PlayStation 4 Console Discussion

[madeinbeats]

that francis video is awesome ilove how he says the share button it sounds like sarah button!

he has a real good point about blizzard

 

and @madeinbeats, since sony are asking for all games to support remote play and have a vita control scheme, i can see them certainly offering similar experiences, which is a good thing! it means devs will be making games for PS4 AND WiiU, it leave MS and the nextbox as the odd one out, where its versions of games will already have cut features

 

I'm talking about asymmetric gameplay rather than off-screen. Should be a piece of piss to get 99% of PS4 games to off-screen play with literally 1 line of code. Let's see how good their 'game server' streaming/receiving tech performs.

Edited February 22, 2013 by madeinbeats

[Daft]

PS4: PC-like architecture, 8GB RAM delight developers

 

Sony's PlayStation 4 press conference was a pitch to developers as well as gamers. The console's architecture chief Mark Cerny talked more about CPUs and GPUs and teraflops than he did his own game, Knack. He described the PS4's architecture as like a PC's but "super-charged for gaming". PS4 is "a platform by game creators, for game creators", he said.

 

 

---

 

The PS4's PC-like architecture isn't the only new feature to have met approval from the development community. The console's impressive 8GB of GDDR5 RAM came as a surprise to many gamers - and even some developers we spoke to who have worked with PS4 dev kits.

 

Traditionally console dev kits contain more memory than retail units. With the PS4 dev kits containing 8GB of RAM, Sony's announcement that the retail unit would contain the same amount delighted as much as it surprised.

 

"8GB of GDDR5. Just for a minute can you work out what that means?" Gilray says, excited. "That's a phenomenal amount of memory. And the fact it's GDDR5 memory as well is just nuts."

 

 

---

 

Gilray isn't sure about the idea of being able to ask a friend to virtually take control of your game to complete tricky sections. "I think part of being a games player is not having someone help you, to do it yourself," he says. "The idea of somebody else using a virtual controller to take over kind of freaks me out. It's a good idea, but it kind of freaks me out."

 

He's more enthusiastic about being able to download games as you play them, and being able to pause and resume a game at will.

 

"The whole 'you can download stuff while you're playing' thing is mental," he says. "That's phenomenal news. The idea of having it so you can buy the game and get a little drop quickly, start playing the first part of the game while the rest is downloading in the background, is brilliant.

 

"I know we don't have the greatest broadbrand infrastructure in the world still in the UK, but what always gets me is if you've got a 4GB game to download, you've got to wait for 4GBs to download, when that might be a 20 hour game."

 

 

Baynes has already come up with an idea for PS4's cloud features.

 

"The built in light bar and touchpad have opened up some interesting control possibilities but the Gaikai streaming has a lot of potential for innovative game mechanics too," he says.

 

"Outside of the examples given during the press conference, imagine a co-op game where you can interact with and see other players in multiple, detailed, diverse environments with picture-in-picture using Gaikai streams rather than loading and rendering the different scenes locally? It's given us some very cool ideas about new ways to play that just wouldn't be possible without it so that's exciting."

 

"Speaking for myself, the social aspects of the PS4 sound incredibly interesting," says Brooksby. "Watching and interacting with other's gameplay streams is going to make playing and sharing really fun. I'm particularly excited at the prospect of 'blooper reels' thanks to the always-on video recording."

 

Link

 

There's more. Interesting article.

Edited February 22, 2013 by Daft

[Captain Falcon]

I think someone needs to go make an "The 'Other' PS4 Thread" over in the Nintendo section...

 

 

Given Epic games Mark Reign was as delerious as a school boy when he appeared on GT with Geoff at the thought of the PS4 having 8GB of RAM, and that UE4 was the first demo shown on stage, what are the chances of Gears of War going appearing on a Sony platform? MS might publish them but the IP is wholey owned by Epic themselves and the PS4 sounds like agame developers dream whereas the Durango sounds like it's going to have a few ecentricties to work around in order to keep up to speed with the PS4. But as a game dev, and more importantly as an engine providor, surely they need to position themselves in a way that allows them to show off their engine to it's fullest potential and that won't be possible on a Durango as it stands. Of course they will tailor a version to it as it would be commercial suicide not too but in terms of saying "come look at the all singing all dancing UE4", the PS4 seems a better platform.

[dwarf]

You don't actually know what's in the Next Xbox though, do you? If it's similarly built as a PC, it too can undergo change. It's too early to say what it'll be.

[Retro_Link]

I think someone needs to go make an "The 'Other' PS4 Thread" over in the Nintendo section...

I was just about to Thread rip all the PS4 talk in Wii U Console Discussion into a new discussion thread in General Gaming... but amongst not sure what to call the thread... you could well be on to something! :p

[Daft]

I propose, The 'Teh PS4 - H4ters gonna H4te - Thread'.

[dwarf]

You could get rid of the Wii U thread, and Wii board, and just make another PS4 thread in general gaming discussion.

 

I think that would go down well.

[Daft]

And change the site name to S-Europe.

[madeinbeats]

*looks back at the last 3 pages*

 

Can someone point out the 'haters gonna hate' posts please?

[Daft]

Sorry, I'll stop making jokes.

[Ashley]

Cheers. Was the PS4 shown?

 

They didn't show it.

 

Copying Nintendo again

[Captain Falcon]

You don't actually know what's in the Next Xbox though, do you? If it's similarly built as a PC, it too can undergo change. It's too early to say what it'll be.

 

Well there has been plenty of rumours floating around and given that SuperDaE guy, who has been responsible for the leaks and tried to flog the dev kit online, has had his house searched and property seized at the request of MS it gives a lot credibility to said rumours as he's clearly in the loop as it were.

 

The rumours being that it also features an AMD 8 "Jaguar" core based x86-64 cpu clocked around 1.6Ghz, has an ATi GPU that delivers around 1.2 teraflops of computational power (compared to the 1.8 of the PS4) and comes with 8GB off DDR3 and 32MB of sDRAM. It also has 4 Data Move Engines.

 

Whilst it can under go some changes, that aren't going to be massive ones at this stage of the day and RAM around amount aside, and not even the devs knew about that, the PS4 has come in exactly in line with rumours that were floating around and there was less evidence to back those up. All the systems tools that will be out there are based on the configuration they are aiming for and substantial changes to the set up of the unit could render a lot of it useless and mean a waste to however much has been plowed into R&D.

 

I know some people here like to bash Digital Foundry both here and at EG but this article was about as accurate as it gets with regards to the PS4 and so it's difficult to think they could be so far off with Durango.

[Daft]

Sony has opted for a tighter system - fewer memory modules, but all of them very, very fast. It retains GDDR5 as the single memory pool with all the raw bandwidth advantages that entails, but it is limited to 4GB (there are rumours of 6GB/8GB upgrades but this is highly unlikely to happen).

 

LOOOOOOOOOL

[Sheikah]

You could get rid of the Wii U thread, and Wii board, and just make another PS4 thread in general gaming discussion.

 

I think that would go down well.

 

I think that would do the trick. This thread has attracted people who have hardly set foot on this board, it clearly has some sort of allure. Well, for haters with hardly anything positive to say.

[Retro_Link]

@Daft, what's LOL? (I useless at understanding specs stuff)

[Daft]

Just that they thought the 8GB upgrade wouldn't happen.

 

It wasn't that funny, I needed to write ten characters.

[Captain Falcon]

LOOOOOOOOOL

 

To be fair, no one really thought it likely due to the cost involved - or at least, few people did. Devs might be pushing for it but they don't have to worry about the cost of buying the parts and assembling the boxes.

[Daft]

I know, I only find it amusing in hindsight.

 

Edit: Just noticed the user name from the press conference.

 

 

Hint that DayZ is heading to PS4 maybe?

Edited February 22, 2013 by Daft

[Dog-amoto]

[Dcubed]

To be fair, no one really thought it likely due to the cost involved - or at least, few people did. Devs might be pushing for it but they don't have to worry about the cost of buying the parts and assembling the boxes.

 

Exactly, it's going to cost a fortune here. The heat and motherboard complexity increase it brings is also very significant - expect it to be bigger and louder than the original PS3 model was...

 

And even then, you have to wonder if the benefits are really worth it in the end. It's all well and good having 8GB of RAM, but there's one big massive bottleneck holding it back and that's the BD disc drive (which offers a max read speed of 27MB per sec). Being generous to Sony here and assuming that games have access to 6GB of that in total (with 2 GB locked off for OS use; I'd be surprised if it were that much really), it would take 3 mins and 48 seconds to fill the RAM completely from disc! - and that's ignoring seek times!

 

You're never going to see loading times that long though, because that would just be completely absurd so unless they require mandatory installs for every game, I can't even imagine a game even really needing that much RAM at any one time (if you were working with less RAM, you'd just remove unnecessary data when you don't need it).

[Daft]

I don't think the BluRay drive is going to be a bottle neck, they'll just install games onto the HDD. Surely that's the biggest advantage of playing while games download/install. Isn't that what DF said?

[Shorty]

Presumably they can use the secondary CPU to install the game while you play now, so it's not a big deal. You've said 6GB but some games will probably manage on 4GB with other memory reserved for preloading the next part.

[madeinbeats]

When you think that only 7 years previous, doubling the RAM in the 360 from 256 to 512Mb cost MS a theoretical 1 billion dollars in future profit margins, you can only imagine the financial burden the ps4 will be. It doesn't seem to make much sense using the RAM they are when it would seem to get absolutely crippled by the drive speeds, but that could be offset slightly by compression tech decompressed on the fly or maybe they might use a kind of hybrid SSD. I know that's even more cost, but hey, they don't seem to care! But even a bog standard HD would raise it to at least around 100Mb/s read speed wouldn't it?

 

When you look at a game like KZ4 though, with it being highly scripted, it knows exactly what it needs to load down the line so can just constantly keep refreshing the RAM.

 

EDIT. Also, we can assume greatly at this point that at least 1Gig, very probably more, will be used for all those OS features, useless they have a separate pool for that, I'm sure most people would doubt that though.

Edited February 23, 2013 by madeinbeats

[Dcubed]

Presumably they can use the secondary CPU to install the game while you play now, so it's not a big deal.

 

That won't work because the game needs to be able to load the data off the disc at the same time, you can't install the game onto HDD and read data off the disc into RAM at the same time because the disc speed bandwidth is being taken up by the game loading from disc.

 

27MB is a hard limit that you can't get around, unless you install the game to the HDD before you play and even then, filling 6GB of RAM would still take a long time! (average 7,200 RPM HDD is around 100MB read speed, so it would take around 61 seconds to fill 6GB of RAM - still on the lengthy side...)

Edited February 23, 2013 by Dcubed

[madeinbeats]

I know you hear people moaning about it, but are most people really that bothered about installing before you play? I mean, how desperate does someone have to be to resent an install?

 

Can't wait to see how big this and the 720 will be though. What have they learnt from the YROD/RROD fiasco to make sure that doesn't come about again?

 

Do gamers these days just except high console failure rate as a part of life now? I know this gamer doesn't.