Yes, the best thing EVAR was to to stick 8 Atom equivalent cores into a box matched to a GPU that is held back by said cores and make PC development a pain in the ass, because PCs are not APUs and do not have a fat pool of unified memory. Ooops. That is indeed the future!
That's not the best. They could have waited 1 more year to faster CPU/GPU or put in higher TDP parts and priced consoles more. However, NO ONE on the forums can come up with a better alternative at $399 PS4 MSRP. 1152 shaders 7870 is nearly as fast as 7970M/8970M/290M, basically AMD's flagship mobile GPU at 100W or less TDP. Based on how PS4 was designed, nothing precluded the engineers from pairing that CPU in standalone from with an NV GPU. Alternatively, they could have done a console with an Intel CPU and NV GPU. Why haven't they? Because these components are wayyyy too expensive. You think NV would sell Sony a mobile GPU as fast as a 7970M for a good price? Wishful thinking. We'd get an even slower part or Sony would have needed to price the console at $499-599. And let's not even pretend that Intel CPUs are cheap.
Also, based on massive losses of Xbox division and PS3, it's obvious that putting high end parts into an expensive console doesn't necessarily make you profits. PS3 was a disaster financially as the first 3-4 years Sony was probably just making up with game sales the huge hardware losses incurred by selling an $800 launch PS3 at $599. There is also some stat that something like 50% of all original 360s failed over time. I believe it cost MS hundreds of millions if not billions to replace those failed consoles. That's why MS went really conservative with total power usage / heat of XB1.
So ya, it's easy to criticize the low end hardware in a $400 box but when someone is asked to make a better console for November 2013 at that price, they have no answer.
Games like Ryse Son of Rome show that consoles can produce amazing graphics despite low end hardware due to optimizations. Just because Evil Within is locked at 30 FPS and looks average doesn't mean that Sony's or MS next gen games won't blow this game away in the next 5 years. Just compare the graphics of PS3/360's 1-2 year old games from launch vs. the Last of Us and Uncharted 3 and Gears of War 3. We have not seen what PS4 is capable of in the hands of its 1st party developers like Naughty Dog. Believe me once we see cross platform console games 4-5 years from now, cards like 980 will choke.
And really I hate to say it but I understand the developer's point of view. FIFA 2015 sold 5 million on consoles in the first week, only 30,000 of those were PC. Most developers only release PC games because they already have the console version designed in the PC. If it wasn't for consoles, games like AC, Far Cry, sports games would have trouble existing since they don't sell well enough on the PC alone to recoup their development and marketing costs.
P.S. Oh and the Cell in PS3 was an overpriced piece of garbage. Despite the hype, it was the 360 that consistently had better performing / better looking cross platform games. It requires a vast amount of programmer and financial resources to extract maximum performance from the Cell to outperform the 360. This shows that expensive custom made CPU have also shown to be a failure for consoles. At least now with x86, PS5/XB2 should be backwards compatible.
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