Sony Announces the PlayStation 4 and the Death of Hardware • Hacker News Board

Re: Sony Announces the PlayStation 4 and the Death of Hardware

#31

Post by warfangle » Thu, Feb 21, 2013, 5:12 PM UTC

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #30

warfangle wrote: post #22

Sony didn't talk about hardware, because the PS4 doesn't really differentiate itself with the next-gen xbox hardware-wise. You'll have two main variables to consider: - which (or both) slightly differentiated but mostly-overlapping game library do you want access to - do you want to give money to the company that installed spyware via music CDs, or the company that gave us IE6, Vista, and chair-throwing CEOs? I think…

> Sony didn't talk about hardware, because the PS4 doesn't really differentiate itself with the next-gen xbox hardware-wise. I think it does, actually. It has little over 50% more GPU shading power, twice the pixel throughput, and more than twice the main ram throughput. The difference is just about enough to make sure that PS4 can run at twice the resolution (720p vs 1080p) or twice the frame rate compared to XBox n…

> 50% more shading power

From my reading, four of the shader units in the PS4 are reserved for Compute Units; things like physics (just cause 2) and lighting (battlefield 3), which cuts the raw advantage from 50% to 16%. Apparently on the 720, developers will be able to choose how to allocate compute units across the cores.

> twice the pixel throughput

Mainly useful for stereoscopic images or 4k. How many people have 4k tvs and 3D tvs? 16 render output units are plenty for 1080p (the PS4 has 32).

> twice the main ram throughput

At the cost of half the storage (4GB vs 8GB).

It's pretty much a tossup. Orbis is choosing different things to optimize compared to Durango. Textures will probably be able to be larger on Durango, while level loading will happen faster on the Orbis.

> with PS4 just having more of it

More of some things; less of others. Faster at some things; slower at others.

Either way, I'm not giving a dime to either of these evil companies.

Re: Sony Announces the PlayStation 4 and the Death of Hardware

#32

Post by kayoone » Thu, Feb 21, 2013, 5:21 PM UTC

My guess is that in the future the device in your living room is more or less just a PC which is streaming content (games, movies, music) to you. You pay for a subscription to the playstation network/xbox live/steam to get the content they offer, but they are rendered in the cloud and streamed to you. I tried some of Gaikais game demos last year and was very impressed at how well it worked. Of course for the mass market this is atleast 5 years away, but its coming!

As even games are now moving to the cloud, i wonder how much longer the computing power of your local device really matters. The quality of your internet connection is getting increasingly more important than your hardware.

Re: Sony Announces the PlayStation 4 and the Death of Hardware

#33

Post by Tuna-Fish » Thu, Feb 21, 2013, 5:51 PM UTC

warfangle wrote: post #31

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sony didn't talk about hardware, because the PS4 doesn't really differentiate itself with the next-gen xbox hardware-wise. I think it does, actually. It has little over 50% more GPU shading power, twice the pixel throughput, and more than twice the main ram throughput. The difference is just about enough to make sure that PS4 can run at twice the resolution (720p vs 1080p) or twice the frame rate compared to XBox n…

> 50% more shading power From my reading, four of the shader units in the PS4 are reserved for Compute Units; things like physics (just cause 2) and lighting (battlefield 3), which cuts the raw advantage from 50% to 16%. Apparently on the 720, developers will be able to choose how to allocate compute units across the cores. > twice the pixel throughput Mainly useful for stereoscopic images or 4k. How many people have…

> From my reading, four of the shader units in the PS4 are reserved for Compute Units; things like physics (just cause 2) and lighting (battlefield 3), which cuts the raw advantage from 50% to 16%. Apparently on the 720, developers will be able to choose how to allocate compute units across the cores.

You are reading bad sources. PS4 can allocate everything to graphics. And even if it couldn't, a lot of the graphics work in today's game engines is run as compute shaders anyway, so it would not matter in the slightest. The whole "cuts the raw advantage" spiel was concocted by fanboys to make themselves feel better. I strongly advocate that you pay no heed to anything said by anyone who mentions it.

> Mainly useful for stereoscopic images or 4k. How many people have 4k tvs and 3D tvs? 16 render output units are plenty for 1080p (the PS4 has 32).

Completely untrue. The load on rops doesn't depend on just resolution, but on what they draw. In deferred engines (which everyone uses now), you can often reduce load on other parts by storing intermediate results, spending more fillrate. On consoles, everyone designs their games to spend all the fillrate that is available.

Fillrate does, however scale linearly on resolution and frame rate, so if a game is designed to run on Xbox next at x resolution and y frame rate, to run at 2x or 2y you would need twice of it. Which is probably why Sony has exactly twice of it.

> At the cost of half the storage (4GB vs 8GB).

?!? What exactly are your sources anyway? PS4 has 8GB of GDDR5.

> Textures will probably be able to be larger on Durango

Umm, no. More memory means larger textures. The textures will be pretty much identical for the consoles.

> More of some things; less of others. Faster at some things; slower at others.

No, Orbis is strictly superior in everything. Which is my point.

Re: Sony Announces the PlayStation 4 and the Death of Hardware

#34

Post by kbutler » Thu, Feb 21, 2013, 6:03 PM UTC

Irregardless wrote: post #11

They didn't mention anything about the hardware, and you've jumped to the conclusion that this means hardware is dead? Talk about linkbait... Gamers may not care about hardware aesthetics (the original Xbox is a fat, ugly hunk of cheap plastic), but they sure as hell care about the technical aspects. E.g. Is it backwards compatible? Will it play used games? Can I take my save data to a friend's house? Can I replace t…

> E.g. Is it backwards compatible? Will it play used games? Can I take my save data to a friend's house? Can I replace the HDD if it fails or I run out of space? Etc.

Only one of those desires is about the hardware, and it's not central to the user experience.

But I agree - the hardware is very much alive, but it is moving to the background, no longer center stage.

Re: Sony Announces the PlayStation 4 and the Death of Hardware

#35

Post by ctdonath » Thu, Feb 21, 2013, 6:54 PM UTC

Fulfills my contention that in advertising/promotion, specs are an excuse for inadequacy. Most users don't care what the numbers are, they just want the darn thing to just work. Apple has brilliantly embraced this, reducing admission of specifications (ex.: iPad RAM content) and pushing technology to the point where it just doesn't matter (ex.: "retina" displays - nobody cares how many pixels 'cuz you can't see them). Sony has long been prolific in their specifications, which as a then-fanboy I learned were hard limits more fulfilling of marketing checkboxes than usable performance (ex.: yes, it's a 50GB drive; no, you can't use 10GB of it because we're obligated to store "installation copies" of software which you can't get to). Maybe Sony is realizing that, to most users, it doesn't matter what hardware the games run on, just that they DO run and convincingly so.

Re: Sony Announces the PlayStation 4 and the Death of Hardware

#36

Post by taproot » Thu, Feb 21, 2013, 8:21 PM UTC

kbutler wrote: post #34

Irregardless wrote: post #11

They didn't mention anything about the hardware, and you've jumped to the conclusion that this means hardware is dead? Talk about linkbait... Gamers may not care about hardware aesthetics (the original Xbox is a fat, ugly hunk of cheap plastic), but they sure as hell care about the technical aspects. E.g. Is it backwards compatible? Will it play used games? Can I take my save data to a friend's house? Can I replace t…

> E.g. Is it backwards compatible? Will it play used games? Can I take my save data to a friend's house? Can I replace the HDD if it fails or I run out of space? Etc. Only one of those desires is about the hardware, and it's not central to the user experience. But I agree - the hardware is very much alive, but it is moving to the background, no longer center stage.

They didn't release details on the hardware or show the casing because;

a) its not finished, or

b) they're saving it for e3.

How this linkbaiter came to hardware is dead, fucked if I know.

Re: Sony Announces the PlayStation 4 and the Death of Hardware

#37

Post by nateabele » Fri, Feb 22, 2013, 7:20 PM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #23

nateabele wrote: post #18

Except physical hardware kind of does matter. In the case of the new Xbox, as well the new MS Office, whatever software you buy is locked to the device it's purchased on for life, no matter what. Have a PC/console die on you? Guess you'll be buying all new software.

>In the case of the new Xbox... software you buy is locked to the device What gives you that idea? Even on the Xbox 360, I own many games that are "on demand" (no physical disc) and I have them installed on multiple consoles as long as I'm logged into my Xbox Live account. I haven't heard Microsoft say that this would be changing.

You must be using a definition of the word 'new' with which I'm unfamiliar.

http://www.develop-online.net/news/40383/Xbox-720-to-employ-...