AMD: "Today's consoles are not fast enough for true 4K resolution in 30 FPS"

Renaming modern games in 4K is not an easy business. Now, one of AMD's developers announces that neither Sony's or Microsoft's latest game consoles are fast enough for the purpose.

At the launch in 2013, the eighth-generation consoles aimed at the then gold standard 1920 × 1080 pixels at the frame rate of 60 FPS. Over the years, however, this standard has gradually increased. Among other things, due to the increased sales of 4K-resolved televisions, why Sony and Microsoft later launched the faster Playstation 4 Pro models and Xbox One X.

But rendering the four times more pixels to 1080p has proved to be problematic even on the new hardware. Now, AMD developer Timothy Lottes announces in an interview with Edge magazine that it is simply due to a lack of computational power in both Playstation 4 Pro and Xbox One X.

According to the statement, a graphical computational power of about 7.4 TFLOPS is required to render 3840 × 2160 pixels in 30 FPS with image quality similar to that found in Playstation 4 titles. Something like the Polaris-based graphics and processors of 4.2 and 6.0 TFLOPS in Playstation 4 Pro and Xbox One X, does not reach.

In the same way, however, Lottes mentions that it is a bit of a simplification of reality as modern games often use techniques such as checkerboarding, super sampling and temporal reconstruction. With this, games can be rendered in a slightly lower resolution, while the technologies help to "fill in" missing pixels in a cheap way for the graphics processor with good image quality.

But it does not have to be too far before games in true 4K resolution are everyday food on console too. The Sony Playstation 5 is expected to launch in 2019 or 2020 and then with AMD's next generation graphics navi under the hood, which provides a much needed boost in computing power to meet the new requirements.