Quantic Dream CEO: The PS4 is “like the PC of next year or two years”

Tuesday, 30th April 2013 15:07 GMT By Nick Akerman

Quantic Dream co-CEO Guillaume de Fondaumiere has been speaking about Sony’s sparkly new console box again. Yesterday we reported how the studio has taken inspiration from the PS4 for its upcoming Beyond: Two Souls project. On the chatter trail once more, Fondaumiere has suggested Sony’s new hardware is “like the PC of next year or two years.”

In an interview with GameSpot, Fondaumiere indicated how the step up between PS3 and PS4 is already extremely noticeable.

“We are already seeing in the first (PS4 tests) that we’re doing a big difference,” he commented.

Quantic are well-known for trying to produce realistic facial expressions and emotions on screen. Even though David Cage’s recent demo of a Jerry Seinfeld/Christopher Lee crossover impressed, Fondaumiere wants to outline the tech has its limitations.

“There are limitations on the PlayStation 3 and there will be limitations on PlayStation 4,” he said. “With the PlayStation 4, it’s something that really is more like the PC of next year or two years.”

Interesting comments from Fondaumiere. What do you make of them?

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  1. Max Payne

    *grabs popcorn*

    #1 1 year ago
  2. KrazyKraut

    Erthazus in 3,2,1……

    #2 1 year ago
  3. pbvider


    #3 1 year ago
  4. Samoan Spider

    Way to poke your penis in the hornets nest there GdF! @1/2 This’ll be fun to watch :P

    #4 1 year ago
  5. voxelman

    Who’s PC? Because last time I checked most were pretty different from each other.

    #5 1 year ago

    ^ A hardcore gamer’s PC?

    #6 1 year ago
  7. CPC_RedDawn



    My PC is probably about 2-3x what the PS4 has under its hood (but it still has to run a chunky OS yet its still more powerful). But my girlfriends PC is about 5 years old now and can only just run Diablo 3. This is just dev’s trying to drum up some publicity for the PS4. I find it funny how all the companies/people involved with the PS4 are praising it saying its the most powerful PC ever. The you have rival companies of these saying the complete opposite to try and deter people away from the console. For example Nvidia, they came out a few weeks later with a facial tech demo that completely blew Quantic Dream’s demo out the water, but then said oh yea our PhysX technology is going to be supported on the PS4 even though they know it contains AMD CPU/GPU.

    #7 1 year ago
  8. Deacon

    It’s gonna be awesome. To hell with all the dick-waving and “nah mate my pc’s better” shite.

    #8 1 year ago
  9. Rockin a Jack D

    More PR gobshite from the Sony camp. They done the same with the PS3 and that turned out to be a piece of shit.

    Anything that wasn’t developed in-house for the PS3 ran like a fucking dog on the system.


    Yeah, no fucking shit sherlock…

    #9 1 year ago
  10. Hussar

    @9: TF? Cerny mentioned countless times that PS4 has a new architecture, programming for it is like PC-like, and it’ll be much easier to develop good-looking games. While PS3 was designed by science masters in an underground cave due to its unnecessary complexity.

    Discussion where 90% userbase is uneducated whining brats is impossible to have. G’day.

    #10 1 year ago
  11. smoke.tetsu

    Quantic Dream makes games exclusively for Sony platforms. Of course they are going to say favorable things about the hand that feeds them.

    #11 1 year ago
  12. Erthazus

    True. It’s a PC. A next PC to my grandmother’s PC.

    I have a PC right now that is x2 time’s more powerfull then PS4 or Xbox next will ever be and it is not the most powerfull configuration right now and Intel,Nvidia, AMD didn’t launched it’s newest hardware yet.

    In fact, I can play games in 2560×1440 resolution and it says something already.

    #12 1 year ago
  13. Stardog

    He’s right in the sense that it took some dev’s a few years to port their 360/PS3 gen games to PC so that most PC gamers had time to build a decent enough PC to run them.

    FIFA didn’t even release the “next-gen” FIFA on PC until FIFA 11.

    #13 1 year ago
  14. Richenbaum

    Can’t even get through one day anymore without some kind of masturbatory statement from QD.

    #14 1 year ago
  15. Bashtee

    @12 You still can’t compare it, because console games are programmed close “to-the-metal”. Going by John Carmack, your PC is just as fast as a console rendering a specific game.

    What AMD and Sony did was quite simple, they took PC components, removed the bottlenecks and voila, there you go. Considering the current technical situation, a wise decision I might add.

    #15 1 year ago
  16. mxmassef

    Ps4 is not so bad. Its Gpu is something like radeon hd 7870 and that is not bad at all. And it has amd10 cpu and 8 gb ddr5 ram. Its rather good than a bad pc.

    #16 1 year ago
  17. skapunkmetalskater

    Always baffles me when people say things like this… To say the PS4 is a high end PC is one thing, but to say something like it’s comparable to future PC tech is just daft.

    Granted, you’re limited by what devs produce for the platforms, and as always just because a PC can produce higher spec content, doesn’t mean it’ll have games that look better than console titles… but if a dev opts to developer solely for PC, such as the first Crysis for example, you can build up to make it run as it should be seen.

    Oh, and tech upgrades, like Direct X that grant new abilities in games…

    Great links by the way @16, I always look back to the Nvidia human head demo when devs go on about new graphics and remember how we had the tech years ago but one uses it properly.

    #17 1 year ago
  18. Joe_Gamer

    More like the PC of two years ago MINUS the windows overhead, which is still pretty good.

    #18 1 year ago
  19. sg1974

    @11 QD chooses to develop exclusively for PlayStation. They are not tied to Sony, and would make more money if they went multiplat. Which kind of says you’re talking crap.

    #19 1 year ago
  20. Eddie Rodrigues

    @12 Same argument, new day. I don’t think you are totally wrong though. And showing off your PC gamer “Skillz” won’t make you look more intellectual.

    @15 “as fast as a console reading”… w-what? WHAT?

    @19 Your argument is more accurate.

    #20 1 year ago
  21. nollie4545

    CEO of company trying to big up his companies own product in non-marketing ploy shocker…

    Anyone who thinks that by buying a PS4 they will suddenly get Crysis 3 on ultra at 60fps is going to be very disappointed come Christmas day….

    Its CPU is cheap and nasty.

    The RAM is cheap and nasty.

    The GPU…. is cheap and nasty. And its all stuck together a nice, cheap and nasty system on a die sticky bun which console fanbois will suck up like so much stale milk and ask for more, whilst forking out over the odds for games as they try to offset the loss they made selling the console.

    Still, since this is probably the last time we will see a console as such, better to go out with a bang I guess.

    #21 1 year ago
  22. sg1974

    PC fanbois are funny.

    #22 1 year ago
  23. nollie4545

    Oh yeah but it has 8GB of RAM, DDR5!!! And no operating system, of course running windows is so crippling to the average PC CPU these days, oh and those horrible antivirus suites, all the time using up so much precious RAM and CPU cycles!!!

    #23 1 year ago
  24. Lengendaryboss

    I never knew PS4 for independent Quantic Dreams was their product.

    #24 1 year ago
  25. sg1974

    @24 Typical ranting PC fanboi, cares more about gigs and hertz than games. Small penis?

    #25 1 year ago
  26. Richenbaum

    @26 You can’t really pretend you’re being “all about the gameplay” when you’re defending a game/system that doesn’t even exist yet. All you’re fighting for is an intangible brand name.

    and I guess by your logic the guys you like so much that are making this game must not care about games either then if they’re sitting here talking about tech specs and graphics, right?

    #26 1 year ago
  27. nollie4545

    Even if I had a small cock, I would still not feel the need to bleat about 8GB of DDR5 RAM and how it is a PC slayer…. because it isn’t.

    What PS4 wannahaves need to realise is that if that kind of architecture offered real benefits, PCs would already have the technology, after all, its not like PCs are some niche product, there are billions of PCs on planet earth doing billions of tasks, which is half the reason the PC hardware market moves as it does- the slightest improvement could potentially save masses of time, money, energy or all three.

    The thing is, anyone who is even half savvy with computer tech is not raving about the next gen consoles for the same reason they weren’t raving about current gen consoles. That is because PC gamers are prepared to invest more money in gaming, not less. How you then claim than PC owners do not care about games, is a bit of a mystery to me I have to say. Why else would you invest $300 in a graphics card if you didn’t care about games? Is it because they look nice sat in the box or something?

    #27 1 year ago
  28. sg1974

    @27 Fail. Not defending PS4 or talking about tech specs. Challenging the PC fanboi and his obsession with numbers, and obviously I’m someone who thinks those numbers don’t matter as much to gaming as they do to the PC fanbois. (Some of the best games I’ve played this gen barely woke up my consoles.) Not my fault that shot flew miles over your head and you made yourself look like an ass.

    @28 No, you’re bleating about how your chosen platform is better for gaming because it has higher numbers (well, can have – if you have the money). Why would you spend so much time, money and effort (well, quite…) if you didn’t care about gaming? Well, first, I didn’t say you didn’t care about gaming, I said you cared more for your precious numbers; and second, perhaps for the same reason many men with small penises “invest” in Ferraris but spend more time polishing them than driving them.

    Personally I’ll take a 360 or PS3, or their successors, over a PC rig any day of the week and twice on Sundays as I haven’t got the inclination to dedicate so much time, money and effort to keeping up with the Jones’s with the hottest most up-to-date rig, and most non-casual gamers agree (even a large number PC gamers hate that proliferation racket…). Especially when many of the best-rated PC games are available on console, or there are equally as good alternatives in the genre. Yes, the game costs more in the box, but a current gen console cost less than your yearly graphics card upgrade. What was that about forking out? And anyway, it is interesting how you fail to note the difference between “care about gaming” and “care about how games look”. Kind of proves my point. Do graphics cards make a game?

    ME2 was a game released on PC and console, well received and highly rated on all platforms. It appears to have sold 10 copies on console for every 1 on PC. Why? Because few give a crap about your better shading or framerate – just like few gave a crap that Journey wasn’t running at 100fps with a resolution higher than most humans can detect.

    Some anecdotal evidence from Metacritic re ratings of some highly-rated PC games of recent times which also released on PS3 – a better metric than choosing platform exclusives, I’m sure even you would have to agree (I’m using the PS3:PC dichotomy as it seems appropriate to this thread*):

    Bishock Infinite: PC 94; PS3 95.
    Tomb Raider: PC 86; PS3 87.
    Mass Effect 3: PC 89; PS3 93.
    Far Cry 3: PC 88; PS3 90.
    Portal 2: PC 95; PS3 95. A tie.
    Batman: Arkham City: PC 91; PS3 96.
    Dishonored: PC 91; PS3 89. Hey, you won one.

    * G1gahurtz will be along in a minute to call me a PS3 fanboi, but I’m used to it. Strange though: he never jumps on my pro-XBox or MS-positive comments….

    #28 1 year ago
  29. Richenbaum

    @29 You absolutely were talking about tech specs, the fact that you were whining about them instead of worrying about them doesn’t somehow make you not talking about them and your other pro-console-and-ONLY-console statements make it pretty clear to any literate person that you are in fact getting all defensive about consoles, and since the PS4 is the console being discussed here it’s not exactly hard to read between the lines.

    Trying to use online review scores as evidence of actual quality isn’t doing you any favors either. How can you expect anyone to take you seriously when you’re spewing such utter nonsense? Come on, you only care about the gameplay but you’re throwing review scores and sales figures out there as proof of gameplay quality? That’s every bit as ridiculous as trying to use graphics to prove quality. Look, you very obviously have a raging console boner going on here and that’s ok if that’s what you’re into, but don’t try to weasel out of what you’re saying and pretend that you don’t. Everyone can see it and you’re just contradicting the hell out of yourself.

    #29 1 year ago
  30. sg1974

    @30 So many words with so little logic or analysis.

    1. The old false dichotomy of “if you are opposed to y, you must be in favour of x”. Yet it misses the point. Even if I am a PS3 fanboi, that doesn’t change what you are and your friend is.

    2. If critical reviews are not a reasonable metric of the quality of a gaming experience to put forward in a debate on the merits of a gaming platform over another, what is? Framerate? Resolution? Well of course, we already know that, for most PC gamers, the answer is “YES!”. Well how about we put that to one side and use sales instead? For cross-PC/console releases, the consoles usually win by a mile. Back to framerate and resolution, eh? Of course it’s all subjective; my point is all your better numbers and greater costs do not deliver an overall better gaming experience, by most opinions.

    3. “Reading between the lines” is what not very clever people substitute for “I have no evidence that you think/believe/are x, but I have decided you do think/believe/are x; therefore you are proved to think/believe/be x – so I win”. Try dealing with what I said, not with what I didn’t say, and you might land a punch or two.

    All three taken from the “Big Book of Argumentative Techniques For 12 Year Olds.” All you missed was a good straw man. Read the exchange dimwit. The PC fanboi was whinging about the hardware numbers, and I teased then challenged him on it. Not the other way around as you suggest. Oh look, so there was an albeit weak straw man after all…. (look it up).

    If it is so superior, why are there so few of you? You can’t use cost as justification, because you PC fanbois are always claiming the costs are grossly exaggerated – and then you talk about cheaper games on the shelf.

    Keep digging.

    #30 1 year ago
  31. Joe_Gamer

    PC gaming is stupidly easy right now, I have all four platforms and you know which one is the easiest to use? The fucking PC, I don’t even have to leave my chair to get the games and they always just fucking work. Yeah sure, ten years ago you had to reach into the hairy bowls of your PC and tickle the INI files, stroke the registry, and pray to seven different minor deities(and praise be lavished unto those gods, because in order to play my games I HAD to learn how computers fucking work and now I’m a System Admin with a good job that I love) and now everything just works.

    Seriously, with the exception of some GFWL abominations(you should be boycotting them anyway so you have only yourself to blame) you have to be goddamn mentally deficient to have problems with PC games these days.

    People loved consoles(me too) because they could put in a cartridge/disk and sit on the couch with their friends and everything just worked, that’s not really the case anymore. I don’t care about what platform it’s on, I just love games, but consoles lately? they are only about money and control, games are a distant, distant, afterthought.

    Take PC hardware, strip out windows, strip out all the PC software and you have a VERY potent gaming platform. But start shoving in advertisements, Social features, Netflix, Hulu, stupid DRM, avatars with clothes that cost REAL MONEY, backwards ass tech(looking at you CELL processor) Region locks, interface locks, 3d camera’s, wonky add on motion controls, and you end up a bloated carcass with all the weaknesses of a PC and none of the strengths. Modern consoles are pissing away all the advantages that they had by trying to be everything no one asked them to be.


    #31 1 year ago
  32. mxmassef

    Pc fanboys doesn`t seem to understand how much optimizing the grapchics affect on the games.

    #32 1 year ago
  33. Erthazus

    and how much? you mean Red Dead Redemption on the PS3 or GTA 4 that is sub-HD upscale? Or games that are from 2008 looks a bit better in 2013?
    Optimization is not a magic. Hardware has it’s limits and beyond that you can’t do anything. That’s why games like Assassins Creed and others look the same every year with few additional effects. Because there is a hardware limit and you can’t do Killzone:Shadow Fall graphics on your PS3.
    PC in fact can do this since 2007. Crysis 1 – direct X10 in 1080p or even 2560×1440 resolution. Here you go.

    I like how some moron tries to compare Metacritic PS3 to PC. The only problem that this does not add something to the conversation because you know, there are much more console sites/magazines then on the PC side.

    #33 1 year ago
  34. Erthazus

    Console gaming was always weak since Atari. It was always a crappy experience compared to Personal computer and the only diference between them was a price (in which hardcore gamers don’t care at all) and easy to use with the control limitations.

    That’s it. Since then, consoles can’t even do MULTITASKING. PS4 only now is trying to do that in 2013 (it’s not even out there). PS3 games in most cases are 720p or SD 480 upscaled. It’s not even funny.

    Graphics cards now can give you experience with 2560p already and next year or in 2015 4K gaming will be available, but on the PS4 and Next Xbox we still play in 1080p a 2004 standard. Woohoo.

    I’m not saying right now that console gaming is stupid. I have console and I have a PC. I can compare. It’s just console is a much weaker experience compared to PC in every way there is.

    anyway, KthxBye. Going to play DOTA2 right now with M/K on Steam.

    #34 1 year ago
  35. DrDamn


    Maths fail.

    #35 1 year ago
  36. Erthazus

    Maths fail?

    26 reviews for PS3
    66 reviews for PC

    Arithmetic mean. Do you know that or you never had math in your school? Of course you never had any math… You don’t even know what Memory/Ram is for.byebye.

    #36 1 year ago
  37. DrDamn

    They use a weighted average – how they weight them was a recent point of discussion. The point is that just because there are more reviews for one version over the other comparison of the results is still valid if there are sufficient samples for each.

    Also you said the problem was “there are much more console sites/magazines then on the PC side” – and your chosen example has many more for the PC …

    Oh and I have a first class degree in maths thank you very much.

    #37 1 year ago
  38. Erthazus


    Yeah. That’s true. I choose this one because it was the highest rating on meta right now. Everything else in most cases are always high on consoles because of PS Magazine or Xbox Magazine and etc.


    It is not valid because you can’t compare them. Metacritic is nothing more but a site that “collects data” from other sites and nothing more. It is a good site if you want to see if the product is good but comparing platforms using metacritic is just nonsence.

    #38 1 year ago
  39. DrDamn

    I think reviews scores are nonsense, so metacritic is even more so. However comparison being invalid is nothing to do with different numbers of reviews for each platform. What affect are you claiming this has? More reviews = higher score, more reviews = lower score?

    #39 1 year ago
  40. Gheritt White

    Consoles /= PC, which is why nobody gives a fuck about multitasking on consoles.

    Of course consoles are a “weaker” experience than PC, they’re a more tightly focused product, rather than a do-anything Swiss Army knife.

    But then again, we all established that Erathzus doesn’t know shit a LONG time ago.

    #40 1 year ago
  41. Reddpayn

    Pc that has roughly the same specs (i have one) cant even run games like cod mw2 or gta4

    #41 1 year ago
  42. Reddpayn

    And ps3 can run cod on 60 fps 1080p
    So optimizing makes some difference

    #42 1 year ago
  43. PCFreak

    Everyone Company say’s that and after two years’s it become crap and new technology comes and then they say now this is more powerful . all part of marketing strategy and selling it out.

    PC Gaming
    Far Cry 3
    Comedy Movies

    #43 1 year ago