How the PlayStation 4 is better than a PC

[BallaTheFeared]

Plain wrong. The 'PS4' version was not running on the PS4 but in an early dev. kit. This version has same DOF, same motion blur, same AA resolution, same meshes, same textures, same everything except SVOGI removed and a slight scale down in the number of particles for some FX. Tessellation was included but broken due to a bug in the build shown.

The PC version did run on 2GB VRAM and final mature API, the 'PS4' version did run in a kit limited to only 1.5GB and non-final APIs. They received the kit a pair of weeks before the show and could not optimize anything or even fix the bugs.

You just quoted what the dev said, lol!

I said

There was the technologically advanced PC version, with proper DOF, Motion Blur, Tessellation, Global Illumination, and more, and then there was the PS4 version which had none of that.

Dev said

Feature wise most everything is the same, AA resolution, meshes, textures (PS4 has tons of memory), DOF (I assure you both use the same Bokeh DOF, not sure why that one shot has different focal range), motion blur.

Biggest differences are SVOGI has been replaced with a more efficient (read: pre-rendered fake lighting) GI solution, a slight scale down in the number of particles for some FX

Now if you actually watch a comparison video you can see DOF does not work properly. Also while you're soaking up the marketing PR, there are several different quality settings for the "same" Boken DOF, higher quality being more demanding on the hardware. It's quite easy to see that in many shots there is simply no DOF taking place on the PS4, and when it does take place it isn't nearly as good of quality as that which is seen in the PC demo. I wouldn't go as far as saying he's lying, I'm sure it does have DOF. The problem is it's low quality DOF. That means the effects aren't as good, and the accuracy isn't as good either. Case in point, the video.

As far as motion blur goes, where? Sure the entire scene might have it, you have to hide the choppy low fps somehow, however there is no object based motion blur as seen clearly on the 2H Mace in the PS4 demo.

Finally the removal of global illumination is a huge blow to the overall image quality. Of course it's no surprise since these effects draw a massive amount of power from chips like the 7970, 680, and even Titan, a low tier gpu from AMD was simply never going to be able to handle this kind of high power calculation intensive workload, which is why it was removed completely, the PS4 lacks the power to render real time lighting.


As far as broken tessellation goes, good for them, I'm sure they enjoyed the added processing power they were afforded by not having to lose it to tessellation workload. Maybe they used that freed up power to add some FX, since so much of it was already missing and they didn't have to worry about lighting.

Of course nobody is talking about AA, meshes, or texture quality, we already know without tessellation a lot of the textures suffered from low quality because tessellation was meant to enhance it. AA in this case is FXAA, no big deal there it's a minimalistic solution, and meshes looked fine since they freed up so much gpu performance not rendering real time lighting or tessellation.


Furthermore there are some gaping holes in your "theory" as far as what the system used actually was. First and foremost, the 1.5GB video card. Which video card from AMD's current GCN lineup has 1.5GB? Obviously since you believed they used a more powerful piledriver octo as you call slower, then they can't be using a custom APU with less vram/system ram, they'd have to use products they already have on the market. So we can do a 1GB Video card, and for the other 500MB we'll use for system ram, except where are you going to find a 500MB stick of DDR3 or two 250MB sticks? You aren't of course... I don't know what your problem is, but at this point it's beyond old.

It seems for you anything is a source so long as it furthers your agenda. This could be new register forum posts, or even unverified comments in a news article, anything and everything is fair game for you. Heck you even take the words of people trying to sell their product to make millions of dollars at face value, despite indisputable video proof that shows otherwise, as well as anything that comes out of AMD marketing.


I'm not even saying this is final PS4 quality, I'm sure it will look much closer to modern PC's than it does currently. However you're the one trying to say a 7860 GPU is going to out perform a 680, even Titan, and a AMD tablet based cpu is going to match a desktop i7. Honestly you're beyond delusional at this point, it's pretty obvious your love of AMD despite the raw facts in front of you is causing you to troll this thread willingly or unwillingly. Either way you should stop while you still have posting privileges, they're already on to you on the CPU forum.

 

[finbarqs]

just call DOF Bokeh. Having DOF literally means having more things in focus. Watching the comparison video, the Playstation 4's has more DOF than the PC's. The PC lack the DOF that the PS4 has. that said, The PC has bokeh incoporated into one particular scene (obvious) that the PS4 didn't have.

 

[Erenhardt]

What are you talking about? Actual gameplay was probably 25 to 26 fps on avg with drops to 24.

The only area it has enough umph to hit 30 with drops to 28 consistently is in a small cave.


You're delusional if you don't think they optimized the heck out of these titles to run as close to 30 fps consistent with no headroom past it. They're using every ounce of power they can, failing to deliver 30 fps most of the time and now you're trying to say there is another 20-30 fps left in the tank, bwhahaha, please.

If there is no headroom, why even bothering with fps cap?
Why there is fps cap?
A. For energy saving purpose.
B. To lower console temperature.
C. To provide smoother experience by rendering frames without huge spikes up and down, but in close range (28+-2fps)
You have 3 (three) chances. You can call your friend, take 50/50 or ask someone on this board. Good luck

 

[BallaTheFeared]

just call DOF Bokeh. Having DOF literally means having more things in focus. Watching the comparison video, the Playstation 4's has more DOF than the PC's. The PC lack the DOF that the PS4 has. that said, The PC has bokeh incoporated into one particular scene (obvious) that the PS4 didn't have.

More, or less?

If there is no headroom, why even bothering with fps cap?
Why there is fps cap?
A. For energy saving purpose.
B. To lower console temperature.
C. To provide smoother experience by rendering frames without huge spikes up and down, but in close range (28+-2fps)
You have 3 (three) chances. You can call your friend, take 50/50 or ask someone on this board. Good luck

That's easy, 30 fps is their target because 60 would take twice as much power to hit. Shooting for 30 allows them to enable vsync and triple buffering. Using 60 fps would have no benefit. All of A, B, C apply as well, though realistically at this point A and B mean very little. Consoles have gone through node shrinks to reduce both, now the focus in purely on optimizing each area to hit around 30 fps, give or take a few fps. Using 30 as your target allows you to focus your game design around a set performance threshold, each level and area can then be designed to hit that target or as close to it as possible, either slightly above or below.

Take the cave, that was the only area in the video it was able to hit 30 fps, and even then it would drop to 28. The cave however has a lot more going on than the outdoor areas. They could do this because they knew exactly what hardware they had, and exactly what fps target they needed. The cave took the additional power gained from not having to render a decent view distance and used that power to create a more robust area. Leaving performance on the table means your game isn't as optimized and areas are not as good as they could be.

 

[Erenhardt]

Take the cave, that was the only area in the video it was able to hit 30 fps, and even then it would drop to 28. The cave however has a lot more going on than the outdoor areas. They could do this because they knew exactly what hardware they had, and exactly what fps target they needed. The cave took the additional power gained from not having to render a decent view distance and used that power to create a more robust area. Leaving performance on the table means your game isn't as optimized and areas are not as good as they could be.

Yes, important locations that are part of the main quest line are designed to use 110% of console power - that's why it dips to 25fps.
But that is THE CAVE. There is no other cave like that in whole game. There may be more similar location during main quest, but other 'side' locations are far from it and performance in those less demanding areas is well above 30fps.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

You have no proof of that sadly, all you've shown is neither console is capable of sustained 30 fps in that particular title in the areas shown.

This is the optimization consoles get, it's not some magic pixie dust some would have us all believe. It's developers working on a fixed platform, with fixed capability. They are simply optimizing each part of the game to provide maximum visual fidelity at a specific frame rate, on specific hardware.

They gain nothing by using less than what they have, the goal is peak usage at all times.

If you want to make a case for other open world caves being less demanding that's fine, but you aren't going to be able to tie that into your PC fps charts unless you can show a review where they go into said caves - which I think we both know is highly unlikely.

Small areas don't necessarily mean low demand either...

That small area was one of the most demanding areas in the entire game, gpu wise.

 

[HeXen]

What 3DTV do you have and what software do you use for it for PC gaming? That alone will tell me if you're a serious PC gamer from your couch or if you think just plugging in a laptop qualifies as that: lol:

And ANYONE who PC games from a couch will want a wireless mouse handy for the couch, wouldn't they? You speak as if that very fact is somehow a drawback, you either must be using a corded mouse for your laptop otherwise such a notion would be obviously absurd. Same for the PC wakeup. Boots up instantly to the desktop ready to do whatever. Then again, maybe you have some unreliable crap no wonder the idea of a hibernating computer gives you the shudders.

And what exactly does "abuse" have to do with your argument? If you think flipping through PS3 discs that scratch over time is less abusive than simply running ALL PC games from the hard drive, then

And everything I posted was no lie either. Everything I said was valid. And no one is arguing that a PC is going to replace consoles in the living room (other than yourself for some odd reason), the point was that someone posted gaming in the living room on a couch was an advantage for the PS4 when clearly PC gaming accomplishes the very same thing. Or have you never heard of the notion of an gaming HTPC before?

I didn't bother reading beyond bolded because again you are making assumptions instead of just seriously asking first and purposefully just trying to contradict with your personal preference when I made no arguments against that. Again, you are a niche consumer for that market and the proof is in the sales. Feel free to go out and ask general consumer's yourself. I talk about it with them every chance I get.

My PC has a Core I7/680GTX/8gigs ddr3/SSD....again, I use it for mainly for games outside of FPS/MP. Like 3rd person, racer or any game that is gamepad ...My PC regular desktop is the same parts except different PSU and Case and it's for games where KB/mouse prevail the most.

My 3DTV is a Sony Bravia 42".^_^

 

[galego]

What does it mater what the memory requirements for an OS are? As long as the software load on your machine does not surpass it's memory buffer, it shouldn't make a difference.

Memory requirements are a good measure of bloatness. The more lightweight and fast OSs (including the OS in the PS4) require about one order of magnitude less memory than a bloated OS such as Windows 7/8.

Some of the most demanding pc games today require very little system ram, like crysis 3 needing only about 1 gb, or metro last light at 500mb (according to gamegpu.ru)

The Killzone demo for PS4 already requires more than 1.5 GB of system memory. This is the statistic:

• Sound: 553MB
• Havok Scratch: 350MB
• Game Heap: 318MB
• Various Assets/Entities: 143MB
• Animation: 75MB
• Executable/Stack: 74MB
• LUA Script: 6MB
• Particle Buffer: 6MB
• AI Data: 6MB
• Physics Meshes: 5MB

I don't know the memory used by the Elemental demo, but it run on an i7 with 16 GB RAM (I don't know how many was used nor for what, but I suspect that about 10-12 GB were for uncompressed textures).

I ... don't know where you got that info from ... and I don't really understand why you think a 3.5-4 ghz vishera is not as powerful as the ps4's jaguar chip.

Recall we are not comparing two chips on the same hardware on a PC with the same OS.

We are comparing two chips on different hardware and one of them running a bloated OS and the other running a lightweight OS.

The same chip can run faster on a different hardware/software. Or a slower chip can compete with a faster chip on different hardware/software. The car analogy also applies here:

A motorbike with a 100 HP engine is faster than a car using the same 100 HP engine. Or a motorbike with a 150 HP engine can compete with a car using a 500 HP engine.

 

[futurefields]

a low tier gpu from AMD was simply never going to be able to handle this kind of high power calculation intensive workload, which is why it was removed completely, the PS4 lacks the power to render real time lighting.

PS4 can certainly render lots of real time lighting. But probably not as much as a GTX680 equipped PC.

 

[joshhedge]

Recall we are not comparing two chips on the same hardware on a PC with the same OS.

We are comparing two chips on different hardware and one of them running a bloated OS and the other running a lightweight OS.

The same chip can run faster on a different hardware/software. Or a slower chip can compete with a faster chip on different hardware/software. The car analogy also applies here:

A motorbike with a 100 HP engine is faster than a car using the same 100 HP engine. Or a motorbike with a 150 HP engine can compete with a car using a 500 HP engine.

Reading through what you have said here makes me really wonder how ignorent you are to the facts of the matter.

Having a lightweight OS running on sub-par hardware is still going to perform worse than a bloated OS, one which can do so much more - bloated is the wrong term to use, in my option - which runs on significantly more powerful hardware. Why are you delusional to this and continue to deny it? A 8 core Jaguar CPU is no where near to the same league as an i7.

I am a fan of both console gaming and PC gaming, having owned a PS3, but reading through this thread in an un-biased manor really leads me to a strong conclusion that this PS4 will not perform better than high end PC hardware. Don't get me wrong, the PS4 will be a nice and well needed step up from the PS3, but don't be thinking that it is anymore than that.

It's also interesting to note how you ignored Ballas most recent argument to your points.

 

[sontin]

Memory requirements are a good measure of bloatness. The more lightweight and fast OSs (including the OS in the PS4) require about one order of magnitude less memory than a bloated OS such as Windows 7/8.


The Killzone demo for PS4 already requires more than 1.5 GB of system memory. This is the statistic:

• Sound: 553MB
• Havok Scratch: 350MB
• Game Heap: 318MB
• Various Assets/Entities: 143MB
• Animation: 75MB
• Executable/Stack: 74MB
• LUA Script: 6MB
• Particle Buffer: 6MB
• AI Data: 6MB
• Physics Meshes: 5MB

And? Metro:Last Light is not even using 1,5GB at all with all effects and SSAA and less than 1GB of system memory.

So Metro on a pc is much better optimized than Killzone on the PS4.

:awe:

 

[showb1z]

bla

fgs man, I've never gotten anywhere near maxing out my ram while gaming. And my next build will surely be 16gb, cause why wouldn't it be right. I can't even remember when system ram used to be an issue, 1999? 8gb system + 2gb vram is pretty much the minimum for high-end systems.That's already above the PS4, so don't worry about us, we won't be running into a memory wall anytime soon... Just stop this nonsense.
And an i7 really doesn't give a shit about running a "bloated" OS and some 50 other threads in the background. Unlike consoles, modern desktops have tons of power to spare.
Use some common sense instead of being off in fantasy land.

 

[2is]

Memory requirements are a good measure of bloatness. The more lightweight and fast OSs (including the OS in the PS4) require about one order of magnitude less memory than a bloated OS such as Windows 7/8.

It's funny how memory works differently depending on what fits your agenda better. Sometimes high memory usage means something is bloated, other times low memory usage means performance is artificially being limited. Keep digging.

I also think its hilarious what you refer to as "research" you post a question on a forum (weather it's here or someplace else) get varying answers, again pick the one that best fits your agenda, then post that nonsensical "research" in here.

 

[Cerb]

just call DOF Bokeh. Having DOF literally means having more things in focus. Watching the comparison video, the Playstation 4's has more DOF than the PC's. The PC lack the DOF that the PS4 has. that said, The PC has bokeh incoporated into one particular scene (obvious) that the PS4 didn't have.

No, having DOF literally means blurring the scene. Most PC games, for whatever reason, do have DOF. Luckily, it can be turned off almost universally, except in cutscenes, where it actually makes sense. Without DOF, nothing in the scene is out of focus. This is good, because DOF that would make any sense would also require eye-tracking, and much higher framerates than we're used to.

 

[-Slacker-]

Memory requirements are a good measure of bloatness. The more lightweight and fast OSs (including the OS in the PS4) require about one order of magnitude less memory than a bloated OS such as Windows 7/8.

And how does the bloat-ness affect game performance if the machine you're running the game and OS has more than enough system memory?

The Killzone demo for PS4 already requires more than 1.5 GB of system memory. This is the statistic:

• Sound: 553MB
• Havok Scratch: 350MB
• Game Heap: 318MB
• Various Assets/Entities: 143MB
• Animation: 75MB
• Executable/Stack: 74MB
• LUA Script: 6MB
• Particle Buffer: 6MB
• AI Data: 6MB
• Physics Meshes: 5MB

I'm guessing you think that's relevant because that claim you made - that PC ports of ps4 games will need n fold more memory (can't be bothered to go back and check, but it was a relatively large number. And you're basing that on the fact that ps3 ports need far less memory than their pc counterparts? Toward the end of the ps3's life cycle? Is that correct?

I don't know the memory used by the Elemental demo, but it run on an i7 with 16 GB RAM (I don't know how many was used nor for what, but I suspect that about 10-12 GB were for uncompressed textures).

You think that PC had 16 gb because it needed to? You understand that ddr3 is cheap, especially for a developer showcasing a demo, right?

Recall we are not comparing two chips on the same hardware on a PC with the same OS.

We are comparing two chips on different hardware and one of them running a bloated OS and the other running a lightweight OS.

The same chip can run faster on a different hardware/software. Or a slower chip can compete with a faster chip on different hardware/software.

The most annoying part of having to discuss things in this thread has been, for me, that people keep assuming that I somehow forgot consoles can make more efficient use than a PC of the same hardware, which means that I have to constantly go back to square one and start the discussion all over again.

The question has never been weather or not consoles - the ps4 in particular -use hardware more efficiently than a PC, but how much more efficiently

You speak so matter-of-factly about things that you can't possibly know, making assumptions like the 10-12 gb Elemental demo thing, or about jaguar performance compared to vishera etc, and it makes people scratch their heads and go "huh?"..".

The car analogy also applies here:

A motorbike with a 100 HP engine is faster than a car using the same 100 HP engine. Or a motorbike with a 150 HP engine can compete with a car using a 500 HP engine.

This may be a hypocritical request, but don't patronize me.

 

[futurefields]

No, having DOF literally means blurring the scene. Most PC games, for whatever reason, do have DOF. Luckily, it can be turned off almost universally, except in cutscenes, where it actually makes sense. Without DOF, nothing in the scene is out of focus. This is good, because DOF that would make any sense would also require eye-tracking, and much higher framerates than we're used to.

Lol, no it does not. Having "DOF" does not mean anything and nobody should ever say something "has DOF" because in the imaging world that means nothing.

There is short DOF and there is long DOF.

Having short DOF means stuff in the background and/or foreground of the subject is out of focus.

Having long DOF means everything or most everything in the entire scene is in focus.

Just to say "This has DOF" should not mean anything, but in modern video gaming, just saying a game has "DOF" implies that the game actually has short DOF and uses some kind of processing to achieve that.

Old games have inherently long DOF because that sort of post-processing is a relatively new thing in games.

 

[finbarqs]

More, or less?

That's LESS Depth of Field. A lot of photographers (to keep from confusion) literally call it "Depth of Focus". So if you say "I want more depth of focus" that literally means I want MORE in focus, vs. saying "I want less depth of focus".

In an entire scene, the FOF is the playing field, and the DOF is sample from the field. FOF = Field of Focus, DOF = Depth of Field.

But everybody without the proper know-how confuses DOF with DOF effects in which people will think "I want MORE DOF effects" which roughly translates to "I want less in focus".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_of_field

 

[Cerb]

Lol, no it does not. Having "DOF" does not mean anything and nobody should ever say something "has DOF" because in the imaging world that means nothing.

DOF refers to a shader effect which blurs objects father away from a focus point. Video game != photograph. Turning off DOF refers to restoring the situation in which everything is effectively in focus. General focus concepts are N/A, without adding such effects.

Whether it should be called something else or not, it's too late, now. The checkbox says, "depth of field," beside it, whether it's in the game options, or an injector; and it does apply an effect with adds depth of field where it did not exist. It's done poorly, sure, but it's currently impossible to do it well.

 

[futurefields]

DOF refers to a shader effect which blurs objects father away from a focus point. Video game != photograph. Turning off DOF refers to restoring the situation in which everything is effectively in focus. General focus concepts are N/A, without adding such effects.

Whether it should be called something else or not, it's too late, now. The checkbox says, "depth of field," beside it, whether it's in the game options, or an injector; and it does apply an effect with adds depth of field where it did not exist. It's done poorly, sure, but it's currently impossible to do it well.

Well, technically the effect is taking away depth of field, but, I get you.

 

[Aikouka]

Memory requirements are a good measure of bloatness. The more lightweight and fast OSs (including the OS in the PS4) require about one order of magnitude less memory than a bloated OS such as Windows 7/8.

What does memory use matter when you've got magnitudes more memory to use? Windows is a general purpose operating system, and yes, they use more memory because of different services, system applications and user applications, which are loaded up by default. Back in the day, some hardcore gamers would actually have more than one PC, which seems crazy, but it was because their gaming PC was rather stripped software-wise. That really isn't necessary anymore, because other than intensive activities (such as encoding), we have more than enough compute power and memory to handle all that extra junk.

Also, if you want to talk about horrible, bloated stuff... what about software in general? Why does the PlayStation Network Store on the PS3 literally take around 20 seconds or more to open? It's gotten to the point where I use the PSN web store for just about everything.

The Killzone demo for PS4 already requires more than 1.5 GB of system memory. This is the statistic:

• Sound: 553MB
• Havok Scratch: 350MB
• Game Heap: 318MB
• Various Assets/Entities: 143MB
• Animation: 75MB
• Executable/Stack: 74MB
• LUA Script: 6MB
• Particle Buffer: 6MB
• AI Data: 6MB
• Physics Meshes: 5MB

If I had to guess, I would say that part of the higher memory use is because of the way console games typically run... off optical media. They may want to cache more media because of the time it takes to pull the media off the disc or they want to leave all disc access for other things (i.e. only graphical media like textures).

I don't know the memory used by the Elemental demo, but it run on an i7 with 16 GB RAM (I don't know how many was used nor for what, but I suspect that about 10-12 GB were for uncompressed textures).

Honestly, they probably just built the equivalent of a higher-end gaming system. They also probably used pretty speedy RAM, which most likely wasn't necessary.

We are comparing two chips on different hardware and one of them running a bloated OS and the other running a lightweight OS.

The same chip can run faster on a different hardware/software. Or a slower chip can compete with a faster chip on different hardware/software. The car analogy also applies here:

A motorbike with a 100 HP engine is faster than a car using the same 100 HP engine. Or a motorbike with a 150 HP engine can compete with a car using a 500 HP engine.

You do realize that the operating system doesn't sit there using tons of computational resources? If I closed Firefox, which includes this TwitchTV stream, I would probably be using maybe 1% of my CPU if anything as most of the CPU usage is by Firefox and Flash Player.

 

[3DVagabond]

Lol, no it does not. Having "DOF" does not mean anything and nobody should ever say something "has DOF" because in the imaging world that means nothing.

There is short DOF and there is long DOF.

Having short DOF means stuff in the background and/or foreground of the subject is out of focus.

Having long DOF means everything or most everything in the entire scene is in focus.

Just to say "This has DOF" should not mean anything, but in modern video gaming, just saying a game has "DOF" implies that the game actually has short DOF and uses some kind of processing to achieve that.

Old games have inherently long DOF because that sort of post-processing is a relatively new thing in games.

We need to make assumptions sometimes to keep the flow of conversation going. We regress a lot here. I think it's reasonable to assume, because we are talking about gaming not photography, that we also have no DoF and saying a game has DoF means it's performing a process to artificially create DoF effect. No DoF is not the same thing as long DoF. It's, literally, No DoF, because there is no processing going on for that effect. Long DoF still infers there is a process running to create an artificial DoF.

 

[finbarqs]

but gaming is referencing to camera effect, so I think we need to acknowledge that. Obviously in gaming DOF is going to be artificial, unless they actually decide to incorporate 100% photo/film characteristics in their game.

 

[HeXen]

The xbox's projector thing, using the TV as the focus point and the projector as peripheral, now that's what I call DOF effect.

 

[Blitzvogel]

And? Metro:Last Light is not even using 1,5GB at all with all effects and SSAA and less than 1GB of system memory.

So Metro on a pc is much better optimized than Killzone on the PS4.

:awe:

They both may be FPS, but I wouldn't compare the two. KZ's demo is rendering a much larger environment and perhaps, more diverse.

TBH, I'd expect better sound rendering for a built-for-PS4 game than a current PC game and hence as high or higher quality sound assets and design. 360 games are required to support 5.1 Visual rendering isn't the entire equation. As per everything else, the sheer memory size allows for more pre-loading a la PC. Also, going back to top end console exclusive quality, just because a console doesn't have the same rendering horsepower doesn't mean it can't have a larger and more diversified repertoire of textures and art assets. I'd rather have a nice range of diverse 1024² textures instead of seeing the same 4096² texture repeated too many times.

 

[Sleepingforest]

Just because an environment is larger doesn't make it more demanding. Lighting, shadows, high-res textures, and so on can easily make a smaller indoor environment just as demanding as an expansive outdoor environment.

And I don't see why a console exclusive would have better or more "diverse" (seriously, heo does diversity impact performance?) textures than any other game (especially things that originate for PC, like the Witcher).