| Cyborg13B said: I'm somewhat pleased with the direction Playstation 4 has taken. Let's take it by subjects: 1. X86-based CPU processing That was a very logical choice. What a bad move - giving the Playstation 3 a PowerPC-based architecture, given the fact that everyone uses X86. Everyone everywhere likes this, because it makes programming exponentially easier. Plus - the X86 is better at DirectX and OpenGL shader calls, at the same clock-rate. It is way better at operating system procedures at any clockrate. Thus - allowing for a 1.6 ghz clockrate - half the PowerPC. Virtually no heat distribution. 2. Useless hardware The blu-ray drive is useless. Doesn't visibly impact the video game. Plus - 8.4 GB for a DVD is enough for most games - probably 95% of games. The 8 GB of RAM is useless - it would take 6 minutes to load a game with that much data. 2 GB makes more sense - 1.5 minutes, and is enough for 95% of games. 8 X86-based CPUs are useless. There's no way to use 8 CPUs efficiently in in-game conditions. 2 would serve for 95% of games. Playstation 4 could easily cost $275.00 if those features were deleted. We're in the big leagues now! 1.84 TFLOPS performance. That's a lot. Playstation 3 had at best 300 GFLOPS. A TFLOP supercomputer basically - meaning in 2000 - that could've been a super-computer. 2-3 billion transistors. Plus Playstation 4 is intelligently designed. The x86 processing is one component. Another component, is the asynchronous move engines. That certainly helps to move data far more efficiently - while the game is running. Another - the 32 MB SRAM on the GPU, which allows for unbelievably massive geometry rendering, and free 2x AA at 1920 x 1080p, even at 60 fps. Plus - there's likely a vector co-processor in the CPU design we're not aware of - another massive improvement. All said and done - 100% utilization of the available hardware in the best way - that's unheard of. It's main weaknesses are: 1. The Blu-Ray drive. Not necessary. Especially a BD-XL one. A 8.5 GB DVD is enough, and far cheaper then a regular Blu-Ray drive. Games would look identical. 2. 8 CPUs. Hard to utilize 8 separate CPUs! Takes expert programming. 95% of games will use at most 2, and it would make no visual difference. 3. 8 GB RAM - hard to load 8 GB of data. Would take 6 minutes. 95% of games will only use 2 GB, and it would make no visual difference. |
Useless?
1. Most games for PC and 360 are released in 2 DVDs... so over 10GB game data in today standards... the Blu-ray is necessary with 25GB minimum. The lack of 7.1 sound, voice transalations, high resolution textures (in PC everytime the developer releases a patch HD textures because the DVD did 't had enough space)... so the games will start to became bigger in a good sense.
2. You know most games uses 4 cores? Yeah... games run in 2-core but they are bootleneck for high-end GPUs... with PS4 8-cores all the developer will begin to parallelize the code to run in more cores... the PC will get a big leap in terms of code running in CPUs. The industry will finally grow to the next level after Crisis (2007).
3. The 8GB is not only to load data... it is to create data with the GPU... sorry but in today standards the BattleField 3 on PC already use over 3GB memory (2GB VRAM + 1.5GB MainRAM)... so again the PC developers will grow to the next leval of graphical and open world games. The work of this generation is Open World... without 8GB that will be impossibile to make huge worlds... forget the small Halo, CoD, Gears, Crysis, Uncharted maps... now you see what the Open World means.
So I disagree with all your points... and PS4 didn't have eSRAM.
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