PlayStation 4 may be a graphics powerhouse (by console standards) thanks to its powerful GPU, but for games that are more CPU-intensive, the PS4 has not been quite on par with its primary competitor, the Xbox One. That is about to change, however, as Sony Corp has reportedly unlocked a bit more power on the PS4’s CPU, allowing game devs to benefit from faster processing speeds.

The details about the power increase were found buried in the changelog for FMOD, an audio middleware platform that has been used in games like Forza Motorsport and Tomb Raider. In it, one of the updates says, “PS4 – Added FMOD_THREAD_CORE6 to allow access to the newly unlocked 7th core.”

Previously, two of the eight cores in the PlayStation 4 CPU were dedicated to the console’s operating system, but now, by freeing up one of those cores, Sony will allow developers to take better advantage of the PlayStation 4 CPU for their games.

It is not yet clear exactly how much of the seventh core will be available, and some reports suggest that at least some of the core will be shared between the OS and the game.

Following Xbox’s lead?

Unlocking the seventh core in the PlayStation 4 CPU is yet another recent move made by Sony that replicates a feature already added to Xbox One, which unlocked its seventh CPU core for use by game developers at the end of last year.

Earlier this month, Sony Worldwide Studios head Shuhei Yoshida mentioned on Twitter that PlayStation 4 would be getting remote play support for PC, and reports also emerged that full PlayStation 2 emulation would be coming to the console as well, effectively bringing some form of backwards compatibility (just not for PS3) to the system.

Despite seemingly being one step behind Xbox in terms of system features, PlayStation 4 has been the highest selling console of the current hardware generation, recently topping over 30.2 million in worldwide sales, and it continues to perform especially well outside of the US, where Xbox has traditionally been lacking.

Many non-American gamers point to Microsoft’s hyper-focus on the US market as one of the major failings of the Xbox One, which has many features that are exclusive to the US and Canada only.

Photo by TBIT (Pixabay)