more like a day one update lol. Seriously the amount of patches and updates is gotten beyond annoying in some games. Consoles are no longer the old plug and play. Factor in that you can't even replace your own hdd in the xbox one, it makes PC more attractive as I got full control of patches and updates and how I back them up.

Who cares? I have a gaming PC, but how many people have PC's more powerfull then a PS4? Nit many. Graphics will be fine.

Umm no. Next consoles are usually around close high end PC at first, just slightly lower maybe (Remember oblivion pn PC and console at launch? Very similar), then over time PC widens the gap. yes, you can get an enthusiast PC that will be a lot more powerfull, but no one makes games to utilize such a small part of the market. Graphics look more then good enough for it to be much of a concern now.

How many people have PC's that can out perform a dedicated box with 8 GB GDDR5 ram, and a unified architecture? Not many, also consider PC's have a lot more overhead so a PC would need higher specs to run the game at the same pace. yes PC's can obviosuly more powerfull, but that is hardly the whole story.

More than the amount of people that own a PS4...

Not for long.....................

I'm not so sure. I think PS4 will be a succes. But within a year from release, most gaming PCs being bought will be more powerful than a PS4.

I'm keeping a close eye on the PS4 because it's looking to be a good purchase for a good price. But it's definitely underpowered compared to PC rigs. And that's alright.

LOL, no. Most peoples PC's are only on par with 360 and PS3....High end gaming PC's are not popular it is a niche market. It is hardly underpowerd, it will be close to high end PC graphcis at first, just like 360 and ps3 were. oblivion looked as good on console as PC at launch.  Over time PC will get better but barely any games will utilize them. Graphics are already good enoguh for 99% of the population./

I don't feel like starting a heavy debate but I will say this: while it's true that the majority of games will not utilize the extra power, I'm positive that even mid-end videocards and CPUs will be more powerful than PS4's within a year from PS4's release. This has been the case with PS3/360 as well, except for PS3's Cell processor which was powerful, but extremely inefficient. And today's consoles are way more behind than PS3 and 360 were at the time of release.

PS4 is budget console and I'm all the more happy for it. Sony has learned from their mistakes.

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.

No way.
The Xbox One and Playstation 4's GPU is Mid-range.
High-end is a single Radeon 7950/7970 and better, Extreme/Enthusiasts is multiple Radeon 7950/7970's or a 7990.

In comparison, last generation consoles had high-end GPU's relative to the PC.
And considering AMD's new GPU's should be launching around the same time as the next generation consoles...

Also, Oblivion is probably the worst example you could use, it performed like crap on the consoles and on the PC you could run it on hardware equivalent to the origional Xbox if you mod the shaders.

Yes, generally the PC has higher overhead due to the API's and Windows itself and the fact that developers needed to support multiple CPU instruction sets. But that's not always true either, every game usually ships with better graphics out of the box on PC, that's not free on performance. - If you take a game like the origional Crysis it would run rather well on a PC that is specced similar to the consoles, yet the console version looked horrible in comparison.
Call of Duty is another example too.
This time around, consoles will get less optimisation for it's hardware compared to a PC of similar specification due to being more PC-like at the fundamental hardware level, no amount of unified RAM is going to fix that.

Pretty much any High-end PC made within the last 4 years can be faster than the Playstation 4, that's the sad reality of the situation and hence why it isn't classed as "High-End".
GDDR5 and by extension any type of RAM, doesn't do any form of processing, the PC has a memory hierachy for a reason, to hide latency and bandwidth deficits whilst keeping costs low, you can claim you have 8Gb of GDDR5 all you want, it's not a game changer when comparing a console and PC, I have more total GDDR5 memory on my GPU's (Albeit, only 3Gb out of 9Gb is actually usable for games) than what the PS4 has, with 4x more system memory.

8Gb of system Ram these days is generally regarded as a gamers minimum with a shift to 16Gb, this next generation consoles will finally give people a reason to upgrade their PC's, heck, if it wasn't for the fact I'm running at a resolution 10x higher than the next generation consoles, I would have a lower powered PC too (Provided my work didn't require it either!).