| bbd90 said: Hi guys, this is my first post on these forums and I just wanted to clarify some things. First, You can't take a cosole's specifications and compare them directly to the PC counterparts. It doesn't work that way. Today's PCs are exponentially faster than PS360 but yet the games don't look a whole lot different. That's because the PC has a lot of OS overhead and API problems they have to deal with. With consoles you have a single unified specification that you can directly code for so the results will look much better than anything we have seen before (probably mid-late cycle). Reports are saying that Sony is encouraging developers to code down to the metal with low level access to the GPU libGCM style, this means games in the future are going to blow away what the PC is producing today. The PC will always more powerful than a console but the console will always make more efficient use of the components.
Second, the 8GB of GDDR5 RAM is a potential game changer. Sony's OS most likely will not take up more than 1GB and that's being really generous because they really went with minimalistic design and tried not to block the developers to harness the power of the system. That leaves 7GB for the games, this will not all be utilized right out of the gate and there is a couple of reasons for that. It's more of a future proofing method because they expect this console to be the focus for the next 7 years but also because as games start to unlock the true power of the consoles it's going to start eating up that RAM rather quickly. If you played The Witcher 2 with Ubersampling or Crysis 3 with the DX 11 patch you can see that once the high resolution textures are introduced the VRAM starts to become a bottleneck. I think both Sony and Microsoft understand this well enough to equip their systems with ample RAM for the future.
So basically, as PC gamer these things are amazing to see from consoles. Sony (and Microsoft based on rumors) have empraced the PC architecture which will mean better games for everyone. The processing power is nothing groundbreaking but in consoles it's going to really work well and even though we might not see the benefits of having 8GB of GDDR5 right away it was definitely the right call to make. Better to be safe then to be sorry later down the line. Developers are happy, gamers are happy, now the ball is in Microsoft's court hopefully they will have a console that is equally as exciting. |
Good first post. I don't now much but seems you make a good point.
