Can consoles offer native 4K games ? Yes, although it depends on the console and the visual load of each game. Visual excellence and the search for UHD resolutions has been the battlefield of Xbox One X and PS4 Pro, but none is powerful enough, according to an AMD engineer. And, now, it has marked the power that Xbox Scarlet and PS5 should have .
Teraflops have always been important to measure the graphical power of consoles and machines, but the term began to become popular with the release of both Xbox One and PS4 in November 2013. We then entered into a ” war ” in the one that decimals, supposedly, made a difference.
With the release of PS4 Pro , the figure was anchored at 4.2 teraflops, while Microsoft announced its Xbox One X as a machine with a power of 6 teraflops. As you can imagine, engineers came from one and the other talking about these figures.
The most talked about statement was that of Mark Cerny, engineer of PS4 and PS4 Pro, among other tasks within Sony and the videogame industry, who stated that for the native 4K 8 TF was necessary . The reality is that, while PS4 Pro is not too many titles with a high graphic load that go to native 4K, in One X we see examples of very sharp games with a resolution 2,160p without scaling.
Now, however, it has been AMD itself that has marked the ” cut note ” as far as tera flops are concerned. Timothy Lottes is one of the AMD engineers, and in statements to the latest issue of the British magazine EDGE has stated that the consoles will need 7.4 tereflops to offer a native 4K resolution, a rate of 30 frames per second and a visual quality match to which they offer PS4 games.
He has not given examples, but we imagine he means that for a game as pointer as God of War go to native 4K (right now he uses a technique to scale the image to 2.160p) and 30 frames per second without any compromise, that graphic power would be needed.
Why do these statements matter? AMD is the company that has been responsible for giving life to all versions of Xbox One and PS4, and is supposedly developing the SoCs of the upcoming consoles, PS5 and Xbox Scarlet , which will build a Ryzen CPU and Vega graphics (for example , in Sony it seems that they are investigating with Ryzen as the processors of PS5 ).
However, 7.8 teraflops seem scarce if we bear in mind that the new Vega graphics that will arrive in the face of the launch of the consoles will surpass, by far, the 12 teraflops that the AMD Vega 64 has launched in 2017 ( and that we were able to analyze ), so the game should go more towards the 4K and 60 frames per second with graphics with the current quality that towards the 4K and 30 frames per second.