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PS3 to PS4 Internals make no sense as an "Upgrade"

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Kohta

Member
Joined
Jan 24, 2011
Location
Zebulon, North Carolina
tldr;
Damn it Sony... why did you have to put **** components in the new system. My confusion is how is 1.6ghz (slower clock cycles) going to compare to a crippled super computer Cell at 3.2? I can't imagine any amount of new instruction sets making a CPU that slow faster than an open source 3.2ghz cell that is phenomenal at OpenGL which supports PhysX!

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I am not understanding how this new machine is supposed to be very much of an upgrade, i care alot more about PC's because if i have more control of whats in my machine, and i will eventually own one of the machines anyway since unfortunately alot of gaming companies are being contracted to make games ONLY forthier system, like Naughty Dog, The Ucharted Series, The upcoming The Last of Us, there is no denying these games would be phenomenal on PC but they feel they will make more money on consoles due to less piracy.

So, to the point.
The PS3's Processor is the famous 3.2 GHz Cell Broadband Engine with 1 PPE & 6 SPEs, which to be honest is still impressive today in terms of games that are exclusive and use the hardware to it's potential.

PS3 GPU
The GPU is a 550 MHz NVIDIA/SCEI RSX 'Reality Synthesizer', they gave this chip the ability to render very early versions of PhysX, which at the time was called Dot Dynamics, it was a stiff version of PhysX, much more like Physics than the CUDA technology we have today, Naughty Dog stated in a press release way back in 2007 or 2008 that the RSX on thier games was really on useful for Anti-Aliasing, Textures, upscaling(DVD's, BluRay and PS1/2 games) while the majorty of lighting effects and realtime rendering took place on the Cell.

PS3 RAM
The RAM is the only real issue i see with the Ps3, infact i saw this early on, about a year after it released i had 2GBs of RAM in my machine and i thought the PS3 was going to suffer from RAM limits before anything else... and that held very true, 256MBx2 channels (512MB) is a major flaw, the biggest mistake is they picked XDR which was insanely expensive, GDDR3 RAM was available at the time for 1/10th of the cost per GB and it would have had no effect on it's performance, with 1GB of RAM the PS3 would have literally **** slapped the Xbox in every single way, and the PS4 could have been set back another year or 2 with more impressive technology than today.

PS3 abilities
The Ps3 can emulate DX9 through OpenGL, which takes significantly more processing power to create the same image assuming a port from the Xbox, in most cases it just didn't look good, the other method was to render the same information in DX9 on the RSX chip which we all know was not nearly as powerful as the Xbox's Combo, it made the CPU in the PS3 a single core to work from and caused performance drags which is where the developers would just lower detail and effects to push the game out. when an exclusive came along though, it started to shine, the Cell and RSX worked together like a champ to deliver, for a fact, games that still look amazing by high-end PC standards. The DX9 limitation is the sinker.

PS4 CPU
This is what i don't understand, a 1.6Ghz x86 AMD CPU 8 core, WHAT? This is what you find in a crappy gaming laptop, This is where i ask WTF? because it doesn't matter if you put 20GBs of RAM behind it, or somehow figure out how to put 5 GTX Titans in there, this CPU is going to kill it down the road in the same way i knew the RAM would in the Ps3.

PS4 GPU
It's an APU, built into the CPU, so not much better than a high performance integrated GPU on a laptop. They say it's supposed to be somewhere around a 7770 and iv'e also heard 7870 from a leaked developer blog on Kotaku, either way, that is still no where close to as impressive as the Cell processor has been(for it's time)

PS4 RAM
The only area i even praise the specs of this System, 8GB's good job! you learned, sort of, you took it a step farther and even positioned it as GDDR5! to bad that AMD CPU and GPU are going to be worthless in about a year.

PS4 Features
The claims from the sony press conference are that it has the ability to utilize DX11, that's great but the hardware in my opinion doesn't seem like it's going to be able to keep up with the ability of DX11, since it is an AMD CPU/GPU combo, i think it safe to say we will never see anything like Tessalation, PhysX and CUDA type water details.

My confusion in all of this seems like this new system is a step above the PS3, but that processor and the APU graphics smells like this system will have a hard time with anything remotely detailed on DX11, i'm not biased towards Sony or Microsoft, i loved my Playstation 3 and my Xbox for different reasons, but i am almost hoping Microsoft's Xbox will come out and say "This is how you make a Console last 10 years..." and show off a 6 core Intel at 3.6ghz, 8GBs of GDDR5 RAM and a Quad core mobile graphics chipset at 900mhz powered by Nvidia with the flex of a GTX 680.
 
x86 can be optimized differently than the Cell architecture. From what I understand, Cell and Power PC CPU's have a simpler pipeline and thus can be run at higher frequencies. The x86 CPU we are seeing in the PS3 will likely be able to match the CELL and even outperform it due to the different pipeline. But most importantly moving to x86 makes it extremely easy for developers to optimize for both PS3 and PC.

But really all they need it to be able to do is drive the video card, and even if the PS3 has 7770 level graphics that will still look much better than the PS3. The point isn't to compete against PC gaming, it's to provide a smooth experience that people can be happy with in their living rooms.

Really, anyone who wants both will be able to just buy both. I have a Gaming PC and all the current gen consoles. I didn't buy them all at once but I was able to buy them all eventually. Although I probably won't be buying any of the current gen consoles any time soon.
 
a 1.6ghz celeron g440 is more than twice as fast as a pentium4 3.2ghz for example both are single cores. so yea new instructions / core efficiency can make a huge difference.

not to mention as you said the new one is an 8 core... wehere as the old one was a "7core" idk how that worked i think it was a single core with 7 virtual cores or some crap like that not 100% on that.

and a 7770 is over 3 times more powerful than a 3870 the video card that was top dog around the time the ps3 was released iirc the video card in the ps3 is quite a bit slower than the 3870 i think it was closer to a midrange card from the era.

edit after some reading it seems the ps3 is more in the 7800gt range of gpu power... which is alot slower than even a 3870.

so the ps4 is going to have alot more horsepower than a ps3 in theory.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/536?vs=514

consoles done have do to any emulation or anything they just get straight to the game, as that is the onlything they have to process they dont have the other 8000 windows processes / services running, all they have to do is play a game.
i mean look at the semi decent graphics consoles still have to day for the crappy hardware they have in them compared to computer hardware today.
 
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Ah ok, i was under the impression x86 and powerpc were generically compatible and the samething, in other words, no real upgrade.

Here is an image of the cell in the ps3, the 7 cores it had were specifically for a certain coding, whether they could be coded individually or worked as a float and mirror i don't know but it's still OpenGL and i guess architecture is something i can't fathom as being a deal breaker in performance.

qrCBm6K.jpg

and this is all they gave us at the conference, it uses Brazo and Southern Islands
ykP8kuq.jpg
 
Just think about it for a moment. The PS3 and 360 used hand-me-down mid-ranged equipment at the time to produce amongst the most beautiful games of their time, some of which couldn't be properly replicated on the PC without top-end horsepower.

These new consoles are packing high-end, current generation hardware (Not top-end of course) with compatibility that will allow even further optimization. Shoot, these consoles are going to support 4k, which is just awesome. It saddens me a bit that there's so much overhead on PCs, so much that fossil parts on a 360 can contend with something as OP as a 680
 
By supporting 4k, for the PS4 at least, this is for non-gaming media only. So this isn't nearly as taxing as playing a game.

Rumours for the Xbox give similar specs to the PS4, but with GDDR3 memory instead. This will make it easier, I assume they won't need to port it like from the 360 to the PS3, it should more or less work on both systems at the same time.
 
Just think about it for a moment. The PS3 and 360 used hand-me-down mid-ranged equipment at the time to produce amongst the most beautiful games of their time, some of which couldn't be properly replicated on the PC without top-end horsepower.

These new consoles are packing high-end, current generation hardware (Not top-end of course) with compatibility that will allow even further optimization. Shoot, these consoles are going to support 4k, which is just awesome. It saddens me a bit that there's so much overhead on PCs, so much that fossil parts on a 360 can contend with something as OP as a 680

You're forgetting the 30fps cap and the lower resolution upscaled to 1080p.
So, no way a console can compete to a 680 (talking ps3 and xbox 360 here)
Pc gaming is on a whole different level...60-120fps/hz, 1080/1600p. Yeah, not even close :bday:
 
You're forgetting the 30fps cap and the lower resolution upscaled to 1080p.
So, no way a console can compete to a 680 (talking ps3 and xbox 360 here)
Pc gaming is on a whole different level...60-120fps/hz, 1080/1600p. Yeah, not even close :bday:


Well, of course. I never claimed a 360 could drive my 3 monitor 120hz monitor config.

On the flipside, comparable setups, say.. single monitor / screen single unit, they compete remarkably well considering the immense difference in technology and horsepower.

I wasn't aware that PS4 only supported 4k for media, I was under the impression it also did a slightly-less-than-4k scale up for games, too. (Which is what most current-generation hardware does anyways)

The new x-box is to support native 4k, isn't it?
 
im confused on how power pc cpus got into this, PPC is risc based. completely different then x86 and imo should have been used going forward. just so much more room with risc that needs to be looked at. mhz to work done, risc over x86 any day. as far as programming that is a mute point since all your smartphones use a Risc based cpu. if the cpu got coupled with a better and some more tweaking to the arch it self. you could have an 8core at the same speed or a bit faster using about half the power and putting out half the amount of heat.

i mean what if you really could game at a true 1080p on your console instead of having 720p output then upscaled to the tv. i thought they should have done this a while ago and im sure they could do this. each risc cpu being 2 or 4 cores coupled with a updated gpu to the die. have 2 - X number of dies on the motherboard that could pass data back though a unified memory pool. now with each cpu the gpu on each would handle a section of the video to be rendered, ie you have 4 dies so each one renders 25% of the screen. would be something similar to what 3DFX did back in the day with SLI voodoo cards, except they were odd and even lines to be rendered by each card.

food for thought.
 
it is also needs to be said, that differen artictures can not be compared(apple to apples that is, more like apples to oranges). maybe to get any kind of decent performance from cell it needs those higher clocks. though you must also remember cell was designed just for the ps3. it has not had realy any time to mature and be tweaked.

x86 has been around for a really, really long time, but Risc is older then X86. risc lost out in the battle of consumer pc's due to x86 being more flexible or really being pushed as the one to use.

Some interesting ideas...I like the 3dfx style solution :D (miss my voodoos)
think about this, a very fast/high bw buss in the form or copy of pcie 3.0 as the interconnect. 8 dies with dual cores running 2ghz and a nv640/650 gpu core count and clock speed wise(or insert amd equal). then connected to a really large unified memory pool of about 16gigs either with next gen DDR4 or specialized rambus ram for the task. i mean if that doesnt wet anyones whisle i dont know what will. though i often wonder what intels "larrabee" would have done, had they been able to excute their plan. as it was they were aiming for a 100core@1ghz arrangement. a version of it does exist but is costly, not as many cores, not sure on clock speed. it is stuck doing compute tasks like nv's telsa cards.

as far as smart phones video processor goes it is from a well know company. the however dropped out of the desktop pc market (i think) around the time of the voodoo 2's. powerVR had a decent product back then but you had like 4-5 choices for a brand of 3D graphics card for just the chip.
 
I feel that this will be good news for pc gaming because porting will be easier.

We are at the age that video games are at a road block with graphics and from this point we can say its almost like saying "cartoon" vs "real looking", and I dont think we can get past that wall anytime soon.
 
Wow I am surprised one big thing got missed here. The coding.

We are not talking about a game that gets programmed for DX on god knows how many system configurations or for CUDA that has to run on how many generations of cards?

We are talking about programs that are written for the specific hardware. I mean this is one of the reasons porting to DX generally sucks but many times porting to a console does fine.

If I am writing code for this game I will know exactly what I am working with. I don't need to worry about MS or some BS compatibility issues. I don't need to worry about system specs either.
 
What the PS4 brings, really, is easy porting between PC (X86/AMD64), Xbox (X68/AMD64) and PS4 (X86/AMD64).
 
slapped...
 

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