The Economist: "The newest games consoles look underpowered and similar to PCs."

[greenmedic88]

From a CPU and GPU standpoint, the trend of consoles essentially being purpose built PCs more or less started with the original Xbox and was consolidated with the XB360. Now they're essentially using mobile processors with double the cores of current mobile SoCs and a shared memory architecture, which the XB360 already used.

I suppose the only significant difference other than the shared memory, is the fact that these new designs have access to more VRAM (GDDR5 in the case of the PS4) than all but the the highest end custom built PCs, which are limited by the current VGA cards being produced which top out with the GTX Titan at 6GB of GDDR5 memory at $999 and the GTX 780 at $650 (the only two cards currently on the market with this much memory), a price that maybe less than .1 percent of PC gamers can afford/will pay for. Quick reminder that Crossfire and SLI set ups are not additive when it comes to VRAM (i.e. 3 x 2GB GDDR5 VGA card does not = 6GB of memory addressable for games). It's still 2GB, or whatever each card being Crossfired/SLIed has on board.

Low memory size was the biggest constraint of the 7th gen. The 8th gen will be CPU and GPU bound by comparison.


Personally, this all a bit irrelevant to me as I'm going to be doing the majority of my gaming on a PS4 anyway. I appreciate the update which at $400, is quite a bit less than the price of a much needed update for my 2010 PC build (which was about a $1200 build). I could go with a much cheaper upgrade at about the same price as a new console, but a proper rebuild would include a $300+ CPU (since it would be used for rendering, with games being secondary), a $300 VGA card at minimum (which would be on the low-mid end of what I'd want), plus a new mobo and at least 16 GB of RAM. I'd also replace the SSD boot drive array to a higher capacity set up rather than reinstall everything on the current tiny by today's standards 128GB boot drive. About the only things I'd be re-using would be the case, PSU, optical drive and HDD (which would also be updated to a larger RAID array).

If I was primarily using this for gaming, I'd actually feel pretty stupid for spending that much since I generally prefer playing games on console anyway.

I don't feel too bad about paying $400 for a new console by contrast.