised by how much more apparent it is than 4k. I can see resolution fakery, but that's why I asked if they thought it was possible to scale down the 4k Dolby Vision to 1080p Dolby Vision

I mean, you can definitely fake Dolby Vision. The Apple TV 4K has an option to always output Dolby Vision, and they do their own tone mapping to output normal HDR or SDR content in Dolby Vision. I don't use this feature, and it had pretty terrible reviews at launch (although I heard they have improved it).

But yeah, I think the actual presence of additional dynamic range is pretty noticeable for most well-produced content.

Netflix could fake Dolby Vision by dumping MORE data in than was in the original stream - that seems like a wasteful way to cut corners.

I think you may be responding to something that I didn't write, because I absolutely never suggested that NetFlix is lying or tricking you.

It's just a matter of fact that, for various (many) reasons, people will get 720p streams. Some of these people are paying $3/month for "Premium" with "Ultra HD" and simply do not notice that they are not getting 4K streams. NetFlix would probably rather keep the $3/month, the alternative would be to educate their users about why they are are not getting 4K (can your TV handle it? can your playback device handle it? are they connected correctly? are they configured correctly? do you have sufficient bandwidth? are there problems with your ISP? does your device have the right DRM?) and this is both time-consuming and likely to create a bit of a support nightmare.

Sorry, I misinterpreted. I was thinking from the perspective of people with working 4K setups who are seeking 4K content.

Do you mean if you don't have a 4K TV and streaming device? Or if your bandwidth isn't enough? I'm not sure how they downsample their Dolby Vision streams, since my TV definitely switched over into Dolby Vision. I suppose the Netflix app may be able to stream lower resolution versions still with the Dolby Vision metadata.

> I don't understand why they would choose to make video quality the main object of price discrimination

I think this is how perfect society should work when marginal cost is zero.

Netflix cannot directly charge proportionally to your income.

But the cost of your TV set is somewhat proportional to your income.

If you have 4K TV then you are rich, and you can afford to pay more. To allow poor people who cannot even buy FullHD TV to pay less.

So everyone can watch movies, poor folks can afford it, and rich people won't mind the price.

In another word, it would be worse (from a society point of view), if the price was constant, but only rich people could use Netflix.

(BTW this is how people pay for government services with taxes: rich people pay more money (even with flat tax rate) but get the same service).

8K seems like a good bet, since 6+ years ago when the PS4 came out 4K matched your statements about 8K today. :-)

8k support is so Sony can sell more TVs.

Seems to me that both 8k and ray tracing capabilities fall into the category of better to be prepared than not, because upgrading consoles beyond the HDD isn't really much of a thing – you just replace the whole thing. Maybe they could do a PS5 Pro thing much like they did with PS4, but why not just include the hardware right off the bat if it's available and fits within the cost parameters?

As a very happy PS4 Pro customer, I'm definitely also in the optimistic camp. Heck, I don't even care all that much for the hardware, but I absolutely loved Horizon Zero Dawn and given its a PS exclusive I'll buy the PS5 just because of the next HZD installment.

8k piped into a next gen VR headset would be epic.

All of the changes are pretty much expected and even mandatory for justifying a new generation, especially with the spec boost we saw mid generation.

Nothing disappointing, but also nothing surprising/exciting.

There really isn't much revolutionary/big they could do, tough, apart from VR as part of the package.

The 8K support definitely seems bizarre considering 4K seems barely supported properly in even most PS4 games. Or if it is supported, you have to play the game in 30fps instead of 60fps @1080.

4K gaming on PC, even with decent hardware, is still somewhat hard to hit comfortable frame rates.

The PS4 works fine as a 4K Blu-ray player though. Having the hardware to support 8k output means you have that covered when it becomes widespread

PS4 (even the Pro) cannot play 4K Blu-rays. I'll predict that the PS5 won't be powerful enough to handle 8K AV2 video or whatever ends up coming out.

PS4 Pro has the power to play 4k blu rays but doesn’t have the capability due to either the drive or licensing fee.

Power isn’t the issue as the Xbox One S is equivalent to a base PS4 and handles 4k discs fine.

I doubt we’ll see broad 8K support in triple-A games for some time, but 2D games arguably benefit more from higher resolution, anyway. The Playstation 3, which ran most games at a maximum of 720p (many, like the Grand Theft Auto series, rendered internally at 640 or 512), actually supported 1080p output, something the Pixeljunk series used to great effect. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a sprite or vector-based game on the PS5 that does something similar with 8K.

They won't really support native 8k in any real game. They'll support 8k the way ps4 pro support 4k. Through their upscaling technique. I'm all for that. The ps5 should definitely be able to do true, real 4k, and upsample to 8k

I imagine it's easier to sell higher resolution over higher framerates.