And much cheaper compared to what it would cost in terms of attempting to build such a custom PC rig if it's even possible...

Based off prices I've seen for super gaming PC being a few grand

The PS4 will be a "steal" assuming Sony is reasonable and does not attempt to sell their upcoming new console for no more than $400

This Blog was pretty interesting on PS4

http://gamer.blorge.com/2013/03/11/ps4-will-out-power-most-pcs-for-years-to-come/

Honestly 8 gigs of ram is nice and all, but most gaming computers or when building computers, its easy to match and surpass that now (and it don't cost no few grands, maybe if you buy alien ware comps, but if you build your own, prob not).

All i gotta say then is, hopefully if making a universal architecture does indeed bring cost down, we can get away from $60+ new games. Prob not since while we might get a steal from the specs, they just get a steal right back at us to even things out and then some.

Old news is old.

Can I tab out and watch Pokemon reruns

Didn't they confirm that launch games are only going to run @ 30fps?

I guarantee that people have gaming rigs right now that "push more polygons" and "run at higher framerates" than the PS4. The question is where the PS4 will fall in terms of performance:price ratio. At launch (assuming that the PS4 retails at $400-500USD), I doubt a gaming PC will best Sony's console in terms of getting the most bang for your buck. Considering the subsidized stucture of how consoles are initially sold, this wouldn't be much of a surprise. The biggest potential problem in PS4 games being outperformed by equivalently priced PCs would be unoptimized programming that usually plague launch games.

Not a chance in hell. There is no way an APU will be better than a Titan or a 690 or a 7990. Memory is not everything in a computer. They just can't put that kind of technology in a mass market consumer device and charge a reasonable price. Maybe if the PS3 was $1000, or they were willing to take an absolute killing upfront (like a 500-600 loss per console), but neither of those things are going to happen.

sounds like a shitload of speculation.

i do think the GDDR is their linchpin to power with affordability. but i think overall PCs will be more powerful still, if not as well optimized (initially)

Man imagine how much quieter and smaller gaming PCs will become if or when powerful APUs arrive on the market as PC hardware. That's an exciting prospect.

Dawg, I can't wait to get my hands on this fat rig.

For the record, I bought 8GB of RAM a little more than halfway through last year for thirty five dollars. Now, the RAM that Sony is using, purportedly DDR5 or GDDR5 or one of those two, is much faster than my RAM, but it's still RAM. It's still just a place where programs are loaded so they can be read faster. It isn't going to do a ton for things that a processor is better at (A.I., number of people on screen, number of things going on at once, etc.) or the things that a GPU is better at (weather effects, textures, particles, etc.). Will it help those things? Yes, but more and faster RAM isn't going to magically save a middling processor or graphics card.

If I were to bet on the PS4's approximate power in relation to PC's, I'd say that it will be mostly equivalent to a machine available now that is on the high end of middling. So, probably about the same or a little better than mine (7870, i5) and that's for a machine that will probably run games at 30 frames, possibly even with the resolution still at 720p. Maybe it will be better than I'm giving it credit for but it will not outpace what modern PC's can do now. Really, guys, just take a look at this. That's a very high end PC running a lot of Skyrim mods now. The PS4 won't be capable of that, and definitely won't be capable of it at 1080p, 60 frames.

Digital foundry threw out some fun numbers on that subject already

PS4: 1.84 TFLOPS

3 Titans PC: 15 TFLOPS

If you have a ton of money you can already have the performance of the next next gen consoles. If the rumors of a 7850 (A stock 7850 is 1.76 TFLOPS and extremely easy to overclock) in the PS4 are true, it won't be too hard to surpass.

A PS3 for comparison was .25 TFLOPS.

Console manufacturers waited too long. PC gamers have been playing "next gen" power for a long time. When PS4/720 games come out people will be disappointed because they have already seen what can be done today.

@slaegar: To be fair though, I doubt more than a handful of people have experienced gaming with 3 SLI'd Titans.

Sigh... I wish I can just game on just one GTX Titan.

We all do.

We All do. :(

That's a titan running Crysis 3 at 4k vs Uncharted 2(3?) at native resolution.

Titans are crazy over priced, though. $1000 of any other modern video cards (SLI/Crossfire) will easily out perform it.

i wish i could experience a GTX Titan

in my mouf

"out-power most PCs for years to come"

Well yeah, most PCs in the world are not gaming PCs.

See i too am a master at PR and marketing.

@slaegar said:

@andorski said:

@slaegar: To be fair though, I doubt more than a handful of people have experienced gaming with 3 SLI'd Titans.

Sigh... I wish I can just game on just one GTX Titan.

We all do.

We All do. :(

That's a titan running Crysis 3 at 4k vs Uncharted 2(3?) at native resolution.

Weird color separation in the dude's face, can't tell if he has a strange hair line or if he tans with a plate on his face.

As far as the PS4, i'm curious what the high bandwidth, unified system memory will bring to the table.

I always hate entering into these sorts of thread discussing next-gen console power, because it always manages to remind me that yes, PCs are better in every way and the PS4 is already outdated ect blah humsigh. And yet I keep doing it! Like as some form of self-harm.

I could probably buy the parts for my own decent PC for the same price of the PS4 anyway, but I enjoy the accessibility and an awful lot of the Sony franchises too so... I'd prefer to have both naturally, but the PS4 is still edging out from all I've heard so far. Plus a PC built at a similar (predicted; let's say £300-350) cost still couldn't last me too long before I'd need to upgrade anyway.

Join the dark side. We have driver updates~

(AMD GPU 13.4 is out btw)

That's not true. Games are often optimized for current-gen consoles, and then "upscaled" for the PC. The potential of a having a game built from the ground-up to much more powerful machines is enormous.

For instance, if Uncharted 2 came out on the PC maybe it would look even better - but you would still always be fighting the same 3 dudes. Next gen will allow for more models, better animation, and other things that aren't simply added to PC versions of modern games.

Look at the Killzone stage demo. Did you see the people running scared of the explosion? How every person looked different, and reacted differently to the attack? I thought that looked great.

I mean these are only a few very specific examples of what next-gen technology can bring to video-games. A lot of it could be seen on the games demoed at the PS4 event. PC gamers have not yet seen what next-generation games can bring. Better resolution and textures aren't everything.

You are quickly becoming my favorite person on these boards.

I honestly think that a few months before the PS4 launches PCs will be capable of the same amount of graphical fidelity, if not more. Hell, they might already be at that point. Consoles will never match PCs because PCs are always changing.

Consoles have been holding back a lot of stuff. I remember playing Dead Rising. Stuff like that like simply couldn't happen on the older systems. I also remember playing World of Warcraft in 2006 and not really thinking about how 30 skeletons ran at me because I cast rain of fire in Stratholme.

I then remember Crysis in 2007 and how it looked mind blowing.

I then remember in 2010 wondering how long until something played better on consoles.

and in 2011

and in 2012

and in 2013

I have seen what next gen can bring because some people didn't wait.

Nope, the modifications are indeed very useful from an efficiency standpoint but the 1.8ghz Jaguar CPU and the modified 7850 GPU core don't have anywhere near the raw horsepower of top end PC hardware. None the less it will hold it's own pretty well for a couple of years.

You guys should read this here. Cerny explains why the architecture is much better of a normal CPU/GPU for example

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/191007/inside_the_playstation_4_with_mark_.php

Yeah, BUT CAN YOU ORDER A PIZZA ON IT?

I want to see your damn Playstations and computer ma jiggers handle them apples. Or should I say, mushrooms.

8 gigs of ram? No, 8 gigs of unified memory. So it's not 8GB it's more like 4-5, with 3-4 GB of VRAM.

@sin4profit: He probably has dirt all over but wiped his face off or something. That's what it looks like to me, dirty bald head with a wiped face.

Next gen consoles will allow things to go pretty crazy on PCs but it's not going to be better than awesome PCs the price might be a steal in some regards, but remember that the consoles do a lot less than a PC. I use mine to play games, use the internet, communicate with pretty much everyone in my life, animate, model, and render, photoshop, and edit video. It does all of that for a couple grand, and it does it all superbly well.

There's also the part where the next big jump in PC hardware is coming right around the time of the new consoles, so we don't have a fucking clue what PCs will be like then. God only knows what the next Titan will be like... *drools*.

Yes, it'll be about the best you can get for the money. That's the point. They make it as efficiently as possible and it doesn't need the raw power because software is designed specifically for it.

But to put it in perspective for you, the Unreal Engine 4 stuff that's been shown on PCs (current, usually on a single 680, same card I am currently running) and the PS4, the PS4 ran it much worse and it didn't look quite as good. Now, it's a tech demo and not given as much attention as a full game would hopefully be given, but still. The PC wins out ultimately. And that's a PC with hardware that's a whole generation behind what we'll be comparing to next gen consoles.

I'm excited for next gen consoles, but let's be honest. Games will still look better on my PC than on those consoles. Especially when I pick up the next gen Titan :p

Cross-platform games will likely be almost exactly the same as the next Xbox versions, and likely a bit worse than the PC versions all the way pumped up on a very high end rig. But for PS4 exclusives, give it a year or so for devs to really learn the system, and I'll bet given the 8 gigs on-board ddr5 memory, coupled with the single die APU (even with its on-paper limitations compared to modern CPU parts), PS4 exclusives will indeed look better than any cross-plat game, or even PC-only title for at least a couple years. It's because of the sheer speed of the cohesive system working in unification, rather than how PCs with disparate components work, along with this being a dedicated gaming system, not personal computer, and being able to 'code to the metal,' and use a lot more resources on a running game than a PC with similar specs can.

But yeah, 5 years down the line, PCs will blow it out of the fucking water for sure.

I would have said TNG reruns but the point stands.

This upcoming console generation is going to be so weird. Barring some surprise during the Durango's announcement, I'm expecting everything to be running on some sort of x86 architecture. So...what's the point? At least the PS3 had Cell, and the 360 had a PowerPC. Say what you will about the hell devs had to go through to accommodate these differences. At least they were different! The more I think about the PS4, the more I think, "Sony, you just made a PC." Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, by any means. It's just...what's the difference going to be in this generation? Are we really going to pit just PSN against just XBL? And to some degree, against Steam/Origin/GOG/every other distribution store available on a Windows PC?

@ubersmake: This lack of meaningful differences and everything starting to go the x86 way, and with the recent rise of PC gaming's popularity (again, but hopefully here to stay), along with the whole gaming landscape changing dramatically and rapidly with the rise of powerful mobile computers as Moore's law hums along, makes it seem all the more apparent that this console generation may very well be the last of the traditional home console model as we know it. I really don't see a PS5 and Xbox 1440 or whatever coming along in 7-8 years, continuing this constant console cycle as it's been. Things are just changing too much for that to continue indefinitely, just as we're starting to see the beginnings of radical shifts away from the traditional entertainment media model everywhere else.

@slaegar: @mordeaniischaos: Look at how perfectly round the texture is, though. It looks like a distinctly different texture. Weird.

I'm sure it has one of the better APUs you can get now, but the idea that it's better than a computer with a i7 and a Titan is laughable. I doubt it hardware wise is better than a 680 either. Now if you want to talk about how developing for a PS4 game will make it perform over PCs currently, or for the price you're getting great hardware now thats at least somewhat acceptable. If you're going to say "most," compare it to "gaming" pcs. not the majority iMacs, mac minis and dells with integrated graphics.

I don't think you quite understand what unified means. There is no speration between CPU accessible RAM and GPU accessible VRAM. It's all one big pool sitting on a single chip where either the CPU or GPU can access at any point when needed.

How about "No" and move on from there?

@slaegar: Your post is really confusing. PC exclusives highly-optimized for the PC like Crysis are technically impressive yes, but they are few and far between.

Here comes 3 whole years of people posting about how the PS4's RAM is better than PCs with 16 gigs of it and monstrous Nvidia GPUs and Intel processors, before the PS4 starts crapping out under pressure and they wake up again.

Listen, I was an Xbox player for years, that doesn't mean I lied to myself back then about specs and technology. A locked box costing 400 dollars will NEVER come close to the performance and frame rate provided by an upgradable PC with good parts.

It's still not coming close to touching peoples actual good gaming PCs, but its a nice step forward as long as its priced good and I'm glad..but that's that. So hopefully we can get better looking multiplatform console to PC games now from the start instead of only the end of the gen due to the limits being far outdown by the engines.

I still other than the generalness of just getting more power in this gen which is great and all for plenty of reasons, it comes down to the games for me, as it should for anyone. Until I know what's what with the games I'm still definitely not getting a system at launch again, or for probably at least a good year or longer.

Also some devs have already confirmed still being locked at 30fps for their needed games, so that speaks for itself regardless of whatever anyone tries to say.

Technically, no, there are many pcs now that could probably beat it. The reason games will look incredible on it for awhile probably has more to do with developers being able to optimize games to one set of specs.

It would make more sense for them to specify what they mean, being low end to some medium end PCs(not even close to high end) but I suppose letting it be obfuscated a bit makes it sound better than it is, so I guess its how they would want it. I'm not trying to say it's shit or anything, but as I stated before, the games are what matter to me.

I just find it silly to word the description of the systems specs the way they have been stated to be, trying to make it sound like they are far beyond ANY PC, let alone a single high end one. It's just silly.

Years to come?

lol

I don't think enough people realize that the production "life cycle" of some hardware on PC is measured in months.

@haltiamreptar said:

You know, it looks just like what would happen if he had a full mask on, such as you'd see in Metro 2033, or on a firefighter. The mask protects the face but leaves the rest to be super filthy with soot/dirt, and would leave a very clear and clean edge.

I'm pretty sure PCs can easily out pace the next gen systems so it really will come down to price and bang for your buck.

@liquidprince said:

I don't think you understand how it'll be USED. lol. It's all there, it is not able to be simultaneously used by the CPU and GPU. It's not like one second you'll be using 7 gigs of it for the CPU and the next it'll be using 1.

My system has, between VRAM and just plain RAM, 18 GB of memory. If I had a Titan, my video card would have about as much memory as the entire Playstation 4 System, and I'd still have twice that much in RAM alone.

The advantage of unified memory is efficiency of access, and the benefit of it all being very fast is, well, speed of access. However, that memory WILL be split up. It's not some magic thing that lets you use all of that ram for any little thing. If that were how memory worked, you'd only need as much memory as your largest program needed, not enough to fit all of your programs at once.

And unless they design games in wildly different ways, the amount of memory needed on either side of the equation isn't going to change much. Also, don't forget that the PS4 isn't the first system to have unified memory. The Xbox 360 had 512MB of UNIFIED system memory. It didn't revolutionize much of anything other than giving the developer a little more control over priorities. The difference with the PS4 is memory is dirty fucking cheap now so you can put a lot of really good memory in without it being god awful price-wise.

It's still not going to be all that different from my much older PC (My PC will be over a year behind the times when the next gen consoles come out) and when the consoles come out I'm planning on having upgraded to something much shinier than what I have now (which is still plenty shiny, mind you).

Oh wow, guys, if you think the PS4 is just a bad gaming PC and will have limited value as a platform because of it, you're looking at this from the wrong direction.

This upcoming generation of consoles will affect games the same way widely adopted hardware always does, by raising the floor. Once you have a PlayStation 4 or a Nextbox in a bunch of players hands the lowest acceptable quality is raised. At the moment, there is a certain technical threshold that anyone who plays a lot of modern games is familiar with, PC's have been growing this threshold upwards ever since the 360 launched yet we don't have any revolutionary PC exclusive experiences that you couldn't envision on modern consoles. Even if a designer wants to release something cutting edge exclusively for high end hardware, where do they get the developers and engineers experienced in building that game? Every AAA, commercially successful, well liked game is limited by the bottom of this threshold.

Skyrim is a great example, it runs on consoles and PC's, is feature rich and graphically impressive. When you look at the fine details though you can see the cracks, each area requires a loading screen, each NPC animates the same way, the towns and villages are small and under populated and animated objects become static when observed at great distances. Take a look at gameplay and it's mechanically evident as well, there's no climbing mechanic, you can't build a home anywhere you want and there's no Co-Op. All of that stuff is non-essential and it's absence is completely acceptable because everyone understands that threshold. Once designers and engineers know that their minimum tools have things like 8GB of unified memory for graphics and processing, a lot of the mechanics and features that could never be explored in this previous generation are suddenly on the table.

If it was PC's or nothing we would likely be in a world with far less variety in game design, Consoles are less expensive, non-upgradable game platforms with a lower barrier to entry then a gaming PC. Every generation needs to be better than the last but we want consoles that are less powerful than a high end gaming PC so they can be cheaper, quieter and less power consumptive machines. The two are totally different things that suit the needs of different types of people. PC's and consoles compliment each other and games as a whole are better for it.

So be excited!