Rumor: "Very Affordable" PS4 Based on AMD's A10 APU

[Eclipse Dragon]

If this generation is made on the foundation ofr games being any price higher than $80 then it is on the road to disaster.

If we make it clear NOW that we will not accept $80 then we will ALL be better off.

The question is, will the rich-boys screw it for everyone buying at $80 and throwing away their money they hold no value of and leaving everyone else high as dry. Will console gaming become an elite hobby that average earners will pay through the nose just to experience a small part of?

Personally I already don't purchase games at launch because of the price tag. Why should I when the game's price will inevitably drop less than a year worth of waiting? Sometimes we even get GOTY editions that have all the DLC packaged in. It makes no sense to buy a game at launch unless it's a game that I just really REALLY wanted.

From just general chat on this site, quite a few people also do this, yet we have not seen any drop in price. So why do developers keep charging $60 for their games and then complain when people people buy used? Are there really that many rich kids willing to throw down money at launch or is it something else? I really don't know.

 

[Treblaine]

If this generation is made on the foundation ofr games being any price higher than $80 then it is on the road to disaster.

If we make it clear NOW that we will not accept $80 then we will ALL be better off.

The question is, will the rich-boys screw it for everyone buying at $80 and throwing away their money they hold no value of and leaving everyone else high as dry. Will console gaming become an elite hobby that average earners will pay through the nose just to experience a small part of?

Personally I already don't purchase games at launch because of the price tag. Why should I when the game's price will inevitably drop less than a year worth of waiting? Sometimes we even get GOTY editions that have all the DLC packaged in. It makes no sense to buy a game at launch unless it's a game that I just really REALLY wanted.

From just general chat on this site, quite a few people also do this, yet we have not seen any drop in price. So why do developers keep charging $60 for their games and then complain when people people buy used? Are there really that many rich kids willing to throw down money at launch or is it something else? I really don't know.

That's not a workable model. By waiting you are screwing the developers who get paid based on sales per quarter, and the retailer usually buys games for a price then lowering it later pretty much fire-sale prices to cut their losses making no profit or a loss even. And the dependence on pre-owned market is a further problem, it's sharing one actual sale the developers make money from amongst many.

People SHOULD buy games when they want to play them, but they can't for the price. the PS1 era was such a boom time because $30 was a cheap price yet earnings were high and cost of living was low. Now games cost twice as much, gas costs 4x as much (cuts into disposable income) and median incomes have pretty much frozen.

The problem is the publishers are in a trap of their own making, they drove up the price by being greedy, but drove down new sales.

Instead of selling each game for $60 where it will be resold to 3-4 different people, they could sell the game for $30 to each of those 4 people ONCE.

 

[newwiseman]

Regardless, my point was about how the A10 APU is using GPU tech 6 generations newer than what is in the 360.

Yeah but it's a mid-range GPU, and even then it's the lower powered D series version more akin to the M series versions made for laptops than the 'standard' versions made for discrete GPU cards.

Any fear that the A10 APU will be underpowered is misplaced

I dunno... you might be underestimating the effects things such as switching CPU architecture and the inherent problems of APUs (they're bastards for heat management) will have on the traditional resource efficiency of consoles, not to mention fundamental shift in design theory from 'gaming machine' to 'home entertainment and social media centre (oh yeah, they still play games, I guess, if that's your thing)' that we've seen happening.

That every thing else requires very little power, facebook, twitter, light internet browsing. Hulu and Netflix streaming are probably the most intense task in the everything else category and a Raspberry Pi can do that, err well as soon as they sort out the audio issues with the Android 4.0 release.

For game designers they will want all that to stop while playing most games regardless of what the system can handle. Probably savestate everything running to drive cache when you launch a game, and then have system integrated tasks available from the system menu in game. Last thing someone playing the next Battlefield or COD will want is a notification poping up, and the last thing the game devs will want to think about is how many apps are currently running when they launch this.

True the APU's don't have the most high end components but to be better than current gen that isn't necessary. Without discrete graphics AMD's APUs dominate on [a href="http://www.pcworld.com/article/255838/amds_trinity_processors_vs_intels_ivy_bridge.html"]GPU tasks[/a], and anything done in a console would be integrated. Plus they don't want these thing to retail at $500 while still talking a loss, they'll want to come in around and hopefully below $350 for base models. Plus Sony isn't going to use some off the shelf A10, they'll get something custom.

 

[Ushiromiya Battler]

And welcome to America, where the minimum wage is only $7.25 an hour, and even "real" jobs don't pay as much as equivalent jobs in Australia.

Yet the average American wage is about 15-20% higher than the Aussie average wage, and that's calculated in 'international dollars' which are based on the purchasing power of the US dollar.

Have you got a source on that? Because I've always understood Australians made more in general. They have to, because the cost of living over there is through the roof compared to what it is in the US. Video games are hardly the only thing that you guys get charged more for.

When we're talking about game prices.
In Norway a ps3 game costs the double of what it costs in the US and 1/3 more than in costs in Australia.

 

[newwiseman]

Well that's depressing; PC gamers have been waiting for years for the console designers to get off their arses and bring an offering that will finally move game developers on from graphics that have to run on 5+ year old hardware, and now we find out that the PS4/Orbis/Whatever is going to be running on an AMD A10, a CPU with a 3.8GHz base clock based on the horrible Piledriver architecture?

My "budget" gaming rig from two years ago with an overclocked Phenom II quad-core CPU can happily keep up with Piledriver rigs built today, and they get chewed to pieces by even the midrange of Intel's designs. And that's assuming they use the A10-5800K as the basis for the Orbis; there's the 3.4GHz 5700K model to think about as well.

You can put as much RAM in the thing as you like, if it's running what amounts to a last-gen midrange CPU and GPU it's still going to be rubbish.

Your probably still disheartened by the performance of the bulldozer architecture. I know I am, I'm still using a Phenom II x4 Black that I bought 5 years ago in my gaming system. The improvements that were made for piledrive place it well in the lead of [a href="http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-8350-vishera-review,3328.html"]AMD's previous chips[/a], though not by much; and fix most of what was wrong with the bulldozer's, especially the price.

Regardless the biggest problem with the bulldozer architecture in the first place was it's almost one sided focus on multithreading, in a time when most applications still don't take full advantage of 2 cores let alone 4-8. It also didn't have the through put to maximize all it's cores. With devs writing directly for the chip piledriver should perform great.

 

[SpAc3man]

Maybe it's a matter of coding, but after assembling so many gaming PCs and benchmarking them I've yet to find a game that gets a consistent advantage from 16GB of System RAM, even the highest speed. Even though it makes us more money we argue against customers requesting 16GB of RAM for a gaming rig as we know we'd be taking advantage of them.

16GB only really comes into it's own for processes that don't need to be fast but deal with a lot, like photoshop, video editing and making 3D models and animations. So basically game development.

8GB is just about ideal for even the most demanding games.

I think a likely scenario is the console plan to launch with 8GB, but the dev-kit models have double the RAM (16GB) just to make it easier to tweak, create and combine elements with the goal on the dev-kit to get the system memory usage down to only 8GB which will be the launch version.

Though it may be even half that, 4GB of RAM would be very affordable yet very capable on a console with refined specs and no Operating-System overhead. Xbox 360 has done so well on only 512MB of RAM shared between CPU and GPU. 4GB would be 8 times that, that is three Moore's Law doubling, what you'd expect over 6 years. 2013 is 6 years since PS3 launched in Europe.

Absolutely a matter of coding. If next gen console games could cache huge amounts of game assets like textures and models then they could potentially eliminate faults like texture pop-in and long load times. PC's don't do this yet because not enough PCs have the hardware to enable this. Developers have to use methods that will work for a majority. With consoles being uniform it would be easy to implement. If it is then you can expect future PC games to have a similar feature.

Moore's Law relates to the number of transistors on an integrated circuit. Not memory use of software.

So, 8 and 16 mean that they try to decide between 4 and 8 GB in a console. And since they will make in DDR5, current top RAM for videocards, they will want to organize 512 mb chip production to get 8 GB model out.

GDDR5 not DDR5.
DDR5 doesn't exist. GDDR5, like GDDR4, is based on DDR3 but is more optimised for high bandwidth, parallel tasks like graphics processing and GPGPU tasks. GDDR5 might not be appropriate for use as system RAM as far as I know but we will have to wait and see.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

And welcome to America, where the minimum wage is only $7.25 an hour, and even "real" jobs don't pay as much as equivalent jobs in Australia.

Yet the average American wage is about 15-20% higher than the Aussie average wage, and that's calculated in 'international dollars' which are based on the purchasing power of the US dollar.

Average isn't necessarily median.

Yeah, I was being just a little bit intellectually dishonest there but it did make a few people stop and think about it, so I'll take what I can get.

[explanatory rant deleted]

 

[Treblaine]

Maybe it's a matter of coding, but after assembling so many gaming PCs and benchmarking them I've yet to find a game that gets a consistent advantage from 16GB of System RAM, even the highest speed. Even though it makes us more money we argue against customers requesting 16GB of RAM for a gaming rig as we know we'd be taking advantage of them.

16GB only really comes into it's own for processes that don't need to be fast but deal with a lot, like photoshop, video editing and making 3D models and animations. So basically game development.

8GB is just about ideal for even the most demanding games.

I think a likely scenario is the console plan to launch with 8GB, but the dev-kit models have double the RAM (16GB) just to make it easier to tweak, create and combine elements with the goal on the dev-kit to get the system memory usage down to only 8GB which will be the launch version.

Though it may be even half that, 4GB of RAM would be very affordable yet very capable on a console with refined specs and no Operating-System overhead. Xbox 360 has done so well on only 512MB of RAM shared between CPU and GPU. 4GB would be 8 times that, that is three Moore's Law doubling, what you'd expect over 6 years. 2013 is 6 years since PS3 launched in Europe.

Absolutely a matter of coding. If next gen console games could cache huge amounts of game assets like textures and models then they could potentially eliminate faults like texture pop-in and long load times. PC's don't do this yet because not enough PCs have the hardware to enable this. Developers have to use methods that will work for a majority. With consoles being uniform it would be easy to implement. If it is then you can expect future PC games to have a similar feature.

Moore's Law relates to the number of transistors on an integrated circuit. Not memory use of software.

" could potentially eliminate faults like texture pop-in and long load times."

hmm, kinda done that already on 8GB. I told you, 8GB peaks performance even in the most demanding PC games. 16GB only useful for creative software 3D video rendering up to Pixar level. There is a reason to avoid 16GB in a release model, because it will HUGELY increase the cost of the machine yet have very marginal utility at the development projects in mind.

Doesn't system RAM actually use a "number of transistors on an integrated circuit"?

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

Doesn't system RAM actually use a "number of transistors on an integrated circuit"?

Well, sure, if you just want to take away all the mystery and magic from the world.

I prefer to think of RAM as using colonies of nanometer scale ants... or when I'm feeling really whimsical, cities of anthropomorphic 1s and 0s.


edit: And yes, I did once mod a case (for someone else, alas) to include an antfarm mounted to the windowed side-panel.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

Well ok...as long as it's still a beast. That's pretty much all I expect Playstations to be - powerful, game-playing beasts. No gimmicks, no BS involved, just set it up, put in a disc, use a controller and play a game. And as long as I get that, and PSN is still free, I'm happy to get behind whatever the next Sony console is. I just want the same experience I got from the PS3 but better. Not asking for much.

 

[SpAc3man]

" could potentially eliminate faults like texture pop-in and long load times."

hmm, kinda done that already on 8GB. I told you, 8GB peaks performance even in the most demanding PC games. 16GB only useful for creative software 3D video rendering up to Pixar level. There is a reason to avoid 16GB in a release model, because it will HUGELY increase the cost of the machine yet have very marginal utility at the development projects in mind.

Doesn't system RAM actually use a "number of transistors on an integrated circuit"?

Current Xbox 360 games are about 8GB max when compressed onto a single dual layer DVD. The next generation of games will undoubtedly grow much bigger than that so caching large amounts of resources will quite easily make use at least 8GB of memory. A good example of where things are going is Rage. The HDD space needed in the system requirements is 25GB on a PC. Mostly due to supersized textures. 16GB of RAM would make a huge difference over 8GB if all that space was used for caching assets. This is about using RAM in new ways. Not the same way PCs have been doing for years. However I agree that 8GB is more likely than 16GB. They are using an SSD so load times from the installed game files rather than cached data will be "fast enough" in terms of optimising performance and price.

Yes it does but it is not the same for software/OS memory usage as you implied. Just because 4GB would follow Moore's Law doesn't mean it wouldn't be hugely beneficial to use at least double that.

 

[Treblaine]

PCs are designed to do a whole host of things, gaming being one of them. Consoles are designed purely around gaming.

Things like that cut both ways, for example I want to do MORE with my integrated circuit technology than JUST play video games licensed by Sony/Microsoft/etc

A PC does more than a console, it's a robust web browser, photo editor and social interface not within one gaming network like Xbox Live but across many different networks. It's got the ultimate backwards compatibility for games and the ultimate variety not just in the highest fidelity graphics but scaling each element according to your preference, be it speed, resolution, fidelity or whatever.

If you get a home videogame console... you'll probably still need to get a home computer. But if you get a gaming capable computer, you don't really need a console. Especially with how games that are exclusive to home consoles are few and far between these days and more than ever they are going multiplatform with a PC release.

Console I consider much more of a "disposable luxury" than my gaming PC. My PC is EVERYTHING in home electronics, from facebook for my job, editing and posting videos, word processing, emails, file storage and backup, THIS very website which I wouldn't like to depend on console-browser to access. Of course taking photos off devices, scaling and sorting them and uploading them, uploading music and movies to media players like iPods. Netflix still needs a PC to sort your choices as far as i know. So many essential things are PC-browser based.

When budgets get tight, if I have to chose between marginalising my console or my PC you know which one all of us would chose.

A single PC may be expensive, but not as expensive as investing in a console (and $60 per game) and discovering you still need to fork out again for a low-spec PC for all your non-gaming needs. Then you'd just be wasting processing power, you COULD just have one processor and graphics card etc for both gaming and social computing switching between the two. And each processor is not "specifically made for gaming" they are general-purpose processors, it's the operating system and interface (gamepad vs mouse + keyboard) that's the deciding factor.

All I'm saying is when my budget gets tight, the console goes and the PC stays. You don't need a super-powerful killer PC. Remember, console games settle for much lower settings than the maximum settings on PC, to compensate for lack of a console just lower the settings to console level then it runs smoothly as on console (still not that smooth).

I applaud Sony going for a more budget A10 system as it recognises their place in the technology landscape, it is NOT the centre of my life or really anyone's life, it is not an indispensable component to being a modern connected and technologically capable person. The home PC is that. Consoles are a luxury we cannot so easily afford any more.

What I'd be most impressed with is if Sony's new A10 based console takes a leaf out of PC's book on affordable games.

That's another reason why I couldn't abandon PC, as PC has affordable games to an extent that console do not. So many PC games are Free-to-play, or fan-made mods. Steam sales are such good deals. I've been playing Brutal Doom on Zandronum recently, a free mod in a free source-port engine or Doom (that I got for pennies in a Steam sale) IT IS LITERALLY AWESOME!!!


PC is cheaper to run, more varied and dynamic and essential to remaining connected.

That's the way I see it. I'd be very interested, if you have a difference of opinion, to hear why I should - when faced with financial limitations - chose to invest primarily or exclusively in a console at the cost of marginalising my PC.

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

Everything sounds good except the RAM. Isn't 16GB a bit of an overkill?

Not really. RAM is really cheap nowadays with 8GB being standard for a middle-of-the-road laptop or a regular desktop. 16GB sounds like a good place to be for a next-gen console.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

And welcome to America, where the minimum wage is only $7.25 an hour, and even "real" jobs don't pay as much as equivalent jobs in Australia.

Yet the average American wage is about 15-20% higher than the Aussie average wage, and that's calculated in 'international dollars' which are based on the purchasing power of the US dollar.

Have you got a source on that? Because I've always understood Australians made more in general. They have to, because the cost of living over there is through the roof compared to what it is in the US. Video games are hardly the only thing that you guys get charged more for.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wage

It is wiki, but links are provided. The page simply puts the OECD numbers in an easy to read chart.

Here is another one. I believe this too is based on the OECD numbers and expressed in PPP (money is expressed in 1 US dollar spent in the US). This a more simplistic number, and simply average monthly salary with cost of living included.

http://1-million-dollar-blog.com/average-monthly-salary-for-72-countries-in-the-world/

The OECD has a site, but it's not easy to understand or compare numbers.

edit: Note, these numbers are adjusted for living expenses (PPP number does that). I think that is what the other poster was probably using. If you go simply by actual dollars, Australia is considerably higher. Yet the cost of living more than eats up that difference. So it really depends on how you look at things. From a video game perspective, 33% higher costs in Australia should be expected and not really any different than US prices considering the wage differences.

Okay, your edit confirms what I was thinking, then. My point was that Australians weren't getting screwed over as much as they tend to think they are, because they have higher wages to match the higher cost of living. Although apparently they /are/ being screwed over more than I realized. If you listen to the Australians saying "$60? Ha! We pay $120, quit complaining!" You'd think they made half as much money as Americans do when adjusted for cost of living. The reality is more like 80-something percent.

 

[Treblaine]

Everything sounds good except the RAM. Isn't 16GB a bit of an overkill?

I'm not sure why sleetblind says what they say. 16GB is EXTREMELY high for system memory. Even the most bloated, demanding and poorly optimised PC games don't gain any benefit from beyond 8GB. I've seen games run Team Fortress 2 on max settings Mann vs Machine (dozens of bots) SIMULTANEOUSLY with Eve Online, that is BALLS LOADS of system memory usage. I see no stutter with 8GB. For a time he was using 4GB and no single game had a problem. I'm no 8GB and regularly leave demanding programs running simultaneously like Chrome with 20 tabs open, photoshop and a Steam game.

I ask my boss who is in the business of assembling and repairing PCs, and you can ask an expert yourself and they'll tell you the same thing.

The only home computers that vaguely benefit from 16GB of RAM are those that are for MAKING games, not playing them. Things like animating and rendering Pixar quality movies or assembling and testing assets for a 3D game.

I think 16GB is just for the "developer kit" that publishers give to coders to design games on, the actual home console may have a half or quarter of that System memory capacity, 4GB is very workable. 4GB today you can play very high quality settings on PC, 8GB is overkill on PC.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

I think 16GB is just for the "developer kit" that publishers give to coders to design games on, the actual home console may have a half or quarter of that System memory capacity, 4GB is very workable. 4GB today you can play very high quality settings on PC, 8GB is overkill on PC.

Hrrmmm... you know 16Gb would be just about right if they were emulating a RISC based environment on CISC architecture system... but the CPU seems a bit underpowered for that. Then again current console OSes aren't exactly resource intensive so it might work well in that. Of course, trying to discern the specs of a console from the specs of its devkit is just idle speculation.


Oh yeah, 16Gb is not enough to render Pixar level animation... but then again, it doesn't matter what sort of kit you drop into a single system, it won't be enough for that. Renderfarms exist for a reason.

 

[RicoADF]

if their smart they will offer a 'premium' edition that supports full backwards comparability..... for a price

It might defeat the purpose if the premium is too high a price.

For example, if the Premium version costs more than a "core" PS4 PLUS the price you'd get from selling your PS3... then it makes more sense jsut to keep your PS3 and get core PS4.

Backwards compatibility made sense with PS1 to PS2. I sold my PS1 then used the money I made from that to help pay for PS2 yet I could still play all my PS1 games. Gamecube didn't have backwards compatibility but it sold for $99 when PS2 sold for $299.

Personally for an all in 1 system that works, I'd pay any price
1 console that plays all my games from psx, ps2, ps3 and ps4 would be worth it. Remember the ps2 and 3 will eventually be unrepairable/replacable one day.