Official February 20, 2013 Playstation event

[patsu]

Gaiki not tied to business model? What?

I'm guessing subscription. No one is going to buy Killzone 4 (or other next-gen games) for Gaiki, and otherwise it's going to be full of PS3, PS2, PS1 games and demos, all things which no one is going to pay significant money for. Subscription seems to be the only way to really pay for it. The thing is, maybe your subscription lets you play all the PS1, PS2 and PS3 games you want, which is pretty cool if you're into playing old games.

Why stop at just subscription ? You can make money multiple ways.

For people who hate subscription or don't use it much, they can provide other kind of schemes down the road or at the same time.

If Sony want, they can also share the infrastructure with multiple parties. They can private label the infrastructure for streaming other games.

 

[Nesh]

NSFW language

 

[Silenti]

NSFW language

Ok, one of the funnier things I have seen lately.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Would work great for the general public and be most likely leaps and bounds better than current OEM "gaming PCs" sold.
Enthusiasts are a breed of their own, obviously, and office machines obviously wouldn't benefit from this that much.

The point is though that he's acting as if their's some big fundamental difference between the PS4 chip, AMD's APU's and Intel CPU's when if fact they are all pretty much the same thing aside from the memory interface. A CPU and GPU sharing the same die with varying levels of HSA like features which talk to off chip memory via a memory controller. The difference is that in PC's, an APU uses a narrow DDR3 bus to serve both the CPU and the GPU as befits it's entry level position in the market.

If you wanted to move it up into the high end of the market in terms of gaming performance then you'd just beef up the onboard GPU and switch over to a GDDR memory interface and solder the memory directly onto the motherboard (which would likely mean the CPU is soldered to the motherboard too). Those changes would be no more of a dramatic change to the existing designs for Intel than they would be for AMD.

The reason no-one has done it is because you'd lose a lot in terms of flexibility of system combinations, upgradeability, size of system memory and overall combined power of the two chips by nature of them having to be small and low power enough to sit on the same die.

I can kinda see the value in APU's pushing further up the performance spectrum than where they are at the moment which is exactly what Kaveri and Haswell are doing but I wouldn't want that to come at the expense of everything I mentioned above when you can simply use a discrete card to get all of that power and more while retaining all of the flexibility and upgradeability.

On the other hand, I agree with 3dilettantes suggestion of a PS4 or Xbox 3 on a board. This would be great if it actually played those consoles games natively. If it was simply a standard PC system that replicated the specs of the consoles though (which is what the article was driving at from what I could tell) then I don't see the point. You could get more performance and flexibility by going discrete or less performance but more flexibility at a lot lower price if you go with a normal APU.

 

[Cornsnake]

NSFW language

Now that was awesome.

 

[3dilettante]

On the other hand, I agree with 3dilettantes suggestion of a PS4 or Xbox 3 on a board. This would be great if it actually played those consoles games natively. If it was simply a standard PC system that replicated the specs of the consoles though (which is what the article was driving at from what I could tell) then I don't see the point. You could get more performance and flexibility by going discrete or less performance but more flexibility at a lot lower price if you go with a normal APU.

At least for Sony, it would make sense to have a stripped-down PS4 board for its Gakai cloud server racks.
They certainly aren't going to stack hundreds of PS4 cases up in a room, and there's a lot of redundant functionality they could concentrate into a per-server or per microserver rack.

The optical, storage, and power components could be combined, emulated, or virtualized enough so that a local data center or ISP could host a rack of PS4s and service a significant number of customers. Plugging it into a standard server mainboard would allow for the necessary management and service tools to be used.

 

[shiznit]

At least for Sony, it would make sense to have a stripped-down PS4 board for its Gakai cloud server racks.
They certainly aren't going to stack hundreds of PS4 cases up in a room, and there's a lot of redundant functionality they could concentrate into a per-server or per microserver rack.

The optical, storage, and power components could be combined, emulated, or virtualized enough so that a local data center or ISP could host a rack of PS4s and service a significant number of customers. Plugging it into a standard server mainboard would allow for the necessary management and service tools to be used.

Gaikai was on stage with Nvidia pushing Kepler GPU virtualization for cloud gaming shortly before they were bought by Sony...

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Neat, I'm actually mostly happy with the choices they made for a console here, which I haven't been able to say for a few generations now Slightly faster than I expected as well.

x86 is a good choice, and jaguar is a very good choice for a console. The tool chain is well-developed and optimization should be easier and more portable (using ISPC on the new consoles sounds like fun!). Integrated CPU/GPU and unified memory is a no-brainer as well... everything is clearly going that direction.

8GB is a good size, but all GDDR5 seems like overkill. DDR3 plus a good cache hierarchy could achieve the same result for significantly cheaper. Still, it's obviously "fine", it'll just drive up costs unnecessarily IMO. DDR3 without a good cache would have been a mistake in any case. GDDR latency might make CPU coding slightly more interesting too, but with 8 cores running at fairly low frequencies, it might not be a huge deal anyways. That said, games are going to have to do a better job of parallelism than they have to date, but that's okay too.

Still not clear what they're doing with the hard drive unless I've missed that. best option would probably be small SSD cache (~20GB-40GB maybe?) plus large conventional HDD (~1TB+, 5400rpm is fine). Again, extending the cache hierarchy on down without skipping obvious levels.

I guess it's pretty clear at this point that it's going to be a good chunk more powerful than the next Xbox, but deltas of even up to 2x (which this won't be) aren't always obvious to end users. My biggest fear here is that this is going to be too expensive for most people given what we saw with price sensitivity last generation. I don't feel like Sony can afford to sell it below cost this time around, and 8GB of GDDR5 worries me...

Seems like indeed the hardware is going to have largely converged across PCs and consoles next generation and it's mostly just going to be software games and closed platforms that prevent compatibility. With all of Sony's talk of being an open platform, do you think they'd let me put Linux on the thing and run a steam box if I wanted to? Doubtful

 

[patsu]

Something escaped my tired ears and eyes yesterday. Apparently, Blizzard confirmed Diablo 3 for PS3 (and PS4). Was a fan of Diablo 1 & 2. Didn't play Diablo 3. Sounds good !

 

[Gradthrawn]

Good interview with Shuhei Yoshida. Clears up a few things that may have been a bit ambiguous during the conference (a little bit about self publishing, the camera, remote play and other items).

 

[rockaman]

I might be dumb owning Diablo 3 already but I'm pretty exited about finding the change they made to the game for consoles. In sacred 2 control were imperfect but definitely the pad implementation were quiet good.
For some reasons I've high expectations. I wonder if they will let people import their toons (from PC).
Defintely not really next gen as Diablo 3 is not exactely demanding and shuold run just fine on either the ps3 or the 360.
Consle gamers are kind of lucky they will get the ironed out version of Diablo 3. I no longer play much but a few of my friends do and Blizzard goes it seems a good job (though it is always to slow for the fans).

I'm really curious about this one. Will it still have AH? AH with game gold or also with real money?

I think Sony will let them do whatever they want, but I think it will be interesting if Blizzard themselves choose a different path than launch Diablo 3 took after they admitted AH was a bit of a letdown/mistake.

Also FF14 and PS2 on PS4 would be dandy.

 

[rockaman]

Why stop at just subscription ? You can make money multiple ways.

For people who hate subscription or don't use it much, they can provide other kind of schemes down the road or at the same time.

If Sony want, they can also share the infrastructure with multiple parties. They can private label the infrastructure for streaming other games.

Very good point. There are many ways to monetize online infrastructure.

For example, what is stopping Sony from offering 1 hour demoes for any game for free, over streaming, with advertisements on the screen edges?

When you download Fruit Ninja Free, don't you get advertisements? Why shouldn't the same game and same advertising revenue reach Sony if its their infrastructure? Will Sony offer the golden road and roll out the red carpet to let developers make these small games for PS4 at a low cost and without an expensive devkit? Is the PS mobile style low entry fee combined with Android style advertising the answer? Will Sony apply it to both PS mini type applications, downloadable demos, and streaming options?

Paying for PS Plus? No advertisements.

Or even 99 cents to play any game for a one hour trial.

The possibilities with this online infrastructure are a long list they will have to explore.

Only yesterday when watching the press conference did it finally hit me I have enough bandwidth for streaming HD gameplay over internet. PS2 and PS1 will be peanuts to stream and hopefully Sony will capitalize and monetize that potential.

Who else can offer on demand Final Fantasy X, after all? This whole idea of premium quality gaming on demand could be the biggest thing Sony has come up with in a while. It could be big, VERY big.

 

[Cyan]

http://blogs.amd.com/fusion/2013/02/21/amd/

Small amount of input from AMD.

Nice to know new opinions on the presentation. I wonder if there are secret ingredients, and would love to know more about the specifics of the hardware....

I liked the presentation of the PS4 for the most part, at least what I have seen of it. The guy who announced the hardware specifications was very eloquent and oratorical, imho. That was my favourite part of the conference, and the 8GB of GDDR5 announcement.

Other than that I loved Knack.

The only downside -apart from seeing Diablo 3, I can't stand that game and how I threw away my money buying that game for PC- was that for a worldwide presentation I expected to actually see the console!

The only thing we have seen is the gamepad. In that sense if they brought journalists together from several countries I expected them to show a bit more of the actual box.

 

[owen]

Monetisation will be easy;

IF this online infrastructure requires PS Plus chances are it is going to expire your game library if you don't connect to PS PLus every month. I figured this out the hard way when i bought my mom a kindle and loaded some free games on it. All those so called "free android games" expire if you do not connect to the internet on a regular basis just to keep tabs on you. Welcome to the connected future yall are so looking forward to.

Imagine millions of ps4 users with mandatory ps plus profiles that have to pay monthly to keep thier game licenses active.

That conference summary video above is awesome. Sony saved us 2 hours of wasted time during e3.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

I guess it's pretty clear at this point that it's going to be a good chunk more powerful than the next Xbox, but deltas of even up to 2x (which this won't be) aren't always obvious to end users.

Finally someone reasonable...

To be honest I'm wondering if the majority of the potential customers would notice a difference between the best PS3 game and the average PS4 game. Naughty Dog, Guerilla, Quantic Dream and the internal studios are already producing some really high quality visuals, and I'd also like to remind everyone again that many people still believe the COD games to be running at a full 1920*1080 resolution.
I wonder how many people actually know even simple technical stuff like the amount of memory in their consoles. Or if they even know the difference between RAM and HDD...

So declaring a defeat for MS just because of a 10 to 30% performance disadvantage based on leaked specs, and without knowing anything about the additional features or Kinect 2, is just way too ignorant of what the average customer cares about.

 

[bkilian]

Finally someone reasonable...

To be honest I'm wondering if the majority of the potential customers would notice a difference between the best PS3 game and the average PS4 game. Naughty Dog, Guerilla, Quantic Dream and the internal studios are already producing some really high quality visuals, and I'd also like to remind everyone again that many people still believe the COD games to be running at a full 1920*1080 resolution.
I wonder how many people actually know even simple technical stuff like the amount of memory in their consoles. Or if they even know the difference between RAM and HDD...

So declaring a defeat for MS just because of a 10 to 30% performance disadvantage based on leaked specs, and without knowing anything about the additional features or Kinect 2, is just way too ignorant of what the average customer cares about.

I had a friend who raved about the awesomeness of the graphics on the 360. It was the best visuals he'd ever seen. He was even more impressed when I swapped out his RCA cable for an HDMI one.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

So declaring a defeat for MS just because of a 10 to 30% performance disadvantage based on leaked specs, and without knowing anything about the additional features or Kinect 2, is just way too ignorant of what the average customer cares about.

Oh yeah, only idiots think this generation is going to be won or lost on hardware specs. Hell last gen already wasn't either if you recall At this stage it's much more about software than hardware, but for us engineers it's still nice to see something a bit more ambitious than I was expecting

I don't expect the delta between xbox/ps4 to be wide enough to justify more than the odd tweak to engines, but I'm certain that we'll still see just as much trolling in the console forums over which looks better

 

[TrungGap]

Finally someone reasonable...

To be honest I'm wondering if the majority of the potential customers would notice a difference between the best PS3 game and the average PS4 game. Naughty Dog, Guerilla, Quantic Dream and the internal studios are already producing some really high quality visuals, and I'd also like to remind everyone again that many people still believe the COD games to be running at a full 1920*1080 resolution.
I wonder how many people actually know even simple technical stuff like the amount of memory in their consoles. Or if they even know the difference between RAM and HDD...

If you show them side by side, yes! They'll notice the differences. I would say they would notice the difference even if it's not side by side. Take a look between Bluray and DVD. Most consumers can tell the BR is clear-er. However, at the end of the day. IQ isn't something that's most important to the consumer. It's the convenience. It's not like all NetFlix users have bad eyesight. It's they value the convenience of the service over the quality...

So declaring a defeat for MS just because of a 10 to 30% performance disadvantage based on leaked specs, and without knowing anything about the additional features or Kinect 2, is just way too ignorant of what the average customer cares about.

This I totally agree with this. There are other factors that make a console successful. The Wii demonstrated this. I think this gen, whoever can convey a better picture to the consumers wins. After all, we're all sheep...

 

[Laa-Yosh]

He was even more impressed when I swapped out his RCA cable for an HDMI one.

Yeah, my example is the guy who thought ALL the games on his PS3 are 1080p native, even BLOPS which is 960*540. And the guy plays on a 50" plasma.

People here overestimate the importance of specs and tech details. It's okay to care about them and analyze them - but we all should keep in mind that this gen was owned by the Wii.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

If you show them side by side, yes! They'll notice the differences.

Again: this guy is a movie critic, works at a movie distributor and handles local theatear and BR releases, has a 50" plasma at his home on his PS3 and uses it for gaming and movies.

And even he did not notice that BLOPS was not running at 1080p, but at 540p.