How to easily push the PS4 to its limits

[freedquaker]

ganoncrotch said:

freedquaker said:

This will be an OVERLY SIMPLISTIC comparison. I am in no way trying to be scientific here, just trying to give a ROUGH IDEA about the UNOPTIMIZED power of PS4, which is quite relevant with the FIRST GEN THIRD PARTY TITLES.

Now, theoretically PS4 is 10x PS3 in terms of theoretical horse power. Let's take an average 3rd party PS3 game running at 640p & 30fps.

Bump up the resolution to 1080p : 3x theoretical performance cost

Bump up the frame rate to 60fps : 2x theoretical performance cost

Enable Anti-aliasing : about 1.3X - 1.5X theoretical performance cost

That totals to 8X theoretical performance cost

You are still left with 20-30% performance to add additional detail and effects. In short, the EASIEST WAY to maximize the PS4 over a PS3 port is

PS3 original  : 640p, 30fps, No AA, medium quality settings

PS4 port : 1080p, 60 fps, 4x AA, high quality setting  (10x performance cost)

That is of course not the OPTIMUM performance, there probably would be much better trade offf choices as well as platform specific enhancement, which are mostly irrelevant for 1st gen 3rd party titles. You can roughly get twice the graphics detail at 30 fps for example, this alone will wow you, but at the cost of higher development spending (likely to be materialized in 1st party exclusives).

I think you are kind of forgetting that each part has a knock on effect here so it's not really how things can work in the real world. to suggest that adding 4xAA would cost 1.5times the ps3 power but this is clearly just based on doing it to a 640p game, if you are talking about 4 more pass's per frame at 1080p you are talking about first multiplying the number of pixels by 3 times, then having to apply 4x AA to the new figure which would then consume 4.5x the power of a ps3 to apply.

 

Same thing exactly with the resolution and frame rate.

simple example

if 720p x 30 fps = 1million pixels x 30 fps means shifting 30 million pixels per second

if 1080p x 30 fps = 2 million pixels x 30 fps is indeed shifting 60 million pixels per second

but 1080p x 60 fps = 2million pixels x 60 fps is 120million pixels per second.

what I'm saying is you can't just add up that double the resolution is 3x the ps3 and double the pixels is 2x and add on some AA for 1.5x you would need to multiply each factor by the next to get how much power is needed so you are talking closer to 12x here with these 3 rather than the 8x you think it would equal.

The reason I said x3 for the upping in resolution is because I was going from 640p to 1080p, which is roughly 3x pixelsand the reason I assume AA punishes the performance about 20-30% is because they usually do not directly apply it but optimize it conditional on the scene / game etc. On a PC scale, I'd agree, but on a low level console specific API level, things are more down to a direct match between bandwidth and Compute Units, rather than PC-like abstractions, which are highly diverse and unreliable. Even then, all those are gross simplifications. I am not claiming any specific statement is accurate, but I am claiming that the overall results will be very much like what I am expecting.