Sony Confirms September PlayStation Event

Over the past year, rumours have been swirling around about upgraded Sony and Microsoft consoles. Since then, both companies have confirmed that they will be debuting new units shortly. Earlier in the week, reports came out that pointed to a Sony reveal of their PlayStation 4 Neo being announced at a September 7th event. Now, we’re getting a near full confirm of that as Sony has started sending out invitations to a PlayStation event on that date.

On 3pm that date, we may finally know what the Neo is all about. According to the rumour mill, the new console boosts the CPU clockspeed to 2.1 GHz from 1.6 GHz which is a nice gain. For the GPU, the improvement is much more drastic, going from 18 CUs at 800 Mhz to 36 CUs at 911 Mhz. The GCN cores are also improved GCN 4.0 variant from Polaris, with the GPU being the same core configuration, at least in shader count, as the RX 480. While the PC side hasn’t seen a massive leap in performance due to GCN 4.0, the nature of the console may finally unleash the full potential of the new architecture.

While the spec jump might seem a big high, that’s no surprise given the requirement to run VR and 4K content. With PSVR set to arrive in October, it seems odd that Sony wouldn’t be launching them together given the obvious synergy. Perhaps the early Microsoft Xbox Scorpio reveal has forced Sony’s hand or they want a large install base of Neo users to sell the PSVR.

The big question, of course, is if the leaked specifications are real. If they are, they fall a bit short of what 4K games require, especially once you compare against the Scorpio. It will be interesting to see if we get a reversal of the situation we saw with the PS4 outperforming the Xbox One.  Luckily, we won’t have long to wait to see how it all pans out for the next generation of consoles.