@tescovee: Not really. AMD Customer Support cannot confirm or deny anything because of NDA agreements. If Diana said something, it was likely never supposed to make it outside of the conversation between the 2 people talking. AMD announced hUMA earlier this year, and it is kind of their ace in the hole when it comes to their APU tech by their own admission, so if the PS4's APU has it built in, that would be significant performance wise according to AMD's previous statements regarding hUMA.
@marokai: Yeah, I think it's pretty telling that people are trying to downplay just how many games Sony has at launch as being "too indie" or "a bunch of F2P". Give me a break, these same people used XBLA as a bullet point for the 360.
@the_laughing_man: Cool, yeah, doesn't surprise me that they would be actively working to back away from something like this, like I said in the original post, I imagine anything said to this effect would be off the record.
I guess like most things, we'll have to wait for confirmation or launch to see if this pans out. Heise would appear to be a pretty significant IT based website in Germany, so I'm sure there is at least some basis for their article.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Papers, Please on the PS4/Vita at some point, I've seen some of the guys at Sony doting on that game pretty heavily on Twitter.
@the_laughing_man: Curious, I guess if the email is legitimate, we should see an official statement from AMD at some point. Otherwise, anyone can type up an email to dispute anything.
@jimmyfenix: I have so many Steam games I haven't touched but that will run in Steam Big Picture mode, if I could pick up a PS4 sized PC $400-$500 and throw it on my TV to run them, it would be a no brainer at this point.
Although both upcoming game consoles Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are based on AMD hardware, only PlayStation 4 incorporates hUMA [Heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access] for supporting a shared memory space. This was explained by AMD's Senior Product Marketing Manager Marc Diana to c't [big German IT magazine] at gamescom. This should put the 3D-performance of PlayStation 4 much farther ahead of Xbox One than many have expected so far. AMD sees hUMA as a key element for drastic performance improvements in combined processors. AMD's upcoming Kaveri desktop processors support hUMA as well.
Behind the scenes, c't could hear from developers that the 3D-performance of PlayStation 4 is very far ahead of Xbox One.
Back in April, AMD manager Phil Rogers explained to c't that hUMA improves 3D-performance in particular. "Game developers have been eager to use very large textures for years. Until now they had to resort to tricks in order to package parts of larger textures into smaller textures. That is because today a texture has to be located in a special place of physical memory before the GPU can process it. With hUMA, applications can work with textures much more efficiently". AMD will give more details on hUMA at its upcoming developer conference in November.
Surprising that AMD would come out and talk about something like this publicly, going to guess it was supposed to be off the record.
Also another article speaking to AMD planning to sell a cut down version of the PS4 APU for PCs. Sounds like a cost effective solution for budget gaming PCs down the line probably, which could be a boon for PC games. I wonder if something like this would show up in a Steambox down the line.
Not surprising, the investment in giving out free copiers of FIFA beyond the initial launch pre-orders could be pretty costly. I'm sure MS could foot the bill, I just question whether it would be worth it to them.
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