How about this?
Play a good but direct console port (ME 3, Dishonoured) on a xbox and a laptop with a 630m. Both have similar theoretical performance (250 gflops for the xbox, ~300 for the 630m) and will play the game pretty much identically at the same settings.
Dishonoured gets about 40-50 fps at 768p on the 630m.
And NO developer wants 8 weak cores vs 4 cores that are twice as strong. They are using the 8 core jaguar design for 1) power as jaguar uses much less power than piledriver 2) price.
What's your refutation for that? So far, you've provided testimony from the people who developed the PS4 and people who make first party exclusives, and you've made some pretty extraordinary claims about the computational ability of the PS4 without hard numbers to back it up.plium said:For platform-exclusive titles, that is - which are few and far between. For cross-platform development, PS3 and Xbox360 will remain important targets, due to the sheer number of installed systems and thus potential profit. The new systems will get better textures and higher polygon counts, maybe new PhysX-like eyecandy, but that will be all.
PS4/XBoxNext shouldn't be a primary development target until 2015/2016, by which time PCs will outperform them easily. Just as last time. And the time before that. Next time might be different, because we don't know what will happen with the PC market during the next 6-8 years, but for this generation it will be the same old same old.
How about this?
Drive a 200 HP motorbike and a 250 HP car on a speed-limited way, with dense traffic, and radar. You would believe that both have what you call "similar theoretical performance", but nothing more far from reality.
The quote did not mention weak or strong. And the quote only mentioned 4-core vs 8-core. Nowhere it said Jaguar 8-core vs Piledriver-4 core.
4. The GPU was verified in an AMD blog to be an 18CU next generation (8xxx) GPU, which AMD says will provide @25-30% more performance/mm2 than the 7xxx generation. The performance of the PS4 GPU won't be in the 7850/7870 ballpark, it'll be in the 7950 ballpark.
Could I get a link please?
I was under the impression that AMD wasn't planning on launching any "next generation" parts for now and that the 7000 series will be "stable" throughout 2013. According to techreport the 7790 which was recently released is still based on the same architecture as the rest of the 7000 series. Even so, where was the 25-30% claim made?
http://blogs.amd.com/fusion/2013/02/21/amd/
"In the case of the PS4, we leveraged the building blocks of our 2013 product roadmap ..." - 2013 = 8xxx.
Actually unified memory address space is a feature from Kaveri . Richland is just souped up Trinity, a solid improvement on a process node and binning side (also Turbo algorithms are much improved and more balanced now).No, I think he means the APU side roadmap--in other words, Richland. That makes sense given the characteristics of the APU inside (unified memory and GDDR5). The 2013 GPUs ARE the 2012 GPUs (rebadged on the OEM and mobile side).
These are the reasons which, in summation, explain why the PS4 will blow away even high end PCs for a few years.
People are hyping this like Playstation 3 - they're gonna get butthurt once it actually comes out.
I don't know about the butthurt (people may remain delusional forever, it happens), but I am definitely having dejavu here between the PS4 hype and the PS3 hype.
And not because the PS4 is being hyped, because truth is that outside of what is always expected the PS3 itself wasn't the thing that was hyped.
What was hyped, to the moon and back, was CELL. ZOMG is was gonna be the next thing in computing. You couldn't go anywhere without hearing about how great CELL was and how unstoppable it was going to be.
Then reality came. CELL was good, but it was little more than yet-another-microprocessor.
Now the same kind of hype is coming up again, only this time it is Jaguar and HSA. And naturally everyone doing the hyping starts the hype with "yeah, but this time it will be different because..."
Man that is the oldest "pump and dump" type psychology playbook rules used on wall street. Every bubble that has ever come, popped, and crashed, started out its existence by being compared to the previous bubble followed by the hypsters saying "yeah, but this time it will be different because..."
Nothing is different here, just the labels have changed. But psychologically it is all the same. Rinse and repeat.
This is the GFLOP argument. It was aimed to show that using strictly gflops there is no major efficiency (more perf per gflop) for consoles vs your modern standard equivalently powerful gpu. You do not need anything like a 20 tflop gpu to match the ps4 gpu.
What I mean by the eight cores is that it would be better for everyone if AMD had been able to put four cores at 3.2 ghz rather than 8 cores at 1.6 ghz because more cores is harder to code for and increases development costs for games.
Last gen used top of the line components, this gen is using midrange.
The Xbox 360 had a unified memory architecture, and it's CPU/GPU together were able to put up a theoretical 115.2 GFLOPS--far more than the Athlon II X2 CPUs (ones from the Windsor generation got around 3 GFLOPS) that ruled PCs at the time. Even the mighty Geforce 6800 Ultra and Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition failed to compete, running at roughly 54 and 67 GFLOPS each.
The very next year, Nvidia got onto K70 and released the Geforce 7800 GTX, which gets a theoretical 165 GFLOPS per pipeline, which could not only play the ported Xbox games, but generally at a higher framerate and with more details than the Xbox. A unified memory, more memory, and even vastly more power upfront are no guarantee of staying ahead.
This is the GFLOP argument. It was aimed to show that using strictly gflops there is no major efficiency (more perf per gflop) for consoles vs your modern standard equivalently powerful gpu. You do not need anything like a 20 tflop gpu to match the ps4 gpu.
What I mean by the eight cores is that it would be better for everyone if AMD had been able to put four cores at 3.2 ghz rather than 8 cores at 1.6 ghz because more cores is harder to code for and increases development costs for games.
I think the first wave of ps4 games will not be using the full power of the hardware (though it will be better than last launch because devs already know how to code for x86) because of backward compatibility for the older consoles and the fact that it will take a while to implement efficient HSA/etc.
Last gen used top of the line components, this gen is using midrange.
I don't know about the butthurt (people may remain delusional forever, it happens), but I am definitely having dejavu here between the PS4 hype and the PS3 hype.
And not because the PS4 is being hyped, because truth is that outside of what is always expected the PS3 itself wasn't the thing that was hyped.
What was hyped, to the moon and back, was CELL. ZOMG is was gonna be the next thing in computing. You couldn't go anywhere without hearing about how great CELL was and how unstoppable it was going to be.
Then reality came. CELL was good, but it was little more than yet-another-microprocessor.
Now the same kind of hype is coming up again, only this time it is Jaguar and HSA. And naturally everyone doing the hyping starts the hype with "yeah, but this time it will be different because..."
Man that is the oldest "pump and dump" type psychology playbook rules used on wall street. Every bubble that has ever come, popped, and crashed, started out its existence by being compared to the previous bubble followed by the hypsters saying "yeah, but this time it will be different because..."
Nothing is different here, just the labels have changed. But psychologically it is all the same. Rinse and repeat.
The PS3 itself was hyped to the Moon and back, I remember it clearly. It was a super computer, it was going to allow Toy Story like graphics, CELL was set to revolutionize the industry. People were going to want to use the PS3 in a super computer lab. The hype was all encompassing.And not because the PS4 is being hyped, because truth is that outside of what is always expected the PS3 itself wasn't the thing that was hyped.
What was hyped, to the moon and back, was CELL.
We all see things differently, but I don't see the hype surrounding HSA and the PS4 to anything even close to the same level as the PS3. And if you look at the actual technical details, the PS4's APU is really cool, I keep saying it but unified GDDR5 memory basically kicks ass. This is what we've been waiting for, I sincerely hope we get the same architecture on high end PCs in some form.Now the same kind of hype is coming up again, only this time it is Jaguar and HSA.
Pretty much everything is different, if you actually look at the technical details.Man that is the oldest "pump and dump" type psychology playbook rules used on wall street. Every bubble that has ever come, popped, and crashed, started out its existence by being compared to the previous bubble followed by the hypsters saying "yeah, but this time it will be different because..."
Nothing is different here, just the labels have changed. But psychologically it is all the same. Rinse and repeat.
You wrote about "similar theoretical performance", but then provided an example which was not comparing theoretical performance.
Read the GDC quotes. Sony offered either 4 or 8 cores designs to game developers and game developers chose the 8-cores design.
No. Last generation used a non X_86 architecture, whose 'theoretical' peak performance could be achieved only under strict lab-like conditions, which was translated to lower performance in real world games.
This was even true on console vs console. 'Theoretically' the PS3 had more raw potential, but every programmer knows that the 360 allowed for better games, due to incorrect core architectural decisions made with the cell processors.
8 Jaguar cores take up less die space than 4 Vishera cores. The less space the CPU takes up the more space they have to add GPU cores. In a device made specifically to play games which would you say is more important.
I don't know why some people are getting so bent out of shape about this honestly. If the PS4 ends up being a mediocre piece of hardware, it won't matter all that much on the PC side. We're still going to see much better console ports for obvious reasons. The PS4 is a mini PC in many ways right down to the processor ISA. What's not to like, porting to the PC will be dead simple in comparison to what we're dealing with now.
It's a win win, even more a win seeing the Xbox next is an AMD64 device.
Are they really though? The Xbox 360 not only had an unified memory architecture, but was also more powerful than any consumer PC hardware by double or more in terms of GFLOPS, even the top end cards like the Geforce 6800 Ultra and Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition. The XBox 360 became "weak" in only a few years because of how fast GPUs improve.Pretty much everything is different, if you actually look at the technical details.