Now you are plain old joking, right ? 1) 1680 x 1050 = 1764000 pixels, 1920 x 1080 = 2073600. That means nearly 20% more pixels. 2) Performance means low details, Mainstream means medium details. That means you can get 60FPS at 1920x1080... At low settings. 3) Crysis Warhead was a little bit less demanding than Crysis. Not by much, but it was. That means you can get 60FPS at 1920x1080... At low settings. In less demanding game. At medium settings, it managed only 48FPS at 1366x768. Do you really expect it to be able to push 60FPS at medium, high or ultra high settings at pretty much double amount of pixels (2073600 vs 1049088)? If Sony and/or MS settles for AMD APU with IGP, then they are already screwed, as technologically they will swap a hardware from 2007 (7800GTX-like stuff in case of Sony, HD2900-like stuff in case of MS) to a hardware with a performance level of 2009-2010 (around 8800GT). Except they will try to sell it for Christmas market 2013 or 2014.
The cell will be dead soon. Sony's partners in the Cell project have all pulled out and abandoned it so I think it is highly likely that they will now go with standard off the shelf hardware. Sony was previously ran by engineers who valued technical achievement and raw power. The PS3 was gimped by being so esoteric and difficult to program for. Now things have changed in Sony management I expect their focus this time will be to make the PS4 as easy as possible to program for. That would mean easier ports for developers, easier for them to maximize performance and less costly exclusives. I have stated for a long time that I think the new consoles will be very similar to each other hardware wise this time.
Sure, maybe not, but worth a fairly rude and sarcastic reply? I'd argue not. A quiet word with a mod, or a pm would have both achieved the same thing, and people wouldn't think you were the aforementioned.
Yeap - I don't see much reason to stick to PowerPC. There is nothing in IBM's roadmap that would be of any interest to Sony/Microsoft. The best way to cut costs is to just sell a PC, branded as a console. Your method of input is different (controller) but what sits under the hood will be no different from most off the shelf PCs. As for Sony's overall financial trouble- yeah they're in a bit of a pickle. But I don't see them falling into bankruptcy. Sony, like Panasonic/Matsushita is a Japanese institution. They will not let it simply fall off the cliff, or be taken over entirely by foreign owned business ventures. The recent bail out of Renesas by the Japanese government is a good example: They were bleeding money for years, operating at a loss but the Japanese government swooped in and saved them. What about Olympus? Saved by a partnership between Sony and Panasonic. They hold the same views with respect to electronics as the Americans did towards the auto bailout.
discussing wether sony will go bankrupt is irelivent as it will be bailed out by the japan banks a long time before it is declared broke. sony and panasonic despite loosing a net 10bil + this year just saved Olympus with there own cash. Both have huge reserves of cash that they can fall back on ( in sonys case its around 20bil in cash that they have and panasonic have 30bil +) PS4 is just total guesswork. If they use the IGP then they are in trouble. But the rumors i have heard say both Sony and MS are looking at a quad core cpu with a 7870 GPU which would not be too unrealistic. Think 8gb of ram is also bogus crap as the current consoles have 256mb the chances of sony or ms deciding they need 8gb is just crazy. 4-6gb is realistic theres only 3-4 games on the market that can use more than 2gb of ram.
The price of RAM is so cheap these days, they could install a shed load before the overall cost is effected/affected? My main concern is backwards compatibility, Which is something i loved about the 360 was it's backwards compatible with most (granted, not all) xbox games, while the PS3 had to be a specific version. If Sony and or MS move to a whole new architecture, then the chances of Backwards compatibility falls without the need for more hardware to make it work. Sam
Indeed, I heard from somebody that the PS4 will have a 3930K, triple 690's and 32GB of RAM Seriously though without a reputable site or something backing up the specs you've quoted this is pointless.
Next gen speculation is never pointless I seriously doubt backwards compatibility will be included on the PS4. I'm willing to be surprised but if they go x86 then the only way to have it would be to include an actual Cell on board. Gonna be hard to keep costs down if they do that. Another issue with BC is the integration current games have with the system back-end, such as the XMB, friends lists, and other things like this. There's no telling that stuff will work without a full PS3 mode emulation the way the WiiU has a Wii emulator.
To be fair... That's kinda what I'm saying although with the possibility of PowerPC staying. But the biggest hobble for the ps3 was definitely a combination of cell plus two pools of memory. With the two pools being a killer vs the 360s one. If you spent your time optimising memory usage 70% / 30% biased towards the gpu or CPU in a shared pool of 512, when you start porting to the ps3s 256 256 banks, you're looking at a bunch of hassle to be on a smaller market share. (i had friends at EA talking about how annoying it was... And EA had money) If it's true that partners have pulled out then yes, I'd imagine they'd use something else CPU wise. And yes it makes sense to make it easier to develop for... Although ps2 was supposedly harder than the ps3 (i'm no coder though). I think they'd have learnt their lesson there. I'm not convinced it's the end of PowerPC for them though.
Does this help? http://uk.ign.com/articles/2012/04/04/sources-detail-the-playstation-4s-processing-specs
I have leaked info of the PS4. It will be powered by an Intel Core i7 3770K, with a BIOS enabled OC, 16GB of RAM, GTX 690 SLI, and it will only cost 300$! The Core i7 cost 30$ to produce, the 16GB of RAM cost 30$ to produce, each GPU cost 70$ to produce... that's: 340$. Sony will take a loss, of course. But perfectly possible. Let's just forget R&D and profit required by each companies.
If Sony were being smart they would make it an x86 system. Straight PC ports would make developers love them.
I would say that the majority of consumers don't give a hoot what's inside the box. The key thing for them is the launch and immediate post launch titles. Like many people, I got the PS3 at launch purely for the BR player, and in the years that followed it's been used predominantly for this purpose. Exclusives apart, I would rather play games on my 360 (if not on my PC that is) as more of my friends have one and XBL is a much better experience than PSN. Sony have already admitted that they focused too much on technology rather than the social aspect of things and it's why they have performed so badly. The Vita is a case in point. It's a technologically excellent piece of kit, but I can't see too many people wanting to pay so much for it and then have to buy premium priced games to play on it - especially with the availability of cheap Android and iOS games. I think both MS and Sony need to look at the trending market before they fill their boxes full of technology. Not too far down the road we are going to get 4K and then 8K TV - I suspect that this tech will be much more popular than stereoscopic 3D and people are going to want to play consoles on them.
With this being the case, i believe the next console lifecycle will be much shorter than the current generation. Though they will still enjoy several years before the technology becomes mainstream or "standard"
Exactly. Nintendo nearly all the time wins the "console war", because while their specs are always the weakest (GameCube aside... beside I think it's the only time where Nintendo lost), is because the games on it, are crazy fun. It's not about power, it's not about visuals. If you are looking for that, then you need to get a gaming PC. This is why Sony lost this generation, and they will continue to lose, if they they continue this path. If you look at the PS3 and compare it to the PS1, what has changed? Nothing. Not even the controller. PS3 is a PS1 with updated graphics, CPU and has larger capacity disk system. While the XBox is similar to Sony, at least they improved their controller, and they differentiate themselves with software and online service. Developers complaints on a console? Screw them. They did fun games on NES hardware, why is specs an issue? It's not. The problem, is the publisher pushing developers to make low cost games, really fast, maximizing profits. Developers are still paid the same amount for 1 console or not. This is another point where Nintendo wins. As they have first party games, and a lot of it, they can games specially designed for the console. So the innovation on a console gets properly utilize. As games aren't made to the lowest common denominator (I bet you, if publishers could publish games for the last generation console, they would force developers to port there games on them).
Sony always support their other departments. The PS4 will support 4k resolutions. Of course, it will be 720p or 1080p upscale, but marketing will do its magic and make people believe that it will be true native 4K. The problem with 4K is content. They are no movies in 4K, TV broadcast can't even keep up with 1080p. Already dish based provide compress the hell out of the signal to provide 1080p. The technology is not there, the studio cameras are few, and super expensive.
And therein lies everything. The mass market is who the big publishers are after - it was the Wii that taught them it was possible and iOS, Android and Facebook that confirmed it. It's one of the reasons I thought it a little strange that Nintendo decided to aim the WiiU at 'hardcore' gamers - maybe they forgot the lesson they taught everyone! The PS1 (and PS2) succeeded as it was both technically very good and timed incredibly well just before the crescendo of console popularity. It was the latter that made it succeed as publishers flocked to it with titles.
