GPU tech is advancing rapidly.
Posted on 04/11/2013 12:23:47 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Although the PlayStation 4 was designed to be like a personal computer in a bid to simplify development of video games, it is still a lot different than personal computers, according to game developers who are working on titles for the PS4. As it appears, the difference between custom system and off-the-shelf PC is pretty huge, yet the technical director or Guerrilla Games did not reveal too many details about it.
Michiel Van Der Leeuw, the technical director of Guerrilla Games, which is a studio that belongs to Sony Computer Entertainment and which is currently working on Killzone Shadow Fall title due late this year, claims that there are loads of Sony intellectual property in the architecture of the PlayStation 4 in general and inside the custom AMD Fusion chip in particular. Moreover, the architecture with ultra-fast unified memory architecture can do wonders to games that are developed with this in mind. In addition, there are various AMD’s enhancements that the company calls “heterogeneous system architecture” and which speeds up software designed for both x86 processors and highly-parallel GPUs.
(Excerpt) Read more at xbitlabs.com ...
I’ll probably get this instead of replacing my trusty old 2006 XP PC I’m using right now. Surf the web and play games, that’s all I use it for anyway.
I’m not sure if I’ll get this, especially at full price. The lack of backward-compatibility is a real sh&t sandwich, done deliberately to make people buy games twice.
It’s not even a high end PC.
Backward compatibility is a double edged sword. That is the main reason MS windows is so bloated. They probably couldn’t touch the price point if its that advanced.
High end pc sales are tanking, partly because of Windows 8 and partly because of tablets.
I need a new pc but instead I bought a Samsung 10.1 Tablet, using it at work on my lunch break right now.
The APU is a good solution for the Gaming console, because this means a simpler systemboard and the simpler the board the cheaper the console.
If you’ve ever disassembled a playstation controller you would see that it’s garbage.
It’s definitely worse in some ways, slower cpu and gpu, but better in others. It will have 8GB GDDR5 (even the Nvidia GTX 690 which costs over $1000 only has 4gb). It won’t have the boated overhead of a consumer OS. Overall it should be an amazing package for the price (presumable $399-$499 range), and will rival the performance of PCs that cost 2x-3x as much.
AND.... it won't have to be upgraded 5 years after purchase to play the latest and greatest games, like PC's do.
I think the tanking sales has more to do with the form factor than windows 8. For what most people do a tablet makes more sense.
It won’t make anybody buy a game twice. If you’ve got something playing on your PS3 and you buy a PS4 you keep the PS3. There’s plenty of ways to have multiple systems plugged into your TV. And nobody will be porting games over to the new system. And lack of downward compatibility means lack of albatross, from a development perspective downward compatibility is primarily not fixing old bad decisions.
And there’s nothing really pushing the market anymore. PC technology is no longer growing by leaps and bounds, a 5 year old PC is no longer dramatically slower than a new PC, if your machine was an 11 then it’s probably still a solid 8 now. The more gracefully technology ages the less drive there is to replace it with the new hotness.
I get that its hard to do with the technology, but I was always impressed with the PS2s ability to play games for the PS1.
I do like that they’re now offering PS1 games from the Play Station Store, but they need to expand the library, and there are a lot of PS2 games I’d like them to make available for download with the new console. It makes sense, having PS1 games become available for the PS3, and then have PS2 games become available for the PS4. There are some especially rare games I no longer have and would want to be able to play again.
But I can still play brand new games on my 6 year old PC, which is only barely noticeably slower than my 2 year old work PC. And I wasn’t anywhere near top of the line then. Also because PCs are components if I really wanted to jump my PC’s speed I could do it with a new GPU card. Performance per watt really isn’t going to drive the market, that’s a nerd stat that doesn’t have that much to do with what I see on my screen.
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