PL4YST4TION 4

[Zeusthecat]

1. I like to get a new console when it comes out, just because. Haven't been able to do this in almost 7 years.

Like Thrik mentioned, playing games on my tv. (yeah, I know I could hook my computer up to it but that isn't happening)

Real life friends are also getting one, so peer pressure.

Cost is much less compared to me building a new gaming rig that can compete graphically.

I'm sure 1 or 2 good games will be available at launch and I will play the shit out of them. Plus I still have countless other games to hold me over on other platforms until exclusives and other good games start to roll in.

They are doing a respectable thing with their approach to gaming vs Microsoft and I want to speak with dollars showing that I support that approach.

And really $399 is pretty damn decent. Considering people will drop over $600 for a new iPad without giving it a second thought I think it is a really good price.

[TheLastBaron]

I've been saying forever that they should set another Final Fantasy game in grimey industrial bumfuck, so seeing that, and seeing Destiny lookin good, unexpectedly pulled me in.

Also I didn't own a PS3, so lets finally play MGS4, Ratchet and Clank, Infamous, Journey, Pixeljunk Shooter etc.

The PS4 isn't backwards compatible, is it?

[chummer]

Final Fantasy XV looks like a typical FF game but then played out like The Godfather? It's weird and delicious.

Do you mean The Godfather: The Movie or EA's The Godfather: The Game: The Movie?

 

Or The Godfather: The Book?

[Thrik]

The PS4 isn't backwards compatible, is it?

 

You'll be able to stream PS1–3 games in 2014 onwards. Sony acquired Gaikai some time ago for this, which is basically OnLive but technologically better. It is essentially the holy grail of backwards compatibility assuming they can get the content library nice and big, as the same service could continue to be available on the PS5, PS6, ad infinitum.

[TheLastBaron]

The only thing I remember about Gaikai from the conference is them saying that when it launches it will only be in the US at first.

[elmuerte]

You'll be able to stream PS1–3 games in 2014 onwards. Sony acquired Gaikai some time ago for this, which is basically OnLive but technologically better. It is essentially the holy grail of backwards compatibility assuming they can get the content library nice and big, as the same service could continue to be available on the PS5, PS6, ad infinitum.

But not the games for which I already have a copy. So I will have to pay again to play the games I already paid for.

[Thrik]

ut not the games for which I already have a copy. So I will have to pay again to play the games I already paid for.

 

Has that been stated? I don't really know much about how Sony are implementing it. It seems like it'd be smart to somehow allow access to games you already own, although I'm struggling to think of how they'd validate that off the top of my head. Hopefully the games will be cheap or even subscription-based like OnLive.

 

I'm going to be keeping my PS3 around for a while anyway, but I'm very glad that a service like this is being implemented. Backwards compatibility is impossible to maintain long term, you can't just keep re-releasing the same old games or expecting every console to support every earlier console's stuff. This is a problem that's going to get quite significant as more and more generations come out.

 

A decentralised platform that allows playing of old games is the only long-term way of keeping old games playable. Especially now that games are getting so advanced that, like films, people might actually want to go back and play the classics. Look at things like Grim Fandango that are now a massive hassle to get running on modern PCs, but are classics people will arguably want to play until the end of time. A service like this would make it trivial to get running and usable on any platform.

[melmer]

You can download uncharted 3 (single player) now as part of your plus subscription, they'll have to offer it to you for free when uncharted 3 becomes available for OnLive through your PS4 or streamed on to your vita. right?

 

I think they'll add an additional subscription model for OnLive where it will be like:

 

Playstation Plus per Month: £4

Playstaion Plus with OnLive per Month: £10

 

Each month they will swap in different games you can stream for free, and then outside of that you will also be able to rent and purchase games using the OnLive model... wait wait wait, so OnLive doesn't charge you a monthly few, you just pay for whatever you are renting?

 

I have confused myself, start again.

 

If you are a Playstation Plus subscriber you will be able to stream the games you own (through Plus) for free + several games inside the plus subscription which will be swapped in and out monthly

 

Out side of that you just rent/buy games using the OnLive model (this will not require PS+)

 

If you own a physical PS3 disk and want to stream the game on your Playstation 4... you're shit out of luck

 

One thing i would like to know, when OnLive comes to Vita will that require me to have my PS4 turned on whilst streaming games to the Vita? am i being stupid

[Justin Leego]

OnLive... do you mean Gaikai? Or the company that was formerly known as OnLive?

 

Or the company formed by staff from the company formerly known as OnLive, whose name is OnLive?

[melmer]

Goddamnit

 

So its Gaikai not OnLive.

 

I've lost the will to live

[Justin Leego]

I was secretly hoping they would bring Kevin Butler back through the magic of holodecks and legal strongarm tactics.

[Thrik]

Haha. Company confusion aside, I do suspect the eventual model will be something like you propose. They'd be mad to not try and integrate PS Plus with it so that people don't feel bummed in the gob, and Sony seems to be doing most things right at the moment. And no, Gaikai will stream directly to any supported device. That actually includes the PS3, which will be able to stream PS1 and PS2 games in addition to its own games.

 

To be clear to anyone else who reads this thread though, OnLive and Gaikai were competing game streaming technologies that were developed at around the same time. OnLive went into full-on trying to compete with the big boys as an independent platform, whereas Gaikai ended up selling their (arguably superior) technology to Sony before really turning it into a proper service who is now using them to develop it exclusively for Sony platforms as a way of distributing their back catalogue.

[melmer]

bummed in the gob

 

 

 

Streaming PS3 games to my recently purchased Vita is an exciting prospect (as i have since realised VITA HAS NO GAMES), apart from the missing two triggers. i guess they'll get mapped to the trackpad

 

I bet they'll release an updated Vita next year with the release of the streaming service with additional triggers. Should have waited

[brkl]

Someone should actually find out what it would cost to build a new PC with PS4 level hardware. It could be pretty cheap, since the processor and GPU don't need to be the newest generation.

 

I mean, this is what RPS's tech guy says about a processor he believes is very close to the PS4 and Xboxdumb:

But as a gaming CPU? Let me give you some numbers. In raw processing terms, these four Jaguar cores have slightly less than a quarter the grunt of a Core i5-3570K. It’s the same story on a core-by-core basis. Less than one quarter of the performance.

 

He was testing a laptop processor of the same type, but with only four cores. However, it seems both systems are going to have some of the cores reserved for the OS like the PS3 does.

[dibs]

Someone should actually find out what it would cost to build a new PC with PS4 level hardware. It could be pretty cheap, since the processor and GPU don't need to be the newest generation.

I was thinking the same. When I was building mine the forums I as looking at said you could get a decent gaming rig for €600. I know that is a good deal more than the Ps4 but I'd live to see what someone could put together nowadays.

I was never much into playing flashy or tripleA games so I'm not much bothered to get either console really. I've played more ftl and DCSS than anything recently! And dark souls.

[Dewar]

Someone should actually find out what it would cost to build a new PC with PS4 level hardware. It could be pretty cheap, since the processor and GPU don't need to be the newest generation.

 

I mean, this is what RPS's tech guy says about a processor he believes is very close to the PS4 and Xboxdumb:

 

 

He was testing a laptop processor of the same type, but with only four cores. However, it seems both systems are going to have some of the cores reserved for the OS like the PS3 does.

 

You can't get GDDR5 memory for PCs at this time, so you couldn't really make a direct comparison.

 

Edit: In the end, I want a console because it just works, no futzing with graphics settings or dealing with the underlying OS install causing problems. Even if I were getting the same performance at the same price from a comperable PC, a console would still be worth it to me.

[Twig]

Someone should actually find out what it would cost to build a new PC with PS4 level hardware. It could be pretty cheap, since the processor and GPU don't need to be the newest generation.

Not entirely the fairest of comparisons, to be FAIR. PC runs a whole hell of a lot more than just a basic OS and a game. I think it would be pretty cheap but even if you got the exact same specs, games would run better on PS4.

 

 

  I bet they'll release an updated Vita next year with the release of the streaming service with additional triggers. Should have waited 

That sounds awful. D: While I'm perfectly fine with playing my handhelds at home (and do so semi-regularly), most of my handheld gaming is on the go. I wish they'd just release PS2 games like they did PS1. Well, I don't think they can, but I do wish. A Vita would be more attractive at that point. There are STILL a lot of PS2 games I never did get to play that I really wanted to.

[JonCole]

Not to shit on RPS or their tech guy, but at this point it's really pure speculation as to the performance of these components. While the CPU is referred to as an "off the shelf" part, the Jaguar generation of AMD CPUs just isn't out right now. It's really just a guess (might be a good one) that half of the cores will be dedicated to background services and it's also a guess that this processor would even be clocked at the same frequency or powered at the same voltage as a consumer PC component. Beyond that, the components of gaming consoles are optimized in a way that simply can't be mimicked by a custom-built PC.

 

All of that said, Jaguar is meant to be roughly equivalent to chips between Intel's Atom and Core i3 chips. It's a low power chipset that's designed on the PC side for tablets and convertible laptops. It's probably going to take much less time for PC to catch up to console performance simply because you can brute force through the optimization of consoles with bigger and better parts. But your Core i5-3750K and GeForce GTX 660 Ti are also a lot more likely to run much hotter, much louder, and much more inconsistently than a console. That's always been the advantage of that model.

[Salacious Snake]

Massive amounts of computing power are great and everything, but I just rolled back to older video drivers in my PC in an attempt to stop the chronic blue screen failures I've been experiencing.

I hate PC gaming sometimes.

[brkl]

I think it would be pretty cheap but even if you got the exact same specs, games would run better on PS4.

 

People have been saying this about consoles for a long time I don't know if that's true with the way games are developed these days. They scale much better than they used to. My PS3 never turned out to be anything other than slow, no matter how long people claimed developers would eventually figure out how to make games for the Cell processor. Now both the consoles run x86 and we know that they use processors that aren't very impressive. The PC has caught up to next gen consoles already. There's no reason to think the games will run better because the case is fancier than on a PC. There'll be fewer random compatibility problems, but I don't see any reason the games will run faster than is to be expected on that hardware. 

 

As far as running loud or inconsistent, I've read a whole lot of stories about RRODs and my PS3 sounds really damn annoying with those little fans it has. 

[Twig]

Yeah you make a good point. But games scaling well on PC just means you can run it at lower settings than found on consoles, and not so much that you're guaranteed to get better performance at the same settings. U:

[JonCole]

People have been saying this about consoles for a long time I don't know if that's true with the way games are developed these days. They scale much better than they used to. My PS3 never turned out to be anything other than slow, no matter how long people claimed developers would eventually figure out how to make games for the Cell processor. Now both the consoles run x86 and we know that they use processors that aren't very impressive. The PC has caught up to next gen consoles already. There's no reason to think the games will run better because the case is fancier than on a PC. There'll be fewer random compatibility problems, but I don't see any reason the games will run faster than is to be expected on that hardware. 

 

As far as running loud or inconsistent, I've read a whole lot of stories about RRODs and my PS3 sounds really damn annoying with those little fans it has. 

 

The are plenty of substantive differences, but I'll point to one of the most obvious ones that will clearly make a big difference in performance vs equivalent PC parts. Namely, AMD's APU architecture hasn't done much for the gaming audience in PCs because the GPUs that they build onto the CPUs are piddly and are only really suited for 1080p video rendering. In the case of the PS4, Sony is basically taking the same video card I have in my PC (Radeon 7870) and builds it on the same die as the CPU.

 

In PCs, the GPU has it's memory pool (2GB of GDDR5 in a Radeon 7870) separate from the memory pool that the CPU accesses for it's operations (probably 4 - 8GB of DDR3 in most gaming computers), additionally having to interface through memory buses that increase latency between the components. In the case of the PS4, there is a shared memory pool of 8GB of GDDR5 (GDDR5 memory has 2X the bandwidth of the fastest DDR3 memory, 4X the bandwidth of the slowest DDR3 momory) that both the CPU and GPU can access. Not only does the PS4 have more and faster memory than a PC, but the system uses less RAM to operate. Sony says that the system will only need 1GB of RAM maximum, whereas Windows 7/8 uses a minimum of 2GB to suitably operate. One more thing, since the 7870 and CPU are on the same die they don't have to transfer memory though bottleneck-prone memory buses.

 

What does this mean? Well, it means that there really is a secret sauce. Add to that the fact that developers have a spec that's not a moving target and a number of familiar architectures in play this generation (as opposed to last, where the CELL processor really offered no advantage to the PS4 as you mentioned brkl) and you have a platform they will develop specifically for and PC's will have to manage through brute force.

[Frenetic Pony]

Wow, just got back.

 

Less new games shown than I'd predicted, and ye gods, the same person that designed the hideous Xbone designed the PS4. Remember when everyone just copied Jony Ive's, that's Sir Jony Ive's designs? You know, Apple's stuff? Can we go back to that? Please, like, you know, the idea that maybe the thing connecting to your TV could be vaguely pretty and not a utilitarianly hideous black box from fucking Mordor. That's whos designed these things, fucking Sauron.

 

Regardless, JonCole while you are mostly correct, both consoles are far, faaaar closer to just a PC sitting in a box this time around. And while a single addressable memory space is quite nice, next years new architectures from both AMD and Nvidia should see a huge boost in video card available ram, 8 gigs for both the top end on both.

 

And really the main difference between a modern high end PC and these things is that there's a lot more GPU addressable ram in the consoles with a lot of bandwidth, so by next year high end PC's will be fine. Also with a TON more GPU and CPU power. Beyond the ram high end PCs already have several times more raw compute power for both, a GTX Titan already has a 6 gigs of ram and near triple the theoretical compute power of the PS4's GPU. Not to mention just how far a desktop Core i7 outclasses both consoles doubled up mobile CPU's. No matter how much a developer optimizes specifically for these new consoles the only thing high end PC's lack today is GPUs with RAM. As Crytek already pointed out, Moore's law has ensured that consoles will never again even come level with high end PC's. Of course, that a high end (Titan) GPU costs $1,000 helps with that

[TheLastBaron]

 Of course, that a high GPU costs $1,000 helps with that

 

If a peasant showed up at one of my lan parties with only a single thousand dollar GPU I would quickly have security escort him off of the premises.

[Frenetic Pony]

If a peasant showed up at one of my lan parties with only a single thousand dollar GPU I would quickly have security escort him off of the premises.

 

In a British accent I hope "Off with you knave, peasant, rapscallion. Who knows what filth ye track into my domain!"