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Old November 15 2013, 12:39 PM   #17
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Re: PS4 and Xbox One Launch Thread

Timby wrote: View Post
Just as a point of order, it's not that the PS4 is significantly more powerful (under the hood they're largely identical), but the difference is in the Xbox One's RAM structure, which is more difficult to code for. It's basically this generation's Cell processor.
Sort of, but not really. You're missing the associated consequences of the XBO memory structure. Slow DDR3 vs GDDR5 on PS4 requires them to come up with a solution for more bandwidth. The solution they came up with is the ESRAM. So yes, that's harder to code for, but in the grand scheme of things not a huge difference in isolation.

The problem is that ESRAM takes up a lot of space on the APU die. Space that in PS4 land becomes more GPU resources, which is where the real ~50% advantage comes in. Even if you master coding for ESRAM (which from the sounds of it is kind of impossible at the moment thanks to the state of Microsoft's dev tools), you're still way behind in performance. Granted I'm sure there's some diminishing returns in play here, but it's still a significant difference in raw GPU stats.

At least with Cell, if you mastered farming out work to all the SPUs you could come up with really impressive results. But the highly similar architectures between PS4 and XBO just make that sort of thing less plausible. They're an apples to apples comparison, and one just has shittier apples.

Anyway, got my PS4 in a day early (won from the Taco Bell contest, Live Mas, Think Outside the Bun, and have yourself a delicous Cheesy Gordita Crunch or two). It's not without its problems so far. Froze up once while downloading a game update. Completely lost power another time while transitioning from gameplay to a cut-scene in Knack.

Someone said that the UI is good? Ehh, not really. I mean it's better than what they had on the PS3 but... it still gets crusty at times, it's not very intuitive. Though the limited voice commands work OK. There is absolutely a ton of room here for all the Xbox One Kinect shit to blow people away. Which is kind of the only hope, since they don't have a chance of competing in raw horsepower, having yielded an advantage they've had since the launch of the original Xbox...

Let's see... games... Knack is kind of fun. It looks pretty good, but not an OMG next gen transition. So far I think the reviews have been a little harsh... I don't know, I got it for free, I'm not really the target audience, but if I were 10 years old I'd probably be blown away.

Resogun is fun, but not completely intuitive. Why am I losing humans? I get that I'm supposed to hunt down 'the keepers' or something when they are announced, but I'm not sure what they are, there doesn't seem to be a timer... ehhh... I'm just confused. Fun game though.

Contrast didn't hook me right away. Haven't given it much of a chance. Frame rate really hurting on this game, and it doesn't even look that amazing. Leaning towards declaring this one an Indie Turd.

Tomorrow I'll have some of the big guns, BF4, COD: Ghosts, and Killzone.

Oh and let's see... the controller. Much nicer than Dual Shock 3... but it seems to have on fatal flaw. While there is a nice lip on the sticks for traction, the middle of the stick is still humped, and I am sliding off the controller way too much. It's too bad, the material all feels great, the new shape is tons more comfortable.. the buttons feel great, the triggers are pretty decent now... they just needed to copy the shape that the 360 sticks used. I'd say even the Wii U sticks end up with better traction even though they are concave and not very grippy material.
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