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ethomaz on 13 July 2013
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Pemalite said:

I am reading everything, I'm nitpicking the quotes and finding the flaws in them.
Seriously, tomorrow if he said the PS4 provides "Super computing levels of performance" much akin to what Microsoft did, people would beleive it, much like with the PS3.

The PC is a stable platform, sure the hardware isn't fixed, but that's not a consequence anyway when PC developers don't (And would be silly to) make the games directly to the metal, developers used to do that on the PC remember and it wasn't pretty. (I.E. Only certain GPU's and Soundcards were supported.)

PC is not a stable platform and it won't be ever... you need always fix something in the PC (or format like "casual" uses pay to do)... you have errors messages everything with drivers issues and games not running like they are supposed to run.

And fixed hardware, close to metal is better for developers than what PC have... there are advantages and disadvantages in both sides but in a developer point the first is better.

Pemalite said:

Nope, not all the tools and API's that are available on the PC will *ever* be available on the PS4, the fact you think otherwise is incredibly amusing, some of it is Microsoft patented technology, so you do the math.

You can uses everything for game development that exists on PC to PS4... you can even make a game using MS Visual Studio with DirectX (any DirectX version to date) to run on PS4.

Any PC game is supose to run on PS4 without major changes... in fact the changes is more to optimize the game for run better in PS4 than to make the game run on it.

So you can uses almost all Windows, Unix (Linux and BSD * BSD means Mac OS too *), etc tools, APIs, etc created for x86_64 and compatible with AMD GPUs on PS4.

In fact you can developer the game on PC using what you want and run on PS4 .

Pemalite said:

You should really check the features that AMD introduced in the Bonaire XT core that are not available on the PS4, allot of them assist with games development, plus you can't discount all the gear nVidia has that isn't going to be available on either consoles.
And, Haswell brought with it a bunch of improvements too.

As for the Geforce 580 vs Geforce 660, depending on what you are looking for, the Fermi architecture would be superior compared to Kepler as it has superior FP64 instruction support and performance. :P

Bonaire is the GCN 1.0 with some new microarchitecture implements.

+ HSA (PS4 have it... the Unified Memory is HSA)
+ ACEs / Queues (PS4 have even more... we are talking about GCN 2.0 in PS4 here 8:8 instead 2:2)
+ New version of PowerTune (I think the PS4 power manegement is even better than PowerTune... thanks fixed hardware)

From AnandTech "There are no notable changes in shader/CU efficiency, ROP efficiency, graphics features, etc. Unless you’re writing compute code for AMD GPUs, from what we know about this microarchitecture it’s likely you’d never notice a difference."

The part of compute code is about the ACEs / Queues that AMD improved in a new leval in PS4 far better than Bonaire.

Even AMD calling Bonaire a Sea Islands... the AnandTech that will use for referece in future articles GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 due these minors changes.

Fermi is not suprerior in F64 than Kepler... nVidia just limited this feature in the PC games based chip models... the Tesla based in Kepler is more powerful in F64 than Fermi (the Titan GPU and new GTX 700 are based in that Kepler).