What’s up with PS4’s surprise firmware update? Is 4K around the corner?

HDR is coming to <em>every</em> PS4, and that means we now know more about its HDMI controller.

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[Wickwick]

Without a UHD Blu-Ray the PS4 could still theoretically stream 4k content from Netflix and the like. Or, funny enough, Sony just launched their own OTT streaming service PlayStation Vue.

 

[Leiesoldat]

What do you mean licensing costs?! Isn't Blu-Ray a Sony IP? Why would they have licensing costs?

Edit: Thanks to HornetFig's explanation below. So follow up: what's preventing Sony from incorporating this license cost into the PS4 Slim and Pro and still sell close to the $300 mark? What makes the One S so different from them that Microsoft can sell at $300?

 

[Theinsanegamer]

wejick[/url]":1wx1s8re]I think there is something to clear up, the thing to understand why old game will be not rendered in 4k is not because the hardware limitation. Why he said there is difficulty on making old games run on 4k and needs anti aliasing and another advance techniques, it is because the old games don't have high 4k standard resolution assets. It's like viewing old low res photo on full HD monitor, you need good antialiasing technique to make the photo quality acceptable.

I couldnt care less about playing old games at 4k, I want to be able to run them AT ALL. When I can stick my PS1/2 disk into my PS4 and play it, then ill be impressed. PS3, as we know, wont be possible due to hardware limitations.

 

[alanmies]

What about 4K video content? That question is harder to answer, because the industry standard 4K codec, H.265, has never been advertised as having PS4 support. The Xbox One S, on the other hand, now supports 4K playback, but we know that's due in part to a brand-new HEVC decoder on its primary chip. Unless Sony has another secret chip hiding in its 2013 consoles, PS4 would have to support H.265 decoding through a makeshift software-coded solution.

While a dedicated decoder chip would obviously be more efficient, doesn't the GPU sit pretty much idle when watching video? Thus perhaps maybe a GPGPU-based solution could work. As the CPU is so paltry I don't see a full software implementation working.

 

[Calavaro]

That's a surprise.

 

[Granite Octopus]

Can we have a write up about how HDR works and what the noticable differences are? It seems to me like it would be more beneficial than a slight bump in resolution that I probably wouldn't notice sitting a few meters away from any moderately sized tv I'd own.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

normis[/url]":18kif9uz]Disks are dead. Netflix streams beautiful 4K and this the PS4 will support. And games. Good enough for me.

disks wont be dead until the ISP's in many countries, specifically the US, get kicked in the hind quarters hard enough to modernize their infrastructure and pricing. Until then, as long as data caps reign supreme and games push above 50GB apiece, disks will stay. Especially since many people dont like the idea of simply renting a game from sony until they decide to shut down the servers.

 

[hornetfig]

Ninhalem[/url]":21r8ud8j]What do you mean licensing costs?! Isn't Blu-Ray a Sony IP? Why would they have licensing costs?

You have to pay the One-Blue pool which is not just Sony but Philips, Pioneer, Panasonic etc who have some patent claim on some part of the Blu-ray disc tech.

Then there may be additional MPEG-LA licensing required too.

 

[orangpelupa]

Interestingly, this could be the reason why ps4 can output 1080p 120hz

 

[UnnDunn]

Wickwick[/url]":1qdg1o54]Without a UHD Blu-Ray the PS4 could still theoretically stream 4k content from Netflix and the like. Or, funny enough, Sony just launched their own OTT streaming service PlayStation Vue.

Yeah, but what would be the point of that, when practically every UHD TV ships with its own suite of UHD-enabled streaming apps?

 

[Deleted member 250988]

normis[/url]":81r3cu89]Disks are dead. Netflix streams beautiful 4K and this the PS4 will support. And games. Good enough for me.

I beg to differ. I currently have 3 TVs at my home and all are equiped with Bluray players and usable simultaneously. All are also equiped for netflix, but 3 concurrent Netflix streams will not play smoothly, despite the fact that my bandwidth is 150Mbit/s.

I've also had the cable company perform upgrades to their network, where I had limited internet access for a few days and then there are the inevitable (unfortunately) outages.

In addition I've had Netflix remove series when I was midway through watching them, very annoying. And the competition here is just not worth it; they are priced so high, buying a series on bluray costs the same as streaming it.

In the end if I really want something, and I want to keep it, I buy it on disc.

P.S. I'm not saying that I'm ripping these discs to my Plex Server and I can stream them just fine to my PS3, PS4 and smart TV. Because that would be illegal even though I paid for it.

 

[Statistical]

This could mean quite a bit for the future of PlayStation 4 as a media hub, so let's explore what's going on here, and what technical roadblocks may remain.

Well HDR without 4K means absolutely nothing for media. There is no 1080p HDR content out there and there are no 1080p HDR sets to display it on. That is very unlikely to change on either the content or display side of things.

So either:
a) PS4 "unlocks" 4K HDMI output (at least for video streaming)
or
b) The PS4 HDR upgrade is intended for games only (and possibly any walled garden Sony content).

If you read the Sony announcement, they carefully they only use the word HDR in reference to gaming so I assume it is going to be "b".

 

[Wickwick]

UnnDunn[/url]":24z4t9mi]

Wickwick[/url]":24z4t9mi]Without a UHD Blu-Ray the PS4 could still theoretically stream 4k content from Netflix and the like. Or, funny enough, Sony just launched their own OTT streaming service PlayStation Vue.

Yeah, but what would be the point of that, when practically every UHD TV ships with its own suite of UHD-enabled streaming apps?

The point was the last thing I mentioned. New UHD TV's don't necessarily support PS Vue. Every PS4 out there will. Besides, some folks (like myself) disable internet connectivity on their televisions.

 

[tigas]

Not only that, even when Netflix moves wholesale to HEVC as UHDBD already is, the bitrate coming from the disk will be an order of magnitude bigger than what Netflix will be able to push though the pipes.

But as seen on CD vs MP3, convenience trumps quality.

 

[Statistical]

normis[/url]":20zuns0h]Disks are dead. Netflix streams beautiful 4K and this the PS4 will support. And games. Good enough for me.

The PS4 will support it how? It doesn't handle 4K streaming.

 

[wintermute000]

is HDR really that great? I can see the point of 4k (diminishing returns and all that) but IRL does HDR improve things that much?

 

[Wickwick]

Statistical[/url]":3m0ad6vy]

This could mean quite a bit for the future of PlayStation 4 as a media hub, so let's explore what's going on here, and what technical roadblocks may remain.

Well HDR without 4K means absolutely nothing for media. There is no 1080p HDR content out there and there are no 1080p HDR sets to display it on.

So either:
a) PS4 "unlocks" 4K output (at least for video streaming
or
b) The PS4 HDR is limited to games and games only.

If the display controller can downsample 4k to 1080p then you can display the HDR content on a traditional HD television. Again, the problem is where that source material comes from without a UHD BD player.

 

[Wickwick]

wintermute000[/url]":2yleeq7y]is HDR really that great? Or is it another push like "3D"

Actually, HDR is pretty amazing even if your visual acuity isn't amazing. I've only ever seen it on an OLED TV though so I can't speak for the LCD version. With OLED the range is amazing but you pretty much need a dark room to watch in.

 

[Deleted member 250988]

UnnDunn[/url]":2128vbfp]

Wickwick[/url]":2128vbfp]Without a UHD Blu-Ray the PS4 could still theoretically stream 4k content from Netflix and the like. Or, funny enough, Sony just launched their own OTT streaming service PlayStation Vue.

Yeah, but what would be the point of that, when practically every UHD TV ships with its own suite of UHD-enabled streaming apps?

The point? Updates, for example I bought the PS3 foremost as a Bluray player, at a time where the standard wasn't really finished.

I get updates to this day, where as my friends that bought 'proper' Hi-Fi Bluray players had to buy new ones, because theirs couldn't handle the evolving standard.

Family had 2 year old smart TV's gone dumb, because the manufacturer didn't update the apps anymore and netflix no longer works. It still works perfectly fine on my PS3 and PS4.

If I could I would buy a 4k Dumb TV over a Smart TV anyday.

 

[Wickwick]

Statistical[/url]":2uftqsnp]

normis[/url]":2uftqsnp]Disks are dead. Netflix streams beautiful 4K and this the PS4 will support. And games. Good enough for me.

The PS4 will support it how? It doesn't handle 4K streaming.

That was kind of one of the conclusions of the article. If the PS4 is supporting one of the HDR standard that means it must support HDMI2.0a. As such, it can display 4k content it it chose to.

 

[sep332]

While he never outright stated during the Wednesday conference that the new PlayStation 4 Pro console will not render games in true 4K, he employed phrases such as "efficient rendering on 4K displays" while summing up a mix of anti-aliasing and visual processing techniques to make games look, well, less blurry on 4K displays, as opposed to a direct up-convert from 1080p.

I still think the resolution depends on the game. Resogun was designed to hit 60 FPS at 1080p on OG PS4 hardware. I think with a few tweaks it could run in native 4k HDR, and look awesome.

Edited to add the part of the article I was referring to.

 

[Statistical]

wintermute000[/url]":3j87ksal]is HDR really that great? I can see the point of 4k (diminishing returns and all that) but IRL does HDR improve things that much?

Honestly after watching Netflix 4K, I think the HDR is more important than the increased resolution. In reality most of the improved quality (at least what is noticeable at normal viewing distance) could probably be achieved by a high quality master, quality encoding to 1080p, the use of more advanced codecs, higher bitrate (less lossy compression) and HDR.

That isn't an option however. Your options are: 1080P at a lower bitrate and no HDR or 4K at higher bitrate on advanced codec and HDR. So at least as a practical matter 4K and HDR go hand and hand. The combined effect is noticeable. Even my wife who rarely notices such things was (briefly) impressed.

 

[Statistical]

Wickwick[/url]":34faak12]

Statistical[/url]":34faak12]

normis[/url]":34faak12]Disks are dead. Netflix streams beautiful 4K and this the PS4 will support. And games. Good enough for me.

The PS4 will support it how? It doesn't handle 4K streaming.

That was kind of one of the conclusions of the article. If the PS4 is supporting one of the HDR standard that means it must support HDMI2.0a. As such, it can display 4k content it it chose to.

If it can decode 4K video. Most devices do it with dedicated ASICs as it is pretty brutal in software. Since the press release was ONLY about HDR output not 4K I think the fact that it will decode and output 4K content is well an unsupported conclusion.

 

[Iamhydrogen]

The Vizio CTO posted in the P-series thread over at AVSForum that they actually have seen some UHD players send HDR over HDMI 1.4. So it seems possible that the PS4 could send it over a 1.4 spec'd HMDI interface.

 

[QuidNYC]

P.S. I'm not saying that I'm ripping these discs to my Plex Server and I can stream them just fine to my PS3, PS4 and smart TV. Because that would be illegal even though I paid for it.

As a practical matter, I can't even begin to fathom how you would get into hot water simply for loading physical media you have purchased onto a private media server -- but if a publisher did sue you (or the federal government did charge you), I'm sure the EFF would love to take on your case in order to attain the legal standing to finally dismantle the DMCA.

 

[Statistical]

Wickwick[/url]":2j936djh]

Statistical[/url]":2j936djh]

This could mean quite a bit for the future of PlayStation 4 as a media hub, so let's explore what's going on here, and what technical roadblocks may remain.

Well HDR without 4K means absolutely nothing for media. There is no 1080p HDR content out there and there are no 1080p HDR sets to display it on.

So either:
a) PS4 "unlocks" 4K output (at least for video streaming
or
b) The PS4 HDR is limited to games and games only.

If the display controller can downsample 4k to 1080p then you can display the HDR content on a traditional HD television. Again, the problem is where that source material comes from without a UHD BD player.

What 1080p HDR TV are you going to display it on?

 

[Deleted member 192806]

Sony will wake a sleeping HDR beast via firmware. What else hides in PS4?

The security minded would have a field day trying to answer that question.

 

[Zak]

What kind of display is required for HDR?

 

[Statistical]

Zak[/url]":3hednlgb]What kind of display is required for HDR?

One that supports HDR.

As a practical matter I have never seen a non 4K HDTV support HDR. The term UHD Premium (Ultra HD Premium) is being used by companies to indicate TVs which are both 4K and HDR capable (and meet other minimum standards).

So if it isn't 4K then it doesn't support HDR. If it doesn't have HDMI 2.0 AND HDCP 2.2 it won't support 4K content (and all HDR content is 4K) even if it is 4K. The latter burned some early adopters. If the TV is 4K and has HDMI 2.0 and HDCP 2.2 but makes no mention of HDR and/or UHD Premium then it probably doesn't support HDR. It might but since that is a huge marketing point right now, the lack of of it should be a huge red flag.

http://meincmagazine.com/gadgets/2016/01/ ... d-premium/

 

[Zak]

Statistical[/url]":1vsf1pz2]

Zak[/url]":1vsf1pz2]What kind of display is required for HDR?

One that supports HDR.

As a practical matter I have never seen a non 4K HDTV support HDR. The term UHD is being used by companies to indicate TVs which are both 4K and HDR capable (and meet other minimum standards).

So if it isn't 4K then it doesn't support HDR. If the TV is 4K but makes no mention of HDR or the term UHD then it probably doesn't support HDR.

Ah. Thanks.

 

[UnnDunn]

eco_nl[/url]":ad1j47cw]

UnnDunn[/url]":ad1j47cw]

Wickwick[/url]":ad1j47cw]Without a UHD Blu-Ray the PS4 could still theoretically stream 4k content from Netflix and the like. Or, funny enough, Sony just launched their own OTT streaming service PlayStation Vue.

Yeah, but what would be the point of that, when practically every UHD TV ships with its own suite of UHD-enabled streaming apps?

The point? Updates, for example I bought the PS3 foremost as a Bluray player, at a time where the standard wasn't really finished.

I get updates to this day, where as my friends that bought 'proper' Hi-Fi Bluray players had to buy new ones, because theirs couldn't handle the evolving standard.

Family had 2 year old smart TV's gone dumb, because the manufacturer didn't update the apps anymore and netflix no longer works. It still works perfectly fine on my PS3 and PS4.

If I could I would buy a 4k Dumb TV over a Smart TV anyday.

If you just want updates, you can buy a Roku or Fire TV box for less than a third of the cost of a PS4 Pro. And they both support PlayStation Vue.

The point is without UHD Blu-ray PLAYBACK, PS4 Pro's utility as a UHD media streaming player is limited at best.

 

[meringo]

wejick[/url]":2rupmazp]I think there is something to clear up, the thing to understand why old game will be not rendered in 4k is not because the hardware limitation. Why he said there is difficulty on making old games run on 4k and needs anti aliasing and another advance techniques, it is because the old games don't have high 4k standard resolution assets. It's like viewing old low res photo on full HD monitor, you need good antialiasing technique to make the photo quality acceptable.

One of the major selling points of 4k gaming is the reduced use of anti-aliasing. More pixels FTW. An excellent solution to those jagged edges.

 

[cheinonen]

For those asking what HDR actually brings to the home viewing experience, here's a breakdown:

HDTV content is limited in range to 16-240 (going with video standards here, which more TVs follow, than the 0-255 PC standard). So if you have a white sheet or a sun, it's going to max out at that 240 level, which is usually set to around 140-160 nits in daily use. HDR moves from 8-bit to 10-bit signals, and uses a different gamma encoding standard. Gamma will control how the display ramps from black to white, and how long you stay in the shadows.

With HDR, the lower values follow a curve similar to prior gamma standards, but it then goes a bit linear past that. What this means in reality is now you can have a value of 240 for a white sheet, but that sun can have a value of 1,000 or so. The sheet or paper remains at 140-160 nits but you get bright highlights that can be between 600-1500 nits in brightness, depending on the display. This does become very noticeable in HDR content, where the sun, a campfire, or neon lights are much more vivid as they would be in real life.

Also all HDR video content out there right now is also supporting wide color gamut, which moves to the DCI/P3 colorspace from the Rec.709/HDTV one. This add lots of shades of red, blue, and green that have been present in movies in the theater for years, but that TVs either couldn't show, or content couldn't encode correctly. These also are noticeable, especially when done side-by-side with the standard HDTV version.

The good news is that UltraHD Blu-ray players, which handle this content, know how to fold it down to work on 1080p displays that don't support HDR or WCG content. I'd assume the PS4 can as well then, but that requires developers to deal with this as well possibly. Either way, both these features make more of an impact that UHD resolution (IMO), but since you can't separate them from that, it's hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison of them today.

 

[slymenstra hymen]

hornetfig[/url]":36mjc6in]

Ninhalem[/url]":36mjc6in]What do you mean licensing costs?! Isn't Blu-Ray a Sony IP? Why would they have licensing costs?

You have to pay the One-Blue pool which is not just Sony but Philips, Pioneer, Panasonic etc who have some patent claim on some part of the Blu-ray disc tech.

Then there may be additional MPEG-LA licensing required too.

What's stopping Sony from pushing the buck onto consumers here with a paid for from the Playstation store solution then? I really don't get why they'd over engineer here if they're not going to make full use of it.

 

[jdietz]

For PC games you have to tweak the settings.
For console games the developer tweaks them for you.
Old PS4 games will run the same as they always have.
New PS4 games will have two sets of settings for which hardware you're using.

It takes complicated multi-GPU setups to achieve 60 FPS at 4K resolution. Single GPU setups do north of 30 FPS for the very highest end cards. You're not going to see something like that in a console. Wait for the PS5 Pro in five years.

It's not pointless - a higher resolution will be drawn on PS4 and then upscaled to 4K so image quality will be better. It's also good to avoid double upscaling which will be achieved on PS4 at 4K resolution. By double upscaling I mean the PS4 scaling to 1080p and your TV upscaling that to 2160p.

 

[ej24]

I usually own Playstation for the fact that ps2 was a fancy DVD player, ps3 was actually cheaper than early Blu-ray players and ps4 was supposedly going to be a good UHD Blu-ray player. I'm shocked they didn't up the drive to UHD BD. They already pay fees to use BD. Why not UHD BD?

The ps4 gpu is essentially a gcn based apu correct? All GCN gpu's and apu's have hardware support for at least h264 decode. Did MS just twist amd's arm to get an apu with an updated video coding engine? There must be a reason Sony didn't include UHD BD, a really good reason like hardware incompatibility. Though if they beefed up the apu (read as: process shrink) you'd think they would have had the opportunity to request h265.

Sony may not sell as many units now but clearly the ones they do will be high margin because the hardware cost clearly doesn't seem to have gone up.

 

[tigas]

For those asking what HDR actually brings to the home viewing experience, here's a breakdown:

[...]

Also all HDR video content out there right now is also supporting wide color gamut, which moves to the DCI/P3 colorspace from the Rec.709/HDTV one. This add lots of shades of red, blue, and green that have been present in movies in the theater for years, but that TVs either couldn't show, or content couldn't encode correctly. These also are noticeable, especially when done side-by-side with the standard HDTV version.

The good news is that UltraHD Blu-ray players, which handle this content, know how to fold it down to work on 1080p displays that don't support HDR or WCG content. I'd assume the PS4 can as well then, but that requires developers to deal with this as well possibly. Either way, both these features make more of an impact that UHD resolution (IMO), but since you can't separate them from that, it's hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison of them today.

In fact, UHDBD supports Rec.2020, which is a colorspace so large that you can map the DCI-P3 space into it without losing gamut. I do not expect any UHDBD (or any UHD streams) to support DCI-P3 natively, as it is completely alien to broadcast practices, colorscience, and code libraries. However, just the same as people were mapping sRGB to DCI-P3 and encoding to x'y'z' primaries, the x'y'z' color values will be decoded back to RGB and then processed and remastered in a Rec.2020 environment. Since most (all?) of the P3 content was created to be seen on a film theatre, having that content, un-remastered, shown in a domestic environment (even a HDR TV) would be disastrous.