Sony revealed the PS4 at an event in New York last month and it managed to impress a lot of industry people. Linus Blomberg, CTO and Co-founder of Avalanche Studios, is one of them.

He told us that due to the competition from mobile platforms, and due to the fact that PCs have overtaken consoles by a large amount when it comes to performance, a new console cycle was needed desperately.

“It’s always very exciting with a new console cycle, for a number of reasons,” he said. “The consoles desperately need a boost since having been overtaken in terms of performance by PC’s several years ago, and also losing market share to mobile platforms.

He also revealed that the PS4 will accomplish a lot of things due to the business model behind it and will open up new opportunities.

“The PS4 will not only be a very powerful gaming machine from a hardware perspective, but it will also be a social tool and integrated marketplace more akin to the successful mobile devices. It’s the best of all worlds in a way; great performance for demanding high-end gaming, good social ecosystem and connectivity, and integrated business marketplace. For Avalanche Studios as an open-world games developer this is super exciting and opens up many new opportunities.

“It’s a perfect fit for the types of games we do, and we are confident that we’ll bring open-world gaming to a whole new level because of it. I’m glad Sony decided to go with 8gb RAM because it means that the PS4 will out-power most PC’s for years to come.

“The off-the-shelf philosophy behind the architecture makes sense from a pricing and heating point of view, but it also means that Sony more easily can make incremental improvements of their system. If that’s actually their plan I don’t know, but it could help preventing the inevitable loss of market shares that the long console cycles entails.”

http://gamingbolt.com/ps4-will-will-out-power-most-pcs-for-years-to-come-avalanche-studios-cto

8gb of RAM does not mean PS4 will out power gaming rigs for years. It's just not logical to expect that because PS4 has to be at absolute maximum $600 (and I only say that because PS3 proved that a console can start out at that price and go on to be successful sales wise). Meanwhile a PC gamer can buy a graphics card that costs over $400 by itself. Then they can easily spend a few hundred more on the best motherboard and CPU. I've seen custom ones on Ebay have the option for 32gb of RAM so they can obviously outdo them there.

As far as value goes I think Sony has always delivered the best because of exclusives, selling at a loss and getting the components cheaper in the first place then passing that on to the consumer, optimizing (every console does this but against PC its always a point), legacy support (at least 10 years for every system), and now a great service with PS+ and the regular store sales they've started (not quite up to steam yet but I've been enjoying half off deals all year). They don't need to be as powerful as PC because they're less expensive than PCs with the same specs. Not that hard to get.

Well I know ram doesn't equate to power but I'm sure ps4 will compete competently with the majority of rigs out there in peoples homes and it will do so for a while yet. Although PC parts are continually evolving, the reality of the matter is most people don't update their rig every time a new graphic card is announced.

Guess im part of the minority then because the PC i built last year is well above the PS4 which has not even come out yet lol I can see what hes saying though but 90% of people just buy there PCs from retail stores which most the time are packing a low end card and 4 to 6 gigs of ram.

Most PCs are for general purpose so no fucking shit, thank you PR stunts for making people dumber again.

A lot of peoples PCs are from the stone age, I do agree here, but the average PC gamer will have a better rig then a PS4.

Why would anyone have any problem with what he said? That's surprising. Most PC gamers don't have have an "ultra-high" computer, it's silly to assume that. He's right, the PS4 hardware, and more importantly, the access programmers have to the full potential of that hardware, will out-pace the common PC people play games on for at least a couple of years and probably more.

No they won't, and especially not for the same price.

Not in terms of raw processing power, but in terms of what developers can achieve on it, I completely agree.

To everyone talking about PC gaming and how powerful our rigs are, that is not the point. Developers are making games to the lowest common denominator. Right now the games on the market are built first for the PS3/360, and laptops that are similarly powered. They are not even scratching the surface of what the weakest GTX 600 or AMD 7000 series card is capable.

With PS4, and I assume the XB3, these consoles are set well above the $500 laptops on the market that most people buy. He believes it will take years for these devices to match these devices in power with the new trend towards tablet like mobile laptops.

This all means that for the next 5+ years games will be made and optimized around the PS4/XB3 hardware. So just like now, no matter how powerful a PC we have, it is still only going to be a PS4/XB3 game at heart. Additionally, he believes the move to industry standard tech will allow much easier transitions to future consoles.

It is going to be so nice to see this gen unfold. Many people are going to be shocked at the advancements in games. PS3/360 have been holding games back for the last 3 years. In the next 3 years, AAA games are going to be unlike anything we could imagine right now. Just be patient, it will show soon enough.