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

[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.

 

[Megacherv]

My computer is better in every way then the PS4 except for the graphics card. Also this guy sounds elitist.

They wanted adequate money to perform a service! They didn't accept my small change!

ELITISM!

... yeah, we knew this already. The only people who take the specs of the PS4 as a super computer are fanboys who don't know anything about tech. Did anyone really expect a cheaply made console to beat the PC?

Well, he is being fairly elitist. A card that came out about a year ago that was top-end when it came out isn't going to be a horrible piece of hardware now, it's still going to be insane, graphics haven't gotten that much better in a year

 

[fix-the-spade]

There's also the argument that Nvidia may not have wanted the business, whilst AMD are currently scrabbling at anything they can get.

Nvidia seem to be shifting towards the mobile market at the moment, no doubt encouraged by the prevalence of the Tegra chip. They freely admit that they high end GPU market doesn't really make them much money, perhaps decided to go to negotiations with a set price that would make it 'worthwhile' for them, one they knew Sony wouldn't like. Whether Nvidia would actually sabotage their own contracts is pretty unlikely, but weirder things have happened.

AMDs success with the Wii may have made them more attractive too, they're much better than Nvidia at delivering to a price point.

 

[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.

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.

Pretty much, it's definitely the reason why some people think consoles kept up (they never did, it's just that when people say a PC game runs 'badly', it's running 'badly' at settings a console never came close to touching).

I wouldn't say that the games were 'optimized' for 720p though, that's kind of just what they can cope with (some games, like CoD, don't even do that). Optimization, for the most part, has applied pretty much wholesale to PC. This is because games aren't made with proprietary engines all the time that require work on making it work well on PC, 360, and PS3.

This is a good thing in the sense that ancient PCs can run games at console level. Admittedly no-one ever does, because setting everything to low is demoralizing, even if it's what consoles are 'set' to. However the bad thing about this, as mentioned previously in the thread, is the immense cost of the optimization has done a lot of damage to many studios.

 

[Gearhead mk2]

Of course, this only matters if you're the kind of gamer that buys games to look at the pretty graphics and not, you know, PLAY them or anything like that.

 

[The Comfy Chair]

Of course, this only matters if you're the kind of gamer that buys games to look at the pretty graphics and not, you know, PLAY them or anything like that.

Because as we all know, gameplay has never, ever been improved by hardware. Which is why no game has ever more complex gameplay than pong. That's all we ever play, prettied up pong. For example:

Call of pong: modern ballfare
Battlepong 3
Guild pong 2
The walking pong
Assassin's pong
Far pong 3
Pokepong
Deus pong

The list goes on.

(sorry, felt the need to assassinate your point, because it's a point that needed assassinating)

 

[Gearhead mk2]

Of course, this only matters if you're the kind of gamer that buys games to look at the pretty graphics and not, you know, PLAY them or anything like that.

Because as we all know, gameplay has never, ever been improved by hardware. Which is why no game has ever more complex gameplay than pong. That's all we ever play, prettied up pong.

Look, at least for me, graphics don't matter. I know upgrading hardware has done a lot for games and the stuff we have now wouldn't have been possible a decade ago. But this constant focus on graphics really annoys me. I like modern graphics but I'd be fine with Gamecube or even PSP level graphics, so long as I can tell what's going on. If you're gonna upgrade your tech, do it so the games can run smooth and process a large world and a large number of dynamic AIs and setpeices instead of wasting all your time and money trying to render and ragdoll every last hair in Widescreen 1080p HD 3D or whatever buzzword is being used this week.

 

[Daemascus]

Snip

Overrated, yes, but still very much a factor, especially when developers are dealing with the very limited amount of RAM. RAM availablity was the reason the PS3 couldn't access the XMB in game for so long, and it's still laggy today. If PS3 games had to run over Windows they would look infinitely more like ass. You're absolutely right with your Uncharted 3 examples, though. I think that if there's PS4 ports of late-era PS3 titles, they should at least have AA that isn't a post-process filter, sharper shadows, and maybe more texture filtering. As I've said before though, the bottleneck will always be the HDTV. No matter what hardware you stick in a console, it'll never run games at 2560p or the resolutions of triple display setups due to the limitation of the living room display. Kind of reminds me of before the PS3 release, when they were touting dual HDMI ports and the ability to use two HDTVs.

It's a case of not caring about what you haven't experienced, basically that Uncharted 3 looks amazing if you've never played a game at 60 or 120 fps with 16xAA/AF at resolutions higher than 720p. Also of note is that not all of us are grpahics whores, and couldn't give less of a damn about any of the things that we're discussing right now, much to Nvidia's dismay : )

Its worst than that sometimes. Alot of the recent consle games aren't really 720p. Its run at a lower resolution and up scaled to fit. With a few post proscesses to pretty it up. Despite what some people on here seem to think, consles will never be more powerul that a middle to low end PC. Once again, video games will be held back by consles lack of powe. And lack of buttons.

 

[Colt47]

Snip

Overrated, yes, but still very much a factor, especially when developers are dealing with the very limited amount of RAM. RAM availablity was the reason the PS3 couldn't access the XMB in game for so long, and it's still laggy today. If PS3 games had to run over Windows they would look infinitely more like ass. You're absolutely right with your Uncharted 3 examples, though. I think that if there's PS4 ports of late-era PS3 titles, they should at least have AA that isn't a post-process filter, sharper shadows, and maybe more texture filtering. As I've said before though, the bottleneck will always be the HDTV. No matter what hardware you stick in a console, it'll never run games at 2560p or the resolutions of triple display setups due to the limitation of the living room display. Kind of reminds me of before the PS3 release, when they were touting dual HDMI ports and the ability to use two HDTVs.

It's a case of not caring about what you haven't experienced, basically that Uncharted 3 looks amazing if you've never played a game at 60 or 120 fps with 16xAA/AF at resolutions higher than 720p. Also of note is that not all of us are grpahics whores, and couldn't give less of a damn about any of the things that we're discussing right now, much to Nvidia's dismay : )

Its worst than that sometimes. Alot of the recent consle games aren't really 720p. Its run at a lower resolution and up scaled to fit. With a few post proscesses to pretty it up. Despite what some people on here seem to think, consles will never be more powerul that a middle to low end PC. Once again, video games will be held back by consles lack of powe. And lack of buttons.

The way people talk about optimization for consoles in this thread, it's making it sound like consoles are where gaming companies go to die.