PS4 Architect: 3 to 4 Years Before Developers Get Used to PS4

[StewShearerOld]

PS4 Architect: 3 to 4 Years Before Developers Get Used to PS4

Sony designed the PS4 to be immediately distinguishable from the PS3 graphically.

When you reach the end of a console generation it's fairly easy, looking back on the years of games behind, to see just how far things have come. Sometimes, at the beginning of a new generation, however, that's not so much the case. With developers still getting the hang of new hardware it can take some time for studios to really start using new consoles to their full potential. Mark Cerny, lead architect behind the PS4, expects things to be pretty much the same with the newest iteration of the PlayStation.

According to Cerny, developers probably won't be taking full advantage of the PS4's hardware strength until "year three or year four of the console." That being the case, Cerny and Sony tried to design the PS4 in such a way that the power difference between it and its predecessor would be noticeable with a mere glance. "We set our target at 10 times the PlayStation 3's performance, because that's what we felt we needed to achieve in order to differentiate the titles," he said. "I knew that at some point, there'd be out on the sidewalk a PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4, and they might even be showing the same game, and the PlayStation 4 had to be powerful enough that when people walked by, they had to look at the PlayStation 4 and say, 'Wow, I have to have that.'"

It would seem that Cerny and company did a good job. Sony has recently reported that more one million PS4's have been pre-ordered worldwide, a figure that Cerny is understandably proud of. "I believe we are at that level of performance," he said. "I mean, the million pre-orders we have is, I think, speaking to that."

Source: <a href=http://www.polygon.com/2013/8/27/4663442/cerny-ps4-devs-will-get-more-out-of-the-hardware-in-year-three-or-four>Polygon


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[frobalt]

10 times more powerful though....Wow, did not realise they were being that ambitious with it.

 

[The White Hunter]

So 8 years before rockstar learns how to develop for x86. Got ya, will skip the GTA 5 PC port next year then.

 

[BloodSquirrel]

That's about how long it took last generation. Of course, they talked about "untapped potential" years after graphics for this gen had plateaued.

To a large extend, graphics are reaching the point where they're going to be bounded more by the art team's ability than technology. It used to be that you could make your game look more realistic just by quadrupling the poly count, but we're getting to the point where it's going to be like drawing a photo-realistic scene with watercolors; the technology is there, but it's something that takes a lot of talent and skill.

The gains we're going to be getting that will be noticeable immediately:

-1080P
-60FPS
-No texture pop-in
-Higher rez textures

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

It's an x86 system. What's there to get used to?

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

Its X86 it should not be that hard.....

 

[Tanakh]

10 times more powerful though....Wow, did not realise they were being that ambitious with it.

Ahh... brah don't fall for it, that is actually the bare minimum they should aim for. Look at this chart http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html and as you can see the current best card is about 11 times better than the best card back when the ps3 was launched.

10 times more powerful is barely enough to somewhat keep up with the PC growth rate, nothing more.

Also, for the X86 posters, yeah, I think the developer ment it would take 3 to 4 years to fully utilize the full power of the PS4 while optimizing for it. It might be true, but only due monetary and multiplataform focus of the developers, not because it would be hard.

 

[ph0b0s123]

Or as I have said so many times in this forum, before and after the PS4 was even confirmed, they should have been using the PC market to bring out their next gen titles.

But no, opportunity missed and the PC just got rubbish ports of current generation titles.

Now console gamers will have to wait 3 years for the titles they could have had now if developers had had better foresight.

OK, now everyone who disagreed with my point can start apologizing, over the following pages.....

 

[Kenjitsuka]

Three or four years?
With the insanely difficult CELL cpu, sure.

But this... This is a *PC*, and you know it.
So it's not gonna take all those years to max it out.
Sure, there will be a way better engine in 4 years, that's for sure.

But just figuring out how the hardware works best... that's been done for the past dozen years.

 

[Ukomba]

Which is why backwards comparability is useful.

 

[Korten12]

Which is why backwards comparability is useful.

Native BC would have been way to expensive. The PS3 has really weird hardware and so it makes native BC really hard to implement.

 

[Covarr]

Which is why backwards comparability is useful.

Native BC would have been way to expensive. The PS3 has really weird hardware and so it makes native BC really hard to implement.

So did the PS2. The PS3 only managed it by building a whole PS2 right into the machine. They could do the same to the PS4, but it would bump the cost by at least $150, probably more.

P.S. Thanks

 

[Hairless Mammoth]

This "developers won't unleash it's true potential for a while" phrase has been thrown around in previous generations. It kinda worked with the PS3 since it had that ridiculous cell processor, but that still had a mid-range GPU that was behind a GPU-generation when it was released. Now you got a dedicated mid-range x86 gaming pc that will be behind a generation or two when it is released, the same pattern as always. They already know most of the hardware. The only thing to get use to is the OS and APIs, which I thought were supposed to be easier to program for.

 

[BloodSquirrel]

It's basically a PC. What is there to get used to? It's using stock x86 architecture. If developers have already programmed to max out a high end PC, they'll be able to push the PS4 as hard as it can go. We're already seeing some of this potentially appear with the news that the PS4 version of Battlefield 4 is downscaled from the PC version, or that Killzone SF will only run in 30fps during the campaign mode.

You really, really should do some research into how PCs and consoles actually work.

PC development is *very* heavily insulated from the hardware. You're writing to the Windows API and DirectX/OpenGL, not to the system architecture. Your memory access is controlled by the operation system. The x86 machine code that needs to be run directly by the game is produced by a compiler. Back in the day you might have done some optimization of your code by directly writing some of the most crucial parts yourself in assembly, but if try to do anything outside of the little box that Windows creates for your program to run in, Windows will slap your for trying to access memory locations that aren't assigned to you and your game will crash.

That's why the same binary can run on both Windows XP and Windows 8, as well as on a multitude of hardware configurations. You don't even need to know what x86 architecture is in order to make a PC game. It's also why that same binary *won't* run on Linux, even on the exact same hardware.

Consoles, on the other hand-

This isn't some hardware heavyweight here. It's pretty well known that this point that the PS4 is using pretty middle of the road components compared to what's available on the PC market. There's nothing wrong with that, but similarly it's wrong to try and suggest that it's somehow going to be a juggernaut that stops developers reaching the ceiling until 3 or 4 years from now.

Every console generation has been, at best, middle of the road hardware at launch. The advantages of coding to fixed hardware with greater access to the nuts and bolts of the system is why we have games looking as good as they do today on hardware that was ho-hum 8 years ago. There's no way in hell you'd get the latest CoD looking like it does on a PC with PS3-equivalent hardware. PS4 games are going to be optimized to a degree that PC games can't be. Just like last generation, we'll have a period where that advantage eclipses the raw horsepower advantage of PCs before PC hardware becomes an order of magnitude more powerful again.

When it comes to 1080p and 60fps, you're going to likely be seeing one or the other, not both. Developers are going to be want to pushing graphics as hard as possible to make for good marketing screenshots, and you can't put 60fps or 1080p in a marketing screenshot. They'll do as they've been doing since this generation, targeting 1080p 60fps for PC builds, then downscaling those for console games in order to make up the difference in specs.

This console generation's hardware simply isn't powerful enough for 1080p to be worth it. The new hardware is. Meanwhile, diminishing returns are setting in with things like increasing the poly budget. Adding more details to the environment is becoming prohibitively costly from a production standpoint. Oh yeah, and marketing screenshots are BS anyways, so they're hardly constrained by the end product needing to be at 1080p/60fps.

 

[-Dragmire-]

Three to four years? Which is about when they'll be asking us to buy the PS 5 because sony needs their mony

Not likely, at that point they will probably just start making a profit on it. Consoles are loss leaders, you really don't want to do that often when your profit mainly comes from games sold on those consoles.

 

[Strazdas]

i dont think it will take 3 to 4 years. they got used to PS3 faster than that, and that was a leap into unique design. while PS4 will be similar to PC and Xbox, meaning that people who developed for PC are already used to PS4. Oh right, everyone kinda abandoned "Develop for pc, port to consoles" strategy. so yeah your loss.

10 times more powerful though....Wow, did not realise they were being that ambitious with it.

frankly, a used office computer is almost 10 times more powerful than what PS3 gave (PS3 is very powerful on paper, was NEVER, NOT ONCE used in even half of its power. problem is - the cell structure is hell to code for).

PC development is *very* heavily insulated from the hardware. You're writing to the Windows API and DirectX/OpenGL, not to the system architecture.

And since Xbone is running win 8 you will be doing the same for consoles. Well that is if Sony can cough up a reliable OS API and some form of directx alternative.

 

[WWmelb]

On the 1080p topic, why is that so many early releases on the PS3 had 1080p, but as we moved further into the generation, they became less and less frequent, to the point where i haven't seen a game released in 1080p for a couple of years now?

You would think as they learn the system and how to milk it, they would be able to do 1080p more often than in the beginning.

Or was it simply an issue with what would fit on a blu-ray? Games got bigger, couldn't support higher resolution textures on the disc?

Or was it because X-box didn't have 1080p support, so devs set their resolution limit at the x-box's limit? But that doesn't seem likely as even the PS3 exclusives seemed to drop 1080p resolutions.

I just remember that the first Bioshock is still one of the most awesome looking games on PS3 when played in 1080.

 

[Lightknight]

10 times more powerful though....Wow, did not realise they were being that ambitious with it.

Ahh... brah don't fall for it, that is actually the bare minimum they should aim for. Look at this chart http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html and as you can see the current best card is about 11 times better than the best card back when the ps3 was launched.

You have to balance the power you want it to have with the amount of money you think customers are willing to pay. The $400 mark is right there in the sweet spot and 10x's the ps3 sounds pretty good considering what they are already capable of doing right now on the ps3. We should see significant advances in AI and physics which will do more for realism than just throwing more polygons at the problem will. Sony could absolutely have released a $1,000 machine that would be a huge upgrade but would not be purchased. At $400, this is far better than I thought they would be able to do.

10 times more powerful is barely enough to somewhat keep up with the PC growth rate, nothing more.

You did well to use video cards as an indicator, but don't forget to account for CPUs/GPUs, RAM speeds and HDD read/write speeds as well as anything else that would touch it. Though CPUs don't really matter as much anymore now that they really just glorified load balancers with RAM handling the actual processing in modern pcs.

Also, for the X86 posters, yeah, I think the developer ment it would take 3 to 4 years to fully utilize the full power of the PS4 while optimizing for it

Yes, it is important to realise that consoles having standard hardware allows for optimizations in a way that pc's don't allow. When the developers know all of the components of a machine directly, they can really get the most out of it whereas a pc with cobbled together components can't be optimized in that way. So even with x86 making things easier, it doesn't wave away the advantages of standardized equipment or the challenges involved in getting the most out of it.

Great post as always, Tanakh.