Sony is said to be working on an upgrade to the PS4 to support 4K resolution. It may work without the need to buy a whole new console.

The report from Kotaku is based on conversations with unnamed developers who’ve received word from Sony.

The main change would be an upgraded GPU that would be partly designed to support 4K and partly to boost the processing power with the aim of allowing more powerful games on the forthcoming Playstation VR headset.

Apparently developers have been using the term “Playstation 4.5,” a name that appears to be a working title at best rather than an official one. There’s also no timescale for a release and no sign that the idea is at an advanced stage.

Why Sony would make such a move now is also unclear, though one theory is that with hindsight it’s decided that these higher specs should really have been in the PS4 from the start to future-proof it. That theory has it that Sony was forced to leave them out because it felt the pressure of competition to get the console out at roughly the same time as the Xbox One. In turn, two years feels just too early to release a completely new console.

How exactly the upgrade would work is also unclear. One possibility is that Sony switches to the “4.5” with a new manufacturing run, but offers a generous trade-in for original PS4s. Another is that it lets customers keep their existing console but have the GPU replaced.

In theory Sony could even sell the new GPU for customers to install themselves, but that sounds like the type of situation that would give its lawyers conniptions with the possibility of something going wrong and it being arguable on who’s to blame.

Whatever the approach, Sony would likely have to be very careful in how it pitched things. It seems far too early to risk users feeling that their PS4 is now outdated or no longer the “current gen”, but at the same time Sony would need to push the benefits to make people feel happy to pay whatever the upgrade cost turns out to be. In particular, it would have to be very careful not to make it seem like people sticking with an “ordinary” PS4 wouldn’t get the full value from buying the Playstation VR headset.