The Case for the PS4K(gamasutra.com) |
The Case for the PS4K(gamasutra.com) |
Consoles once represented predictability, stability and ease of use. Do they have much left beyond the set top form factor, 10 ft UI and a bit more flexibility on how often you're required to be online?
I don't see this evolution of the console market as positive for consumers. But according to the article people will complain online about anything good or bad, so fuck them, right? Using your adult brain to ask if something is in the interest of consumers is not necessary when children online irk you.
I'd say console still have all of these properties. Also, some of these things like set-top form-factor should not be underestimated. Other important advantages are that the buying experience is much nicer (only 1 online store, or a disc), you can expect any game that runs to at least run well enough for a decent experience, every game is optimized for the control scheme that comes with the console, and initial cost of buying a console is a lower than a capable PC.
Really, the only downside is lower graphical fidelity, and lack of games that are not well suited for controller input.
I have a PS4 and a PC with Steam BPM hooked up to my TV, and while I enjoy both I still can't cease to be amazed by the abysmal experience playing some PC games, it really is hit & miss. Even though my PC far exceeds the system requirements of some games they still run like crap (screen tearing, framerate spikes/drops, crashes), they have poor to no controller support, tiny fonts that are unreadable from the couch, they like to pop up mouse-only launchers, popups, updaters, whatever.
PC gaming can be great but let's not pretend any of the advantages of consoles are suddenly lost because they will have mid-cycle HW upgrades (which I personally think are a great thing, if executed well).
Right now GSync is more expensive (custom electronics) and has a better experience (consistent, often wider sync ranges) but long-term FreeSync is going to win because it's a VESA standard (VESA Adaptive Sync) and cheaper. You can often get a FreeSync model for the same price as an old plain monitor, GSync is usually a $200 increase in price.
The points you raise are all true though, the PC experience is not optimized for a 10 ft UI, and the performance tuning is often not as good (although PC is usually pushing a lot more pixels - many consoles render at 720p and upscale, whereas 1080p is standard and 1440p/4K or supersampling are common on PC). The other thing that bothers me is that every PC game is tied to an account somehow, so you can't buy/sell used games.
not really. Even ignoring that decent at this point should be minimum 1080p60. A great many games don't even try for that, and they still experience stutter.
Still I'm going to go home and play WiiU. Although I am upset at Nintendo for messing up the WiiU so badly. Basically a generation with no new Zelda. >:( It doesn't count when it's getting released for the NX at the same time.
I don't want to buy a new console.
I probably wouldn't mind such thinking about consoles if, and only if, the manufactures used the cert processes to really held the developers feet to the fire and prevent the version targeting older revisions from slipping in quality on non-graphical aspects. And not letting them just drop the support for an old version like a phone developer because "Oh my god, the APIs aren't identical, and you even want me to test on multiple pieces of hardware WHATEVER WILL I DO!?"
It does a lot more than 'just about works'. For example, what is regarded as one of the most visually impressive driving games on current gen consoles - DriveClub, works in VR
I bought an XBox 360 and a PS 3 at dirt cheap prices around the time the 1 and the 4 came out and these are both great values, still going strong, etc. Today I am starting to want to play Yakuza 6 and the new Hyperdimension Neptunia game but I can save that for later.
The technological story is that (i) console APUs are in a state of technological improvement but that PCs are not (i.e. Intel is obsessed with making a notebook computer that can fit under the door at a hotel and not with improving any product attributes that matter) and (ii) no way Sony can Nintendo get ahead with a more powerful console.
This is simply an update for people without a PS4 or for people whose original PS4 breaks (I assume it's just a matter of time based on my and others' PS3 experience). It's a ploy to get more money for essentially the same product. Yes, you'll be able to watch 4k Netflix on it, something you can do with a ~ $100 box nowadays, but other than that the name is a misnomer and the upgrade certainly unappreciated in the gaming community. As others have said, if we wanted upgrades every year or two, we'd stick to PC gaming thank you very much.
It's sad because Sony has made all the right moves this generation, completely crushing competitors, and now they attempt this incremental nonsense, which was the whole reason consoles were separate from PC's.
In Sony's case upgradable has meant forcibly downgradeable.
Many bought a PS3 solely because it ran Linux, this was removed by an update.
Sony's famous battle over removing 'other-OS' and its shameful tactics against Hotz exemplified a culture of mistrust of end users and disdain for 'off-label' uses.
Sadly it has a long history of this culture, q.v. the 1990s software removal of Digital-Video-in for European digital video cameras - preventing one dumping back to digital tape - removing much of the value.
Sony, itself, has expressed regrets, like the loss of the digital Walkman market with their near unusable proprietary music codecs that took hours to transcode & upload.
Sony, genius engineering hamstrung by legal.
Explicitly, by their vast media catalogue & the piracy boojums entailed.
When the superior Betamax lost the format wars to VHS because of selective media licensing in the 1980s, Sony responded by becoming a media empire.
Sony has broken its own tech ever since.
Consoles, on the other hand, are designed around a ten-foot OS with none of the launcher garbage and gamepad-only controls; the tighter integration sands off these rough edges. Personally, I'd love to have my (substantial) collection of PC games working on my TV, but it's not quite there yet.
At 60Hz, a frame is 16ms, which is already tight.
Over the internet? Where do you live, a datacenter?
A box 5-20 feet away? Why not plug it into the screen in front of you? I never really understood the draw of game streaming when you can't use the source device in any way (like Steam, Xbox One streaming).
I don't agree about that. Yes 1080p60 is always better, but if a game runs at stable 720p30 I will enjoy it just as much. My experience with PS3 and PS4 games are that with rare exceptions, they all at least provide an acceptable baseline that does not ruin the experience.
The problems I experience with some PC games are of a completely different kind, it's not that I think they should be prettier or run at higher framerates, but that they have glaring technical problems that completely ruin the experience. My last example would be Darksiders 2, a relatively old game that has visuals and game mechanics that don't warrant high system requirements at all, yet even though my PC is far above the recommended specs, has framerate spikes or (with VSync off) screen tearing that gives me headaches basically makes it impossible to play. This game also has a PS4 remake that (arguably) performs below what the hardware should be ablt to pull off (it runs at 30fps instead of 60fps), but at least it's consistent.
Usually you can tweak your way around problems like this, but that's the whole point of a console: not having to do these things...
My gaming PC's 30-40ft away from the living room and master bedroom, in what used to be my office. Steam streaming is convenient because I've got plenty of underpowered hardware around, and I can access the PC's power anywhere in the home. It's convenient, and keeps the hardware away from my infant son's increasingly-roving hands.
It was a subsidised platform with great specs, the cheapest linux box available and ran on a tv, never mind free console & media player. A lot of my student contempories bought it solely for Linux as it was the cheapest way to a Linux platform.
I cite the Condor cluster using 1760 PS3s, once the 33rd fastest super-computer in the world. There are many other published Playstation clusters (PS2 also). The cell processor was highly desirable and very powerful for the price.
I will always thank Sony as 'otherOS' allowed me to evangelise Linux & indeed computing to many families who never considered owning a computer. To kids passively consuming games I could show the power to create them with Linux and turn a passion for gaming into a passion for coding - I was not alone in this.
'OtherOS' use was both significant, socially important, and moreover printed on the box when bought - this seems contractual & IMHO Hotz was in the right to re-enable it.
Sony have world leading engineers and tech, that perfection should deliberately be downgraded for non-engineering reasons breaks my heart.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster
Sadly I feel I can no longer own or evangelise Sony devices until Hotz can too - it was quite unjust behaviour.
Hotz did not lose in court, the courts agreed with Hotz, but his exclusion from Sony ownership was coerced against his will, uncivilly, nonetheless.
I think the trend away from specialty processors with speciality GPUs attached like the Xenon [note: different from Xeon] in the XB360 and the Cell in the PS3, to commodity Jaguar x86 APUs with onboard iGPUs is a big reason behind that. Honestly the XBone is really no different than going out and building yourself a mITX PC on the FM2+ socket, for Linux purposes. Nowadays you're better off with something like the Raspberry Pi for intro-to-computing, although I am a big fan of the ECS Liva series myself.
The Cell is actually a really amazing processor in a lot of ways. It's really more of a SMP system with a ring-topology interconnect than a traditional SMT processor. You have to specifically build your design around it, but if you do so it's really fast. It's actually only recently that general-purpose x86 has caught up enough that it's feasible to emulate it. It would have been a very desirable piece of hardware for HPC, if you had stuff tailored to that architecture.
You only need multiple Titans if you insist on 4K ultra with everything turned up all the way. Consoles typically don't do that, it's always a graphical compromise to make the hardware work at some reasonable level of graphical fidelity. And typically they only target a 30fps framerate anyway.
I have to make the same compromises myself - some settings hurt much more than others as you increase the resolution, but you can find some balance that looks good. Anything that can't be played at 4K can be played at 1440p High or 1080p Ultra and upscaled. 4K is pixel-dense enough that some destructive resizing from 1440p isn't a big deal, or 1080p scales perfectly 4:1. Right now most consoles are doing medium-quality 720p and scaling up the output, so ultra-1080p is still a big step forward compared to a console.
Right now the Playstation 4 has 1152 GCN 1.0 cores, so it's between the performance of a Radeon HD 7850 (1024 GCN 1.0 cores) and the 7870 (1280 cores). Something in the 390 or 970-class would probably be reasonable, that's about 80-90% faster. Maybe 980 or 390X-class on the high end, which are 100-110% faster. And remember that on consoles you get the benefit of a single hardware set that you can optimize for, and play low-level micro-optimization tricks with (GCN is great for this).
Nobody knows where the new Polaris/Pascal chips will fall on the scale, but that performance tier will probably be considered a midrange chip at that point.
Do I think Sony will invest that much in a premium hardware configuration? I have my doubts. But it's certainly possible to make an engineered solution that will play 4K@30fps reasonably well inside a console footprint, particularly once we get the node shrink from Polaris/Pascal.
Plus, it's not even talked about in the article. What motivated your comment?