PSM: PS4 specs more powerful than Xbox 720

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Their immediate track record suggests otherwise.

We had to deal with this FUD pre-Vita, but not again, thank-you-very-much.

He's good at that. Misinformed but entertaining at times.

That's almost expected though, because it was compromised visually to run at 60 on the consoles, so on PC where everything is 60, the difference is more pronounced. The performance doesn't make up for any of the visual shortcomings basically.

Absolutely. And the whole megatexture promise or what I had interpreted as something cool and new, that was disappointing. This is a Carmack game too, makes it a little worse. I know it's a WIP so hopefully the tech will get that much better with competent HW. Well we have competent HW on PC and that didn't turn out that well either ><
 
I bet Sony still manages to fuck up when designing this thing so that in the end it is only potentially more powerful, just like the PS2 and PS3..

All I care for is BC anyway..
 
Absolutely. And the whole megatexture promise or what I had interpreted as something cool and new, that was disappointing. This is a Carmack game too, makes it a little worse. I know it's a WIP so hopefully the tech will get that much better with competent HW. Well we have competent HW on PC and that didn't turn out that well either ><
The game size is still the big issue with that technology. The PS3 and PC version could have been a hundred gig, they could have done 'Rage HD' on PC, sold on blurays and digitally. People have the HDD space and bandwidth. Carmack claimed consumers don't want 'a stack of DVDs', I think that's untrue.

But I think Doom 4 will look great. They're targeting 30 on consoles, it'll be really dark hiding some of the texture shame more effectively etc. It should be a major step up from Rage.
 
Sony will always have the best exclusives. The problem is that Sony exclusives do not sell as much as they should. The key for PS4 is to use it's processing power to make exclusive games more appealing.
 
Sony will always have the best exclusives. The problem is that Sony exclusives do not sell as much as they should. The key for PS4 is to use it's processing power to make exclusive games more appealing.


How?

They need to get rid of their marketing. Every PS3 commercial ends with 4 friggin slogans and it's annoying. It's like their marketing can't decide which one to use so they keep all 4

I'd also like to argue that exclusives aren't as relevant anymore now that 3rd parties have stepped up their games. I spent 90% of my time this gen with 3rd party games.
 
Sony will always have the best exclusives. The problem is that Sony exclusives do not sell as much as they should. The key for PS4 is to use it's processing power to make exclusive games more appealing.
Speaking of first party games, I'd argue that honour goes to Nintendo.

That said, the point is moot anyway with the extinction of the third party exclusive (at least between Sony and Microsoft) - so the biggest factor becomes which console gets the best version of the multiplatform games.
 
Absolutely. And the whole megatexture promise or what I had interpreted as something cool and new, that was disappointing. This is a Carmack game too, makes it a little worse. I know it's a WIP so hopefully the tech will get that much better with competent HW. Well we have competent HW on PC and that didn't turn out that well either ><

On the other hand, for us who prefer to play most games on console, id produced one of the most impressive standout visual showpieces (and one of the best-feeling FPS games) this gen. Compared to many other acclaimed visual showcases, Rage just feels like the right direction for showing off stuff, IMO. (The game itself could only be better having been more fleshed out in its overworld/driving element or having that same bit cut back to focus on the meat of the game.) Certainly, the intent behind the technology should be considered a look to the future of game production tools.
 
Handheld =! Console

Devs did not have many problems with the psp, and that came out before the ps3.

I'm sure devs wouldn't have many problems with a more PS3 like Vita either, given they spent 5 years working over PS3 and were more or less used to its quirks...but the point is Sony took a different tack, and took it in concert with developer guidance. There was a big shift in how hardware is designed at SCE, and the same process that resulted in Vita will be used for PS4. I think it's unlikely to lead them astray in terms of building a machine that makes sense to developers.

We had the same BS pre-Vita. It's even more hollow now, I'm surprised anyone would be pulling that card again seeing where Sony's hardware design appears to be at today.
 
On the other hand, for us who prefer to play most games on console, id produced one of the most impressive standout visual showpieces (and one of the best-feeling FPS games) this gen. Compared to many other acclaimed visual showcases, Rage just feels like the right direction for showing off stuff, IMO. (The game itself could only be better having been more fleshed out in its overworld/driving element or having that same bit cut back to focus on the meat of the game.) Certainly, the intent behind the technology should be considered a look to the future of game production tools.
The future doesn't need the technology. It's a just a different alternative to the normal way of making games while we wait till we have masses of RAM. They're both the short term fixes of that limitation. One produces high res textures but lots of repetition, one offers no repetition, but with high levels of compression. Pick your poison basically.
 
Sony only cared about one of those for the PS3, the CPU.
From what I read Sony had such high expectations of the Cell that they thought they could use two of them and be done with it. We now know that Cell is not well equipped enough to replace a GPU in its entirety and it would probably not have been possible for Sony to use two cells because of the associated costs. Sony realized this quite far into the process, and so had to make a last-minute call to NVIDIA to whip up a GPU for them. If they would've had more preparation they probably could have fitted something more modern. Sony didn't screw up on RAM either with the PS3. XDR was cutting edge at the time. Sony couldn't have foreseen Bethesda's incompetence with a split memory pool.

Sony has no interest in any new media architecture, so it's quite likely we'll see something more straightforward in the PS4 like in the Vita. Again, the Wii U CPU architecture is probably something that will be used the next Xbox and PS4 if they go for and IBM CPU. If Sony doesn't go for IBM but for AMD, they'll probably use something comparable to their 'Trinity' or 'Kaveri' architecture.
 
I'm sure devs wouldn't have many problems with a more PS3 like Vita either, given they spent 5 years working over PS3 and were more or less used to its quirks...but the point is Sony took a different tack, and took it in concert with developer guidance. There was a big shift in how hardware is designed at SCE, and the same process that resulted in Vita will be used for PS4. I think it's unlikely to lead them astray in terms of building a machine that makes sense to developers.

Unless they have some new technology they want to sell, like cell in the ps3 or the emotion engine in the ps2.
 
it's not going to be more powerful than the PC I just made...

uRa5t.gif

NEW NEXT GEN

Probably not, but ports of games made for PS4/720 will probably run like ass on that PC, becuz pc game devs lolz.
 
That much is a given. It's not like that's a matter of preference or something.

:D

I think Sony had a lot of interesting exclusives this gen, but as games, I just couldn't get into them. Both Sony and MS had about the same level of shit exclusives (sorry guys, Wowhawk was a pile). I loved aspects of games like LBP and Uncharted, but as an overall package they left me cold.

One PS3 exclusive I'm actually pumped for this year is Twisted Metal. I'm not optimistic and will wait for user/pro reviews, but man. Many great hours spent on Twisted Metal 2 and Black. Like Gears 3, it will probably be the last hurrah for a console that's given me a lot of fun over the last 5 or so years.

Back to topic, I completely disagree with the person above who suggested it was RAM/Graphics/CPU that were the 3 aspects Sony needs to focus on in their console. As both Nintendo and Microsoft proved, it is the software above all else, and I'm not talking game software specifically. Nintendo's masterfully crafted exclusives and Microsoft's peerless online ecosystem prove that it's NOT all about the games. That, and Sony's horrible dev tools in the launch window just killed their third parties for a couple years. Games had broken voice chat, no AA, tearing out the ass, etc. etc...

Looking forward to getting this next gen going. Let's do this shit.
 
The future doesn't need the technology. It's a just a different alternative to the normal way of making games while we wait till we have masses of RAM. They're both the short term fixes of that limitation.

Maybe not this specific method, but the intent of giving artists a great deal more input on what is seen in the game is the way forward if you want to maximize the art talent you've got in increasingly more risky and expensive games. It certainly helps to even out the playing field if all developers of all sizes can more easily compete with each other, visually, given greater access rather than being still very limited to the funding you can manage to score. Whatever happens next gen, technologically, will still present itself as a barrier or limitation at some point once we've all become accustomed to the new standards of presentation and production quality, so the focus should be on how to better stretch it from the very beginning rather than waiting to solve it toward the end of the platform's lifespan.
 
Speaking of first party games, I'd argue that honour goes to Nintendo.

That said, the point is moot anyway with the extinction of the third party exclusive (at least between Sony and Microsoft) - so the biggest factor becomes which console gets the best version of the multiplatform games.

why is it moot? Surely its more important than ever?

If both consoles are fairly similar in power, then multiplatform titles will be similar in how they look and play. So your main variable becomes first party exclusives or possibly your online platform.
 
Unless they have some new technology they want to sell, like cell in the ps3 or the emotion engine in the ps2.

If they did have a new tech, it would now be developer driven rather than hardware engineer (Kutaragi) driven, so we'd likely see improvement even in that case wrt making sure something wasn't a complete mystery to devs initially.

But I think it's unlikely Sony does. Vita is virtually 100% designed around the R&D investments of other companies. PS4 will have a legacy concern wrt Cell compatibility, or SPU instruction/performance compatibility, but otherwise I don't think there'll be a heavy bespoke R&D investment in processor tech from Sony themselves. They'll let others do the really heavy lifting for them and spend a relatively smaller amount on customisation. And in terms of choosing what tech to bring in and in what form, I think it'll be heavily developer influenced.
 
Same as how people figured it was a 'mistake' for PSP to be powerful.

When a platform doesn't do as well as expected, people will single out any differentiating characteristic (vs the more popular platform) as a 'mistake'. And will correlate one 'mistake' with another (e.g. ease of development). Which is nonsense. Being a good deal more powerful than DS was not a mistake for PSP - it was in fact what helped it get what success it did have. Similarly, being very powerful wasn't PS3's mistake in and of itself - it was how it got to that point and some of the choices made in the system as a whole (vs just processing guts) and where that led wrt cost.

But PS3 was a bit of an aberration in terms of Sony's relationship with technology vs cost. We can have a traditionally powerful playstation, with more traditionally appropriate pricepoints. And even without the traditional development complexity! Their most recent platform design speaks to all of that, IMO.

Great points, especially the bolded.

Please moar power Sony!!!!
 
Unless they have some new technology they want to sell, like cell in the ps3 or the emotion engine in the ps2.

and again, vita says otherwise. the nuts and bots of vita are off the shelf, except the bloody memory card.

I doubt sony would go the in-house hardware route again, they are losing too much money on niche hardware. Recently they just sold their lcd venture to samsung. I'm guessing they want to concentrate more on the soft-hardware integration.
 
If they did have a new tech, it would now be developer driven rather than hardware engineer (Kutaragi) driven, so we'd likely see improvement even in that case wrt making sure something wasn't a complete mystery to devs initially.

But I think it's unlikely Sony does. Vita is virtually 100% designed around the R&D investments of other companies. PS4 will have a legacy concern wrt Cell compatibility, or SPU instruction/performance compatibility, but otherwise I don't think there'll be a heavy bespoke R&D investment in processor tech from Sony themselves. They'll let others do the really heavy lifting for them and spend a relatively smaller amount on customisation. And in terms of choosing what tech to bring in and in what form, I think it'll be heavily developer influenced.

isn't that kind of a shame though? Look at PS2 emulation - still tricky due to the crazy things the GS did. If all the new consoles just become boxes for various versions of the same vendor's chips for the sake of less R&D spend and easier development, it'll be a dull day IMO and we might as well just have one console. I liked the wacky shit that differentiated the consoles back in the day. I liked Kutaragi's determination to push boundaries. And with PS2 developers bloody learned to use it because the platform is so big. Now its like hardware manufacturers are falling over themselves not to upset anyone. A little upsetting is a good thing sometimes.
 
skjdkqhq why do people keep aping this?

There is nothing wrong with split ram pools, that is how it is being (and has been) done on pc for ages.

The only problem with the ps3 was the combination of simply not enough ram and a split pool.
Xbox was a bit more flexible because of the unified ram but it still doesn't have enough either...

The advantage of a split pool is normally that you can have more of it, cheaper (like on pc), but for some godforsaken reason sony chose to only go with 256MB ram +256MB vram.
Split pool lets you have a nice amount of cheaper system ram that doesn't have to be as fast as vram (yesyes extra cost for motherboard bladibladiblah, it's small compared to the cost of the ram chips themselves, yesyes cognitive dissonance argument of it adds up over 50 million units while ignoring that again compared to the cost of a big unified pool or the unit cost it is pretty insignificant) which is awesome for multitasking, buffering/streaming etc.

Do you really want them to go with a limited pool of unified ram and have to deal with terrible loading times between races/levels/maps while the system struggles to flush the ram and refill it from the slow as shit HDD/dic?

PS vita has a split pool, what makes you think ps4 couldn't have one again too?

in before : "Why not 8 GB ram then lulz!11" sarcasm...

Frankly I don't care how they do it, but if I have to deal with obnoxious loading times AGAIN I'm hanging up my coat for the consoles next gen.
Poor loading times have been pretty much a thing of the past (yesyes there are a few exceptions, very few) on pc for over a decade, it's not acceptable.
I want to play not stare at loading bars.

I agree. Regarding the split RAM/unified RAM issue, look at the Vita. Basing on the teardown it seems to have two different types of RAM for the CPU to use -- probably one for the OS and the other one for game content. And look how that turned out. Everyone, with no exceptions, has praised how smooth the OS is when switching applications or doing anything OS related, even when you're in-game.

If Sony goes with a split RAM pool they will have valid reasons they did that. They just have to play smart on the amount. It's no rocket science.

Jesus.... im' gonna have to upgrade to 16gig of RAM just to handle the fucking Killzone 4 and GT 6 gifs.

lol

4GB XDR2 RAM, believe!
Fixed. ;)

I believe it.

When developer's actually know what they're doing with the PS3's hardware we end up with gorgeous exclusives and marvelous 3rd party games.

Killzone 2 is still one of the best looking games this gen ...

killzone_2playstation_3screenshots1.jpg

Agreed.

LOL @ psfanboys with uncharted and Killzone.

They are not the best looking console games this generation.

RAGE and Crysis kick their asses.

Eh, if you say so...
 
PS3 is my favorite system to game on, but I still end up buying mostly 360 games because of XBOX live.

Sony needs to partner with someone who knows what they are doing in online and let them handle it.
get on that Valve!

I can't wait for them both to come out!
 
Maybe not this specific method, but the intent of giving artists a great deal more input on what is seen in the game is the way forward if you want to maximize the art talent you've got in increasingly more risky and expensive games. It certainly helps to even out the playing field if all developers of all sizes can more easily compete with each other, visually, given greater access rather than being still very limited to the funding you can manage to score. Whatever happens next gen, technologically, will still present itself as a barrier or limitation at some point once we've all become accustomed to the new standards of presentation and production quality, so the focus should be on how to better stretch it from the very beginning rather than waiting to solve it toward the end of the platform's lifespan.
As there are only two games that feature megatextures right now, and both look I would say below par (Rage significantly so), while I agree with the sentiment, I disagree with the solution. Traditional tile based texturing has provided much better results, so far at least.

Take something like The Witcher 2. It's DX9, nothing fancy at all, I would say it looks practically five years better, and it's not as if it has huge artistic restraint, it's a stunning world, produced masterfully from the art department. It was also made in like half the time of Rage, and probably a tenth of the budget. That's another element, not only is Rage pretty rough to look at, it also took forever to make. There was big talk about how this technology would allow for very fast game development, but id have not demonstrated that at all.
 
BP, you're just blinded by your Sony allegiance, back down console warrior, it's peace time! RAGE is the bestest looking game eraverrr
 
isn't that kind of a shame though? Look at PS2 emulation - still tricky due to the crazy things the GS did. If all the new consoles just become boxes for various versions of the same vendor's chips for the sake of less R&D spend and easier development, it'll be a dull day IMO and we might as well just have one console. I liked the wacky shit that differentiated the consoles back in the day. I liked Kutaragi's determination to push boundaries. And with PS2 developers bloody learned to use it because the platform is so big. Now its like hardware manufacturers are falling over themselves not to upset anyone. A little upsetting is a good thing sometimes.

It is a little bit of a shame, sure. I definitely appreciate that point. There's ups and downs to either approach. I think there's still room for a platform designer to leave their mark, but I think we are past the days when a new console might usher in some big new (processing/graphics) tech. The processing tech leadership relevant to videogames is now very thoroughly in the hands of other independents. Maybe it would be nice and interesting to have companies like Sony competing there but there's also an argument that as the tech advances, certain things are getting commoditised, and it's just not worth it, and makes more sense for a platform designer to become curator+tweaker rather than fundamental creator.

There are other areas of tech relevant to a games box today where the competence isn't so independently available, and that's probably where there's more scope for a 'creator' role today (e.g. interfaces).

But yeah, one gets a sense of a certain something...lost. But maybe that's to be found in other places. There's interesting contributions and new research being done by these companies in other areas.
 
Take something like The Witcher 2. It's DX9, nothing fancy at all, I would say it looks practically five years better, and it's not as if it has huge artistic restraint, it's a stunning world, produced masterfully from the art department. It was also made in like half the time of Rage, and probably a tenth of the budget. That's another element, not only is Rage pretty rough to look at, it also took forever to make. There was big talk about how this technology would allow for very fast game development, but id have not demonstrated that at all.

I don't disagree that there are tremendous examples of what can be done using more traditional means. As I understand it, the Witcher games are made for relatively little thanks to the location of its development and its average pay and expectation of output per artist. So, differences like these, which ultimately affect the end product, must still be taken into account, of course. As well, Rage did have an extraordinary development time thanks to having to wait for the tech to be developed and applied satisfactorily for current consoles' limitations, but they also seemed to have started and re-started very late into the gen...something Carmack has stated that they won't be doing again since the base work is explored and understood better now. With next-gen, they can scale what they've done to a large degree and maybe even better showcase why it's a good direction to head in, overall.
 
Could you imagine the PS4 architecture as envisioned by Kutaragi? You'd probably need a PHd to get as far as "Hello World."

Thank god that guy's no longer around.

I mean, wasn't the PSone architecture relatively friendly to develop for? It used C and had good documentation as opposed to the Saturn, which Sega just plopped on people's laps and hoped they liked working with Assembly as much as they did on the Megadrive (which turned out to be pretty shitty when it came to making 3D games).

This won them that gen - why they would go the "sega" route with hardware and make it have a steep learning curve with the PS2 and 3, I'll never know.
 
I have no interest in underpowered PlayStation platforms. I can't believe people want Sony -- of all companies -- to not go friggin' mad with its hardware.
Everybody wants it. It's just going to happen. Desire and reality are two different things.
 
I feel like the crazy architecture of PSs helped stave off stagnation a bit. It took longer for people to get to grips with the machines, so the early games were kind of artificially worse than they should have been, giving the illusion of more growth in a way.

Not so much on the PS3, I don't think KZ3 or UC3 look as good as their predecessors, neither of which looked as good as GoW3, the PS3 feels like it's peaked to me. Neither of the other two PSs felt like they had when we moved past them. GoW2 was already PS3 time and was the best looking game on that system. Maybe it was as far as anyone could have taken it, but that's how I feel a console should end, on the rise, not treading water like they are now.
 
I mean, wasn't the PSone architecture relatively friendly to develop for? It used C and had good documentation as opposed to the Saturn, which Sega just plopped on people's laps and hoped they liked working with Assembly as much as they did on the Megadrive (which turned out to be pretty shitty when it came to making 3D games).

This won them that gen - why they would go the "sega" route with hardware and make it have a steep learning curve with the PS2 and 3, I'll never know.

IIRC - but my knowledge and memory is hazy here - the initial approach with PSone development was fairly high level. But, Sony says, developers pressed them for lower level access over time, until ultimately (some) devs were coding to the metal, and doing very well with that.

That, supposedly, encouraged Kutaragi in the direction he went with with PS2, which placed more responsibility on the programmer, the trade off being higher performance.

PS3 was actually a bit of a compromise, relatively - the GPU is very conventional, it was more 'just' the CPU that was more demanding of programmers to get the best out of it. I think sometimes people overstate things on the PS3 side...lots of developers took to PS3 that would never have touched PS2, because it was in many ways more conventional. To paraphrase Carmack, it went from having really one console they could work with (in the Xbox/PS2 gen), to more or less nitpicking between two this gen. I think it's forgotten, but Sony actually won quite a bit of key western development support with PS3.



I feel like the crazy architecture of PSs helped stave off stagnation a bit. It took longer for people to get to grips with the machines, so the early games were kind of artificially worse than they should have been, giving the illusion of more growth in a way.

Not so much on the PS3, I don't think KZ3 or UC3 look as good as their predecessors, neither of which looked as good as GoW3, the PS3 feels like it's peaked to me. Neither of the other two PSs felt like they had when we moved past them. GoW2 was already PS3 time and was the best looking game on that system. Maybe it was as far as anyone could have taken it, but that's how I feel a console should end, on the rise, not treading water like they are now.

There's some hard bounds here, but I think The Last of Us is again pushing some new areas. I'm not sure I would have expected characters that look that good out of this gen, when it started, so consider me surprised by that at least.
 
Bet they both will be more powerful than my pc whose boot sector just got f'ed up with a windows update.
 
I don't see 3D support as anything but a regular feature for all the next-gen platforms going forward since all will be able to support it far better than the current gen and because it's relatively easy to implement, though it takes effort to do it right, clearly. 3D was only Sony's thing, initially, because they had more reasons to push it thanks to their film and television businesses. 3D will cease to be seen as only or mainly Sony's thing, and instead will be practically everywhere.
Yeah, few 360 games already support 3D, so I guess Microsoft was playing the wait-and-watch game wrt 3D this gen. It should be pretty much a default feature on the next gen platforms.

I doubt they will push it harder than they are now. 3D, especially the one where you need a 3D TV and glasses, isn't a strong feature; not only does it require special type of TV, but it's also uncomfortable for many people. It's a nice gimmick to have, but nothing special.
Well, most mid-high range TVs nowadays feature 3D support, so whether people want it or not, chances are they will end up buying it.
 
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