| Soundwave said:
The iPhone 6 is approaching PS3/360 horsepower, the reason you don't see games that utilize that much horsepower is because developers have to make sure their games will run on the iPhone 4/5/5c etc. too, not just the 6. The Vita runs Killzone, and Killzone looks comparable/better than some early gen PS3/360 titles. And the Vita's chipset is ancient, it's basically an iPhone 5 chip I believe, the newer chips that Apple uses smoke the Vita processor. |
Mobile is approaching the level of horsepower displayed by 10 year old hardware. There isn't a single possibility of mobile chipsets catching up with consoles/PC power wise. It's physics. Let's look just from a GPU standpoint (you can follow the same analysis for the CPU).
A desktop decent GPU costs around US$ 300 (GTX970), is pretty big, uses 250 watts alone and generates tons of heat dissipated by a massive fan. The entire consoles costs basically the same, is pretty big, uses 150 watts and generates tons of heat dissipated by a massive fan. Its GPU packs less power than the one above. In both cases, they are done with the most recent technology. Consoles will of course get outdated, but right now PS4 and X1 back modern GPU architecture (mid end GPUs use downscaled tech from the high end ones).
Forgetting the price issue, a tablet SoC must use around 5w for everything. It can't generate a lot of heat because it doesn't have fans (or have tiny ones) and because generating heat equal using power and that will drain battery. A mobile phone will have to use even less.
Pachter says the BS he does because he doen't know physics. You can't do the same thing that a 150w machines does with 5w unless you pack a massively better technology. Mobile is coming close to PS360 because they use tech that are much newer, but they won't catch up PS4/X1 until their tech becomes way obsolete. That will create a gap of some years. We know that processing power rougly increases around 2 times each 1.5 years, so we can calculate a 6 to 7 years gap to equal GPU power.
That's a superficial analysis because probably the CPU power on mobile increases slower because of the limitations of the ARM architecture (it is power efficient, not a powerhouse). The memory bandwidth is another are that increases slower (memory wall) and even performance oriented SoCs as the Tegra K1 don't have as much memory bandwidth as the older PS360. The future Tegra X1 is the first mobile headset that will match the 10 year old tech on these consoles.
About the Vita visuals, it must factor in the clever design of the machine. A 540p screen was used because it gives you 4 times less pixels than 1080p and almost half of a 720p frame. Vita also uses a more customized memory solution that gives it a higher bandwidth. It is closer in bandwidth to a Tegra K1, that is a much beefier SoC than the ones used even on current iDevices.
