Decline PS4 wins the console war against XboxONE, yet it is a hollow victory as Consolesdämmerung is upon us

[IDtenT]

It looks much better on my picture. But Crysis on the PC looks shit:

Is that Ballmer?

I've pointed this out before and I will continue to point it out until it sticks - these consoles are ahead of PCs in terms of architecture design. HSA is a big thing, no matter how much you graphics whores underplay it. It opens up new opportunities for developers that didn't realistically exist before - not because they lacked power, but because they lacked the architecture to work with. It is true that Cell bombed with the PS4, but you have to remember that HSA is going to come to PCs and that both consoles will make use of it (XBO more so than PS4; the only difference between the two consoles in terms of architecture is that XBO is going all in on HSA, while PS4 is playing the current trend game). This is why the consoles are future-proofed and will drive PC technology, because we all know games are designed for consoles first and foremost.

Will future PCs perform better? Of course. Nobody said they won't. Some shit that could happen on these consoles cannot however be handled by current tech PCs because of the architecture - irrespective of how many flops your GPU can do.

 

[DraQ]

Yeah, just forget that consoles always put out more performance than their hardware would do on a PC.

Except when the raw performance is roughly half of what's high-end BEFORE the console is even released, there's some serious limitations on how much optimization can save it. There's a huge disparity, especially compared to the Xbox 360 which had a GPU comparable to the ATI X1800, which was one of the higher-end GPUs around at the time of the console's release.

Expect console limitations to hold games back even sooner on this gen than they did on the last. Oh well, at least I won't need to replace my next laptop anytime soon.

Yeah, but take a look at what graphics can they achieve with a shitty 7 years old hardware now. While it falls short of a PC exclusive graphics whore game, a Forza 4 or Uncharted 3 looks pretty good for running on a shitty hardware. Now I assume with 10 times more RAM and 10 times faster GPU, they could pull off some pretty nice stuff.

So fucking what? There are no games on earth, in which you can't fing a graphical bug, or record a frame, where the engine messes up.

It looks much better on my picture. But Crysis on the PC looks shit:

Crosspost in emoticon thread pls.

 

[grdja]

While a $400 PC bought at same time has no chance of outperforming a same price console, upgrade for same amount of money will give you full parity or put you a bit above. If you do a $400 upgrade 6 months after console release (at which point console price hasn't dropped at all or maybe by 10%) you will leave poor toy in the dust.

 

[Infinitron]

Poor LundB, nobody actually reads his posts

 

[Misconnected]

IIRC, it featured fancy tech that was beyond what PCs were getting (and actually never got). The ATI GPU had some kind of fancy buffer that was supposed to be able to do 4x anti-aliasing for free, but then it turned out you couldn't do some post-processing tricks so most games didn't use it.

I'm too tehcnorant to know anything about that stuff, but the xbox is almost exactly equivalent to a Core 2 Due/8800GT/2GB RAM PC in terms of gaming. Something you couldn't reasonably put together until at least 6 months after the xbox hit the market. Pretty sure you couldn't build an xbox equivalent PC at the same cost until more than a year later.

Anyway... Point I'm slowly creeping up on is: why bother with a massively crippled console at all, when it matches neither the price nor performance of a PC? Seems like the only thing consoles are going to offer over PCs is split screen multiplayer.

 

[Average Manatee]

Guys, you can buy the PS4-equivalent GPU right now for $130. Its CPU is a trash low-power laptop model, just about anything you can buy will blow it to pieces. Don't know where you guys are getting the idea that the PS4 is ultra-competitively priced or anything.

Oh right, IDenT pulls magical fairies out of his bum and that makes consoles powerful.

 

[Kirtai]

The new architectural features should help a fair bit but whether it's enough to make up for the raw performance is unlikely.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

MS made two severe engineering mistakes that would pump up the price: First, 32MB SRAM. Sure they're fast, but ass expensive and require 6x more die area than the DRAM equivalent. Second, motherfucking Kinect pumped full with multiple cameras that can detect various wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. Shit's not cheap.

Third, Microsoft.

PS: Sony however does not care about losing money because they know Papa Kaz is always gonna smile. If not, the Japanese state is going to bail them out.

 

[IDtenT]

Oh right, IDenT pulls magical fairies out of his bum and that makes consoles powerful.

More power arguments. *yawn*

 

[circ]

HSA!

 

[IDtenT]

The new architectural features should help a fair bit but whether it's enough to make up for the raw performance is unlikely.

It doesn't need. It can however do things that aren't possible right now. That's the point.

MS made two severe engineering mistakes that would pump up the price: First, 32MB SRAM. Sure they're fast, but ass expensive and require 6x more die area than the DRAM equivalent. Second, motherfucking Kinect pumped full with multiple cameras that can detect various wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. Shit's not cheap.

Third, Microsoft.

PS: Sony however does not care about losing money because they know Papa Kaz is always gonna smile. If not, the Japanese state is going to bail them out.

The eSRAM is an all-in strategy on HSA. It's likely to not pay off - but you never know. It certainly won't pay off visually.

Kinect is another all-in strategy to try and revolutionise controllers. Dunno how it will play out - but it does give developers more opportunities.

 

[Darklife]

What the fuck is HSA?

 

[IDtenT]

HSA!

Voodoo!

Am I doing this right?

 

[IDtenT]

What the fuck is HSA?

Heterogeneous Systems Architecture. GPU and CPU compute on the same die, utilizing the same cache and memory addresses. This means that you can do computations on the GPU and CPU from the same data sets without any memory transfers taking place.

 

[MetalCraze]

You get quite a lot more bang out of a $400 console than you would with a $400 PC.

Morgoth weren't consoles supermega evil but now you suck their cock? You are like the leading hipster here, bro. Always jumping on what's trendy.

And the bang for the buck is great indeed:

No ability to upgrade. No ability to use it for anything but games, music and video. Pay-to-play multiplayer. Limited storage. No proper internet browsing. No ability to create dedicated server to play with bros. No ability to install better software instead of shit enforced on you by M$ / $ony. No modding. No alternative to One True DRM. DLCs that are free on PCs always cost money on consoles. Shitty game line up (shooters, racing games, fighting games and NOTHING else). Crappy chinese hardware (red XBox 360's circles of doom - remember?).

That bang for the buck man!

 

[J_C]

Guys, you can buy the PS4-equivalent GPU right now for $130.

And it won't perform as good in a PC, than in a PS4.

 

[Average Manatee]

Guys, you can buy the PS4-equivalent GPU right now for $130.

And it won't perform as good in a PC, than in a PS4.

Debatable. Being the same architecture as used in a PC means that most of the optimization should carry over. But in any case, a $180 card will leave it in the dust.

What the fuck is HSA?

It's the cool new word for integrated GPU. It's fast because it's a new word and consoles are using it.

It's similar to how "The Cloud" is a new super awesome thing that does everything, even though we've had the exact same thing called mainframe computing since... the 1960s. But it's a new word and that means it does amazing unheard of things.

 

[Darklife]

What the fuck is HSA?

Heterogeneous Systems Architecture. GPU and CPU compute on the same die, utilizing the same cache and memory addresses. This means that you can do computations on the GPU and CPU from the same data sets without any memory transfers taking place.

Wasn't the same architecture in place in the previous generation?

 

[MetalCraze]

And it won't perform as good in a PC, than in a PS4.

Why?

 

[IDtenT]

What the fuck is HSA?

Heterogeneous Systems Architecture. GPU and CPU compute on the same die, utilizing the same cache and memory addresses. This means that you can do computations on the GPU and CPU from the same data sets without any memory transfers taking place.

Wasn't the same architecture in place in the previous generation?

Nope, not like this.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

You get quite a lot more bang out of a $400 console than you would with a $400 PC.

Morgoth weren't consoles supermega evil but now you suck their cock? You are like the leading hipster here, bro. Always jumping on what's trendy.

And the bang for the buck is great indeed:

No ability to upgrade. No ability to use it for anything but games, music and video. Pay-to-play multiplayer. Limited storage. No proper internet browsing. No ability to create dedicated server to play with bros. No ability to install better software instead of shit enforced on you by M$ / $ony. No modding. No alternative to One True DRM. DLCs that are free on PCs always cost money on consoles. Shitty game line up (shooters, racing games, fighting games and NOTHING else). Crappy chinese hardware (red XBox 360's circles of doom - remember?).

That bang for the buck man!

You are so fucking dumb it's not even funny.

It's not about sucking cock, or choosing sides, it's about a fair and informed assessment of how things currently stand. But I understand what the Russians did to you, so I won't further bash you.

 

[MetalCraze]

So how do things currently stand Morgoth?

You pay less and you get less? No wai

Nope, not like this.

He means in previous generation of PCs

 

[Gord]

Just to give a bit of perspective: The 360 had a GPU comparable to one that cost ~$500 USD at the time of its release. If the Xbox One's card were comparable to something at the equivalent current pricepoint (actually a bit cheaper), it would be the third fastest GPU on that list. Instead its hardware is way down there at the bottom.

Denying that this will have any impact seems rather questionable.

The new console GPUs are more firmly in the middle than "down there at the bottom". The CPU on the other hand...

There are some factors that I see could theoretically still help the new gen of consoles:
* While sporting weak individual cores, the CPU has 8 of them. IF the software can make us of that, it could help somewhat. Problem is, efficient paralellization isn't that easy.
* GCN is relatively good at GPGPU stuff. Offloading some code to the GPU could help (of course that will reduce the reserves the GPU has available for other stuff). At the very least it might advance such features to a point that PC users get something out of it. Also an APU could theoretically be better at GPGPU (but I don't know if that's the case here) than a CPU with a dGPU.
* and of course optimization to a single architecture.

Comparatively the next-gen consoles might be weak, but they are still much better than the old ones. OTOH, if they switch to 1080p at 60 fps with better textures and some fancy effect like SSAO, this might already eat up all of the advantage...

I mostly hope for the base-line to be lifted far enough that pc games will see some improvements as well.
At least a "bad" console port might then look like some "good" port from now.
And hopefully the larger ram will bring back big levels again (and detailed ones, too).

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Debatable. Being the same architecture as used in a PC means that most of the optimization should carry over. But in any case, a $180 card will leave it in the dust.

Try to play the recent Tomb Raider (running on dat 8 year old console hardware) maxed out with a $180 card with decent res/hertz. Good luck.

Oh, but but it still looks so much better on PC! Yeah? Well, but the point is, it's still the same shitty game.

At least with PS4/Xbone there's a good chance now game design will change significantly for the better, which will automatically benefit PCs too. It's a win-win. A bit nicer graphics can't hurt, either. Not worried about that, except shallow graphics whores like Skyway who never can get enough staring at those Arma 3 ground textures.

 

[MetalCraze]

Try to play the recent Tomb Raider (running on dat 8 year old console hardware) maxed out with a $180 card with decent res/hertz. Good luck.

I tried playing it on 260 maxed out save for Tress FX. Smooth FPS.
On my current 660 it will work even better

All while consoles struggle with it at 1280x720 without AA and AF

At least with PS4/Xbone there's a good chance now game design will change significantly for the better, which will automatically benefit PCs too. It's a win-win. A bit nicer graphics can't hurt, either. Not worried about that, except shallow graphics whores like Skyway.

Is that why there's not a single game in XBox / PS4 line up that isn't a cinematic shooter or cinematic racing game or cinematic fighting no different from the same console shit of 10 years ago?

And ironically all of games shown on E3 were running on PCs too.