How the PlayStation 4 is better than a PC

[cmdrdredd]

By all means show us a CPU that is more complex than the APU they designed specifically for PS4.

Complexity doesn't equal performance. AMD CPUs are notorously weak at a given clock frequency compared to Intel anyway.

 

[Nintendesert]

Uh...no.

Both "traditional" shutter glasses and VR provide the same stereoscopic effect, each provide a unique image to each eye, the method of delivery is just different. The only physical differences between the 2 technologies to my knowledge are that.

1) In VR you use a single panel split in half or 2 synced panels for each eye, which means each eye sees the refresh at the same time, where as in shutterglasses each eye sees alternate frames, generally requiring twice the frame rate to get similar smooth motion.
2) In VR your entire FOV is filled with a screen compared to shutter glasses where only the images inside the border of the 3D display appear 3D.
3) In VR you tend to get head tracking which provides the sense of feedback and greater immersion.

There are no other significant technical differences in the way stereoscopic 3D is implemented, the term quasi-3D doesn't mean anything. VR might look and feel better than stereoscopic 3D for the reasons above but they both provide full stereoscopic 3D, they're just delivered via different methods.



Sorry but this is flat out wrong, my setup is cheap and works fine.

My living room is a 125" 1080p projector screen with a 5.1 audio receiver, both the PS3 and PC are able to output to the screen and the audio, I have several of my PS3 controllers paired with my PC rather than the PS3 via bluetooth and configured to mimic the xinput of Xbox controllers which work with basically every modern game.

So lets compare.

PC screen res = True 1080p for everything
PS3 screen res = 720p or less for most games

PC frame rate = 60fps or above always
PS3 frame rate = 30fps average if you're lucky with dips

PC Sound = Full 5.1 Dolby surround
PS3 Sound = Full 5.1 Dolby surround

PC Controllers = Full PS3 wireless controller support or any other USB controller you prefer
PS3 Controllers = Limited range of compatible controllers

I regularly play local coop both on the PS3 and PC with friends, the PC is without a doubt hands down better, at 125" from about 10ft away 1080p looks divine, anything less like 720p or less looks absolutely diabolical. The frame rate drops on the PS3 for a lot of titles becomes almost unplayable, especially in split screen or coop modes.

It cost about £15 for a HDMI cable to the projector, £10 for a Coax run to my receiver, and about £10 for handful of USB bluetooth devices to pair with PS3 controllers, the driver software is free.



I host about 4 LANs a year for close friends, we still have a riot, it's all about the community of being together, getting absolutely shit faced, playing drinking LAN games, eating snacks and takeaway together, putting porn on in the background when drunk, playing card games, board games. Sometimes we play console games on the big screen too, 8 player bomberman on the PS3 with 8 players was hilarious when drunk

Egads! Your screen is humongous! Mine is only 110" and I'll be honest, I'd rather game on PC than on my PS3. I end up using my PS3 for blurays and netflix/amazon prime.

I think the whole PS4 vs PC is silly and the PS4 will actually do a whole lot to advance PC gaming. We'll see but I think the bar will be raised quite a bit more than it was with the PS3 and Xboxwhatever.

I'm hoping in the very least that it leads to:

1. More multithreading
2. More 64bit gaming utilizing more than 2gigs of ram.


Time will tell, but everyone please continue the fight. It makes for interesting reading. :awe:

 

[Beavermatic]

Complexity doesn't equal performance. AMD CPUs are notorously weak at a given clock frequency compared to Intel anyway.

Bingo. You can have the most complex architecture out there... but just because its complex doesn't mean it performs well. This has always been the problem as of late with AMD cpu's, even spreading into their graphics cards.

 

[MrPickins]

Complexity doesn't equal performance. AMD CPUs are notorously weak at a given clock frequency compared to Intel anyway.

And "state of the art" doesn't necessarily mean the most powerful.

 

[3DVagabond]

State of the art when compared to another APU. What we have been saying all along is that people are running 6 core SB-E CPUs at 4.5Ghz and SLI 680s or even SLI Titans. That's a ton more power than any APU.

It's not a 2 year old midrange tech, is my point. I don't think anyone here thinks it's the most uber creation ever. I mean we have people here trying to draw comparisons to their $8K rigs and saying it sucks because their PC's have more raw computing power. What kind of a point is that to make. Then they have to get all aggressive and rude about it. Like they're some kind of geek cyber bully. LOL

 

[3DVagabond]

And "state of the art" doesn't necessarily mean the most powerful.

Glad to see someone else understands that.

 

[chimaxi83]

/facepalm. First off, APU is a blanket term for multi-processing unit integrated architectures. One cannot simply state just a CPU as an APU is CPU and GPU integration.

Second, I can easily outpower the APU of the PS4 with my machine right now, by multiple times over and over, which is a oc'd intel i7 3930k, (2) GTX Titan's in SLI. Outside of the comparable "APU" components, there's also 32GB of extremely low latency DDR3, some pretty speedy Samsung solid state drives for OS's, raided 1TB harddrives for games and apps respectively, and dvd burner, bluray burner, mechanical razer keyboard, RAT mouse, 1000w gold rated psu, S-IPS HP ZR30w monitor at 2560x1600, and various other things.

In every way, shape, form... I've trumped a PS4 or the next Xbox. And my last 3 systems also trumped the PS4. It isn't even comparable. It would be like trying to compare a Ferrari next to a Honda civic.

[image removed]

This is a tech forum, not 4chan. We generally don't want such posts. If your only reply is a meme graphic, then perhaps it would be best not to reply at all.

Moderator jvroig

 

[AnandThenMan]

I mean we have people here trying to draw comparisons to their $8K rigs and saying it sucks because their PC's have more raw computing power. What kind of a point is that to make.

I'm still trying to figure that one out.

 

[Sleepingforest]

I'm still trying to figure that one out.

The OP is saying that the PS4 will be flat-out superior to a PC (and some of the reasons, like the PCIe one, are only technically true; most computers may be on PCIe or PCIe 2.0, but the better gaming ones are on PCIe 3.0, which gets 64GB/s [yes, gigabytes per second. It gets 8 gigatransfers per second, and each gigatransfer is equivalent to 8GB]). Then it got into the usual contest of "Oh well a PC costs more" followed by "well let's look at the peripherals and whatever too" on the PC side.

Well duh. You pay more for the extra power. I don't think anyone is willing to dispute that the PS4 will get you gaming, even if the quality is lower than the top end (especially as the PCs advance), for less than most PCs.

On the other hand, a top end PC will be able to put out more details and AA. The disadvantage is that it costs you more for the actual box.

 

[cmdrdredd]

The OP is saying that the PS4 will be flat-out superior to a PC (and some of the reasons, like the PCIe one, are only technically true; most computers may be on PCIe or PCIe 2.0, but the better gaming ones are on PCIe 3.0, which gets 64GB/s [yes, gigabytes per second. It gets 8 gigatransfers per second, and each gigatransfer is equivalent to 8GB]). Then it got into the usual contest of "Oh well a PC costs more" followed by "well let's look at the peripherals and whatever too" on the PC side.

Well duh. You pay more for the extra power. I don't think anyone is willing to dispute that the PS4 will get you gaming, even if the quality is lower than the top end (especially as the PCs advance), for less than most PCs.

On the other hand, a top end PC will be able to put out more details and AA. The disadvantage is that it costs you more for the actual box.

Right, look at the OP. Not the responses herein. The OP was talking about one subject in a direct manner. Basically stating a PS4 is superior to a PC for gaming.

Do we really think that's true when you account for all the possible configurations of a PC?

 

[Beavermatic]

I'm actually less concerned about how weak the PS4 actually is compared to a high end gaming rig, and more pissed out how console games have put a bottleneck on my PC games.

I get the fact the developers now days want to develop quickly and cheaply, for the masses, on the most profitable systems (and that today is console of course), and that its a crap-ton easier to program for (you've got one set of hardware, so all the incompatibilities and driver support and near infinite hardware possibilities of development support aren't there like PC gaming).

However... my systems potential to do far more grand things like better graphics, physics and effects are suffering because they are now using console as standard for development, then just porting over later to PC. Not all, but most. Instead of getting games focused solely on my hardware platform (PC), that could play and look a billion times better than their console counterpart, I've got to play crappy ports from lazy, greedy developers. And since graphics on consoles are generations behind (and will continue to be even upon release of a new console), my system sits here using the minimal amount of its actual potential.

And for that, that's why I hate consoles. They drag everything else down. They are anti-advancement in technology and development. And more importantly, because there are those out there who support this scam and try to claim its technologically superior.

Eventually what will happen, if it isn't happening already... Nvidia, intel, AMD... they'll just stop producing high end PC technology as fast as they do. And as much as I hate that, who can blame them? Why bother? If developers are settling to develop on the platform that is the weakest common denominator, why bother wasting time to develop the true next-gen stuff for a community where developers don't even bother paying attention to it anymore?

There's also the fact consoles just contribute to making gamers today even more useless degenerates than they should be. Contributing to the "fast food lifestyle" of all play and no work. Use to be to get the best games, you built your damn PC from the ground up, even in the early days (long before any form of plug-in-play) of tromping through IRQ's, config.sys, autoexec.bat's, himem.sys's, and card dip switches on the old ISA interfaces.... squeezing every bit of RAM that you could and HDD space, and tweaking everything up for VESA and then onto OpenGL and GLIDE years later. You took a lot of pride building those machines, to play wolfenstein, doom, quake, diablo, duke 3d, whatever... you learned a hell of a lot in the process, about hardware, servers, remote systems, VoIP, networking, software, operating systems, scripting, architecture... even programming or 3d modeling if your upto making your own games. It's all there and available once you get the system built. In fact that's how I've come to the career that I am now in at 30 years old... messing around and building machines to make my games run faster and play better over a network as a kid.

Now? What do you learn playing a console? What pride do you have in that system other than you can put in a disc and play. Why bother with the effort of learning anything at all. And it shows. I see these Halo kids, Call of Duty kids... braindead as anything could be. Everyone sold out so that they could take the easiest way out.

Now get off my lawn

 

[3DVagabond]

The OP is saying that the PS4 will be flat-out superior to a PC

I don't read it that way. At least not saying that it's impossible to get superior performance by any metric on a PC.

 

[3DVagabond]

Right, look at the OP. Not the responses herein. The OP was talking about one subject in a direct manner. Basically stating a PS4 is superior to a PC for gaming.

Do we really think that's true when you account for all the possible configurations of a PC?

Specialization is a strength of the game console. The diversification of the PC is actually a weakness from a game devs point of view.

 

[frozentundra123456]

I'm still trying to figure that one out.

Very few if any posters said the PS4 "sucks". Personally, I stated several times that I think it will be a very nice gaming platform.

I just get annoyed at the unquestioning acceptance of undocumented statements about how great it will be, and every time someone tries to start a rational discussion, they are hit over the head with more undocumented statements.

Bottom line, nobody knows how good it will be. Some people cant seem to accept that, and insist it is going to be better than a top of the line gaming PC.

 

[Lepton87]

Comparing PS4 to recycled 3 year-old PC hardware is as moronic as it gets. PS4 APU is fabricated on a cutting edge process, only Intel has a better process. It utilities GPU architecture that has not yet arrived on the PC side, both CPU and GPU. On the PC side you really need way more watts and money to surpass it in performance. Hell, my one card costs 2 times as much as the whole console, what's the point comparing such a PC with such a console? It's really like comparing a Civic to a Ferrari. Your wheels cost more then the whole Civic, does it make the Civic crap? How often do you see a Ferrari and how often do you see a Civic? Those 8k$ rigs are like Ferraris in the computer world, PS4 is the civic. No one who looks for a car like Civic will even think about a Ferrari.

ps. I don't even think that my PC will be much faster in games optimized for the PS4 when ported to a PC. I would need a second Titan for my PC to be way faster, but I have a particular dislike of multi-gpus. I had 4-way system last gen, and I don't have fond memories of it. When it worked right it put out more fps then what I have now, but more often then not it didn't work properly. That is not to say that the motion was more fluid even with more fps.

It have more cores, and its bigger, but is it more complex than the 8-core + 7860 on the same die?

You said CPU not the whole IC.
Nehalem-Ex is way more then Bloomfield times 2. It has a very complex ring-bus, similarly Westmere-EX is a very different beast then Gulftown. That's why we don't have SB-EX and never will, SB-E filled that niche for now, EX line will be continued with Haswell. It's hard to compare the two, fully-fledged Westmere-EX costs over 4k$

 

[Black Octagon]

Baaaack in myyyyyy day PC gaming was a science bordering on an art. Gamers these days are all glue-sniffing layabouts with no pizaz. Especially those console gamers, but PC gamers too. Now, where are my false teeth? I'm gonna throw them at your plug'n'play punk ass

Hear, hear!

 

[alcoholbob]

I'm actually less concerned about how weak the PS4 actually is compared to a high end gaming rig, and more pissed out how console games have put a bottleneck on my PC games.

I get the fact the developers now days want to develop quickly and cheaply, for the masses, on the most profitable systems (and that today is console of course), and that its a crap-ton easier to program for (you've got one set of hardware, so all the incompatibilities and driver support and near infinite hardware possibilities of development support aren't there like PC gaming).

However... my systems potential to do far more grand things like better graphics, physics and effects are suffering because they are now using console as standard for development, then just porting over later to PC. Not all, but most. Instead of getting games focused solely on my hardware platform (PC), that could play and look a billion times better than their console counterpart, I've got to play crappy ports from lazy, greedy developers. And since graphics on consoles are generations behind (and will continue to be even upon release of a new console), my system sits here using the minimal amount of its actual potential.

And for that, that's why I hate consoles. They drag everything else down. They are anti-advancement in technology and development. And more importantly, because there are those out there who support this scam and try to claim its technologically superior.

Eventually what will happen, if it isn't happening already... Nvidia, intel, AMD... they'll just stop producing high end PC technology as fast as they do. And as much as I hate that, who can blame them? Why bother? If developers are settling to develop on the platform that is the weakest common denominator, why bother wasting time to develop the true next-gen stuff for a community where developers don't even bother paying attention to it anymore?

There's also the fact consoles just contribute to making gamers today even more useless degenerates than they should be. Contributing to the "fast food lifestyle" of all play and no work. Use to be to get the best games, you built your damn PC from the ground up, even in the early days (long before any form of plug-in-play) of tromping through IRQ's, config.sys, autoexec.bat's, himem.sys's, and card dip switches on the old ISA interfaces.... squeezing every bit of RAM that you could and HDD space, and tweaking everything up for VESA and then onto OpenGL and GLIDE years later. You took a lot of pride building those machines, to play wolfenstein, doom, quake, diablo, duke 3d, whatever... you learned a hell of a lot in the process, about hardware, servers, remote systems, VoIP, networking, software, operating systems, scripting, architecture... even programming or 3d modeling if your upto making your own games. It's all there and available once you get the system built. In fact that's how I've come to the career that I am now in at 30 years old... messing around and building machines to make my games run faster and play better over a network as a kid.

Now? What do you learn playing a console? What pride do you have in that system other than you can put in a disc and play. Why bother with the effort of learning anything at all. And it shows. I see these Halo kids, Call of Duty kids... braindead as anything could be. Everyone sold out so that they could take the easiest way out.

Now get off my lawn

You are pissed? Hah. Guess what, I'm sure developers are pissed PCs are also so slow compared to coding to metal, there are numerous calls that a PS4 would be able to do, but they wouldn't program into a multiplatform game because your 3930k and SLI Titans would be the bottleneck due to the sluggish DirectX API.

The argument will go both ways this gen now that memory bottlenecking is not a concern on the consoles.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Yeah right, I'm pretty sure I would get dips below 60fps on a Titan even at 1080p in some very demanding games like Crysis 3. The card alone costs 1000$

1080p @ 60fps is very attainable on the PC, my old GTX580 with modest OC is still running a most modern games in 1080p with >60fps. Can you find examples where it wont using the most extreme AAA games with crazy maxed out settings? Sure you probably can but you're talking about fringe cases.

Certainly if I was to use settings that represented equivalent visual fidelity on the consoles (that is to say gimp all the video settings) then 60fps would be easy. With the PC the ability to chose has always been a large benefit of the platform, spend your GPU however you wish, either on super smooth frame rates, super high graphics or some balance of the 2, ultimately the raw power of my 580 over my PS3 means no matter how you spend that power it always provides a better experience.

Egads! Your screen is humongous! Mine is only 110" and I'll be honest, I'd rather game on PC than on my PS3. I end up using my PS3 for blurays and netflix/amazon prime.

Yeah 125" from about 10ft away is an amazing way to game, more so on the PC because you need true 1080p and some anti-aliasing, when you put up 720p with no anti-aliasing from the consoles it's like rubbing sandpaper in your eyes.

Don't get me wrong though, I do own a PS3, in part for the exclusives which happen to be pretty good, but largely because I do actually like the local coop gaming experience it provides. It's certainly a significantly lower quality experience than on the PC but they have some fun coop titles and it's pretty cheap if you buy in to the platform late, I just buy 2nd hand games online for no more than $10, because the quality of console games doesn't significantly improve as a function of time so the really old ones are more or less as good as the new ones.

Unfortunately I've run out of good coop games for the PS3, so it mostly sits there unused, you'd think the library would be massive for these kinds of games but in reality it's not nearly as big as you might expect.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Comparing PS4 to recycled 3 year-old PC hardware is as moronic as it gets. PS4 APU is fabricated on a cutting edge process, only Intel has a better process. It utilities GPU architecture that has not yet arrived on the PC side, both CPU and GPU. On the PC side you really need way more watts and money to surpass it in performance. Hell, my one card costs 2 times as much as the whole console, what's the point comparing such a PC with such a console? It's really like comparing a Civic to a Ferrari. Your wheels cost more then the whole Civic, does it make the Civic crap? How often do you see a Ferrari and how often do you see a Civic? Those 8k$ rigs are like Ferraris in the computer world, PS4 is the civic. No one who looks for a car like Civic will even think about a Ferrari.

ps. I don't even think that my PC will be much faster in games optimized for the PS4 when ported to a PC. I would need a second Titan for my PC to be way faster, but I have a particular dislike of multi-gpus. I had 4-way system last gen, and I don't have fond memories of it. When it worked right it put out more fps then what I have now, but more often then not it didn't work properly. That is not to say that the motion was more fluid even with more fps.


You said CPU not the whole IC.
Nehalem-Ex is way more then Bloomfield times 2. It has a very complex ring-bus, similarly Westmere-EX is a very different beast then Gulftown. That's why we don't have SB-EX and never will, SB-E filled that niche for now, EX line will be continued with Haswell. It's hard to compare the two, fully-fledged Westmere-EX costs over 4k$

If only intel has better process technology then that means only about 80 percent of the PC market. What is the revolutionary gpu technology? It is basically a mid level gpu that is one year or so old. Revolutionary CPU, yes it is a cpu that is not used anywhere else, but that is because it is basically a very weak cpu optimized for low power and cost in a specialized device.

Again, I dont doubt the PS4 will be a good gaming device. It will be more efficient than a comparable PC, no doubt. But that is all it is, a very efficient (probably, we have seen no real performance yet) specialized device using a mid level gpu and a very slow cpu.

 

[Beavermatic]

5

You are pissed? Hah. Guess what, I'm sure developers are pissed PCs are also so slow compared to coding to metal, there are numerous calls that a PS4 would be able to do, but they wouldn't program into a multiplatform game because your 3930k and SLI Titans would be the bottleneck due to the sluggish DirectX API.

The argument will go both ways this gen now that memory bottlenecking is not a concern on the consoles.

What in the absolute hell are you talking about?! Sure, the PS4 is gonna have some yet-to-be-determined API that might be all nice and spiffy as far as resource and code goes, but the hardware is still x86 (just like a PC). And the API can only make calls as fast as a CPU or GPU can allow it. It'll still have to function simular to openGL or directx, or in that manner of framework That APU integration is nothing new, nor revolutionary, its just based off already existing tech. And APU intergration have been around for over a decade now, if your going by AMD's coined derfinition. I'm not even sure the guy above praising the PS4 APU even really knows what a APU is, or of what components defines it, lololol.

I dont know who keeps feeding you console sheep these illusions of technical grandeur or superiority, but whoever's doing it has you buying into the biggest load of bull. Maybe their marketing skills are vastly superior, but their hardware sure isn't.

 

[Tuna-Fish]

5

What in the absolute hell are you talking about?! Sure, the PS4 is gonna have some yet-to-be-determined API that might be all nice and spiffy as far as resource and code goes, but the hardware is still x86 (just like a PC). And the API can only make calls as fast as a CPU or GPU can allow it.

The big difference is latency between the GPU and the CPU. In a PS4, and in already existing APUs, this is minimal, as they both access the same memory. You can essentially just pass pointers between them to communicate.

In a PC with a discrete card and a CPU, this is not really possible. Instead, you have to copy buffers between the memory pools. This is much, much slower.

The second important difference is that on a console, you can typically just write commands in the form the GPU understands them into the GPU ring buffers, and you can embed this as static data in your code. On a PC, you have to call an API library like DirectX, which will translate the calls to a form the GPU understands, and then copy them over to the GPU memory. Again, much, much slower.

It's important to note that there's no reason that a PC APU could not do both of these, other than the fact that it would mean that the game would *only* run on that specific APU. Anyway, the net effect is that draw calls are in general a lot more expensive on the PC than they are on consoles. It's important to note that this is already true on present gen -- Xbox 360 has ~15 times less raw power than modern high-end gpus (and since it's less flexible, the difference is much more in practice), but it can manage orders of magnitude more draw calls per frame. This means that many great ways to render that are easy on the 360 are much harder to accomplish on hardware that is much, much more powerful.

 

[2is]

Im surprised we haven't seen a petition to bring back DDR1 to modern computers. I mean, it has MUCH lower latency than DDR3 so it must be better right? This is the thread where we ignore all the drawbacks of inherently weak hardware and simply focus on their strengths is it not?

It's interesting that about a month ago, the PS4 sucked because its using a weak (compared to a modern gaming PC) APU. Then you have a couple developers hyping the product and using fancy terms like draw calls and "code to metal" and suddenly the console advocates are experts that miraculously managed to transform a weak APU to an i7/Titan killer.

 

[GotNoRice]

I'm running 2x GTX680 in SLI and a 2500K @ 5Ghz, I'd be surprised if the PS4 is 1/3rd as fast.

 

[AnandThenMan]

It is basically a mid level gpu that is one year or so old.

It is much more than that. I suggest you read the various articles on the PS4 and the comments from the various devs. We don't know a lot about the PS4 yet this is true, but the little bits of information we do have tell us we are not simply looking at standard PC hardware.

Standard PC hardware would be a mid level GPU and CPU on a motherboard, and that's that. Do you think that's what the PS4 is? If you do, then you have not been paying attention.

 

[sontin]

Woot?
The PS4 is a mid level GPU and a low level CPU on a motherboard.