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Forums - Gaming Discussion - How will Sony fans react if PS4 is not the most powerful Next Gen console?

 

What will Sony fans think?

Not care about the graphi... 221 45.10%
 
Be dissapointed 173 35.31%
 
switch to the most powerful system 95 19.39%
 
Total:489
PearlJam on 23 November 2012

I have been on forums since the PS2, Xbox, GC days and I'm pretty sure Sony fans will always argue that they have the most powerful system despite what the reality is. I still remember those ridiculous arguments about PS2's "untapped potential", and the 2 vector units.

If Sony fans have the weakest hardware, they will still think/say that it's the most powerful. If the machine is marginally better, no matter how small the difference, you will never hear the end of it. Just look at this gen for example.



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Jumpin on 23 November 2012

They'll change their mind on how important graphics are.



I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.

o_O.Q on 23 November 2012
Porcupine_I said:
Are we talking about fans, or fanboys?

Fans will not care as long as they get great games, and fanboys will create a mindset where it doesn't matter.

...you can actually see that right now with another console


lol +1



UncleScrooge on 23 November 2012

I would actually prefer them to release a moderately powerful console instead of a powerful beast. Sony is not in the position to pump out a huge machine - Microsoft can afford to lose money, Sony can't. Then there's the strong Yen...

From my personal perspective I'd want a cheaper PS4 as well. I won't spend more than €300 just on the hardware. I bought my PS3 for €250 and it was totally worth it. But this time I already own a Blu-Ray player and it never feels good to spend huge money on gaming hardware. Make it less expensive and less powerful and it will sell better and get more games.



mantlepiecek on 23 November 2012

I am sure Sony wouldn't pull a wii. Because if it does, then I probably won't get it unless it's very cheap.

I would either go PC only or might get the next box.



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JEMC on 23 November 2012
bananaking21 said:

i remember reading that the gamepad of the wiiU costs an equivalent of about 150$ in japan. so it does add money to each console sold. also i think that the wiiU's disk drive would cost more than a blueray drive because bluerays are every where and they have been making them for years, but wiiu's drive was custom made by nintendo and made specifically for the console.

Those 150$ were the retail price, not the actual manufacturing cost of the gamepad, and I have the suspicion that it's priced higher than usual to demotivate people from buying it. Remember that they only added the ability to use a 2nd gamepad because of the reaction at E3 2011, and so far no game uses it.

About the optical drive, I agree that it will probably cost more than a standard bluray one, but given that it's basically a bluray drive without the capability to play movies and the fact that they don't have to pay royalties for movie playback, I would say that the cost is about the same.

About the question in the OP, as some said, some will accept it, others will deny/ignore it and some will jump to Msoft.



Please excuse my bad English.

Currently gaming on a PC with an i5-4670k@stock (for now), 16Gb RAM 1600 MHz and a GTX 1070

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enditall727 on 23 November 2012
BenVTrigger said:
Personally I think both next gen MS and Sony consoles will be close to power. I got the idea however after seeing some Sony fans attacking Wii U for being "underpowered".

Its just in general some Sony fans seem to be caring more and more about graphics now days.


But the Wii U IS underpowered though

 

I can even admit that. it's not like anybody would be lying by saying that would they?

 

And I didn't really see too many Sony fans "attacking" Wii U for being underpowered. You guys are just exaggerating..



greenmedic88 on 23 November 2012

It's a given it will have better hardware than the Wii U, so the question really being asked is whether it matters if the Xbox 3.0 has better specs than the PS4.

Given than it's another obvious probability that there won't be PS3 BC due to the differences in architecture (CBE to PPC), the PS4 won't have those carry over early adopters and will have to sell based upon the strength of the initial PS4 titles alone (although I'm sure there will be plenty of older PSN titles available to pad the catalog).

As someone who spent the majority of my initial months with the PS3 playing PS2 games in "enhanced" mode due to the general lack of quality titles in early 2007, it could make a difference to some although I imagine the typical PS4 owner would end up buying a bunch of mediocre PS4 launch titles as is typical for early adopters on virtually any new platform.

Price will matter more for the first year since it's generally not until the second wave of software titles (approaching year 2) that new hardware begins to show its advantages. So unless the PS4 and Xbox 3 are priced the same, whatever gap that exists in capabilities won't matter much to fans of either platform when it comes to choosing one to buy over the other.

Personally, if the PS4 was priced $100 less (I don't see this happening), I'd be more apt to buy, regardless of specs since they'll be playing the same games anyway minus a small handful of MS Studio exclusives.

Now if the PS4 had mediocre hardware paired with a mediocre catalog of SCE produced exclusives and relied almost exclusively upon hot third party titles to fill out the game catalog, then I'd have a serious problem with the PS4 and probably wouldn't buy one until at least the second year if at all.



enditall727 on 23 November 2012
BlueFalcon said:
bananaking21 said:
if the leap between ps3 and ps4 is a good one it wont be a problem

 

I think console gamers will soon realize their expectations are not aligned with reality regarding how graphics evolution works and how hardware and graphics evolved in the past. Think of it as a track athlete: learning to walk from childhood, then to run, then to compete in high school, college level, national level and Olympic level. The early stages are easier to conquer and later it becomes ever so more difficult until every 1 hundreds of a second separates thousands of pro track athletes in the world.  The next revolution in graphics requires such exponential increases in hardware performance, it's well outside the realm of PS4/Xbox 720 or Wii U -- this is not coming from me, but from the leading game developers in the world.

I suggest people go on Youtube and find "Unreal Engine 3: Official Samaritan Demo":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSXyztq_0uM

Now ask yourselves, does Samaritan Unreal Engine 3 look next generation to you? That's the BEST next generation consoles will be able to do. The Samaritan demo needs 10x the power of Xbox 360 and its graphics are not THAT revolutionary compared to today's best looking games:

"Last week Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney told DICE 2012 attendees that the tech demo of Unreal Engine 3 released last year, called "Samaritan," required 2.5 terraFLOPS to run at a 1920 x 1080 resolution, 30 frames per second and with 48 operations per pixel (that rig was a monster in size too). By comparison, Microsoft's Xbox 360 console is only capable of 0.25 terraFLOPS, meaning Microsoft will need to generate a new console at least ten times more powerful in order to run the UE3 demo smoothly. 

 

Sweeney estimated during DICE 2012 that a complete approximation of "perfect" visual quality requires computing power of around 2,000 times greater than today's hardware. A "good enough" approximation of visual reality is 5,000 teraFLOPS, or 5,000 trillion floating point operations per second. Looks like consoles have a long way to go before they reach the "good enough" state, if that even happens."

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/UE3-UE4-Samaritan-Tim-Sweeney-Mark-Rein,14698.html

There you have it - to just move beyond this generation marginally, we need hardware 10x more powerful than Xbox 360 and for truly visually impressive graphics, 20,000x the power of Xbox 360, or 2,000x more powerful than today's PCs.

Just to create 1 next generation game character on screen in real life with real-time generated hair and somewhat realistic skin requires $1,000 of modern GPUs.

Sure, this looks nice but probably won't have a WOW factor like going from PS1 to PS2 to PS3 was. I also don't think PS4 will even reach this level above because to get there, you need 2x GTX680s or about 22-24x the power of PS3's GPU and this is just 1 such character on screen not 10 or 20 like in Assassin's Creed. There is no way PS4 will have 2x GTX680s under the hood so what you see above is likely well beyond PS4/Xbox 720/Wii U to begin with.

For this very reason, imo the mind-blowing graphical increases from 1 generation to the next are behind us forever. The first time we went from 2D to 3D and from 3D to complex lighting, shadows and shader effects was mind-blowing. From here on out, it's like climbing Mount Everest with baby steps.

Thus, as long as next generation games run at full 1080P with anti-aliasing and DX11 effects, I am focusing on the gameplay and quality of exclusive titles. If Sony delivers in this area, it won't need to be the most powerful console to be worth purchasing :)

I have a feeling a lot of gamers are already pretty happy with PS3's graphics today. Moving to native 1080P at 60 fps would be a nice improvement. The keys to PS4's success will be its exclusives and price point. As noted in this thread, PS1 and PS2 were not the most powerful consoles in their respective generations but proved widely popular due to their games.

Interesting post

 

I can definitely settle with Samaritan demo graphics :)



flagstaad on 23 November 2012
enditall727 said:

Interesting post

I can definitely settle with Samaritan demo graphics :)

Then you might be dissapointed. The jump between Xbox and Xbox 360 was around 10x, a similar one is required between the Xbox 360 and the XboxNext to run the Samaritan demo. But to make the 10x jump between Xbox and Xbox360, Microsoft sold the console at 400 dollars at a loss.

Now lets suppose you also need the 10x jump from PS3 to PS4, they will need to sell the console at 400 dollars at a loss and with many hardware issues that cost the company even more money, given the current Sony financial situation they will not do it, so the options are selling it at a higher price (something that already backfired for Sony with the PS3) or not making a 10x jump and go for a 6x-8x jump and that would not be enough to achieve the Samaritan Demo level of graphics.

Is too early to tell but I think this is a realistic posibility. On the long run it could be better for Sony to have a console more similar to the Wii U than to the XboxNext as the development cost will not be so high and they could share the developments process, leaving Microsoft in a hard position were only a few developers coul spend the extra cash to create better assets for their console.