By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
AnthonyW86 on 30 March 2013
Edit Thread
Michael-5 said:
zarx said:
Michael-5 said:

How? The amount of processing power of the PS4 is only 9x more. I know RAM jumped 16x, but other things like the GPU speed doesn't even double from PS3 to PS4 (from 550 MHz to about 860 Mhz). I also know the GPU bandwidth only increased 3x (54 to 154 GB/s) and from what I hear the bandwidth was one of the bottlenecks of the PS3 (Id bandwidth related to bus speed? I heard the PS3 has a slow bus speed and that's why newer model PS3's couldn't emulate PS2 games properly).

I don't know too much about computers, but I know that more RAM =/= more power after you reach the point where the RAM is sufficient and no bottlenecking the system. 16x RAM is sufficient for 9x more processing power.


Comparing clock speed of GPUs is pointless. PS3 VRAM had 22.4 GB/s of badwidth and the PS4 has 176GB/s unified which is an almost 8x increase. Memory bandwidth wasn't nearly as much of an issue as having 2 small pools of RAM, the split pools is what caused games like Skyrim to have it's issues where as not having an embedded framebuffer like the PS2 and 360 at worst caused some lower quality alpha blending and lower quality AA until MLAA/FXAA became popular. 

Okay so the VRAM bandwidth increased 8x, GPU Bandwidth increased 3x, Raw Processing Power (What would you call GFLOPS?) increased 9x, GPU Speed increased 1.6x, but because RAM increased 16x the PS4 is 10-15 times more powerful then the PS3 instead of 9x or less powerful?

I don't understand, RAM wouldn't make the PS4 go from 8x as powerful to 12x as powerful, no matter how good it is, it's not needed, something else will bottleneck the system.

You are correct, when it comes to raw computing power the PS4 gpu is 9x as powerfull, memory size or speed doesn't direcly give it more computing power. However graphics memory was the biggest limiting factor in the PS3, especially since it wasn't shared and was fixed at 256mb. With PS4 they could use 5000mb for graphics and much higher speeds, so atleast that bottleneck(as you already mentioned) is finally gone.

But seriously guys why are we comparing a dual gpu card with a console here? You can't blame consoles for for limiting the possibility's or your Crossfire or SLI system. When it comes to power consumption the PC graphics card industry is just going berserk:

Now the HD7990 is slightly more power friendly, using 350W max. But seriously, a 7800 GTX used 80W back in the day and that's why they could use it in the PS3. If you go look at what card fits that bill these days you get.... exactly a HD7850. From a power/performance view a HD7850 is simply top notch, and comparable to the top cards back in the day. Anything higher is not a fair comparison and unrealistic, it would be like comparing a tablet PC to an Ultrabook.

Really you should be able to max out any PC game with a 100W card(aside extra filetring options etc.) but the PC industry has become obesed. It's not healthy to need a 200W+ card to max a videogame out.