Sony could have released a $300 PS4 that is about 4 times the power of the PS3 this holiday

[Pemalite]

VGKing said:

sperrico87 said:
PS4 needs to be a lot more than 4 PS3's duct-taped together.

Wii U was supposed to be a lot more than an HD Wii with a cheap iPad knockoff with buttons as a controller. We can't always get what we want.

I'd rather have a PS4 that focuses purely on power and performance instead of gimmicks.

Because the iPad was the first ever tablet...

/end sarcasm.

And the Wii U is also far more powerfull than the current Xbox and PS3 in terms of graphics rendering anyway, not to mention the extra plethora of new graphical techniques it can perform such as: Tessellation (Adds new geometry to otherwise simple models, great for adding real looking rocks on a flat ground!), Geometry Shaders, GPU accellerated Physics (More CPU time is free'd up for things like A.I or texture decompression), Improved hardware instancing (Lets multiple instances of similar meshes, such as armies, or grass or trees, to be rendered in a single draw massively improving performance.), improved Shadows, Improved Lighting, Improved Texture Compression, Better and cheaper Anti-Aliasing (For the love of god do the current consoles need this.), Improved Anisotropic filtering, Better Mip-mapping, Better occulusion culling... The list goes on.

Yes the hardware specs might only suggest a small improvement, but there is so much more under that hood that developers can/will take advantage of that the Playstation or the Xbox 360 could ever hope to achieve.

Regardless of how much power the next generation brings it will be fantastic at any rate.

If you look at the evolution of games, the more powerfull the console is the more expansive a game world can become as more detail can be rendered on screen at once, this has a massive gameplay improving effect, otherwise we would still be playing corridor shooters where you can't even see a sky but instead we now get massive expansive worlds like Skyrim and Grand Theft Auto.

Although I do own both a Playstation 3 and an Xbox 360, my platform of choice however is the infinitely superior PC, with improved consoles the console ports will be dramatically improved instead of the current crop of bad looking and limited games we have today. (With a couple of exceptions.)

The other factor is that with less powerfull hardware this jump, the hope that we won't get such massively long console cycle will hopefully come to an end which means more rapid improvements in games and hardware instead of this horrible stagnation of mediocrity.