Since the Playstation 4 specs have now been confirmed, I can talk about what they mean
for the next gen of consoles.
Here is a quick summary of this entire video.
The Playstation 4 is as powerful as I could have hoped and the next gen will look pretty.
It will be the same sort of power compared to PCs as the PS3 was against decent PCs at
that time and it should be able to run Crysis 3 at pretty much highest settings at 30 fps.
Now for the long version.
As far as I'm concerned, it's about 3 components: the processor, the graphics card and the RAM
and the price of the console at launch- I've heard rumours that it will be cheaper than
the Playstation 3 was at launch and I think that's reasonable enough, given when it's
released and the specification of the hardware.
The processor is a custom-made 8 core AMD CPU.I don't think we could have hoped for
more than 8 cores and AMD have had a history of releasing processors with more cores than
Intel, but with seemingly less performance.
With the Playstation 4 having 8 cores, I think things could shift in AMD's favour.
In most benchmarks, particularly gaming ones, Intel wipes the floor with AMD.
Even in heavily multi-threaded programs that make use of all 8 cores, Intel's 4 core processors
seem to have about the same performance as the best of AMD's.
With so many cores at the Playstation 4's disposal, I believe that developers will begin
to write games with 8 cores as the standard and we may end up seeing AMD's current processors
outperforming Intel's in the PC market (Until they release 8 core processors themselves,
that is).
A bit of a confession, I've always considered GPUs to be vastly superior to CPUs at most
tasks, as a CPU consists of, say, 8 fast processing units while a GPU could have thousands of
slower ones all working together.
To simplify things, I'd say that an 8-core CPU will open up a lot of opportunities for
better AI in games, though I can't say that I'm an expert.
I find the future of game play is always a lot harder to predict than the future of graphics,
but an 8 core CPU powering the next-gen of consoles isn't going to be holding them back
any time soon and will probably end up making 8 cores the standard for PC units- and even
phones- for a long time to come.
It's a first that AMD have announced that they will later be releasing a similar processor
for PC users later on- it would be interesting to see how it fares against current processors.
I wouldn't be surprised, or disappointed, if they made it a power-efficient chip that's
less powerful than their current flagship products.
The graphics card is also from AMD and is capable of 1,840 gigaflops of processing power.
By comparison, the Xbox360 could churn out 240 and the Playstation 3 230.
This makes it almost 8 times more powerful- in theory.
Let's look at a comparison between different graphics cards and consoles.
I'm sure you could find 100 things wrong with this chart and I'll probably regret making
it, but the thing to look at here is the Geforce 660 and Radeon 7850, which are Nvidia's and
AMD's closest cards to the Playstation 4 in terms of tflops.
Let's have a look at the performance of these cards in games at the full HD resolution,
which will no doubt be the standard for the Playstation 4.
Now, try to ignore how Nvidia wipes the floor with amd in these benchmarks.
This is just the best I've got to go on for potential performance of the Playstation 4
and since future games will be built with the Playstation 4 in mind, they'll look prettier
and run faster than current games with current graphics cards as they will be optimised for
the Playstation 4's tech spec.
I'm assuming that games will aim for 30 fps on the Playstation 4 so they will look more
beautiful than any of the games on this list.
Unless the big next-gen selling point is that 60 fps is the norm.
We'll see.
Finally, RAM.
8 GB shared RAM in the Playstation 4 is more than enough judging from past trends.
I mean, the Playstation 3 and Xbox360 both had 512 MB of RAM, which was pathetic compared
to PCs at the time, while 8 GB is a respectable amount and should lead to shorter loading
times and more detailed textures in games.
RAM isn't exactly the most exciting thing to talk about, so let's just say it's okay
and move on.
I guess that if I had to criticise any bit of the console it would be the graphics card,
but what would I have wanted instead?
A graphics card that won't be released for PC users for several years?
That wouldn't ever happen and I hope it doesn't since then they would be deliberately holding
back technology to try and shift consoles.
As nice as it would have been to have a geforce titan or dual radeon 7970's powering it, we
all know that isn't going to happen either and would be overkill for what is effectively
a mainstream and affordable console.
A geforce 660 isn't going to break any speed records but it could have been a lot, lot
worse.
Just look at the Radeon 7750!
Ew.
I'm sure that some of you would want the console to be more powerful than it is.
The way people perceive PC hardware has changed.
Crossfire and SLI have taken off and benchmarks for £1000 GPU setups has become more regular-
back in 2006 nobody was complaining that the Xbox360 didn't have SLI graphics!
I don't think that a console would be successful at launch if released for thousands of pounds.
The Playstation 3 was slated enough for being more expensive than the Xbox360.
Please remember that consoles don't work in the same way as PCs.
Today's games are still running on what is effectively a 7 year old console and they
still look OKAY.
Refreshing them up to today's PC standards will do wonders for graphics in games and
I'm more than happy for it to be the standard for the next 7 years or so.
My computer, an intel 3770K, 12 GB of RAM and a Geforce 670 may technically be better
than the PS4, but as time goes on I'm sure it will age far worse than the Playstation
4 will, as games are optimised for the PS4's setup instead of just being a PS3 game with
additional and power-hungry bells and whistles for PC users.
You may disagree with some of the things I say, it's probably because I'm a big believer
in optimisation and think that it can do wonders to graphics, making seemingly mid-range computers
produce competitive looking graphics to more powerful systems running inefficient engines.
The future's bright for graphics.
If you consider 'bright' being lens flare, lots of dirt and mud everywhere and your person's
viewpoint being smeared with what looks like fecal matter.