Report: New PS4.5 details surface, no games will be exclusive to it

New information about the updated PlayStation 4 that has been part of the rumor mill for the past month, and it is reportedly codenamed “NEO” within Sony.

Giant Bomb reports that multiple sources have confirmed some new details about the device, often being called PS4K or PS4.5 within the games community, including specs and how Sony will handle having two versions of the PS4 in the market.

The NEO will feature higher clock speed than the original PS4, an improved GPU, and higher bandwidth on the memory, according to Giant Bomb’s sources. The console’s HDD will apparently be identical to the PS4 on the market now.

As of October, all PlayStation 4 games will be required to launch with both a “base mode” compatible with the original system and a “NEO mode” that will be optimized for the updated console. In NEO mode, games will support higher visual fidelity, more stable framerate, and 4K image output, but games will not be required to run natively at 4K.

However, according to Giant Bomb’s sources, the NEO and original PS4 will still support the same games and there are no plans to make some games exclusive to the more powerful console. Sony also reportedly will not allow any sort of exclusive gameplay options to NEO players, meaning that outside of the technical enhancements there will be feature parity between both PS4s.

Kotaku was the first to break news of an updated PlayStation 4, with its original reports stating that developers were being briefed on the hardware during this year’s GDC.

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