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The American Who Designed the PlayStation 4 and Remade Sony

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Re: The American Who Designed the PlayStation 4 and Remade Sony

#11

Post by tadfisher »

ye wrote: post #3

PS4 is just a PC stuck in one configuration, linked to a popular delivery system. I don't get what the hype is about. Yes, it's a pretty good configuration at a reasonable price. But that will only be the case for a few months. PCs will catch up very quickly and will become cheaper, and then much cheaper. As somebody who loves games, I don't see a reason to buy PS4. I'd rather spend a bit more on a PC, and then upgra…

> PS4 is just a PC stuck in one configuration, linked to a popular delivery system.

You've belied the true strength of video game consoles. A single configuration means less testing work and a streamlined experience for consumers. Not everyone is willing to deal with graphics drivers and endless installers.

Re: The American Who Designed the PlayStation 4 and Remade Sony

#12

Post by ewzimm »

quanticle wrote: post #4
ye wrote: post #3

PS4 is just a PC stuck in one configuration, linked to a popular delivery system. I don't get what the hype is about. Yes, it's a pretty good configuration at a reasonable price. But that will only be the case for a few months. PCs will catch up very quickly and will become cheaper, and then much cheaper. As somebody who loves games, I don't see a reason to buy PS4. I'd rather spend a bit more on a PC, and then upgra…

The XBox One is an x86 architecture as well. Pretty much everything that you said about the PS4 also applies to XBox One. Now, there are differences between the consoles, but fundamentally both of the next-gen consoles are x86 CPUs tied to memory architectures that are designed to stream HD content to the screen as fast as possible.

What does processor architecture even matter to a consumer? Is the Xbox 360 a pre-Intel Mac because it uses PowerPC archictecture? I don't see why so many people mention this. Consoles have always been about custom software, not unique hardware architecture.

Re: The American Who Designed the PlayStation 4 and Remade Sony

#13

Post by jmduke »

voidlogic wrote: post #10
dntrkv wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I get a mac, when I could get a PC for much cheaper and it will be faster and I'll have more control over the hardware. Why would I get a iPhone, I can get a cheaper Android and have more control over how I use it. Why would I buy Windows when I can get Linux which is more powerful, customizable, and free. Not everything can be reduced down to specs and numbers. Everyone has different use-cases.

Funny, this is why I use a PC running Linux and an Android phone... and wait- so does my Grandma... And we have very different use cases.

Your Grandma uses a Linux PC? I'd love to hear about her experience with it.

Re: The American Who Designed the PlayStation 4 and Remade Sony

#14

Post by lukeman »

ewzimm wrote: post #12
quanticle wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The XBox One is an x86 architecture as well. Pretty much everything that you said about the PS4 also applies to XBox One. Now, there are differences between the consoles, but fundamentally both of the next-gen consoles are x86 CPUs tied to memory architectures that are designed to stream HD content to the screen as fast as possible.

What does processor architecture even matter to a consumer? Is the Xbox 360 a pre-Intel Mac because it uses PowerPC archictecture? I don't see why so many people mention this. Consoles have always been about custom software, not unique hardware architecture.

The boring nature of the architecture is notable as it puts the focus back on software, which is what people care about. That devs this generation can just make shit without discovering the complexities of custom hardware is a good thing.

Re: The American Who Designed the PlayStation 4 and Remade Sony

#15

Post by Arelius »

ye wrote: post #3

PS4 is just a PC stuck in one configuration, linked to a popular delivery system. I don't get what the hype is about. Yes, it's a pretty good configuration at a reasonable price. But that will only be the case for a few months. PCs will catch up very quickly and will become cheaper, and then much cheaper. As somebody who loves games, I don't see a reason to buy PS4. I'd rather spend a bit more on a PC, and then upgra…

Well you get a few benefits.

> stuck in one configuration

This is a massive benefit to development everywhere. Additionally to really being able to push the hardware to the limit. It's a lot easier to learn how to properly "abuse" a single configuration then thousands of different pieces of hardware in millions of different configurations.

And just in reliability and testing. You can be sure that your exact hardware, with a nearly identical software load has been tested countless times. This is why you can often find games run much smoother on a 5 year old machine, to a modern PC.

Additionally API's are significant the fact that I can allocate memory directly on the PS4, and know that it won't ever be paged to disk is pretty significant. Additionally, Sony's rendering API's are much closer to the actual hardware, which give you much more flexibility in usage.

Then there are a few differences in the particular set of hardware that give it a good advantages to current PCs notably all 8 gbs of memory is GDDR5, which is very fast. And additionally, it's all shared, and cache-coherent between the GPU and the CPU which is really quite significant.

Re: The American Who Designed the PlayStation 4 and Remade Sony

#16

Post by Impossible »

ye wrote: post #3

PS4 is just a PC stuck in one configuration, linked to a popular delivery system. I don't get what the hype is about. Yes, it's a pretty good configuration at a reasonable price. But that will only be the case for a few months. PCs will catch up very quickly and will become cheaper, and then much cheaper. As somebody who loves games, I don't see a reason to buy PS4. I'd rather spend a bit more on a PC, and then upgra…

Huh, Xbox One and PS4 are very close architecturally, beyond both being x86 based. Xbox One is closer to a Windows 8 PC on the software side, assuming you have a DX11 based game that runs on WinRT, which could make lazy ports easier. In practice anyone that would benefit from a lazy port is probably an indie developer, and is using Unity, Monogame or another higher level framework (or OpenGL and C++ for a weird minority) and AAA developers can't do lazy ports because the performance just won't be competitive.

PS4 isn't really close to an existing set of APIs, although it's possible that Mantle (AMD's low level graphics API) is the same or very close to the PS4 graphics API. There are low level specifics like unified memory, asynchronous compute, and Xbox One ESRAM that make neither system look like current PCs, although future PCs might adopt them through new API specs or hardware configurations.

Steam Machine fits your description more accurately, but even it's a little weird in that a lot of games don't support Linux.

Re: The American Who Designed the PlayStation 4 and Remade Sony

#17

Post by ginko »

bradleyjg wrote: post #8

The PS4 may well make for a better video game machine and more profit for Sony, but it's too bad the very interesting and powerful cell processor concept will be relegated to the dustbin.

The APU in the PS4 picks up many ideas from the Cell processor. You have some heavy cores for program logic and many small ones for graphics and computation tasks. Both on the same piece of silicon and attached to the same memory space.

Re: The American Who Designed the PlayStation 4 and Remade Sony

#18

Post by ewzimm »

lukeman wrote: post #14
ewzimm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does processor architecture even matter to a consumer? Is the Xbox 360 a pre-Intel Mac because it uses PowerPC archictecture? I don't see why so many people mention this. Consoles have always been about custom software, not unique hardware architecture.

The boring nature of the architecture is notable as it puts the focus back on software, which is what people care about. That devs this generation can just make shit without discovering the complexities of custom hardware is a good thing.

That's probably true for Playstation, but I think developing for Xbox was already pretty much like developing for Windows, even with different hardware architectures. Most game devs don't looking too deeply at the hardware but just use the tools they're given. The ones who want to understand what's going on in hardware will still study the details of the CPU/GPU.

Re: The American Who Designed the PlayStation 4 and Remade Sony

#19

Post by ChuckMcM »

sjtgraham wrote: post #2

The Cerny Method sounds remarkably like the Lean Startup Method, but apparently pre-dates it quite significantly.

Agreed, and to their credit both are designed to solve the same problem which is to maximize the likelyhood that you're spending the money on the right thing. Long gone are the days when some decides to plop down a million dollars to make some random game, that will be first seen by customers when it is in the retail box.

Re: The American Who Designed the PlayStation 4 and Remade Sony

#20

Post by jokoon »

ye wrote: post #3

PS4 is just a PC stuck in one configuration, linked to a popular delivery system. I don't get what the hype is about. Yes, it's a pretty good configuration at a reasonable price. But that will only be the case for a few months. PCs will catch up very quickly and will become cheaper, and then much cheaper. As somebody who loves games, I don't see a reason to buy PS4. I'd rather spend a bit more on a PC, and then upgra…

The hype is that games will be much easier to program, so that's why it's much closer to PC programming. the CELL processor was very hard to use, and that was a big drag because it slows down developers considerably.

The good thing is that games will be made faster and with less difficulty. That will obviously improve game quality since it will reduce game making costs, I guess it will take much less time to make an engine and maintain it.

As for your comparison with a PC, you should not compare those, because all console are the same, which allows programmers to target a single configuration and optimize as much as possible, while on PC, programmers have to adapt their code for different configurations and drivers, but also require to offer multiple options to adapt to each configuration because PCs never perform the same.

To sum it up, there are no "minimum configuration" when releasing a game on console. Console have a better performance/price ratio. The PS4 would really make an interesting platform now that's easier to make a game on it, especially if it's dedicated to games, not like PC where the OS can suck a lot of resources you might want to allocate on your game.

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