Sony unveiled the newest successor the PlayStation family, the PlayStation 4. The new Dualshock 4 controller combines a PlayStation Move controller into a standard Dual Shock controller; also included is a touch pad.

The hardware is a tad impressive. Starting out with 8GB's of GDDR5 memory supposedly allowing you to power down the console mid-game and start up exactly where you left off in seconds upon turning the system back on. Is it me or are the excuses of "I'm almost done with the level!" a thing of the last console generation?

The console also gets more social with a dedicated share button - for Facebook - and the ability to ask your network of friends for help, going so far as allowing them to control your game from their console. Usernames are also getting put into the background in luu of real names and profile pictures.

As far as digital connectivity goes you'll also supposedly be able to connect to PSVita or other Sony device (Bravia TV, Xperia Play or Sony BluRay Player)

There's not much out there for concrete hardware specifications but there are ideas floating around such as an octo-core 1.6Ghz processor (And the GDDR5 memory). While not blazingly fast, it also won't be blazingly hot which would require noisy fans to cool or have a massive appetite. All of this also leads some to believe the PS4 will support 4K resolutions, maybe not in games but at least the ability up convert 1080p to 4K.

Overall, it looks like Sony has taken a page from Microsofts Xbox and made the PlayStation more social and versatile. A headphone jack builtin the controller is a cue from the 360s', the ability to download things while the console is "off" and other things.

Personally, I'm not too sold on the PS4. Supposedly no backwards compatibly makes my current PS3 Disc collection useless (all five discs) but hopefully my existing digital library will be able survive the migration. It's been mentioned that Sony plans to allow game streaming to diminish download times - including Platinum PS3 Titles - so maybe I'll be able to play some of my titles without downloading them. Fortunetly, I have few full disc-based games downloaded and the rest are independently developed games that were 20 or 10 dollars.

Sony wants to also tie games to your PSN account, like Steam. The one thing I have about digital downloads of games (like Madden and Call of Duty) is that, dic or download, it's 59.99. If the digital download was 29 or 39.99 it'd be more of a tempting download over driving to the store. I also don't play games as much as I use to, so if the PS4 utterly stiffs the user I'll stick with my PS3. That goes for Microsoft too; if the Xbox "Infinity" stiffs the end user, I'll keep my 360. Though backwards compatibility will go a long way and I'll upgrade for that, PS4 and "Infinity."

So, what are your thoughts? I can't find any concrete hardware details but the PS4 looks like a promising console. Do you think Sony showed its hand too soon and Microsoft will take the upper hand yet again with the GPU? (I'd like to say that I find Sony tends to focus on the CPU while Microsoft focuses on the GPU.)




http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/20/4011228/playstation-4-hardware-not-shown
http://www.techradar.com/us/news/gaming/consoles/ps4-release-date-news-and-features-937822
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2415671,00.asp

Mainly interested in what it means for AMD (presumably good things for their profitability?), since the CPU and GPU are on the same die and manufactured by AMD. Otherwise, it'll be a bit more powerful than most PCs for a bit, then spend a long time being less powerful.

More like "not actually turning off, just playing at it". Bad for power use, good for impatient users. The amount of memory in the system has nothing to do with it.

You must not be reading very good sources, since it is indeed 8-core (and manufactured by AMD, as I noted above).

Sauce:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/02/sony-reveals-the-first-official-details-of-the-playstation-4/

It's just S3 suspend. Power usage is nearly nil, certainly won't be worse than the standby power of, say, the PS3. So no, not bad for power use.

My thoughts:
8GB of RAM: finally a generation they didn't needless skimp on the dirt cheap RAM.

Social: stupid, stupid, stupid. I'm trying to play video games, if I wanted to be on facebook *I'd just go open facebook*

x86: About bloody time

8 "core" CPU: Kind of pointless. Also it's beyond stupid that they are using the low powered CPUs. Games want a single, really fast core - they just don't multi-thread well at all. Sony should know this better than anyone given the massive problems Cell caused. But no, instead you'll end up with a console that will get smoked by your average laptop. Yay!

1.8 tflop APU: So basically an on-die Radeon 7770. It'll handle 1080p just fine at least (4K isn't going to be even remotely close to playable)

Correction: game *developers* don't multi-thread well. Depending on the memory model there's no reason a game shouldn't be able to make good use of at least 6 cores, or more.

Given a standard gamelogic-cull-draw, draw is the only part which doesn't parallelize well on CPU (and that's because it's being parallelized on GPU instead). Culling algorithms and physics engines both benefit from parallelism, as can any meaningful AI.


If you have a bunch of mostly unrelated things to do, and you only need to do them at 60Hz, lots of slow CPUs is a great choice.

Your "correction" is simply not true. And, frankly, the egotism is utterly pathetic and disgusting.



True, but also irrelevant because games *don't* have a bunch of unrelated things to do. AI, on its own, can be threaded. Physics, on its own, can be threaded. The problem is that in a game *none of this is on its own*. This is why physics on GPUs has completely failed to take off - it's just not a "fire and forget" task for anything other than particle effects. Your physics calculations trigger game and AI logic updates. Your AI pass triggers physics updates. All of that triggers drawing changes.

For the record, I've worked on parallel computing related research projects for three of the last five summers and do game programming as my primary hobby. I'm not claiming that I personally am a good parallel programmer, but having spent a lot of time chatting with people who program leadership-class government supercomputers for a living, I do have a pretty good idea of what's currently possible, w.r.t. parallel algorithms.



Strawman, we're not talking about GPU parallelism here, are we? Nor are we talking about running a bunch of sequential algorithms as parallel components of the same application pipeline (well maybe you are, but I'm not because that's a waste of resources even if it's pretty much industry standard for game programmers). I'm talking about running a bunch of parallel algorithms in sequence.


If you're interlacing multiple AI and physics passes in a single game tick, then you've already screwing yourself over.

Let's say your single thread game loop looks like this:

• User input
  
• AI logic pass
  
• Physics Step
  
• Cull
  
• Draw
  

Then your simplest multithreaded game loop looks like this:

• Main Loop
  
  
  • User input
    
  • Spool AI tasks to worker threads, and wait on AI tasks
    
  • Commit AI results to game state
    
  • Run parallelized physics + collision algorithms
    
  • Commit physics results to game state
    
  • Dispatch scene graph to cull thread
  
  
• Culling
  
  
  • Build live cull datastructures in worker threads (with lots of cores, ideally a separate thread pool from AI/physics)
    
  • Traverse cull datastructures in worker threads
    
  • Dispatch render queue to render thread after traversal completes
    
  
  
• Iterate over render queue making state changes and draw calls
  

Of course, if you want to do GPU occlusion queries than you have to combine the cull and rendering threads, but there're still plenty of separate jobs to do. Yes, imposing deterministic ordering of physics and AI calculations means that Amdahl's law takes effect. However you can use the main loop as an additional worker thread, and the bottleneck is never worse than the length it takes to execute one element of the task queue. Moreover, if you don't mind an additional 1-frame input lag for AI, you can combine the physics and AI worker pools, as long as you commit the physics results before applying any impulses based on AI decision making.

Personally I think switching to x86 is going to be a mistake but hopefully it will help AMD pull out of the red and get some more hardware devs back onboard.

comic: removed youtube link due to lots of bad language in the "commentary."

I totally forgot that the fact it's going to be an entirely new architecture automatically prohibits backwards compatibility. Even with digital version so of games! The PS3 Platinum hits will have to be run on the PS3 hardware and streamed to the PS4, hence why Sony said you'd be able to stream them.

In that case, I'm keeping my PS3 well into the future.

Nice review, comicIDIOT! You clearly put a lot of work into researching and writing this; it's exactly the kind of quality post I enjoy reading. I've never been much of a console gamer; as a dedicated PC gamer I don't feel comfortable if I don't have a mouse and keyboard to control whatever I'm playing. With that said, all this "social" stuff rubs me the wrong ways, and I feel it's a mistake for a gaming company to commit to making their console interwoven with sharing and socializing. After all, don't console and PC gamers alike generally cast disdainful glances at the so-called "casual" crowd of Flash game and Farmville-playing unwashed masses? On the technical side, I think the departure from the Cell processor is an unfortunate one, given how impressive the chip was from a specs standpoint, but I imagine it will save game-writers a lot of headaches. Or maybe they just need to hire programmers who actually understand threading, synchronicity, and locking.

I thought I wrote it rather poorly, but thank you!



I'm a console player for entirely different reasons. I'd rather pay $400 on hardware for the next six years of my gaming career than continually upgrade a system incrementally. While some people desire to have the best system to play the latest games with amazing quality, I'm perfectly content with what I have until I need to upgrade. Hell, even the PS3 & 360 look phenomenal; I'll probably resist upgrading until at least a few years have past and prices have come down.



It definitely has the privacy probes out but I think it's a step to promote moral behavior similar to why YouTube wants to use a persons real name associated through G+ account.



I don't think it's in anyway related to Facebook/Flash games but more of what I mentioned above and to make your circle of friends more personal.

Actually the Cell and partially the Xenon in the Xbox were pretty terrible processors for general purpose use. While they had great potential some of the "features" such as the hyper-visor severely limited their power. There is a reason Nintendo didn't move to a Cell like design for the WiiU and stuck with a G3/7xx series Power chip just adding more cores and cache. The Cell is a great co-processor for GPUGP like and SIMD tasks and IBM even sells them as such but for general purpose work traditional Power or x86 chips are better.

The 360's Xenon avoided some of this because it didn't include the full hypervisor and other such features but it still wasn't as fast as as a traditional Power core since it shared the PPE design from the Cell.

The Wii's 750CL was underpowered but it was no where near as bad as the clock speeds seemed to imply due to the PowerPC 750CL being more efficient in other areas. And though it does lag pretty bad in raw FLOPS integer math is more important for a good chunk of the basic game logic and for single threaded performance its really not a terrible processor.

Prediction: The PS4 will be emulated more accurately and sooner than the PS3. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see the system being emulated in the next 3 or 4 years.

Heck, a project like Wine could run the games, no CPU emulation required.

Don't count on it. If the original Xbox is any model, nobody will bother developing an emulator. That has an Intel Celeron with Nvidia graphics on a Win2k-derived OS (IIRC), and there are no useful emulators for it.

No. Wine isn't an emulator, it's a binary shim. System semantics are probably closer to POSIX than Windows in any case, but it's unlikely to be very similar to any systems in common use.

Care to actually elaborate on that?



Dude, Cell sucked. The CPU part of it (the single PowerPC core) was trash, and the SPEs are a handful of floating point SIMDs with no real purpose. And even though all it could do was floating point work, it was still slower than the GPU sitting next to it - a *lot* slower.

It looks like Sony may have finally designed a controller that is not entirely uncomfortable to hold, so from my perspective it looks good so far.

Yeah, the social aspects really have nothing to do with casual gaming--really it's just free marketing. Think of it this way:

Or:

And if that's all tied into the console, then they click there, and if they don't have the game it prompts them to buy it. And for everyone on Facebook, they just got advertised to for the game and the system.

I'm quite happy with the xbox controller; the PS4 one just looks like a PS3 controller and an xbox controller had a weird baby. I kinda likes this dude's idea:

Is it just me, or do consoles in general seem to be slowly dying? It used to be that the advantage of a console was that it was superior to a personal computer for a much lower cost. That has now reversed in the last decade, with PCs outperforming consoles without much difference in price. To maintain their price advantage, console manufacturers have had to jack up the price of games in order to sell modern consoles at less than their unit cost. Furthermore, modern consoles seem to be moving closer and closer to PCs, adding features like internet browsing, applications and social networking garbage. Even independent game developers can easily publish to consoles now, and most games can be purchased and downloaded digitally. It seems to me that if this continues, eventually the only substantive difference between a console and a PC will be the format of the games it can play. Doesn't that mean that console games, which have to be approved and licensed by the console manufacturer, will eventually go the way of the Betamax?

One big issue is that people are comparing consoles to computers for their power, not price. People don't seem to realize that hardware for consoles doesn't magically materialize, it comes from currently existant technology.

Look at consoles this way, by buying a console, you're essentially ensured that you have a system capable of running new games 4~8 years into the future. Whereas, with a computer, you have no guarantee whatsoever.

That depends on what you buy. If you get good hardware now, you'll still be able to play new games 4-8 years down the road. You'll have to scale down your graphics over time as you play newer and more advanced games, but the effect would be no different than what we already see on consoles(Skyrim on the Xbox is what you'd get if you were running it on a 7-year-old gaming PC). The difference is you can customize what kind of fidelity you lose on a PC. For example, I don't care for AA or Shaders, so when I adjust my graphics settings I invest in Texture, Model, and Particle complexity first, AA, filters and shaders later. On a console the adjustment is made for me and tends to sacrifice texture quality and model complexity for shaders and other effects. You can also upgrade your PC over time if you want better visuals. With used hardware markets, you can sell existing components and use the proceeds help offset the cost of newer ones.

And yes, today's consoles use the same or similar hardware to what's available for PCs, that's part of why I think they might be on their way out. Consoles used to use strictly proprietary hardware that was more advanced than anything available for private home computing. Now that PCs and Consoles are pretty much on the same ground, the PC is gonna start to win through adaptability and extensibility. I suspect today's console manufacturers will at some point fully transition into specialized gaming PCs. Both Microsoft and Sony already do that to an extent. Nintendo is the only one I see continuing to make consoles in the future, and only because they market to families and casual gamers who aren't concerned with power or visuals.

While you're right, I'm a casual gamer who isn't concerened with graphics or visuals but I also like the games like Battlefield, Call of Duty, etc that aren't being made for Wii. However, Black Ops 2 is on the WiiU and if more titles make their way to the WiiU I might be making a transition to it over the future PS4 and Xbox.