How the PlayStation 4 is better than a PC

[OILFIELDTRASH]

Biggest win comes from the developers ability to trust that there is no bottleneck between CPU & GPU.
If one can just write data from chips cache to another they can get some decent wins.

But if no bottleneck exists there will be no wins.

 

[showb1z]

I loled.
You have a nice machine there... worth about 5k$ or more? How do you feel about it? Are you proud? Do you feel you have THE POWER no one ever had? Do you feel like a king of the WORLD?!...
...If "yes", than I'm sorry for you. You just got yourself overpriced garbage. You need expensive hyperfast SSD just to startup this crap in resonable quick manner. Your $600 CPU has to be overclocked to have anything done, because most of the time it is generating '0's while waiting for other components. When it is finally working, it uses only 1 core. Your extremely low latency DDR3 compares to GDDR5 like DDR2 to DDR3. BTW. I recently upgraded my PC. I changed ram from DDR2 CL4 to DDR3 CL9 - so DOWNGRADE by your standards...
And you need 1000W PSU to keep this heater going... They should put environmental taxes on you.
And all this will now lose it glorious shine because of 500$ system with APU.
We are ready for the flood of your frustration and anger. Go ahead and post 10 replies flaming and cursing upcoming hardware.

You're seriously making a post like this in a hardware enthousiast forum?
I didn't lol, I chuckled though.

 

[Black Octagon]

LOL, that post is almost as unbelievable as the fact that this thread is still going

 

[NTMBK]

The pci e is not bottlenecking games. Especially those of us with modern PCs with a pcie 3 slot.

PCIe does not appear to be bottlenecking games because current games are designed with that bottleneck in mind. There are algorithms which would die at the hands of PCIe, so developers don't use them right now. But remove that and you free up developers to use new algorithms.

 

[OILFIELDTRASH]

PCIe does not appear to be bottlenecking games because current games are designed with that bottleneck in mind. There are algorithms which would die at the hands of PCIe, so developers don't use them right now. But remove that and you free up developers to use new algorithms.

Okay so you believe removing this bottleneck will allow inferior hardware to compete against a high end PC?
Let me ask why AMD currently doesn't implement this on the desktop space?

 

[Olikan]

Yes, they very much do, if you use a deferred engine. Like almost everyone in the industry does today. Besides, I think the PS4 is healthily overprovisioned on ROPs.

deferred engines alleviate the problem, but it is still there
...yet, titan benefits from it too

yeah, ROPs and bandwidth is very good for the PS4 targets (1080p)

 

[exar333]

I am actually surprised that both Sony and MS have not gone to a more iterative console release process, like tablets and phones. Release a refreshed console every 12-18 months to keep up with industry changes. Trying to build a console to last for 5-10 years is just silly. HDMI specs? Who knows what it will support. Native 4K support for games? Forget it. Future DX12 release? Forget it.

No one else in the industry locks themselves into a single device, for so long, in the market anymore. It would drive more consistent console sales, naturally refresh the line along the way, and reduce needing to live with the roller coaster console sales curve we see during the natural lifetime of the console itself.

Why not put out an evolutionary console each year, with better and better CPU/GPU specs and keep the brand constant, rather than the hardware inside?

 

[sontin]

The problem with this it that people would need to buy a new console every 12-18 months. And at that point they would go straight to the PC.

Seeing the pace in the mobile world i guess this is the last console generation. nVidia will update their Project Shield every year with a 3x times faster SoC. Game developers will make more and more games for android. You buy them once and can play on nearly every other Android device.

 

[Olikan]

Why not put out an evolutionary console each year, with better and better CPU/GPU specs and keep the brand constant, rather than the hardware inside?

this destroys the whole point of consoles...

instead of long term profits, we would have short term...
Prices will have be higher, and at this point people will just go to PC... if that happen, Sony will be another DELL, HP

 

[Enigmoid]

I am actually surprised that both Sony and MS have not gone to a more iterative console release process, like tablets and phones. Release a refreshed console every 12-18 months to keep up with industry changes. Trying to build a console to last for 5-10 years is just silly. HDMI specs? Who knows what it will support. Native 4K support for games? Forget it. Future DX12 release? Forget it.

No one else in the industry locks themselves into a single device, for so long, in the market anymore. It would drive more consistent console sales, naturally refresh the line along the way, and reduce needing to live with the roller coaster console sales curve we see during the natural lifetime of the console itself.

Why not put out an evolutionary console each year, with better and better CPU/GPU specs and keep the brand constant, rather than the hardware inside?

You just described the pc.

 

[Pottuvoi]

But if no bottleneck exists there will be no wins.

True, although in this case the games are designed in a way that CPU/GPU do not share a lot of the data.
When this is possible, it can be properly exploited and give proper advantage. (Think vertex pruning on Ps3.)

 

[exar333]

this destroys the whole point of consoles...

instead of long term profits, we would have short term...
Prices will have be higher, and at this point people will just go to PC... if that happen, Sony will be another DELL, HP

I get a new phone every two years, but many people are still buying the older model (at a discounted price) still. I can go to the google or apple store and get games that work with pretty much any recent apple or google-phone made in the last 3-4 years. Often times, I can also run these on phones even older. If I don't have a super high resolution phone, it runs at a lower resolution.

For those who say 'it would then just be a PC', how is that really any different than a static device? It's already essentially a PC.

Most gamers already replace their consoles every 3-4 years anyway due to them failing or whatnot. Look at how many folks replaced their PS3s and 360s. It's often times cheaper, and easier, to just replace Rather than try and get it fixed.

This isn't 1990 anymore, tech moves MUCH more quickly and consoles should adapt or risk becoming obsolete even more quickly than we have seen.

I certainly don't buy a laptop, tablet, phone or PC and expect it to last for 7-10 years. Why should I do the same for a console?

 

[Rakehellion]

Doesn't seem like it.

http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph5458/43816.png

http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph5458/43817.png

Sure, there are some differences but PCI-E 3.0 8x or PCI-E 2.0 16x seems to saturate the card in games.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5458/the-radeon-hd-7970-reprise-pcie-bandwidth-overclocking-and-msaa

ps. Compute is a different story.

You're aware that your graph shows that 2x PCIe is enough for most games, right?

Everyone who's written a graphics program knows that the bus from the CPU to the GPU is the slowest part of the system, thus video games are programmed from the ground up not to saturate the bus by using things like VBOs, batching, and instancing. A game is designed to use a small fraction of the bus from square one. Obviously when you eliminate the biggest bottleneck in the system, you're going to be able to make more advanced programs.

Okay so you believe removing this bottleneck will allow inferior hardware to compete against a high end PC?
Let me ask why AMD currently doesn't implement this on the desktop space?

They are. But you understand that completely redesigning how your computer works is not a small task and will be faced with technical and adoption issues?

 

[Rakehellion]

I get a new phone every two years, but many people are still buying the older model (at a discounted price) still.

Nail on the head. That creates fragmentation.

Releasing a new console every two years would result in either:
-New games won't work for the old system, rendering it an expensive paperweight and negating the billions of dollars Sony and Microsoft spent developing it.
-New games will work for the old system, but won't add any tangible new content, thus won't be worth the investment.

Fact is, consoles still drive the game industry. They do this by remaining constant, which facilitates adoption.

Even the GPU nerd's precious Crysis 3 had its PC graphics and gameplay significantly crippled to make it compatible with consoles.

 

[Rakehellion]

I certainly don't buy a laptop, tablet, phone or PC and expect it to last for 7-10 years. Why should I do the same for a console?

You don't buy a laptop, tablet, or phone and expect it to last 10 years.
You don't buy a game console, TV, car, or house and expect to replace it every 2.

 

[DrBoss]

I loled.
You have a nice machine there... worth about 5k$ or more? How do you feel about it? Are you proud? Do you feel you have THE POWER no one ever had? Do you feel like a king of the WORLD?!...
...If "yes", than I'm sorry for you. You just got yourself overpriced garbage. You need expensive hyperfast SSD just to startup this crap in resonable quick manner. Your $600 CPU has to be overclocked to have anything done, because most of the time it is generating '0's while waiting for other components. When it is finally working, it uses only 1 core. Your extremely low latency DDR3 compares to GDDR5 like DDR2 to DDR3. BTW. I recently upgraded my PC. I changed ram from DDR2 CL4 to DDR3 CL9 - so DOWNGRADE by your standards...
And you need 1000W PSU to keep this heater going... They should put environmental taxes on you.
And all this will now lose it glorious shine because of 500$ system with APU.
We are ready for the flood of your frustration and anger. Go ahead and post 10 replies flaming and cursing upcoming hardware.

Impressive... spoken like a true 14 year old who should probably be paying attention to his teacher instead of surfing the internet via his smartphone while simultaneously fantasizing about the next Halo.

 

[Makaveli]

Impressive... spoken like a true 14 year old who should probably be paying attention to his teacher instead of surfing the internet via his smartphone while simultaneously fantasizing about the next Halo.

lol I don't know about you but it made me laugh

 

[Beavermatic]

...well, if there was anything special about AMD's APU, looks like intel's going for the throne....

http://www.dailytech.com/Intel+Anno...Up+to+a+3x+Performance+Boost/article31464.htm

 

[Erenhardt]

...well, if there was anything special about AMD's APU, looks like intel's going for the throne....

http://www.dailytech.com/Intel+Anno...Up+to+a+3x+Performance+Boost/article31464.htm

Do you even read what you are posting?

An Ivy Bridge i7-3770K part scored around 1560 in 3DMark 2011 [source], thus the new Iris Pro-equipped chips should be scoring over 3000, if Intel's performance claims are accurate. That indicates that the Intel's on-die graphics will be slightly better than a full discrete AMD Radeon HD 7750 GPU which scores around 2900 [source].

They based this on score from this graph:

1560 is a i7 3DM11 score with HD6570 dedicated GPU
HD4000 scores 652 points in graphics suite:

Intel claims that HD5100 is 2x faster than HD4000 which gives you final score of 1300 points. That is a bit slower than A10 APU...

 

[Blitzvogel]

PS4 should be a good platform for 4 years. Versus PC I think it will have decent legs, similar to the 360 versus the PC platform, despite the already huge compute advantage between top end graphics now and the expected 1.84 TFLOPS of performance for the PS4, which wasn't the same case for the 360. It was on relatively equal parity with the best PC graphics at the time (without getting into absolute specifics).

The PC will benefit from the similar architectures. Multiplatforms should be excellent be them built for PC first or PS4 first, and hell we may see PS4 & PC crossplatform play. It would make sense for Sony to do that with Planetside 2, Everquest, and encourage the F2P developers to release their titles on the PS4. Making the PS4 the ultimate gaming console should mean embracing as many genres and game models as possible.

On the other hand, we PC gamers need the new consoles to get developers to finally push their visuals. The average performance of GPUs in machines used by dedicated PC gamers is maybe on the level of a Radeon 5770/7750? I honestly wouldn't be surprised if it's much lower.

 

[alcoholbob]

I am actually surprised that both Sony and MS have not gone to a more iterative console release process, like tablets and phones. Release a refreshed console every 12-18 months to keep up with industry changes. Trying to build a console to last for 5-10 years is just silly. HDMI specs? Who knows what it will support. Native 4K support for games? Forget it. Future DX12 release? Forget it.

No one else in the industry locks themselves into a single device, for so long, in the market anymore. It would drive more consistent console sales, naturally refresh the line along the way, and reduce needing to live with the roller coaster console sales curve we see during the natural lifetime of the console itself.

Why not put out an evolutionary console each year, with better and better CPU/GPU specs and keep the brand constant, rather than the hardware inside?

The only reason the cell phone model works is because a cell phone costs almost nothing to make and is like 80% profit. Nobody in their right mind would pay Microsoft $1000 for an Xbox8 and then buy a new one every 2 years but still play the same games but have a spiffer Kinect or 2% better pixel density.

 

[galego]

There are lots of reasons why game developers and related people are considering the PS4 a nearly perfect gaming PC.

• It uses PC stuff, which implies that lot of tools and experience are available to the console, instead re-inventing the wheel.
• The console hardware is fixed. Therefore developers can target the same metal.
• The OS allows for coding at low level, maximizing the usage of resources.
• No incompatibility from old drivers and/or different updates.
• Innovative hardware never seen in a PC before: APU-HSA, hUMA, fast GDDR5 as main memory...

Regarding performance the PS4 will be a beast. Epic showed a demo at GDC 2013 where the PS4(*) was able to compete with an ivy bridge i7 + 16 GB RAM + GTX-680. It was behind this high-end gaming PC by only a fraction of the price!!!

(*) The funny part is on the details:

The developers received the kits weeks before and had no time for tuning the demo beyond a fast port from the PC, therefore the demo run without any optimization.

They also used an early API, unlike the PC version which run on mature Windows API.

The demo did not run on final PS4 hardware but on an dev. kit with constraints. Developers only could use 1.5 GB VRAM and the full demo run only at 27-29% of the PS4 final specs!!!

Therefore the PS4 is faster than any available gaming PC.

Of course in some years things will change but then will become a PS5...

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Also because they depend on selling it to eat.

 

[2is]

Regarding performance the PS4 will be a beast. Epic showed a demo at GDC 2013 where the PS4(*) was able to compete with an ivy bridge i7 + 16 GB RAM + GTX-680. It was behind this high-end gaming PC by only a fraction of the price!!!

We've been through this before in the other thread where it was you against everyone else for about a dozen pages worth of posts. The "PC version" of that demo had higher details and frame rate. If by compete you mean they both were able to run it, then yes, it did compete.

Was it impressive for console hardware? Sure, was it better than the unit it was competing against, no.

 

[Beavermatic]

Do you even read what you are posting?

It a complete literal sense, and a "It should be funny, but is not" kind-of-way, No... No I do not.

Honest truth.