Sony's PlayStation Neo is already expected to be launched in fall but a new simulation of the console's hardware shows that it could perform horribly at 4K resolution.
Both Sony and Microsoft had claimed that their upcoming upgraded consoles will be able to handle 4K gaming. The latter has their Project Scorpio which is basically an Xbox One with upgraded hardware but it is expected in 2017 and not this year compared to the PlayStation Neo.
Now, researchers from Eurogamer have tried to simulate the claimed power of the PlayStation Neo which has been leaked to contain a new Polaris 10 GPU. The researchers have used the new AMD Radeon RX 480 GPU for the tests.
In order to simulate the true power of the PlayStation Neo, the RX 480 was underclocked to 911MHz which is the card's "power state two" that uses less electricity in order not to generate a lot of heat which is bad for consoles due to their closed system. The processor used in the simulations was an Intel Core i7 6700K to put as much as the graphics load onto the video card.
While the PlayStation Neo did perform well for the 1080p and 1440p tests, it did not hold well in 4K with framerates below 30 frames per second. Sony could use 4K upscaling for the PlayStation Neo which means it would still output 4K but not the true native version that everyone was expecting, 4K reported.
The same could be said for the Xbox Project Scorpio but Microsoft could still do some more hardware tweaking and improving as there is still over a year before it can be released. Sony's PlayStation Neo could be disappointing for those who were expecting true native 4K resolution gaming for their 4K televisions and monitors.
PC gamers have already anticipated that there will be some sort of quality cost cutting for the PlayStation Neo and the Project Scorpio which both claim true 4K gaming capabilities. Even the NVIDIA GTX 1080 cannot really provide a straight 60fps for all games on 4K.
Sony could launch the PlayStation Neo this fall along with the PlayStation VR. Official specs and release date have not been confirmed yet.