PS4 'isn't quite as powerful as Epic was hoping for,' Digital Foundry reports
Although Epic Games publicly has high praise for PS4, the wizards at Digital Foundry have determined that maybe "the next generation of console hardware isn't quite as powerful as Epic was hoping for." How did they come to this conclusion? By comparing the first Unreal Engine 4 tech demo, running on a PC equipped with an Nvidia GTX 680, with the latest presentation running on a PlayStation. By analyzing the two, minute differences where the PS4 comes short can be found.
"The biggest casualty is the omission of real-time global illumination, which produced some really impressive lighting in the original presentation," Digital Foundry writes in their report. "GPU particles are fewer in number, depth of field has been significantly retooled and isn't quite as impactful on PS4, while object-based motion blur appears to have been removed. The flowing lava effect had real depth and texture to it in the original PC version - on PS4, it's significantly flatter."
While PlayStation fans will undoubtedly be disappointed in the analysis, Digital Foundry does note that the differences can be the result of the relative newness of PS4. "The DirectX 11 API is very mature while the PS4 tools and APIs are still in their initial stages of development--it's going to take time for devs to fully get to grips with the new hardware." Thankfully, being based in x86 should make development on PS4 mature much more quickly this time around.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=gtfCWYjOsvI
http://www.shacknews.com/article/78554/ps4-isnt-quite-as-powerful-as-epic-was-hoping-for
