Sony announces the Playstation 4

I pre-ordered my PS4 last night from ShopTo.net which lists it as £450 RRP but discounted to £400. They did not ask for a deposit (unlike GAME!). I suspect the actual price will be around £350-£380 but ShopTo.net are just covering themselves by listing a higher price. Once the final price is announced at E3 then they'll change it for pre-orders too.

 

Compare Skyrim on Xbox to Oblivion on Xbox and look at what kind of improvements a game can pull out from the same engine, further into a consoles' life.

It's a fact of life. The games that comes out near release are almost universally nothing close to what the console is capable of.

And even saying that, some of the demos they showed were pretty impressive. And they were just that, demos, not even close to finished.

 

The event was underwhelming but I am looking forward to seeig more of the PS4 and hopefully the nextBox

 

Well you must be pretty blind cause most were FVM's , the console is good for $450 thats about it , it doesn't compare to a good gaming PC @$1000. Its pretty hard to get though to ppl heads that console are outdated when they come out. The tech is already old and ppl still don't understand that console still use an api , that direct to metal is a load of BS.The cpu is a netbook processor and the GDDR5 is only going to be use for the GPU which will most likely be a 6770 or 7770 amd. It still got nothing.Carmack has even said the next gen console will target 30FPS and he would have gotting the dev kit too. The only reason games look good on consoles (same games) is because dev doesnt build for the core pc. Its all that multi platform crap and the reason why some games run like dogs balls on pc is because they are made for the console CPU, cell or whatever in the xbox 360....You can keep telling your self that the NEX Gen BS consoles will beat our current PC OK.

 

Agreed. The PS3 was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSGL with a 7800 (basically). That's huge jump from that with the PS4 and should bring it a bit more modern.

Yo.
That is pretty much every reason why I'm thinking about getting a PS4 (well, that and if it has Last Guardian).

 

You have no idea what your talking about as a $1000 PC is nowhere near the specs of this.

That is my issue with the new bunch of PC gamers these days, they either don't know tech, or they are willing to lie to people to push their own agenda, either way it makes the rest of us look bad.

You don't even have to know anything about game development to see that the direct to metal stuff is not BS, just looking at what is capable on the hardware is proof alone, and you can't quote Carmack when he is one of the biggest complainers about how much better direct to metal is, not forgetting he was very very wrong about next gen console tech, which as a fan of his is disappointing.

If PC gamers spent more time learning and/or buying games, and less time complaining, while stupidly throwing money at Nvidia/AMD, then the platform would be in a much better state.

 

It isn't really close to metal that does it, it's the design process.

When you're developing an engine on any device you're going to pull in a lot of telemetry data on time of completion of certain operations. The PS3 for instance may perform operation "A" significantly faster than an Xbox or X86 architecture due to either an advantage in the way power works or some other design decision. That operation may work on X86 and Xbox but not to the same degree. Since your designing for the PS3 you leave it in as is. When it inevitably gets ported over to the other consoles, it doesn't get reprogrammed or anything unless there are show stopping issues -- and even then those are the only things that are fixed, for the most part everything is left the same.

Because both 360/PS3 are Power based architectures and generally have a lot of threads, a lot of things between them are going to be optimized in that regard. Those things are not going to translate well to X86.

And this is only on the CPU side, GPU is even more difficult as the PS3 doesn't even have a unified arch, so a lot of optimization goes into balancing pixel/vertex/etc so it works properly on the modified 7800 in the PS3, the Xbox 360 -- while unified, at had all kinds of issues with extracted parallelism in order to fill the entire branch (Reason why the R600-2900XT was bad). You basically have to design the game specifically for it in order for the architecture to fill its pipeline properly.

So yeah, now as a developer you have a $100M budget and time limit to develop a game. You're going to target the least common denominator, especially because its going to give you the highest sales. Yeah maybe you'll throw PC gamers a bone by adding some DX11 features, but the engine is still a console engine, they aren't rewriting anything for PC/X86 optimization. That is until now. Now that PS4/New Xbox has and is rumored to have X86 and a regular off the shelf GPU that disparty between console programming and optimization and PC programming is going to close.

As for the PS4 and it's power, it has a 2TF GPU in it. Regardless to what it is, if optimized correctly it's essentially at the same level as a 670. AMD still has the extraction problem though -- like look at the 7970, it has 3.7Tflops compared to the GTX680's 2.5 and yet they compare similarly, that's because no one has spent the time figuring out how to fill that pipeline and extract it's performance. Now that the PS4 has that arch in it, developers will optimize for that and learn to extract full power. Because of this I also bet that the games being designed for the PS4 that do get ported over to the PC will perform a hell of a lot better on AMD hardware.

 

Thanks for the info Denial, your one of the few people on here that posts facts and not emotions so always appreciated.

The AMD thing is starting to look tempting, between the possibility of better ports and things like AMD hardware being so much better value these days, i'm just running out of excuses to stick with Nvidia.

PhysX is also a big talking point for PC gamers, unless i missed something UE4 has been announced as having PhysX support, but Sony were talking GPU Havok and UE4 games so unsure if that means GPU Havok and CPU PhysX on consoles while CPU Havok and PC gets GPU PhysX or vice versa, or both on PC and consoles.
It's a Friday night so not the best explanation, but i'm sure most will guess at what i'm hinting at.

 

Any word on keyboard and mouse support? If I could use those easily I wouldn't even want a gaming pc anymore.

 

The PS3 has it so I doubt they would suddenly drop support, especially if they are going to try to market this more as a HTPC than the PS3. I haven't used the PS3 in a while so it may already have this but I'm really hoping they include a webkit based browser or at least something better than what the PS3 used to have.

I forgot where I read this, I believe it was Anandtech, but basically Nvidia believes that it cards comes with a premium experience. So when you buy the card, you're buying into that entire experience of surround, driver support, twimtbp titles, PhysX, etc -- because of that they said there hardware will never ever really compete on the cost front. And I think that it's becoming more obvious that Nvidia is sticking to that idea (Titan).

Now I guess it's kind of up for debate as whether this is a good or bad thing, to me personally while I think the something like the Titan is overpriced -- I like that Nvidia is obviously spending a lot more time refining it's overall experience. Like the whole new debacle about frame limiting and overall smoothness, Nvidia has taken care of this despite the fact that very few people even really cared or published information about it. Or for instance the new cooler on the 690/Titan. Just by looking at it or seeing it's performance you can tell that it's very well designed and uses high quality materials and build.

Recently I feel like a lot of technologies have been in this race to the bottom. Where every single company is trying to find ways to cut costs and as a result the overall experience of owning a device is kind of an afterthought. I mean it's not so much with video cards, but for example laptop displays. For so long have they been getting worse and worse - I mean just the other day I was pricing out a $2000 dell precision laptop for work and by default the thing came with a 1366x768 display that probably has the worst viewing angles and terrible contrast and everything else. And while people here love to hate on Apple, it seems like they were the only company genuinely invested into the overall experience. They are the only company that has strict as hell standard requirements on display calibration for instance -- like all recent Chinese android phones I've been seeing people go nuts over are using all the displays that failed Apple's spec.

Anyway yeah, AMD is definitely offering good products at incredible prices. And as I said I really think it's going to get better for them now that they are in consoles with their modern architecture and whatnot. Hopefully they can take some of that revenue and put it into R&D and build some good processors. They have a lot of catching up to do in order to compete with Intel effectively.

 

It wasn't native gaming support though, i tried on both consoles and no such luck.

I honestly expected native mouse/kb support from at least one of them.
If Sony/MS don't the i still think it's a missed opportunity, but on the other hand it could be a bad idea as the mention of mouse/kb tends to send shivers down the spine of many console games, while it could also damage PC gaming quite substantially as many FPS and MMO games would jump shop by the millions.

Denial, that is why i have stuck with Nvidia since 2008, i actually agree with that policy, pay abit more for better software support in the long run, i just feel Nvidia have let their guard down abit recently, while AMD are only in the news to spell their impending downfall, yet they are still up there supporting games and fighting.
FYI: Here in the UK 7950 = £204, which includes £60 worth of games in Crysis 3 and Bioshock 3, or £218 and you get Bioshock 3, Crysis 3, Far Cry 3, Sleeping Dogs, Hitman Absolution and Nexus.

Same situation with Sony i think, they could be crushed by MS at any point, but they aren't giving up without a fight, and hard not to like and respect that.

 

Doubt it since NVIDIA has not opened up GPU PhysX on AMD GPUs. Seeing how the PS4 uses a customized Radeon HD 7800-series GPU, I highly doubt there will be GPU PhysX support unless NVIDIA does it only for the PS4.

Guys, there is NO DX11 support on the Playstation 4 since DirectX is a Microsoft-exclusive technology, it has DX11 capabilities but it will run with OpenGL ES 3.0 (assuming they're keeping it at ES like they did with PS3) or if they run the full OpenGL stack, it'll be OpenGL 4.2 (AMD hasn't baked OpenGL 4.3 support yet for their DX11 capable cards).

Microsoft has used a unified memory architecture (UMA) since the original XBOX, it has worked very well for them so I don't see any issues. The 128-bit GDDR3 really helped the XBOX 360 which was considered state of the art when the XBOX 360 launched in 2005. It allowed greater developer flexibility so that they can decide how much memory is dedicated to the GPU and for the rest of the system. A dedicated memory architecture like on the PC, does not let developers do that. One of the reasons why PS3 was hard to program for because developers were constrained by the 256 MB of XDR2 RAM for system and 256 MB of GDDR3 for the GPU.

deltatux

 

Yeah I was thinking about it after I posted but whatever -- you get my point it's consistent with what's on the PC in both API and architecture.

 

True, but was that not refused by AMD due to a smart business decision, different story when it comes to the a console.

Either way if GPU Havok is offered on Nvidia and AMD, but GPU PhysX is still Nvidia only then it means Nvidia users have the best of both of worlds, while AMD is left behind.

I'm assuming that is what people meant as it's been mentioned as a GPU with DX11 featureset, though i hope no one thought Sony was going to use DirectX, but wouldn't surprise me as many thing DX is all there is gaming wise.

 

Yup, and a bit of a side commentary, I find it interesting that AMD hasn't baked OpenGL 4.3 yet since NVIDIA has. Then again, NVIDIA has had a better non-Windows support than AMD has, so that might explain why.

It's kind of sad because OpenGL 4.3 adds provisions for GPGPU support along with better memory security and etc.



I'm running the latest AMD Catalyst 13.2 Beta 6 for Linux. It uses the same OpenGL code found in the Windows version.

AMD blames NVIDIA for not opening up and NVIDIA blames AMD for refusing. Everyone's blaming one another, no one knows what really happened.

As for DX, sure because the majority of PC gamers run Windows and thus only know DirectX as being the only 3D graphics technology. However, they forget that their non-Microsoft platforms like Android, iOS, Linux, Mac and etc. all use OpenGL. Microsoft Windows is the only anomaly that doesn't use OpenGL as its primary renderer.

deltatux

 

I agree, but the biggest complainers are those who think DX11 is the Pinnacle of gaming visuals, and judge visuals on the what game/engine has the highest DX number rather than actual features.

Really looking forward to the PS4, the controller still looks like garbage, but the system as a whole appeals to me in many ways.

 

Do you even own a console? Seriously You really think they look good and what do you mean throwing away our money? We all like progression in technology, and don't **** on Carmack buddy we know rage was crap and he was brought out but he still knows his ****. Whats can't i do on a PC that the console have only just got the power to do now? If you think halo 4 looks any better then halo 3 then you must blind, yes at the start of the console the release game don't look the greatest but that don't look much better 3 to 4 years later... halo 3 , reach and ODST are one of the best looking games on xbox 360 and they all drop below 30fps. Oh any by the way i have a mate (which means nothing to you ) that programs UNIX based crap and i'd tell ya programing for 8core's or what not is a F*Ck load of work and ofcourse the sony and nintendo is open gl.

 

I understand that we lose abit of grunt due to having a OS and direct X api as an overhead but i don't think it all that much...

 

I buy everything, so yeah I own both, and yes considering the very old hardware inside them it think they look amazing considering he harware.

Halo 4 actually does look much better than Halo 3 as that game is a huge mess visually, nice artwork but the aliasing is awful looking in Halo 3.

I'm not crapping on Carmack, i think the guy is a genius and great and joy to listen to but he was the one who said consoles are so much easier to code for.
He also said next gen consoles would not be a big leap in hardware, and that is a lie as PS3-4 is a huge jump.

 

Huge jump graphically, the CPU front is lacking due to the AMD Jaguar cores. I still can't believe Sony opted for an Intel Atom-like CPU instead of a full fledged x86 CPU.

Sure Jaguar is faster than Intel Atom but I don't expect it to touch even a Core i3/AMD A4 APU.

deltatux