McHuj
Member
As awesome as Polaris is I really doubt its in PS4.5. There will be a power jump but nothing that big not to mention thats a total different architecture to program for.
If Nintendo are pushing things though I could see Polaris being in the NX
I think Polaris is probably the only way they could achieve a significant upgrade to qualify as a PS4.5. Sure you get better performance per watt going to a smaller process, but why not utilize an architecture already built and optimized for that process.
Assuming a PS4.5 is real, there are two options I see:
1. Shrink existing PS4 SOC and increase clocks on GPU and CPU. This is possible, but will require an update to faster GDDR5 or GDDR5x. Simply increasing clocks may starve the higher performing CPU and GPU.
2. Update the GPU IP with more efficient architecture designed for 14nm that performs better at same memory BW (and or clocks). This would certainly offer much better performance.
I'm not really sure anything other than option 2 makes sense in that with option 1 would probably only offer only 20-30% perf gains. Not enough to really matter.