PS4 Pro is a “good machine” with a “good spec”, Xbox planning exec Albert Penello has said, but its 4.2 teraflop GPU “is not enough to do true 4K”.

Speaking to Eurogamer, Penello explained that Microsoft had purposefully chosen a 6 TFLOP GPU for its upcoming Project Scorpio so that it could “deliver Xbox One-quality games in 4K”, and have “fewer asterisks around the 4K experiences” than Sony.

“I think there are a lot of caveats they [Sony] are giving customers right now around 4K,” he said. “They’re talking about checkerboard rendering and up-scaling and things like that. There are just a lot of asterisks in their marketing around 4K, which is interesting because when we thought about what spec we wanted for Scorpio, we were very clear we wanted developers to take their Xbox One engines and render them in native, true 4K. That was why we picked the number, that’s why we have the memory bandwidth we have, that’s why we have the teraflops we have, because it’s what we heard from game developers was required to achieve native 4K.

“Now, similarly to what Sony said, that doesn’t mean I’m going to require developers to do this,” he continued. “They’re going to be able to decide to take that six teraflops of power and do what they think is best for their game.

“But I know that 4.2 teraflops is not enough to do true 4K. So, I feel like our product aspired a little bit higher, and we will have fewer asterisks around the 4K experiences we deliver on our box.”

While some games will run at a native 4K resolution on PS4 Pro (including The Last of Us Remastered and The Elder Scrolls Online), the majority will be upscaled via a technique called ‘checkerboard rendering’. The technique is impressive, according to first-hand reports, although not quite as crisp as a native 4K output.

PS4 Pro includes a 4.2 TFLOP GPU and an improved CPU, and is due to go on sale this November. Scorpio, meanwhile, which is scheduled to release holiday 2017, will include a 6 TFLOP GPU and improved memory bandwidth. Penello also suggests it may include a 4K Blu-ray player, a feature missing from PS4 Pro.

Source: eurogamer.net