HawkMan Posted June 8, 2012 Share Posted June 8, 2012 x86 is not a better architecture for games. It is so full of useless cruft from ye olde ancient DOS days and compatibility instructions, that it just not worth it. PowerPC is the adopted platform for the game industry for a multitude of reasons. RISC is much better than x86 in the embedded world. They're more efficient at what they do. You're confusing RISC vs CISC with effieicient and unefficient. which is not true. And we're not just talking Power vs X86 here. But Cell vs X86. and in fact CISC is better for many thigns compared to RISC. RISC would be good if the consoles very extremely lifted in what they did and the instructions where specifically crafted for those things. That's not how consoles today are. They are advanced devices that do a LOT of things, running complex games, where more instructions sets are actually an advantage over having to string together a lot of simpler RISC instructions.More importantly neither Sony or MS is going to waste the resources to have a Specially crafted RISC processor with an instruction set for gaming, that's the CELL all over again, High risk(pun not intended), and with next gen consoles taking over the living room completely, reverse reward. Remember Apple back in the Power days. their RISC CPU's where excellent at color conversion tables. that's what they where made for, making them champions of Photoshop. problem ? They sucked at EVERYTHING else. hence why photoshop actions where always used to show the superiority of Mac's, of course then X86 overtook their PowerPC chips in raw power and besides being slower in everything else, they where now also slower in Color conversion tables, and after a few years of trying to be different for the sake of being different, they admitted defeat that they would never catch up again and switched to Intel. RISC doesn't men faster, not even on an embedded system, which it could be argued that the "gaming" consoles are not anyway. RISC only means they're more efficient for the tasks they're designed for. you're living 5 years ago, when everyone thought RISC was the future and it would take over processing because it was more efficient, then people started learning that fewer and more efficient instructions aren't necessarily better unless your system is only designed to to a limited amount of things, since simple fast instructions strung together to do the same job as one or two slower complex instructions, end up being... slower. And in the end, they scaled worse as well magnifying the problem. RISC is great, or it's purpose, Just not seeing it on the future Media entertainment hubs, which is what the next gen "gaming" consoles are. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Emn1ty Posted June 8, 2012 Share Posted June 8, 2012 Consoles are not PC's. The processors are usually custom built along with other hardware, they don't have an OS to bog them down and due to being standardized developers can squeeze every once of what one would see as lesser than the standard. Even if the PS4 had mid level hardware on launch, it would still easily compete if not surpass some of the higher end PC's out there merely for the fact the developer doesn't have to worry about a plethora of hardware/driver configurations. You wonder why consoles became so big? They eliminate a lot of the hassle you go through with PC's. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Veiva Posted June 8, 2012 Share Posted June 8, 2012 (edited) Yes, they'll lose backwards compatibility, but power architecture isn't magically better than x86 as you think, for certain things it is, but not universally. and the Cell worked in an entirely different way anyway. they're not going to be using the Cell. it's to different and to difficult to use and not efficient for gaming use. So they'll drop the Cell architecture for a far more affordable and far more powerful X86 system, which true won't have the power to emulate a completely different architecture. so if you want tpolay PS3 games, get a PS3, PS4 games, get a PS4. As I said in a previous post, the PowerPC architecture is much more efficient for an embedded system like the PS3, Xbox 360, Wii U, etc. Although Sony may ditch Cell, they surely won't ditch the PowerPC architecture. In fact, I am certain that a proper, multicore PowerPC could emulate the Cell architecture by merit of the similarities. The flexibility to license it and modify it for the purpose of a games console outweigh any benefits that x86 may offer. You're confusing RISC vs CISC with effieicient and unefficient. which is not true. And we're not just talking Power vs X86 here. But Cell vs X86. and in fact CISC is better for many thigns compared to RISC. RISC would be good if the consoles very extremely lifted in what they did and the instructions where specifically crafted for those things. That's not how consoles today are. They are advanced devices that do a LOT of things, running complex games, where more instructions sets are actually an advantage over having to string together a lot of simpler RISC instructions.More importantly neither Sony or MS is going to waste the resources to have a Specially crafted RISC processor with an instruction set for gaming, that's the CELL all over again, High risk(pun not intended), and with next gen consoles taking over the living room completely, reverse reward. Remember Apple back in the Power days. their RISC CPU's where excellent at color conversion tables. that's what they where made for, making them champions of Photoshop. problem ? They sucked at EVERYTHING else. hence why photoshop actions where always used to show the superiority of Mac's, of course then X86 overtook their PowerPC chips in raw power and besides being slower in everything else, they where now also slower in Color conversion tables, and after a few years of trying to be different for the sake of being different, they admitted defeat that they would never catch up again and switched to Intel. RISC doesn't men faster, not even on an embedded system, which it could be argued that the "gaming" consoles are not anyway. RISC only means they're more efficient for the tasks they're designed for. you're living 5 years ago, when everyone thought RISC was the future and it would take over processing because it was more efficient, then people started learning that fewer and more efficient instructions aren't necessarily better unless your system is only designed to to a limited amount of things, since simple fast instructions strung together to do the same job as one or two slower complex instructions, end up being... slower. And in the end, they scaled worse as well magnifying the problem. RISC is great, or it's purpose, Just not seeing it on the future Media entertainment hubs, which is what the next gen "gaming" consoles are. No. I am talking about the various advantages of the PowerPC architecture, which not only leverages less instructions, but has much more efficient pipelines. Furthermore, since they do not need nearly as much power as the equivalent x86, they produce much less heat. Do you want a full-tower PS3 sitting in your living room? Not only this, but the PowerPC architecture can be designed and extended just for a console hardware manufacturer. You may say that no console manufacturer would do this, but they've all done it. For example, the Xbox 360 makes use of the freedom of PowerPC licensing to make a system on a chip. The comment about "more instructions requiring more time" is also wrong. PowerPC employs smaller pipeline stages, but many more, in comparison to the x86 architecture. Not only does it require less power to run these stages (resulting in more efficient design), more instructions can be executed at once, resulting in a similar output. You cannot overclock/up the Ghz of a PowerPC and expect it to perform considerably better as a result. This does not make the PowerPC any worse than x86, however. Edited June 8, 2012 by Veiva Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andre S. Veteran Posted June 9, 2012 Veteran Share Posted June 9, 2012 If I get 4x Uncharted 3, I will be happier then a pig in ****. My point being is people tend to still refer to the PS3 as some underpowered console, which even if it is on paper, it still produces glorious results. So yeah, I am fine with that. 2GB of memory isn't going to get you 4x Uncharted 3... It'll get you Uncharted 3 with slightly sharper textures, a few more enemies on-screen at once and slightly more varied animations. If that's what Sony gives us, I guess we'll run along with it, but it's definitely not what the industry expects as the next gen.Anyway my point is that fighting for 8 gig is a waste, it'll never happen and isn't necessary, and it won't happen because it isn't necessary, and because it kills the bottom line and slows adoption. I hope we'll at least get 4 gig. That 2 gig rumour is underwhelming and it's not what's to going allow really pushing the envelope. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pitreck Posted June 9, 2012 Share Posted June 9, 2012 The GPU is an ATI r10xx at 800MHz with 1843 GFLOPS, this is code-named "Tahiti." This chip is also include on AMD Radeon HD 7970, both chips (CPU and GPU) are 28nm processors. This part worries me. Radeon HD 7970 has the power of 3788 GFLOPS. Sure, it works at 925MHz, but still. Radeon HD 7950 (also Tahiti core) that works at 800Mhz has the power of 2867 GFLOPS, but it has fewer stream processors and texture units. In fact, 1843 GFLOPS makes that GPU comparable to Radeon HD 7850 (which at this time is middle-end card and has half of the stream processors and texture units of the HD 7970) :/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HawkMan Posted June 9, 2012 Share Posted June 9, 2012 Could the first GPU they talk about be the APU gpu which is just a low power radeon, and the HD7970 be the discrete card. and if it is they probably work together like on computer hardware, effectively in games making the 7970, one tier better in performance. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gian Posted June 9, 2012 Share Posted June 9, 2012 I am unaware of what stage the CELL currently is but I wouldn't dump it so quickly. Actually I wouldn't dump it for a x86 out of the box processor. Maybe CELL is not what sony was looking for, but it was a smart attempt. I wouldn't dump the development tools, the acquired technology, the chance to reduce the investment cost on CELL and the chance for a unique gaming architecture which would put them in front of the rest. But I haven't looked into the topic, so if sony decides different, well they probably know better. However I don't trust those "sources" :p Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yusuf M. Veteran Posted June 10, 2012 Veteran Share Posted June 10, 2012 The specs are a little better than I expected. Hopefully, Sony will stick with it and use at least 4 GB of RAM. Also, it's likely that Sony and Microsoft will want the next generation to outlast this one. This means it'll be even more important to go with powerful hardware. Right now, the only console game I'd play is Modern Warfare 3. A game like Battlefield 3 looks much better on PC. The difference is graphics quality (and performance) is hard to ignore. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Venomous Posted June 10, 2012 Share Posted June 10, 2012 So 2014 Release at $599 :rofl: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
metro2012 Posted June 10, 2012 Share Posted June 10, 2012 It would be a quad-core AMD x86 CPU running at 3.2GHz fake Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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