For those who haven’t seen the Gamasutra interview:
They’re using a stock amd64 architecture (so Java should work), and packing 8GB of unified CPU/GPU GDDR5 RAM - goodbye CPU/GPU bottleneck.
You may start drooling now
Of course there will be bottlenecks. A bottleneck is simply the first limit that games hit as they scale up.
And, of course, this isn’t interesting except for prospective PS4 developers. Plus, it remains to be seen how large that market is going to be, and how easy it will be to get into it.
For me as a PC developer, the most exciting point of this thing is that PC hardware will try to get near that kind of power, so we’ll all be coding against something like that in five years or so. Hopefully.
<cite>@toolforger said:</cite>
For those who haven't seen the Gamasutra interview:
They're using a stock amd64 architecture (so Java should work), and packing 8GB of unified CPU/GPU GDDR5 RAM - goodbye CPU/GPU bottleneck.
You may start drooling now ;-)
Of course there will be bottlenecks. A bottleneck is simply the first limit that games hit as they scale up.
And, of course, this isn’t interesting except for prospective PS4 developers. Plus, it remains to be seen how large that market is going to be, and how easy it will be to get into it.
For me as a PC developer, the most exciting point of this thing is that PC hardware will try to get near that kind of power, so we’ll all be coding against something like that in five years or so. Hopefully.
I think AMD announced the PC “unified mem” chipset for next year, no need to wait this long
I am a bit of a PS fanboy and I also like what Sony does lately. They seem to be one of the few companies that can still discern between their actual “old” user base and the whole load of “casual” users that the iOS generation brought into the market. Also in terms of other areas like Pro Audio, marvelous devices they built lately.
Ah, I missed AMD’s unified memory plans.
Makes sense - with that technology brewing, they could easily help the PS4 engineers.
In the mid term, if they really manage to make the GPU-RAM lane fast enough, they might have a better buck-to-bang ratio than Nvidia. And that’s going to push Nvidia out of the market unless Nvidia can come up with something similarly radical.
Interesting times ahead, it seems.
I don’t do consoles but if I decide to plunge it will definitively be a PS4. Microsoft’s greed knows no bound and if my “contribution” can help pass the message, so be it.
As far as the PS4 specs, it’s nothing hardcore gamers won’t have within a year. Two for the least hardcore at max. The only worry I have is the AMD/ATI video hardware. They’ve always been known to be shoddy drivers developers, not sure why it would change now, but hopefully they will have made things better. I’ve been burned too many times to trust them again; and that goes back to ATI’s first iterations of video cards.
What is a new revelation and also great to hear, is that Sony has been touted as being very Indie friendly for this new generation. I’ve heard of a LOT of devs praising their new outlook on indies and that’s greatly refreshing.
re: ATI… I’m willing to be optimistic. The only reason the drivers are useable at all is because AMD bought them. If AMD weren’t in the picture then it would be a dismal and bleak future.
I’m a big fan of my PS3… if they keep the price reasonable for the PS4 then I may even preorder. I’m a long time PC-gamer but I enjoy just getting to pop a disk in and not worry about stuff sometimes. Also, we use the PS3 as a Netflix/Amazon Prime machine at least once a day.
Well about AMD/ATI again, I bought and ATI 5870 card about 3 years ago because the shader compiler are more picky than nvidia’s ones, and thought it would be easier for shader development.
If you don’t mind the fact that the fan began to rattle like mad about 2 or 3 month later making an obnoxious nose, the card was quite good.
Now on the software side…after the first driver update, CCC (the ATI driver conf software) was not launching anymore… I searched the web and plenty people have this issue and mitigated success on resolving it. I’ve never been able to fix it, but I didn’t really cared…But that’s makes it look a bit unprofessional.
At some point, one new revision of the drivers completely screwed up opengl applications (missing objects, terrible perf and so on). So I rolled back to an older driver version.
I’ve never been able to update the drivers again, the issue has never been fixed… and it last 1 year and a half more
At some point the card began to display memory trash randomly on the screen, and i just got enough of it.
All this happened in a 3 years span. For a card that cost me around 500€ that’s just not bearable.
So I switched (back) to Nvidia, and since my life is a lot easier… the driver update is just easy as hell, the drivers works perfectly.
I’ll never buy an ATI card ever again, period.
Even if they have the latest technology with terrific power…well nvidia will come with something similar at some point.
EDIT : I kind of hijacked the thread :p, so about the main topic, I’ll buy a PS4 for sure, I had all Sony console since the beginning, and for me they are alwaysTHE gamers consoles.
<cite>@nehon said:</cite>
Well about AMD/ATI again, I bought and ATI 5870 card about 3 years ago because the shader compiler are more picky than nvidia's ones, and thought it would be easier for shader development.
If you don't mind the fact that the fan began to rattle like mad about 2 or 3 month later making an obnoxious nose, the card was quite good.
Now on the software side...after the first driver update, CCC (the ATI driver conf software) was not launching anymore.... I searched the web and plenty people have this issue and mitigated success on resolving it. I've never been able to fix it, but I didn't really cared....But that's makes it look a bit unprofessional.
At some point, one new revision of the drivers completely screwed up opengl applications (missing objects, terrible perf and so on). So I rolled back to an older driver version.
I've never been able to update the drivers again, the issue has never been fixed... and it last 1 year and a half more
At some point the card began to display memory trash randomly on the screen, and i just got enough of it.
All this happened in a 3 years span. For a card that cost me around 500€ that’s just not bearable.
So I switched (back) to Nvidia, and since my life is a lot easier… the driver update is just easy as hell, the drivers works perfectly.
I’ll never buy an ATI card ever again, period.
Even if they have the latest technology with terrific power…well nvidia will come with something similar at some point.
EDIT : I kind of hijacked the thread :p, so about the main topic, I’ll buy a PS4 for sure, I had all Sony console since the beginning, and for me they are alwaysTHE gamers consoles.
To clarify my point just a little, I agree with this. AMD has made the driver situation from a total joke into something frustrating but minimally usable. I didn’t meant to imply that it was “good” and other than the PS4, ATI cards are still on my “don’t buy” list.
Well so far i have had ati dirver problems and more, but never anything real critical (eg like nehon)
The only nvidia i bought so far fried itself LITTERALLY(with flames and smoke) exactly 2 days after warranty. So for me nvidia is a bit of a nogo.
<cite>@Empire Phoenix said:</cite>
Well so far i have had ati dirver problems and more, but never anything real critical (eg like nehon)
The only nvidia i bought so far fried itself LITTERALLY(with flames and smoke) exactly 2 days after warranty. So for me nvidia is a bit of a nogo.
Once a decade or so, I dip my toe into the ATI pool… way back since the ATI All-in-wonder cards (All-in-blunder was a common replacement term) in the 90s. Every single one of them has been utter crap for one reason or another. When I did OpenGL work in the early 2000s we had to get rid of all of them.
On the other hand, I’ve had probably 40 or 50 nVidia cards that were fine… and for some reason seem to perform better in real world situations beyond what the head-to-head benchmarks would imply. Now, granted, a bunch of those were Quadros back when someone else was paying for them.
My problem with Nvidia is that they don’t play nice with Linux.
Mode switching flickers, performance is somewhat unreliable - a year ago, a driver upgrade reduced performance to 10% of the FPS I had before, then it went to 20%, recently to 70%.
That’s a Quadro 2000M card (NV3C chip), so everybody’s mileage will probably vary. However, Nvidia’s drivers don’t interoperate very well in general, which is largely attributable to their unwillingness to play by that market’s rules.
<cite>@pspeed said:</cite>
To clarify my point just a little, I agree with this. AMD has made the driver situation from a total joke into something frustrating but minimally usable. I didn't meant to imply that it was "good" and other than the PS4, ATI cards are still on my "don't buy" list.
Problem with AMD’s acquisition of ATI is that most of the ATI teams remained intact. Indeed AMD sure pushed some buttons to get the quality higher, but when you’ve dug yourself a deep hole, higher means nothing.
I’ve also had some nVidia cards behaving badly, that died prematurely, but the rarity of it makes up for when it happened (once since I switched). It would be the same for AMD cards if it happened once in a rare while. Problem is, it’s mostly passable/good once in a rare while…
As for the PS4’s hardware, well… It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Sony had their own engineers do or modify the drivers themselves because I’m sure as hell Sony is aware of AMD’s lack of polish on anything video-related drivers. Or maybe I should call these bloatware. Anyway. I hope it won’t come back to bite them.
Problem is, Sony didn’t have a choice since nVidia decided to not participate in the console war in any way and concentrated on their new hardware, the Project Shield handheld.
<cite>@zarch said:</cite>
The PS4 has the advantage of consistent hardware though.
When you know that your entire market is running the same hardware testing becomes a lot easier - for both hardware and software.
Definitively yes. No contest. But given AMD`s history, would you let them do it by themselves? I’d be willing to bet Sony sent some engineers down to AMD’s HQ to work with them on this. This isn’t something you can dismiss. You have to have top performance from the get-go. And that’s something you’ve never seen with AMD in many, many years.
I don’t really play games much anymore, but have an xbox 360 and ps3. Me and my friends always prefer the xbox. The controller feel much more natural, and so gameplay in general feels tighter. But the xbox 360 has broke 3 of my games, and is my 3rd one i’ve had to purchase due to the Red light of death! You also have to pay about $40 a year for xbox live, so in the long run its more expensive than a Playstation, which normally costs more initially. But even through that, I still prefer the xbox for hardcore gaming, although I won’t be buying either of the new consoles, as I don’t have the time for recreational gaming anymore (or research as some of you like to call it ;))
<cite>@wezrule said:</cite>
I don't really play games much anymore, but have an xbox 360 and ps3. Me and my friends always prefer the xbox. The controller feel much more natural, and so gameplay in general feels tighter. But the xbox 360 has broke 3 of my games, and is my 3rd one i've had to purchase due to the Red light of death! You also have to pay about $40 a year for xbox live, so in the long run its more expensive than a Playstation, which normally costs more initially. But even through that, I still prefer the xbox for hardcore gaming, although I won't be buying either of the new consoles, as I don't have the time for recreational gaming anymore :/ (or research as some of you like to call it ;))
Also, all of the “console exclusives” that I was really interested in are PS-exclusives. XBox essentially has no exclusives… I just get them on the PC if I’m really interested.
This next round will be interesting because there’s no extra “in” like with the PS3’s blu-ray player and the PS2’s DVD player. The PS3 is still my favorite blu-ray player even now that they are cheap enough that I have a few of them.
I have to say, the PS4 looks so much more appealing than the Xbox One.
For example there are restrictions on used games, and it requires as internet connection to play any games (I guess will help piracy, but seems like a big hassle!). Its also gonna cost about $100 more.
Sony’s PR campaign basically just trolls all the bad stuff about the Xbox 1 ^^
(or research as some of you like to call it ;))
