Epic VP: PS4 is Like a Perfect Gaming PC

[utgardaloki]

You can't compare individual components between PC and console. Even if they appear to be the same. Any system is a result of:

Components
Architectural layout
Standard

Console components in themselves are often less powerful than their PC counterparts. But few PCs have top of the line or even near top of the line components for gaming. Developers aim for and set the bar in accordance to what will be capable of running on the largest segment of potential customers. That segment is mainly made up quite weak PCs. You think last gen consoles are holding PCs back? Well so are weak PCs.

The architectural layout of consoles however isn't necessarily weaker. On the contrary it's often extremely powerful for a number of reasons. One is the architectural layout itself. Another is the standard. PCs don't have so much a standard as they have a frame within which they are allowed to move around. You can vary their components in an enormous way. That's good for the PC market but it's everything but for games. In console terms the PC "standard" is broken. In any given console standard every component as well as total layout is known beforehand. A programmer knows exactly what their code will do for every darn machine following that standard. That helps enormously with a number of things that in the end results in considerably better performance than could ever be achieved on a PC containing the very same components. On the PC those components are never known to the programmer but rather simply anticipated... together with that component or this component and that mobo or that one. Not good. If you were to program for PCs the way you program for consoles you would have to optimise for every single imaginable configuration possible in the PC world. That's impossible. So quite a few compromises are made along the way.
The PS3 can run Cryengine 2 and 3 even under heavy memory constrains. My old GTX 7800 how ever struggles like hell to do the same even though it has higher bandwidth than the more or less same GPU in PS3.

In the end the never ending argument made by PC gamers is that "my components are so and so fast while console X only has these components". To leave out two out of three equally important categories doesn't give you a very good idea of the whole picture.

The PS4 is better compared to last gen consoles than PCs in order to get a good picture of how powerful it might be or not to be. The PS4 is pretty darn more powerful than last gen. And even though last gen consoles are outdated technically speaking, they are still holding up quite well compared to what we see on PC.

 

[ojas]

[citation][nom]spentshells[/nom]Oh your pc has 8 GB of gddr5?[/citation]
Doesn't have 1.5 GHz Jaguar cores either, thankfully, seeing that Piledriver needs 4 GHz to be competitive.

 

[royalcrown]

[citation][nom]tomfreak[/nom]Hi, I come from the future via a time-machine. I have a PC running 64bit OS + 16GB RAM which easily out-spec the PS4 speed.[/citation]

ROFL...WOW... YOUR PC IS AS FAST AS THE PS6 !!! Also, you should go to the year 2485 and check out the Playstation GTX 680.

 

[ojas]

[citation][nom]aggroboy[/nom]The big beef is this: you're using memory benchmarks for existing PCs. PC's discrete GPU evolution path has been designed around the limitation of the PCI/AGP bus, GPUs became standalone processors designed for receiving command buffer instructions and keeping all computations local. So you took memory benchmarks of existing PC architecture (two powerful but not tightly integrated subsystems) and come to the conclusion that developers won't take advantage of a new heterogeneous architecture based on single memory address space and shared controller.How does your bottleneck scenario come into play when the CPU and GPU are sharing the same address space, all tasks can be offloaded to either and processing can be spread to cores based on dispatch workload?[/citation]
Well, APUs have shared address spaces too, they're limited by bandwidth, except when the CPU is the bottleneck. Sharing the address space (and a high memory bandwidth) doesn't magically take care of processing bottlenecks, but it will improve performance on both the GPU and CPU side where there's a lot of reading/writing to RAM. Even on the GPU side there's stuff that's more shader bound, so it won't help there.

Current processors aren't really bottlenecked by memory bandwidth in games, GPUs can be, however. The PS4's GPU's bandwidth is up there with the higher end cards of this generation, but then its actual processing cores might not be.

I'm not sure what to expect on the CPU side...going from 18 GB/z to 35 GB/s with an integrated memory controller doesn't seem to make that much of a difference, but i wonder what happens when you increase that 18GB/s by 10x.

I still think that, unless there's huge emphasis on using all 8 cores, and those cores can all run at 1.5 GHz to effectively output over 5 GHz...then maybe. I dunno. But they'll be good for at least a year or two. It can at least match the mid range market.

 

[ojas]

[citation][nom]roadrunner343[/nom]I'm mainly curious to see how the GDDR5 works as system memory due to the increased latency. Again, I'm assuming there is a reason no PC currently rely on graphics memory for system memory, and instead they use it solely for graphics. My guess is the latency, and it will be interesting to see just how much better (if any) the GDDR5 performs as system memory.[/citation]
Me too really. Bandwidth will increase 10x over the APUs we have today, i wonder how much of that can be used effectively. I also wonder, won't the bandwidth get spread between both?

 

[kawininjazx]

Even if you go to walmart and buy a cheapo laptop, it has 64-bit windows on it.

 

[KelvinTy]

even 5 years ago, when I was studying high school, those PCs with 4:3 17inch LCD monitors run on XP-64bit... I don't know where the VP of unreal is from, but he might be just a little bit out-dated on tech "now-a-days". Even when I started working for small businesses, they have dual core 64bit computers running win7-64bit...

 

[bogo663]

Well, that gave me a good laugh.

 

[mikeyman2171]

Why not focus on the fact that we might FINALLY see games written for multithreaded environments which would benifit EVERYONE regardless of platform. Our CPUs have been multithreaded for years now and most games and apps are still single threaded for no other reason than programmer preference. Who cares what type of ram the machine has really, especially if its only being used as a crutch for a program that isnt coded to take advantage of the current processors.

 

[senkyen]

The only way I could agree with the "perfect gaming PC" statement is in the sense that performance-wise it is a perfect example of an average gaming PC and that its hardware is perfectly compatible with current PCs. All the rest he said is complete nonsense.

 

[-Jackson]

[citation][nom]bluestar2k11[/nom]Far as i know, no gaming PC has GDDR memory as it's primary ram. So for bandwidth the console will likely win for quite some time to come, even if it lacks in processing pixels and shader effects.Windows 32bit does have that limitation, but it can be expanded to 4Gb if you code it right. My skyrim currently uses 2.5Gb of ram to run with all my mods, and i believe it can go up to 4Gb. But most don't program their games to do so. For skyrim i believe modders did it first as they found quickly that it would eat up to 2gb without issue, and then crash.I've got high hopes for this generation. Not because i favor consoles, but because the parts the new consoles use will hopefully advance gaming, PC gaming, use modern API features and processing like Dx11 and tessellation, and 64bit progressing and memory address space, and make better ports to and from, which benefits every gamer.Out of sheer curiosity, won't don't we have PC's using GDDR memory as primary ram? The PS4 is doing it, partly because of the integrated chip, but why couldn't standard desktops do so since most CPU's use a CPU integrated memory controller, and by extension, why couldn't that controller run at the clock of the CPU to fill the processing requires to push/pull that much data?GDDR5 afaik, completely outperforms DDR3 SDRAM, which much faster clock speeds and much higher bandwidth. But I'm sure it is more expensive. Is it just price? Or is there some reason in the processing itself that doesn't lend well to gaming systems as primary ram?[/citation]
Possibly because VRAM and DRAM are different - functionally. Just a guess though.

 

[d_kuhn]

The best thing about the PS4 announcement... which makes me want to hug it... is that regardless of how 'perfect' a pc gaming system it is, it IS (or very nearly is) a gaming PC. That means all those game houses who've been putting out crap for PC because they're porting from consoles will be able to get closer to publishing quality PC titles just by doing a good PS4 build.

But... the thing that worries me is that I hear Sony wants to charge a hundred beans per game... that aint gonna fly.

 

[upgrade_1977]

So, if they used off the shelf PC parts, then obviously it's software not hardware, so either they aren't coding it correctly on the PC, or the PS4 has the same limitation.

(p.s., ive seen quite a few games use more then 2gb usage, so it can't be true)

 

[utgardaloki]

GDDR5 afaik, completely outperforms DDR3 SDRAM, which much faster clock speeds and much higher bandwidth. But I'm sure it is more expensive. Is it just price? Or is there some reason in the processing itself that doesn't lend well to gaming systems as primary ram?

Primarily GDDR 5 needs to be soldered onto the motherboard in order to work so no stick modules meaning no up-grades to general PC-hardware (laptop might benefit). That's a no-go for PC but excellent for console builds which do not require versatility (they rather demand the opposite).

 

[upgrade_1977]

Alright, since it's based on "off the shelf PC parts", then I bet, that within a week some hackers will have the thing benchmarked with 3Dmark or some kind of benchmark just to show that it really is just a low end pc running especially optimized code. And obviously epic is comparing a low end PC not a high end PC, cuz everyone knows the specs of Ps4 are based on low end parts.

 

[upgrade_1977]

[citation][nom]utgardaloki[/nom]GDDR5 afaik, completely outperforms DDR3 SDRAM, which much faster clock speeds and much higher bandwidth. But I'm sure it is more expensive. Is it just price? Or is there some reason in the processing itself that doesn't lend well to gaming systems as primary ram?Primarily GDDR 5 needs to be soldered onto the motherboard in order to work so no stick modules meaning no up-grades to general PC-hardware (laptop might benefit). That's a no-go for PC but excellent for console builds which do not require versatility (they rather demand the opposite).[/citation]

Doesn't matter how much memory the system has, if it doesn't have the Cpu or Gpu processing power then ram doesn't mean anything except quicker loading times. I heard the 8 core processor is from a phone..?? Is that true?

 

[gm0n3y]

Do modern games really need more than 2GB of system memory (plus the ~2GB of GPU memory)? If so, then hopefully they'll start releasing PC games that take advantage of more memory as any modern computer has 8-16GB.

 

[dextermat]

Maybe from a noob prespective I guess (yes, I did say noob)

 

[biohazrdfear]

These guys are idiots. Typical business people that don't know hardware or games. They just know marketing. 8GB GDDR5? Boy I'd love to see a GPU or APU with 8GB of VRAM that's not $1,000 like the TiTIAN. Limited 2GB? Last time I checked I had 16GB DDR3 1333 overclocked and over 4GB of usable VRAM on my SLI graphics cards. Yeah, perfect gaming PC? More like perfect piece of shit. I hate consoles. Always have. To me they are only media centers. I do everything on my computer. Period. So why have consoles that collect dust when I can be playing my games on my PC? PS4, you did a great job with your hardware...but its still not gonna' beat out my Far Cry 3 at ultra settings, 32x MSAA, and Direct X 11.

 

[biohazrdfear]

[citation][nom]gamoniac[/nom]Folks, PS4 and Xbox Next are dedicated gaming consoles. In 3-4 years, most PCs will again have better hardware than these consoles, but for now (April 2013), most gaming PCs are not as powerful as these consoles -- 6-8 cores, 6-8GB GDDR5 RAM, etc. Keep in mind, your PC might have 16GB of memory, but how many GB of memory does your video card have? And yes, Windows has a 2GB limitations on addressable memory space per program on 32-bit platform.When hardware on gaming consoles became aged, you complain. Now that they are refreshed, just enjoy the next few years, would you?[/citation]

You must have a PS3 huh?

Lol, no console will ever be more powerful than a high performance desktop. Period.