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BlueFalcon on 21 January 2013
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timmah said:
Due to Sony's financial situation, I seriously doubt 4GB of GDDR5 RAM and won't be surprised if the GPU is weaker than predicted either.

Even if the 4GB of GDDR5 is not true, an HD7870 style GPU rumored for PS4 is much more powerful than the ~HD7770 GPU rumored in the 720. Based on #s, it doesn't sound like a big difference, but it's huge (http://www.techspot.com/review/615-far-cry-3-performance/page3.html). These rumors better be false for MS's sake or their console is dead in the water graphically against PS4 long-term.

timmah said:

Also, it is very, very likely that a 4-core AMD APU in the PS4 would be clocked down somewhat compared to the PC version to save on power consumption & heat (though still arguably better than the rumor in this thread). 

Even if it's clocked slower, a 2.8-3.0ghz 4-core APU APU would mop the floor with a 1.6ghz 8-core CPU. Most game code doesn't land itself well to parallel processing beyond 4 threads. At 50% parallel coding, the difference between 2 similarly powerful 4-core and 8-core CPUs is minimal. The clock speed and instructions per clock would matter more. In that case, for games a fast 4-core CPU >>>> slow 8-core CPU.

timmah said:

Most gamers will not give two rips about 4k, and since almost all gaming is and will be done at 1080p for quite some time, and at some distance from the screen, you'd be hard pressed to see massive visual differences in games on the two systems unless you buy a 4k TV and sit 4 feet from it (presuming the PS4 can even do 4k at all).

It's not about games at 4K. It's about multi-media capabilities long-term. If 4K TVs take off in 4-5 years, then PS4 will enjoy a multi-media advantage like PS3 did with BluRay. Since consoles are not used just for games, any advantage in multi-media capabilities in the living room is important.

timmah said:
...... am I the only one that feels this tells us nothing meaningful? Specs like this mean nothing, as we learned last gen. 

That's because last generation, the actual components in Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360 were all different. It was a lot more difficult to make the comparison. Since AMD is making GPUs for all of the next gen consoles, you can compare the GPU processing power directly if you know the specs/GPU architecture/generation. The comparison would not be too dissimilar to comparing GPU specs on the PC from AMD's own product stack. For this reason the specs comparison is pretty relevant. For the first time one company is making the GPUs for all 3 next gen consoles.  Also, if 1 console has 8 core AMD Jaguar CPU and the other has a 4-core AMD APU, it's also pretty much a done deal that the APU system has the faster CPU because Jaguars are low-end tablet CPU cores, but AMD's APUs have their high performance (relative to AMD's product stack) CPU cores.