EA Exec: Xbox One and PS4 Are "A Generation Ahead" Of PC

[Me55enger]

Someone let EA's PR team out of the Isocubes again...

 

[spartandude]

Really Taneja? S@£t. I think it's time you bought yourself a new pc, your pc must be still running windows xp.

its funny you say that because until last month i was still running xp, and tbh i was rather comfortable for some high end games, ive just upgraded to future proof myself for a few years

 

[The White Hunter]

That's a bold statement and Taneja offers no details to back it up, but I have to wonder how either the Xbone or the PS4 would stack up against a PC built around, say, a 4.5 Ghz quad-core CPU and three Nvidia Titans - since we are, after all, talking about the "highest-end PCs" available. Or is he referring to mass-market machines, the sort of off-the-rack (but still relatively "high-end") Dell rig your mom might buy to send emails and play hidden object games? That's a different scenario entirely, and one in which this comparison fits far more easily - but that's also a demographic that's far less likely to be interested in what Rajat Taneja thinks about the coming generation of consoles.

Don't be silly, since Sim City it's clear as day what he means, "EA Sports games require the power of the cloud to run", but the power of the cloud is still not strong enough for yearly roster updates.

At some point, both Sony and Microsoft will release detailed specs about the hardware in, and performance of, their new gaming consoles - and until it does, claims like this, even coming from a guy who'd appear to be in a position to know, are just going to look silly.

Anandtech had an interesting article on that: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6972/xbox-one-hardware-compared-to-playstation-4

Forgive me but I hate the way these people throw around "The CLoud", the cloud is anything past your own closed system, it's not some magical thing, it's a bloody server. I wish they'd just call it private hosting/storage.

OT: No, you and I have very different ideas of high end. A machine bought now for say, £400? Yes, the PS4 is probably going to show it up due to the corners you'd cut to get there. However, a £600-£1000 machine will beat it all the way to the bank.

And 600-1000 is mid range. High end we're talking socket 2011 and quadfire.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

If he limited himself to saying that the PS4 is a generation ahead of the PC, I would have no beef with this. Because frankly, it kind of is with it's 8 gigs of GDDR5 and a very good 8 core x86 processor plus a pretty solid 1.8tflops GPU and a massive memory bandwidth that makes me stand in awe. Consoles can use their power a lot more efficiently than most PC's. Even if they are less powerful. But the Xbox One is already very far behind. 8 gigs of DDR3 and a 1.2tflops GPU is pretty weak regardless of how they manage to distribute that power. My 4.9Ghz i7, AMD 7890 and 16gb of DDR3 demolish the Xbox One.

Now all this console power won't make any difference when the consoles are released. DDR4 and GDDR5 are both coming to PC in 2014 along with new processors, graphics cards and motherboards. PC will be the most powerful machine by the end of the second quarter of 2014 probably. Not to mention one thing that really makes a huge difference and consoles don't have it. The motherfuckin' SSD.

 

[KaZuYa]

Also not being funny but everytime I see a picture of a EA or Microsoft executive they look like someone with either some kind of mental illness or someone with such a fake smile you know they are reading it off a card and have absolutely no idea what they are saying or what it means.

 

[Baldr]

Typical EA, putting the foot in the mouth. He could of had a valid point. The majority of computers out there are dinosaurs and game developers pretty much have to take that into consideration when developing games.

 

[Another]

Ahahahahahaha! I built most of my pc 3 years ago, and I still have better stats than the Xbox one and PS4 (Exception is processor, have better clock speed but fewer cores). Only thing I upgraded was my graphics card recently to a 680.

God, the industry as a whole has just been painful to listen to the last few days.

The cpu is more akin to the kind of cpus you find in tablets. It's not a match for even a modern dual core. Anandtech have an article on the jaguar architecture. Don't get me wrong, it's a fantastic architecture from amd, but it's a netbook one, not a high performance one (i.e. desktop pc and normal sized laptop) like Intel core or amd bulldozer.

Did not realize that. Good to know. In that case my pc is all around superior. I guess my only concern at that point is how well the pc ports are optimized at that point, but that always varies game to game.

Captcha: one hit wonder. How apt for the xbox brand.

 

[Raesvelg]

You do realize that, aside from the incredible bias present in the way it was reported here, he never actually said that the new consoles will be more powerful than current high-end PCs?

Because he didn't.

It's easy to conflate his statement about the new consoles being more powerful than the old consoles with his statement about the system architecture being a generation ahead of current PC architecture. But it's still a mistake to do so.

Whether or not he's correct in the statement he actually made, of course, is... debatable. SoC architecture has some significant advantages, to be sure, but you can't upgrade individual components on that chip, obviously. For single-purpose, mass-produced devices like consoles and tablets though, his statement is incontrovertibly true.

 

[Paragon Fury]

Intel i7 CPU @3.20GHz, 6 Cores
12GB RAM
AMD HD Radeon Series 6800 w/1GB VRAM x2
2TB HDD

Even with my 3 year old comps' couple of weaknesses (older GPU, HDD isn't solid state) it eats this "next generation" alive.

Your move EA.

 

[The Comfy Chair]

You do realize that, aside from the incredible bias present in the way it was reported here, he never actually said that the new consoles will be more powerful than current high-end PCs?

Because he didn't.

It's easy to conflate his statement about the new consoles being more powerful than the old consoles with his statement about the system architecture being a generation ahead of current PC architecture. But it's still a mistake to do so.

Whether or not he's correct in the statement he actually made, of course, is... debatable. SoC architecture has some significant advantages, to be sure, but you can't upgrade individual components on that chip, obviously. For single-purpose, mass-produced devices like consoles and tablets though, his statement is incontrovertibly true.

But PCs have had SoCs for a few years now In fact, the exact architectures used in the xbox and PS4 SoCs are to appear in netbooks within a couple of months. The xbox and PS4 are just using an AMD APU. Sure, they're APUs that have a vastly different CPU/GPU ratio (normal APUs have a vastly superior CPU and a weaker GPU than the PS4/Xbone), but APUs all the same.

The reason no-one uses them in high end PCs, and the reason AMD don't make high end APUs (instead making high end CPUs and high end GPUs, both vastly vastly more powerful than either aspect of the APU), is due to the issue with heat. High end PC components (CPU + GPU combined) draw over 3x more power than what the xbone and ps4 will draw. It's just not something you can slap a heat spreader on and call a day. They have to be separate. It's also why they're massively more powerful to boot.

 

[ph0b0s123]

Wow, the new consoles will be a generation ahead. How are they accomplishing that, a new revolutionary CPU and GPU that can process stuff faster than we have ever seen, something out of the box like the cell CPU was supposed to be in the PS3?

No, just an APU that AMD designed to be aimed at tablets and smart phones later in the year. http://wccftech.com/amd-cut-down-version-playstation-4-jaguar-apu-consumers/

So both the new consoles that are taking all their design que's straight from the PC market, will be a generation a head of PC's even though using the same hardware. Hardware from the PC chip marker who repeatably cannot compete with the CPU power of the other PC chip marker Intel. Someone want to explain that logic to me....

These comments might have worked a generation ago with the PS4, as it's CPU was so left field and no-one knew what to expect from it. But just get getting PC hardware and sticking a Sony or Microsoft badge on the front does not make is suddenly a great deal faster. The same way sticking a Ferrari badge on a medium sized family car does not make it a supercar.

The hardware will punch above it's entry level weight but not by very much.

If he limited himself to saying that the PS4 is a generation ahead of the PC, I would have no beef with this. Because frankly, it kind of is with it's 8 gigs of GDDR5 and a very good 8 core x86 processor plus a pretty solid 1.8tflops GPU and a massive memory bandwidth that makes me stand in awe. Consoles can use their power a lot more efficiently than most PC's. Even if they are less powerful. But the Xbox One is already very far behind. 8 gigs of DDR3 and a 1.2tflops GPU is pretty weak regardless of how they manage to distribute that power. My 4.9Ghz i7, AMD 7890 and 16gb of DDR3 demolish the Xbox One.

Now all this console power won't make any difference when the consoles are released. DDR4 and GDDR5 are both coming to PC in 2014 along with new processors, graphics cards and motherboards. PC will be the most powerful machine by the end of the second quarter of 2014 probably. Not to mention one thing that really makes a huge difference and consoles don't have it. The motherfuckin' SSD.

How is the PS4 so far ahead of the Xbox One when it uses the same frickin APU from AMD as the One does?. The DDR4 and GDDR5 hardly makes any difference. As linked above the APU was designed by AMD to be used in smart phones a tablets. So these next consoles are only going to be a bit faster than some to be releases smartphones and tablets. Generations ahead my a$$.

 

[templar1138a]

From what I've been reading, that "generation ahead" is the result of inbreeding and drug abuse during pregnancy.

 

[The Comfy Chair]

The thing people forget when considering the PS4's 8GB of GDDR5 memory is that the GPU can only do so much work anyway. None of the upper mid range PC cards like the HD7970 or GTX670 need to ever go above their provided memory (3GB and 2GB respectively) and when more memory is provided it doesn't provide any real boost to performance. A PS4 has something more akin to a hd7850, and will never effectively use more than 2GB of that 8GB.

The reason for 8GB is that the system still needs that amount of ystem memory for the CPU to do it's thing, but you need the bandwidth for the GPU part to do it's thing (The GPU aspect of APUs scales well with faster memory). PCs get around this by having 8GB of DDR3 (~20GB/s) for the CPU (more than enough for even beastly CPUs that are up to 10x faster than the PS4s) and 2-3GB of GDDR5 running at 220-250GB/s for the GPU.

The PS4 can't do this because it's an APU with one memory bus. So the simplest solution is to simply give it the faster memory. Sure, it's excessive for the CPU, which could get by on very little bandwidth (which is why DDR3 is still standard for PC). But it does give the GPU the bandwidth it needs, even if it wont ever utilize more than a quarter of the total, whilst also giving the CPU the total memory it needs, even if it wont use the bandwidth.

Microsoft are showing their PC roots a bit with their modifications though. Instead of getting a load of GDDR5 for the CPU and GPU, they used slower DDR3 memory with a high bandwidth buffer for the GPU, so the GPU has the bandwidth it needs whilst still using slower overall system memory. This is closer to a traditional PC setup than PS4s more 'standard' APU, but the small amount of the extra memory (32MB) may prove troublesome. However, since the xbox one also only has a GPU equivalent to a HD7770, it probably wont run into bandwidth issues anyway.

Captcha: know the ropes, heh, not bad for essentially a 'a basic introduction to memory buses'.

 

[Lightknight]

While I would certainly question his comments, I should point out again that consoles are optimized in an entirely different way than pcs and specs are not directly comparable. Optimization includes bandwidth efficiencies.

Skyrim's minimum pc requirements requires a 2.0 GHz dual core processor, 2GB of RAM and a DX9c video card with 512MB RAM.

Yet it is playble on systems with 6-7 year old CPUs that have 512MB of RAM (The ps3 even divides its RAM into two segments).

You cannot look at their specs and think, oh, that's a pc with 512MB of RAM. It won't work that way.

That being said, I do have a hard time believing that the mentioned specs are ahead of the most advanced pcs on the market. We don't even know the CPU specifics on the Xbone. I'd say the PS4 at least is the equivalent of a high-end pc. But highest? I guess we won't know until we get to play with it.

 

[The Comfy Chair]

While I would certainly question his comments, I should point out again that consoles are optimized in an entirely different way than pcs and specs are not directly comparable.

Skyrim's minimum pc requirements requires a 2.0 GHz dual core processor, 2GB of RAM and a DX9c video card with 512MB RAM.

Yet it is playble on systems with 6-7 year old CPUs that have 512MB of RAM (The ps3 even divides its RAM into two segments).

A 2GHz dual core processor (like a core 2 duo, since that's the kind of thing they're referencing) isn't far off what a 360 can do, and skyrim doesn't use 512MB of vRAM at console settings. Sure, it uses more system RAM, but it can afford to (and a lot of games simply keep many more of the assets in system memory so it doesn't have to do things like 'stream' to memory - which drains performance), and as a result it doesn't suffer from horrendous issues like the PS3 version has with running out of memory.

Like for like (based on theoretical performance), consoles have about a 15-20% edge over similar powered PCs. It's not a big difference. Grab a 7800GT and a core 2 duo at 2GHz and you'll get console like performance in most games. It's just that 'console like performance' is synonymous with 'unplayabale' nowadays.

You may not notice it if you have no choice, but when you see that you're moving every slider to the very left, every option to low, setting resolutions at a mere 1280x720 at best, you notice big time how far you are behind. Also, going under 30fps is constant on consoles now, and that would also be an instant 'need an upgrade' on PC.

It's not that console-powered PCs 'can't play games', it's just that no-one wants to play games on them because they're basically being reminded every second that they're playing the 'worst version' they can of that game, whilst others are playing it with all the pretties. At least on console when you're running at 20fps, everyone else is too. It's like how the happiest countries are the ones with the least difference in wealth between he richest and poorest. If no-one is significantly better off, you feel better.

 

[Jodah]

Rarely have I seen a more appropriate time to post this:
Seriously...this has to be a joke...please tell me this is a joke. Nobody in the industry can seriously believe this can they?

That shit may fly if you are talking about midrange laptops but midrange-high range desktops and gaming quality laptops can be well beyond the specs of either console already. He's even more wrong by the time they are actually released. The moment a console is release it is already obsolete compared to a gaming PC, that's how it's always been, and, due to the nature of technology, that's how it always will be.

 

[Chaos Marine]

Bwaha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha *Inhale* ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha *Inhale* ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha *dies of laughter*

What an idiot!

 

[Johnson McGee]

Now that the upcoming generation of console has defeated PC forever the production budgets of their games can bankrupt companies at a higher frequency than ever before!

 

[Nihlus2]

As much as I am happy to see an actual progression after 8 years of standstill in the console world (so we can finally have a unified raise in standard of games and ports)... that has got to be the funniest statement I have heard all week.

Now is the time to celebrate the broken down wagon has actually started moving again after 8 years. Don't try and glorify it as having suddenly warped the boundaries and time and space to get ahead.

...Oh EA.

 

[panosbouk]

Nvidia's senior vice president of content and development, he sees the PS4's specs as outdated, even today.
"If the PS4 ships in December as Sony indicated, it will only offer about half the performance of a GTX680 GPU (based on GFLOPS and texture), which launched in March 2012, more than a year and a half ago."

(From an articles on March 15th after the PS4 reveal)

Now we have EA comes and claims that both consoles will be better than any high end PC today? Who are they kidding?