Sony Reveals More PS4 and Dual Shock 4 Details 242
Yesterday, Sony gave a presentation explaining a bit about the new PS4 hardware, the development environment (Windows 7 based IDE), and the changes to the Dual Shock controller. From the article: "The system is also set up to run graphics and computational code synchronously, without suspending one to run the other. Norden says that Sony has worked to carefully balance the two processors to provide maximum graphics power of 1.843 teraFLOPS at an 800Mhz clock speed while still leaving enough room for computational tasks. The GPU will also be able to run arbitrary code, allowing developers to run hundreds or thousands of parallelized tasks with full access to the system's 8GB of unified memory. ... The DualShock 4 controller that's standard on the PS4 eliminates one feature that was seldom used on the PS3 —the analog face buttons..."
The trackpad will support two touch points, the rumble motors can be controlled more finely, and the analog sticks were tweaked for "reduced dead zone and better feeling tension that grips your thumbs."
Too bad (Score:0, Insightful)
Too bad it's made by sony though.
Re:Too bad (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Too bad (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not going to hold my nose because of a 4 year old Linux thing
I disagree. If the management responsible for Sony's behavior in the George Hotz and Lik Sang cases has neither left nor repented, I don't see how I can forgive Sony.
Re:Any Word On compatability? (Score:4, Insightful)
Acquisition of GaiKai and skinny on the street says it will be offered down the line by some sort of cloudy streamy service.
Which means if your home Internet is satellite, microwave, capped DSL, capped cable, or capped fiber, good luck.
Re:Anyone ever use (Score:5, Insightful)
the analog face buttons? I gave up pretty quick on them after using them to play Mad Maestro on the PS2. Didn't even realize they were still in the PS3. I do wish Sony would stop adding pointless features to their game pads. It's not so much that the features bug me as I'd rather they spend time/money somewhere else. Plus it'd be nice if the gamepads weren't $60 bucks. On the plus side the PS4's gamepad looks cheap to produce.
I think the useless touchpad will drive up the price.
Re:What's the point of buying a Sony PC? (Score:5, Insightful)
PCs don't get to run Sony exclusive titles. People like them, a lot. It's the same for the other consoles, it's about the games, not the transistor configurations. The new xbox will also return to x86 architecture. Going to moan about that too?
Re:Nuh uh (Score:5, Insightful)
No hardware compatibility, no emulation == no buy.
Why not? Don't you already have a PS3 you can play your PS3 games on? It's a brand new console. Backwards compatibility didn't help the Atari 7800, and it didn't help the Sega Genesis much either. Why spend so much effort engineering in backwards compatibility when you can just play your old console?
When DVDs came out, I didn't bitch that they weren't backwards compatible with what I already had. I kept my VCR and watched my tapes on that when I wanted to, and watched DVDs when I wanted to do that. What's so hard about that?
Promising backwards compatibility and then removing it is a shitty thing to do to your customers. Being up front about the lack of a feature that's barely useful is doing things right for a change.
Re:GPU already years out of date (Score:4, Insightful)
1.8 teraflops, 800MHz clock speed... so they're aiming for a GPU with roughly the same power of something nVidia released in 2010?
Not to mention only 8GB RAM shared between GPU & CPU, I'm sure that'll last us for years to come!
Two pieces of fairness here...
1.) the PS3 had 256MBytes of RAM on its release.
2.) like every other console, it can get away with having lower specs than a general purpose PC - it doesn't have to run an operating system in the same sense that a desktop does; in broad terms it's closer to ESXi and its requirements than Win7/OSX/Ubuntu in its, so far more of that RAM can go to the game itself.
Bonus: Even if we postulate that the OS takes a gig of RAM itself, 7GB is roughly 1/3 of a single layer Blu-Ray disc. I know that HD textures can eat up graphics RAM pretty quickly, but is it really limiting to have 1/3 of a game in RAM at a time? Let's face it, console game creation has always involved working within some incredibly tight limits...even Crysis 3 doesn't require that amount of RAM to play. If 7GB of RAM and streaming the rest from an internal hard disk is a constraint, then I'd be forced to assume that the people writing games cut their teeth on ActiveX controls...
Re:PC/PS4 multiplatform releases (Score:3, Insightful)
The internals might be PC architecture, but Sony is going to make damned sure there's lots preventing you from running these games on a PC.
Please elaborate on these "lots". How is Sony going to prevent licensed developers from taking their own games, which are already ported to very PC-like hardware, and making PC ports available through Steam on the PC? And what is Sony going to do to attract PS4 ports of games originally developed for the PC?
Both Macs and Windows use PC architecture computers, and yet, I cannot run most Mac software on my Windows PC and vice versa. I can run Linux on both, but I can't run software designed for either on Linux. Software compatability is a lot more involved than the underlying hardware.
Used (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't have a PS3.
Then why do you have PS3 games that you would use with backward compatibility? Or would you be buying used games?