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New reports regarding Sony’s next PlayStation claim the complex Cell processor series that powered the PS3 could be for the chop, with Sony believed to be looking to simplify its next-gen machine to appease developers.
Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry hardware expert underlines the AMD links, claiming PS4 is likely to appear in a form that’s “essentially a PC” thanks to Sony dropping the custom hardware approach and using AMD’s off-the-shelf components.
AMD has previously been reported as being in the running to provide PS4′s graphics chipset, so it would make sense for Sony to unify the lot. [Kotaku via Eurogamer]
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I would take this “expert” opinion with a pinch of salt.
Sure, Sony may indeed go with AMD for the GPU in the PS4, however given the GPU in the PS3 is rarely actually used more than an eleborate frame-buffer, and all the GPU rendering is actually done in the cell’s pipeline, it’s likely Sony will stick with the Cell, and be able to pick whoever they want for the end of the line GPU.
Makes alot of sense for Sony and Developers as dev costs are stupidly high and yes the PS3 has alot of raw power but it’s a bitch to get it working right. Something closer to PC/360 would save costs especially as with next gen there is so much more content to be created games will be ridiculously expensive enough to make.
I really don’t want to have to put up with the mediocre PC ports that Xbox owners have to suffer. The PS3 exclusives offer unique gaming, BECAUSE it’s doing things the right way, the modern way.
I don’t see any load times in Uncharted3, and it’s got unparalleled graphics, which to me shows that any game not meeting these standards are because they are stuck in the old PC/Xbox/80′s way of coding.
If the Xbox, PC and PS were all to use the same type of hardware, why would there be crappy mediocre ports in the first place? What exactly would they be porting from?
I think this is brilliant and I hope its true, because regardless of the platform you game on, the game will look great.
So I have to disagree with you “the modern way” statement, as its not a modern model, its an antiquated model.
“If the Xbox, PC and PS were all to use the same type of hardware, why would there be crappy mediocre ports in the first place?”
Because the old way of coding is not the correct way to code. It’s the quick and dirty way. Well written code will scale very well the more cores you add to a CPU, badly written code won’t.
I would take your “expert” opinion with an entire ocean full of salt.
Firstly, well written code CANNOT automatically scale by adding more cores – this is a fact that you have made up. It scales by the code being written with multi-threading in mind. Even bad code can be written to support multiple cores. The code needs to be written so that tasks can be spread between the CPU’s/cores – it cannot happen automatically, the CPU needs to be told by the code when this is allowed to happen otherwise major bugs would occur, such as an item in memory being read while it is being written to.
Considering the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and modern gaming PC’s all have multiple cores, and game dev’s have been taking advantage of this fact since around 2005 – I dont understand the point you are making. Do you think that by unifying the hardware they are going to take a step backwards and stop writing multi threaded code?
Anyway it is mainly the job of the graphics card to make things look amazing on screen. The processor is reponsible for providing the graphics card with the data it needs – such as what needs to be written on screen (but not how – that is the graphics cards job), what enemies to draw, etc.
Back to the point at hand here, currently games written for a specific device will always look slightly better as the game devs can take advantages of nuances in the system and by investing all their time in one system.
But by having these systems use similar hardware underneath, this will no longer be the issue that it is currently. The game would in theory be written once (but compiled for the different systems as required), but look the best on the device with the best hardware.
MikJe – as much as i like the drake games unparallelled? for a console sure, but compared to a PC they arent that great at all.
The PS2 was also a bitch to code for, but developers bit the bullet and coded for it, and the results we astounding (at the time).
The PS3 is not hard to code for per-se, what’s hard, is coding the way the PS2 wanted to do it, and the way the PS3 wanted to do it, and having that same code work on old legacy “PC-like” platforms.
I hope for your sake you’re just trolling, and not a genuine imbecile.
Unlike your good self who appears to be both.
At least MikJe is bringing something to the party other than off the shelf insults.
Dont be obtuse. Did you even read MikeJe’s post re: “the mediocre PC ports that Xbox owners have to suffer.” Mental1st was pointing out what needed to be pointed out.
The PS3 and the PS2 before it are badly designed architectures because they put throughput of vector maths by proprietary coprocessors ahead of any other concern. Whilst this sort of stuff is necessary for games, it’s very inflexible, you have to engineer everything you do around offloading specific kinds of work to those coprocessors.
It is clear to see that after Sony Computer Entertainment effectively sacked Ken Kutaragi, who was the driving force behind designing console hardware in this way, they have now embraced making consoles architecturally ‘normal’. Their latest piece of hardware, the PSP is basically just a smartphone with dedicated VRAM, and its launch software is all the better for it.
I suspect the latter, judging from the subsequent posts.
Odd, I thought Sony were all about obfuscation via custom hardware.
so 8gb of ram then
And your comment sorta sums it up. What average Joe that reads here knows about embedded systems and custom hardware design is a big fat zero, so they try and apply what they “know” about PC technology to a console like the PS3. However the reality is that everything goes out the window, as the is very little PC-like in the PS3 current design. It doesn’t use DDR memory (it uses REALLY fast, but insanely expensive XDR memory for example), it doesn’t use PC data buses or PC-like coding styles, everything it written in a totally different manner entirely, code for the PS3 is written as massively parallel tasks that are streamed between the cores of the SPU’s (the PPE being the master scheduler).
What 8GB in a PC would do would be done in 256MB on a PS3.
So when you see comments like OMG, “PS3 should have had more memory, as my phone has more memory than it and memory is really cheap”, or OMG “the Xbox’s unified memory is so much better than the dedicated pools of memory in the PS3, because I read about it on the internet once from someone I have never heard of who might be Microsoft”…
ahahha no.
The problem you have is you need to store lots in the memory at one time and there is a lack of memory to do so. It’s all very well and good having low latency and faster memory but it doesn’t do anything to help caching in the memory. For that you just need more memory so we’ll never see anything like MSAA or higher resolution textures or 1080p games on the PS3 because there simply isn’t the capacity.
Also you forget that current games do no benefit by latency or speed. You’ll get the same frame rates from and old stick of DDR2 as you do in a fast DDR3 thats had the latency reduced. Games just don’t relly on those factors as something like bench marking software does.
Also the RSX doesn’t have access to the main system memory and the Vram for the PS3 is old GDDR3.
Lets not forget that the PS3′s OS uses a lot of the system memory to run that OS, so games have access to around 80mb less than that at least.
I think you’re just looking at benchmarking software and ignoring how games actually work.
Also the Cell doesn’t have cores, it has one processing unit and 7 helpers, spes are not cores.
The sooner these Japanese companies stop using proprietary hardware and creating crazy development kits the better. They all need to use hardware developers understand so moving to a CPU that we see in an average PC is a much better step than the disaster than was the cell.
It took developers like 4 years to get a hang of that thing and even now the PS3 versions are never that great because it isn’t worth putting in the extra time.
The hardware turned out to be inferior to the 360 which is funny seeing how they bigged it up so much. The GPU in the 360 can push more pixels and has access to more memory because it isn’t partitioned and the OS uses less memory. The cell needs like 7 times more code to get anything out of it, so the potential power of it often never gets used and ends up being weaker than the Xeon inside the 360.
The only reason you get games looking like Uncharted on the PS3 is because Sony have a good first party who will dedicate the time to it. Microsoft on the other hand have no first party, they’re all third party developers they’ve paid to create exclusives but most of them have left now.