here is a great comment about the ps4 from ars technica and im sorry that its a wall of text
I don't know what to think about the PS4, All they showed at the press event was that its an upgraded PS3. Heck even most of the games showed at the even are confirmed to be released on the PS3 (let alone XBox 360). And WatchDog was running, again, on a high-end PC.
The games demonstrated where not even a game demonstrated. We just saw few glimpse of game play, lots of fog, and particle effects to make it look visually appeasing, but nothing demonstrate the real power of the console. KillZone look nice, but if you analyses the footage, you question some ares as being pre-rendered (like the buildings where it starts), because if you see the trailer again, you notice that when he is walking, you see lots of impressive visuals, but the field of view is very very short... you have smoke everywhere. You can't see shit. I remember games on PC that used to be like this many years ago, it was a cheap trick to hide view limit, to show more impressive graphics. So all in all, I am not too impressed. Although., it did have some cool stuff like Knack that I was more interested in seeing as it was a PS4 exclusive.. but only glimpse of it was showed.
As for the specs, it's clear that the console is a powerful system.. for a game console, but I feel insulted that they just throw fancy terms that most people don't know. It has 8GB of RAM! WOOOOOWWW, While it is impressive, it is being shared with the system and RAM. It is using shared memory. Now while, on PC shared memory graphic card are very poor performance, at least they used GPU optimized memory.. GDDR5. But, the CPU will struggle.
For those who don't know, GDDR5 is modified DDR3 chips, where in exchange of reduce density and increase latency, you have high bandwidth. GPU doesn't really care about latency... it care and wants more high bandwidth over anything else. Why? Because it allows the GPU to store and load large data.. such as texture, and process scenes in advance, etc. The CPU in the other hand want low latency.
Also, we have no idea on the speed of the memory.. is it 400MHz? 800Mhz? 60000MHz?
Faster chip cost a lot of money... assuming Sony wants to avoid the huge loss they had with the PS3 on each sold, and wants to sale it at a lower price.. it's probably slow memory.
Also, we don't know how the GPU manages memory. Assuming it's a Radeon 7000 series architecture, those cards, while impressive, needs A LOT of memory compared to Nvidia offering with the 600 series. It's just how the architecture was designed.
Also, as the console record a segment of your play to share it, we don't know if it will be using an SSD to work with (but that will be a lot of writes, which might impact the life span of the SSD, especially if they use an asynchronous memory over synchronous ones (asynchronous cost less), or worst, TLC memory. Or , and more likely, will be using the RAM as storage. So in the end, if it uses the RAM for temporary storing the game play.. games have what? 2GB of RAM to use?! So, in other words, they throw at us on purpose fancy numbers, in order to impress us, but they are meaningless.
Also, a lot of people are questioning the 8-core AMD... and saying it's really a 4 core CPU, with some technology to make it kinda 8. It's a bit like if Intel says Core i7, 8 core CPU... where they really mean 4 core, but with hyper-threading. That is what people believe, there is a lot of questions and ambiguity on this
Also, a lot of stuff that was said on the press event about the console where empty promises. There were at no point "We can do it", but rather "We think we can do it".
Also, all they have been doing it throwing at us buzz words, like we will be exited about it... I guess that's was more targeting for investors rather than gamers, that fine.. but investors didn't buy in, as the stock of Sony went down.
Ok so the console is not ready.. that's fine, and that's fair. Probably Sony is still working on contract with manufactures to know what they can have as deal, to be sure on what specs the console they can have, at the price region they want. That's fine... Nintendo did the same. So how about the controller? Beside the share button, we know nothing. Does it have rumble or was that put aside like the PS3 at release? How about the MAIN FEATURE of the controller, the big fat touchpad? That's like Nintendo going on stage and saying "Here is the WiiU controller, that black box that looks like a screen turned off, we have no comment on it." I mean common. So far, I see no reason or point of the touchpad.. at least with the WiiU game pad, I kinda can see what Nintendo is going for, and it looks fun to try. I don't see it as ground breaking, but looks like a cool feature to have to change the game experience a bit. PS3 touchpad? heeuuuuu... rub my finger on it to make my charter do stuff? Maybe, tap on it, and is like an extra button? Come one! Now, that is gimmicky like crazy! And I am NOT using a touchpad to interact with a game as a mouse. That's stupid.
And how about the console downloading games in advance with me knowing, as it thinks I want to buy it? That will kill my bandwidth limit. Not everyone live in a country that have GB/s internet and unlimited bandwidth. It better have a turn off feature.
How about latency in streaming games over the net?
So in result, I am a disappointing in this press event, it raised more questions than answers. It has some cool features, like streaming a demo, I guess sharing video clips in you are in to that, but not much. For me, nothing that says I want the console.
Even if you were not interested in the PS3, would still have a reason to buy it, and perhaps several games (which makes Sony gets their money back, especially in the later revisions of the consoles), due to the Blu-ray player, as it was nearly half the price of one. This time, Blu-ray player drop significantly in price. You can find some at 60-100$ on the PC, that can even burn Blu-ray disks. So I don't see the appeal.
Sony really has to up the game at E3. But I guess, Sony did what they wanted to do, get people talking about the PS4.
a lot of what he said i agree with, how about you
