It looks like game developers have more processing power to play with when making games for the PlayStation 4. A report from Eurogamer has revealed that Sony recently unlocked the device's seventh CPU core.
The find was discovered on the Beyond3D forum, where the following update was included in a recent changelog note:
PS4 - Added FMOD_THREAD_CORE6 to allow access to the newly unlocked 7th core.
Previously 2 of the 8 cores on the PS4's custom built AMD Jaguar APU were reserved for operating system use. Freeing up another another core for processing games may help increase the performance and stability of future releases on the platform.
As for the present, Eurogamer says that this new addition will have no effect on already-released games unless developers opt to release patches that will utilize the unlocked core.
Earlier this year Microsoft, Sony's biggest rivals, issued a similar update to the Xbox One that gave developers access to a seventh CPU core to help close the graphical disparity between the two systems. In 2014, Microsoft gave developers approximately 10% more graphical horsepower when it freed up resources previously reserved for the Xbox One's Kinect camera.
Even in the wake of those moves, The PlayStation 4 was still the more powerful console, being able to run games at full 1080p resolution while the Xbox One made use of lower, or variable resolutions to achieve the same performance. The increased processing power did help the Xbox One achieve more consistent and stable framerates in some titles, which, to some gamers, was a bigger plus than higher resolutions.
There's no telling how much the new unlocked core will bring to the system, but it will no doubt widen the graphical gap even more between the two consoles.
