Nvidia Claims PS4 Is Only as Good as a "Low-End" PC

[Neyon]

Technically what he says is true but it isn't a fair comparison really. That year old (I'm not exactly sure how march 2012 is more than a year and a half ago) GTX 680 still retails for ~£390 upwards on its own. No, a next gen console won't be as powerful as a high-end gaming rig today. In a few years even low end systems will trump it with ease. However that would be the case even if they did use a high-end GPU such as the 680 or 7970.

Consoles can't be upgraded in the way a PC can, meaning to improve performance you have to buy the next version rather than replacing only a few parts. This next console version may take a very long time to arrive, while PC hardware is updated fairly regularly. However hardware stability and standardization allows developers to more efficiently use the hardware console gamers are using. So in the end games optimised for consoles can outperform those on a more powerful PC that the software has not been optimised for - at least in the early days of the consoles lifespan before hardware moves way ahead again.

 

[n00beffect]

This is ridiculous:

No console, no matter what gen it is could ever compete with PC/laptops in terms of hardware, because PCs and Laptops are ADAPTABLE. You can upgrade them, while with consoles you don't have that luxury. It's really that simple.

So this claim, in and of itself is meaningless - of course it's *going to be* a low-end pc one day, because high-end pc's will have evolved past what we call 'high performance' now. Stop quibbling over bollocks, will ya? Guy's obviously pissed because they lost their bid, that's pretty obvious.

This claim is just one bitter CEO going 'Yeah? Well WE are happy that we couldn't supply you with our hardware, because we prefer PC's anyway, and your console sucks by the way, so NYEH! (spits out his tongue)'

 

[destroyer2k]

Why should we compare a new machine to average computers, majority of which are old?

The whole point is that the PS4 is below average gaming computers bought now, not to mention when the PS4 releases.

You sir deserve a medal here is your prize: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_does_average_mean

And the point is: if let say 500k bought a new gaming pc does that mean all of steam 50 million user have a better pc?

The answer is NO the average still represent the most used gaming pc.

 

[rofltehcat]

Imo, raw power is no longer a must. I don't want games to look more "realistic", I want them to have great art styles that are consistent in themselves and give me a great feeling. Sadly, "realism" today means mainly adding more brown into moder military shooters.

I'll still stick to my pc, so meh, don't care much either way. The most it affects me is that I need to upgrade my pc less frequently. So I'll buy new hardware every 4 years instead of every 3 or so?

 

[Ishigami]

He is right but he is also wrong.
He is right that the PC will outperform the PS4 or any other console but it matters little.
Many games are made for consoles because that is where they sell. If you compare game sales between a console and a PC, the PC business can be deemed almost as charity.
UbiSoft threatened the PC players several times with dropping support of the PC due to laughable bad sales.
CryTek who is basically the only company to challenge the top tier hardware these days is making a huge loss on every Crysis they put out there. They don't really care because their games are not their real product but only a prove of concept for their 3D engine. (So are the titles of id or Epic)
And even these guys had to make their engine run on consoles in the end to adapt to the market.
Boast about your PC specs all you want, I too own a very powerful PC and is my preferred platform these days, but for the average publisher this is not a platform they could focus on.
Mind you I'm not saying there is no business to be made on the PC. Valve is doing well and so is Blizzard or CD Project. But lets also be honest these are more or less the exception to the rule. Unless you cater towards a niche and/or keep your budget in check, therefore limiting how much you can use the hardware, it is rather hard to be profitable on the PC. (Blizzards games are always made with a not powerful PC in mind: Look at WoW, D3 or SC2, it has to run in South Korean internet cafès)
Valve is doing great due to Steam which is basically a console platform on the PC and still highly regarded by many (not me). Blizzard has WoW still paying most of their bills and CD Project is keeping their budgets low due to their location in a low cost country.
You can't expect everyone going these roads and being successful, it is not like they haven't tried: Uplay, Origin, SW:ToR and relocating Devs on a large scale to locations with tax advantages e.g. Montreal.
If your a publisher and you want to produce a game with high production value the only option is to release to the consoles. You can't pour 20+ Million into a game that may only sell 500k units. You need sales in the millions and to get that on the PC is very, very hard.
Deep Down and the new Killzone that where shown for the PS4 looked better than anything I currently run on my PC and my PC is supposed to be more powerful than the PS4 already. But it does not matter because there is no software for all that power I have.
Crysis may be more advanced technology wise (I don't know) but tbh it does not show. I'm wowed visually by Deep Down not so much Crysis. Maybe because I know Crysis is just a FPS and Deep Down could be anything in my omagaination atm.

I'm glad the new consoles are in sight. And I hope they are designed in a way that allows the companies involved to turn a profit in less time even if it means that they are not as powerful as they could be. I too think this cycle was too long but it was that long because Sony and Microsoft put out their hardware with a loss in the first place and that was due to the demand of players to get a stronger hardware.
Well that backfired in the long run didn't it?

Well lets see what the PS4 will costs I doubt that they will repeat their 599$ and 499$ mistake of the PS3. Therefore I say it may be 399$.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

Console hardware isn't really relevant is it? I mean, despite the specs of the X360 or the PS3, they have made some truly remarkable games for those consoles.

Conversely, just imagine how much better Uncharted, Heavy Rain or Halo would work/look on PCs.

Console hardware is really relevant. I don't know why you'd say it's irrelevant.

"despite the specs of the X360 or the PS3, they have made some truly remarkable games for those consoles."

You don't need a lot of processor power if you know how to use what you have efficiently.

 

[Stavros Dimou]

No,I'll have to disagree with him.
While ps4 can't top the fastest pcs of today,it isn't really similar to a 'low end'.
I'd call it comparable to a medium/mainstream performance PC.
It seems the power of its graphics card sits somewhere between AMD HD 7850 and AMD HD 7870.
That's on the middle of the performance spectrum. Sure there are more powerful cards,as there are also weaker cards.
My thinking is that cards from 1$ to 100$ are low end,from 101$ to 249$ medium,and from 250$ and up high end.

 

[Andy Shandy]

So yeah, I can't really say I give much of a fuck about this sort of shit, so long as the games themselves that are on the system are good quality. And by that I mean that they're fun or engaging etc not that they are shiny.

 

[The Comfy Chair]

Console hardware isn't really relevant is it? I mean, despite the specs of the X360 or the PS3, they have made some truly remarkable games for those consoles.

Conversely, just imagine how much better Uncharted, Heavy Rain or Halo would work/look on PCs.

Console hardware is really relevant. I don't know why you'd say it's irrelevant.

"despite the specs of the X360 or the PS3, they have made some truly remarkable games for those consoles."

You don't need a lot of processor power if you know how to use what you have efficiently.

Exactly, which is why it's so great that the optimization of engines like unreal engine applies 100% to PC too. Grab a 360 esque PC (go for a ~2.5-3GHz C2D and a 8600GT since they're roughly in the ballpark) and it will play games like a 360 does (720p, 30fps, mostly low settings on textures ect. with some mediums on effects) pretty much without fail really (some games will even look better, like source engine ones will run sublime on it compared to a 360). I know that breaks the whole fallacy of 'optimization makes a console as good as a much more powerful PC' but myths deserve to be busted.

What has held back the difference of PC and console games in terms of 'the games look the same' is youtube. Youtube is blurry, 30fps and 720p (1080p videos are marginally better but still blurry). Console gaming is blurry, 30fps, and 720p. PC gaming looks prettier, crisper, smoother ect. without any effort being made by the dev at all, but is displayed with a blurry, 30fps, 720p video. When work is put into a PC version, it can look amazing, but you'll never see that properly in a youtube video. Hell, even battlefield 3 doesn't look much different on youtube and that game looks insanely good at times on the PC (people who *have* to have a console are in for a treat when battlefield 4 on PS4 gives you a glimpse of what we've had on PC with BF3). It's also why the PS4 launch videos didn't look that much better than current gen games either from our perspective.

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

Oh great, exactly what we needed. Another fucking console war. Only this time it's been console players and PC supporters.

Also, the guy's comments sound like something that might have been relevant in 2004. Nowadays when the budgets of the biggest releases rival those of your average Michael Bay flick and we're constantly talking about how the prices of games are approaching the breaking point, the guy still wants to "harness the power of newer GPUs for more performance and to take advantage of newer, modern graphics technologies." More pixels! More polygons! More lighting effects! Sharper textures! More surface! Screw actual content, we need to make it as shiny as possible!!!

 

[Moonlight Butterfly]

Compared to my PC I didn't think the stats were that impressive at all. But I play consoles for the exclusives not for the graphics.

 

[The Comfy Chair]

Oh great, exactly what we needed. Another fucking console war. Only this time it's been console players and PC supporters.

Also, the guy's comments sound like something that might have been relevant in 2004. Nowadays when the budgets of the biggest releases rival those of your average Michael Bay flick and we're constantly talking about how the prices of games are approaching the breaking point, the guy still wants to "harness the power of newer GPUs for more performance and to take advantage of newer, modern graphics technologies." More pixels! More polygons! More lighting effects! Sharper textures! More surface! Screw actual content, we need to make it as shiny as possible!!!

The advantage of power is that it's easier to make pretty or more interactive games. Compare the graphics of small productions today versus small productions on roughly the same budget 5 or 10 years ago for example. If anything the spiraling costs of AAA production is amplified by stagnant console tech requiring thousands of man hours of cutting down and squeezing everything into the limited performance envelope (this also benefits PC, but bleh, it doesn't help developers at all, which is why console devs are going bankrupt left, right, and centre, whilst PC centric devs seem to do fine). That's not just visuals, that's everything in a game.

So a bump in performance makes it easier and cheaper for developers to make the same standard of game.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

The fact that Nvidia lost the PS4 bid to their rival doesn't really bode well for Nvidia trash-talking the PS4 like this. The whole thing comes off as something as tactful as EA tends to do in Press Releases.

Sony didn't want to pay a lot of money. They said this for years because they can't afford it.

This is especially true if Sony were set on using a SoC/APU processor because... well, Intel graphics tech is still too far behind the curve and nVidia GPGPUs (CUDA cores) cost a bundle. That left whatever AMD was willing to offer for the price...

Well, okay, they could have gone with ARM based SoCs but that's smartphone/tablet tech and it's currently the fastest developing tech around. Doesn't seem a good idea to put out a console that could, within 2 years, be outstripped by phones, tablets and cheap Android powered consoles.

Plus, out of AMD, Intel and nVidia it's AMD that really needs the financial shot in the arm that this sort of component contract can bring.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

The advantage of power is that it's easier to make pretty or more interactive games.

The real advantage to raw computing power in game dev is not having to spend millions optimising your game.

 

[The Comfy Chair]

The advantage of power is that it's easier to make pretty or more interactive games.

The real advantage to raw computing power in game dev is not having to spend millions optimising your game.

Yep, i mentioned that

If anything the spiraling costs of AAA production is amplified by stagnant console tech requiring thousands of man hours of cutting down and squeezing everything into the limited performance envelope (this also benefits PC, but bleh, it doesn't help developers at all, which is why console devs are going bankrupt left, right, and centre, whilst PC centric devs seem to do fine). That's not just visuals, that's everything in a game.

It's why the Witcher 2 on PC had a dev cost of around $10m or so, but looks better than any console game ever made in terms of graphical oomph, whilst also being a very deep game. Sure, it was a bit of a performance hog on max settings, but that doesn't matter so much. I'd rather have a very pretty, complex game than one that runs a bit better but had to sacrifice the former two.

In the end, we can upgrade hardware, we can't get a sequel to a game if the studio goes bankrupt optimizing.

 

[Colt47]

Well, the Xbox 360 GPU was about as powerful as a 7800 or 7900gt. Comparing that to the hit at the time on PCs, the 8800gtx, the console GPU had about 1/3 the FPS of the later in power. However, the console still ran games optimized for it at decent FPS.

So yeah, the guy is being an idiot and just really doesn't like the fact that they lost out on a good manufacturing deal. Truth be told I think Nvidia is in a pretty hard spot at the moment, as AMD is providing a much better value with their top end GPUs than Nvidia is (assuming AMD doesn't make the mistake of hardware locking the damn voltage on newer 7970s that aren't GHZ edition). Likewise, as much as project shield is a good product and will fill a niche, the PS4 is going to be making a bigger splash on the market than what essentially equates to the PC equivalent of a Wii U tablet controller (or eventually the PS Vita).

As far as optimization goes: it's an expensive business, but the fact that the system now uses a sensible hardware architecture, it shouldn't be as difficult to scale things back for the console.

 

[Athefist]

Seems like he is openly pandering to the stereotypical PC elitist.

That's exactly what he's doing. Nvidia's had a couple years to fix one issue with its cards crashing TF2, and hasn't managed even that. Before they start throwing stones, they should fix their glass houses. http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1774666

 

[The Comfy Chair]

Well, the Xbox 360 GPU was about as powerful as a 7800 or 7900gt. Comparing that to the hit at the time on PCs, the 8800gtx, the console GPU had about 1/3 the FPS of the later in power. However, the console still ran games optimized for it at decent FPS.

So yeah, the guy is being an idiot and just really doesn't like the fact that they lost out on a good manufacturing deal. Truth be told I think Nvidia is in a pretty hard spot at the moment, as AMD is providing a much better value with their top end GPUs than Nvidia is (assuming AMD doesn't make the mistake of hardware locking the damn voltage on newer 7970s that aren't GHZ edition). Likewise, as much as project shield is a good product and will fill a niche, the PS4 is going to be making a bigger splash on the market than what essentially equates to the PC equivalent of a Wii U tablet controller (or eventually the PS Vita).

You're forgetting the 8800GTX could run those games on 1920x1080, and still can run games like mass effect 3 (that didn't do anything special with the PC version) at that resolution perfectly fine with high settings. It's still a good workhorse today, and that's because of the consoles pinning down the minimum specs. The 360 runs game like a 8600GT does (worse, in fact, with some engines like source which are tailored more for PC), which is roughly 7800/900GT performance. So optimization really didn't account for much.

P.S. Yes, the HD7970 is a beastly card, and i love all the game offers AMD are doing recently When the gtx670 came out nvidia were in a good place this gen at the higher end, but they never followed up with cuts after AMD reduced the price of the HD7950/70.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

And now I'm gonna tell you why this is what nvidia thinks. You see, the PS4 and the Nextbox will use AMD's hardware. AMD's CPU and AMD's GPU. So the architecture is similar to that of a PC. In theory that means that porting from PS4 to PC will be easier. Also in theory, this means that porting to AMD powered PC is easier than porting to Nvidia GPU powered PC. This puts a lot of pressure on Nvidia. It puts some on Intel as well, seeing how they have their own line of CPU's.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if Nvidia and Intel team up to officially support as many PC exclusive titles as they possibly can once next-gen consoles hit the market.

 

[Colt47]

Well, the Xbox 360 GPU was about as powerful as a 7800 or 7900gt. Comparing that to the hit at the time on PCs, the 8800gtx, the console GPU had about 1/3 the FPS of the later in power. However, the console still ran games optimized for it at decent FPS.

So yeah, the guy is being an idiot and just really doesn't like the fact that they lost out on a good manufacturing deal. Truth be told I think Nvidia is in a pretty hard spot at the moment, as AMD is providing a much better value with their top end GPUs than Nvidia is (assuming AMD doesn't make the mistake of hardware locking the damn voltage on newer 7970s that aren't GHZ edition). Likewise, as much as project shield is a good product and will fill a niche, the PS4 is going to be making a bigger splash on the market than what essentially equates to the PC equivalent of a Wii U tablet controller (or eventually the PS Vita).

You're forgetting the 8800GTX could run those games on 1920x1080, and still can run games like mass effect 3 (that didn't do anything special with the PC version) at that resolution perfectly fine with high settings. It's still a good workhorse today, and that's because of the consoles pinning down the minimum specs.

P.S. Yes, the HD7970 is a beastly card, and i love all the game offers AMD are doing recently When the gtx670 came out nvidia were in a good place this gen at the higher end, but they never followed up with cuts after AMD reduced the price of the HD7950/70.

Yeah, that's the other thing. Consoles get the luxury of being optimized to run games at lower resolution since the typical TV is 720p compared to 1920x1080 or 1920x1200. That's a huge difference in required processing power.