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Sony announces the Playstation 4 - Well Sort Off
Weirdest launch ever ? Without showing even one photo of the product Sony Entertainment announced the Playstation 4 to much fanfare today in New York. The company hopes to make use of its acquisition of Gaikai in the next generation console by incorporating its cloud technology. It also hopes to make its online platform a lot more social than it was back with the Playstation 3. Unlike past launches, Sony declined to show off the console itself. Instead, it showed off the new DualShock 4 controller and the games that will be running on the new Playstation 4 when it hits the market during Holiday 2013.
After the press conference, Sony issued a press release outlining the technical specification of the new console:
- Single-chip custom processor, with eight x86-64 AMD Jaguar CPU cores and 1.84 TFLOPS next-gen AMD Radeon based graphics engine
- 8GB GDDR5 memory
- Built-in hard drive
- 6x Blu-Ray and 8x DVD drive
- USB 3.0 and auxiliary ports
- Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 2.1
- HDMI, analog AV-out, and optical S/PDIF audio output
- DualShock 4 controller, with two-point capacitive touchpad, three-axis gyroscope, three-axis accelerometer, vibration, light bar with three color LEDs, mono speaker, micro USB port, stereo headset port, extension port, 1000mAh battery
- PlayStation 4 Eye camera, with two 1280 x 800 cameras, f/2.0 fixed focus lenses, 85-degree field of view, 30cm minimum focusing distance, four-channel microphone array
Sony's president of Worldwide Studios explained the absence of the presence of the new console was that it would be revealed at a later date so that the audience will not "get bored" in future announcements.
At launch, critics slammed Sony for charging upwards of $500 for the PS3, arguing that it had too many features. HDMI, Wi-Fi and optical audio didn't come standard on the Xbox 360 at launch, but they all proved important over the years. Meanwhile, the fast XDR memory of the PlayStation 3 came in handy, but there was far too little at 256MB. Here, Sony's seeking to maintain the speed with GDDR5, but ups the capacity to a generous 8GB. Similarly, gamers ended up appreciating the PS3's built-in hard drive when they started downloading games or installing them, but the first-generation 2x Blu-ray drive made that a painfully slow process.
The Microsoft Kinect took the world by storm at its debut, and not just because of the 3D depth camera: the always-on microphone array allowed a Kinect-equipped Xbox 360 to recognize voice commands. Now, with the PlayStation 4 Eye, Sony will have both motion tracking and voice recognition hardware at its disposal, but also higher resolution and a much larger field of view. While the Kinect can only fit two people in its sweet spot, and has difficulty tracking them at times, the PlayStation 4 Eye could do more... theoretically, anyhow.
Last but not least, there's that custom AMD processor to discuss, and here's where we need to be extremely careful about jumping to conclusions: with a custom design, there's no telling exactly how powerful the processor might be, or how much developers might get out of it. Still, we can draw a few parallels: we actually saw a quad-core Jaguar processor at CES, inside AMD's Temash reference design. Contrary to what you might believe, Jaguar actually isn't a beefy CPU; AMD's selling the tiny cores in chips designed for low-end laptops and tablets. And yet, with floating-point performance of 1.84 teraflops and a next-gen Radeon architecture, the GPU will likely have more power than a 1.76 teraflop AMD Radeon HD 7850, a mid-range graphics card for gaming computers. Source the verge
Denial
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Posts: 13755
Joined: 2004-05-16
#4537650 Posted on: 02/25/2013 03:14 PM
Again, I was only trying to emphasize from Sony's point of view.
Also the point being is that in 2006 when the PS3 launched, in order to build something to match it's power you did have to go over around $800. It was just that powerful at the time compared to the competition around it. This time around, they are launching in eight months something that is already obsolete hardware wise (except for the GPU and RAM maybe).
But the PS3 was $800. Sony was subsidizing the cost and losing $300 on every sale of the lesser 20gb version, $240 on the 60GB. And what did they get for it? The 8800GTX launched the same month the PS3 did and out performed the GPU in it 2-1.
So yeah, I still think the hardware decisions in the PS4 were the correct ones. They are offering extremely good potential performance (slightly under a GTX680) plus all the other stuff for near the price of a 680 (1.84TF vs 2.5TF and $400 vs $450). On the CPU side the performance isn't really that relevant. It has to feed the GPU frames and that's about it. Unless you're going to subsidize the cost you're not going to get more performance per $ out of the thing.
Again, I was only trying to emphasize from Sony's point of view.
Also the point being is that in 2006 when the PS3 launched, in order to build something to match it's power you did have to go over around $800. It was just that powerful at the time compared to the competition around it. This time around, they are launching in eight months something that is already obsolete hardware wise (except for the GPU and RAM maybe).
But the PS3 was $800. Sony was subsidizing the cost and losing $300 on every sale of the lesser 20gb version, $240 on the 60GB. And what did they get for it? The 8800GTX launched the same month the PS3 did and out performed the GPU in it 2-1.
So yeah, I still think the hardware decisions in the PS4 were the correct ones. They are offering extremely good potential performance (slightly under a GTX680) plus all the other stuff for near the price of a 680 (1.84TF vs 2.5TF and $400 vs $450). On the CPU side the performance isn't really that relevant. It has to feed the GPU frames and that's about it. Unless you're going to subsidize the cost you're not going to get more performance per $ out of the thing.
Chillin
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Senior Member
Posts: 6814
Joined: 2006-01-18
#4537651 Posted on: 02/25/2013 03:18 PM
So yeah, I still think the hardware decisions in the PS4 were the correct ones. They are offering extremely good potential performance (slightly under a GTX680) plus all the other stuff for near the price of a 680 (1.84TF vs 2.5TF and $400 vs $450). On the CPU side the performance isn't really that relevant. It has to feed the GPU frames and that's about it.
AI, sound, pathfinding; these are just some of the parts processed on the CPU. I was hoping for games this generation which would allow for a far greater amount of units on screen with much better AI than in the past; this is not going to happen now with the CPU power available here.
So yeah, I still think the hardware decisions in the PS4 were the correct ones. They are offering extremely good potential performance (slightly under a GTX680) plus all the other stuff for near the price of a 680 (1.84TF vs 2.5TF and $400 vs $450). On the CPU side the performance isn't really that relevant. It has to feed the GPU frames and that's about it.
AI, sound, pathfinding; these are just some of the parts processed on the CPU. I was hoping for games this generation which would allow for a far greater amount of units on screen with much better AI than in the past; this is not going to happen now with the CPU power available here.
IPlayNaked
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Senior Member
Posts: 6559
Joined: 2009-10-12
#4537655 Posted on: 02/25/2013 03:21 PM
Again, we are arguing what Sony could have put in for the price.
The fact that you can build a more powerful retail system near the PS4's price is pathetic.
It's been shown to you multiple times that you cannot.
Again, we are arguing what Sony could have put in for the price.
The fact that you can build a more powerful retail system near the PS4's price is pathetic.
It's been shown to you multiple times that you cannot.
Denial
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Posts: 13755
Joined: 2004-05-16
Senior Member
Posts: 13755
Joined: 2004-05-16
#4537668 Posted on: 02/25/2013 03:46 PM
Sound is trivial for a modern processor.
As for AI, without implementing statistical machine learning modern AI isn't going to get better regardless to the processor being used. Pretty much all game AI is just highly scripted events and predefined algorithms. You're basically limited by development time rather than CPU power.
And even when SM is used it's going to benefit from having higher vector math output which is where Jaguar cores are superior to similarly specced Intel processors anyway and once again will benefit from having more threads.
And on that note I'm done posting as I believe we reached an impasse.
I'm not a big console gamer but from an engineering standpoint the PS4 looks sound. Would I like to see consoles disappear entirely in favor for a certification approach? Absolutely. I've posted about that here before -- but at the moment that doesn't look like the direction the industry is headed, unless Valve manages to pull a rabbit out of it's hat. So here we are stuck with the PS4 and Xbox whatever they are calling it. I think they did a pretty good job hardware wise and I'm glad they switched to X86. Hopefully we can get some good games by next year on both the consoles and PC.
AI, sound, pathfinding; these are just some of the parts processed on the CPU. I was hoping for games this generation which would allow for a far greater amount of units on screen with much better AI than in the past; this is not going to happen now with the CPU power available here.
Sound is trivial for a modern processor.
As for AI, without implementing statistical machine learning modern AI isn't going to get better regardless to the processor being used. Pretty much all game AI is just highly scripted events and predefined algorithms. You're basically limited by development time rather than CPU power.
And even when SM is used it's going to benefit from having higher vector math output which is where Jaguar cores are superior to similarly specced Intel processors anyway and once again will benefit from having more threads.
And on that note I'm done posting as I believe we reached an impasse.
I'm not a big console gamer but from an engineering standpoint the PS4 looks sound. Would I like to see consoles disappear entirely in favor for a certification approach? Absolutely. I've posted about that here before -- but at the moment that doesn't look like the direction the industry is headed, unless Valve manages to pull a rabbit out of it's hat. So here we are stuck with the PS4 and Xbox whatever they are calling it. I think they did a pretty good job hardware wise and I'm glad they switched to X86. Hopefully we can get some good games by next year on both the consoles and PC.
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But you can't and that's my point. You built one close for near $500, $550 if you get similar GPU performance, probably closer to $600 if you include all the other crap like bluetooth input device and whatnot. That $200 is going to come from volume purchasing and probably selling the console at a loss. If there is a tech site reporting that they can build a PC for $400 (again which is rumored) that includes everything I get in a PS4 i'd like to see that.
You also keep putting a huge emphasis on CPU performance which is meaningless on a console. Low latencies are good when doing general purpose computing but for gaming it's pointless when the only thing your doing is shifting textures. 3GB of ram is barely enough now -- skyrim heavily modded @1080 comes close. When you start rendering open scenes with heavily tessellated elements and throw 4K textures on it you're going to blow that near instantly. Currently the only reason why you see games with such low texture budget is because all the games are optimized for current gen consoles which have close to nothing.
Again, I was only trying to emphasize from Sony's point of view.
Also the point being is that in 2006 when the PS3 launched, in order to build something to match it's power you did have to go over around $800. It was just that powerful at the time compared to the competition around it. This time around, they are launching in eight months something that is already obsolete hardware wise (except for the GPU and RAM maybe).