PlayStation 4 (codename Orbis) technical hardware investigation (news and rumours)

Fair enough.

 

Anything on the level of PS3 Slim or quieter would be fine by me. I dont need to have dead silent console.

 

Not sure if dead silent is needed, but my slim is not very silent and had the original 60GB to start with. Would not mind less noise than from the slim one, especially when watching movies etc.

 

The PS3 slim is 250W max, the same as the PS4 - so it seems a reasonable estimate.

But, given that the PS4 should be a bit simpler to cool, it might be a bit queiter? (and not having the blu-ray continuously spinning won't hurt).

 

The fact that next gen consoles have dedicated decoders and are designed also for low power usage in addition to gaming should make them quiet when not pushed hard. I would expect next gen consoles to put out significant heat only during gaming and then it might be noisy

I think xbox360 and ps3 didn't have too good idle/movie playback power consumption versus next gen consoles.

 

Don't confuse the rating of the power supply with the power consumption of the console. The PS4 is suggested to use half the power of the PS3 at launch, which means that the PS4 would consume around 100W.

The current PS3 Slim consumes around 60W, down from around 200W for the PS3 Fat at launch.

It probably has an even smarter layout. But we'll see.

 

If you look at ps3 power consumption between XMB(idle) and gaming it's not much at all(58W versus 70W on latest model).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_technical_specifications#Form_and_power_consumption

I'm guessing ps4 would have big difference between idle and full load. Also the hw decoders/encoders should make things like youtube, netflix, blu-ray work with very low power compared to ps3. This should affect the perception of noisiness a lot.

 

Why should the user interface use HTML5?

 

I think the question should more be, why would it be slower?

 

Some Gaffer claimed that he attended Sony's private presentation about PS4 UI. There are HTML5 elements in the presentation layer. It's wired to the PSN backend to provide live information about the user and his friends.

Compared to XMB ? It only needs to show just 10 or so pre-loaded icons usually. ^_^

The PS4 UI needs to deal with more visual objects, "live" information, and assorted background tasks (e.g., uploading shared video, installing to HDD).

EDIT: I was talking about the main UI, not the in-game XMB. PS3 is limited by memory, so in-game XMB was s-l-o-w. In this area, PS4 should perform better because of 8GB RAM.

 

The original PS3 slim was actually pegged by CNet around 100W:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10318727-1.html

But with multiple PS3 slims, it's hard to nail down exactly what people mean by the term .

 

I expect the PS4 to be quieter than the ps3 slim because all of the things mentioned above, and the fact that there's far more ventilation in the PS4 compared to the PS3 slim.

 

You must be kidding. You expect UI on next gen console to be slower than on past(current)gen? And why you think it will be done in HTML5? Also we have seen some UI demos and there was no any sign of slowness.

 

Haha, that's why I want to see the final UI.

If it does turn out slower, it won't be the first time a more complex, flexible and feature rich UI gets outrun by a UI with tens of small, static icons.

 

Web guy here. You say that HTML5 rendering is 'more expensive' but in order for that statement to be made there has to be a target with which to compare. HTML5 is 'slower' or 'more expensive at rendering' compared to what?

You're not comparing it to other web technologies (like Flash, which HTML5 largely annihilated in almost any meaningful metric).. And HTML5 performance varies depending on the OS, software (browser) and hardware combination.

So in general, unless there is some baseline metric here to compare it with I don't see how you're making these statements.

What are console UI's normally coded in? C?


I'm not trying to be combative, I'm honestly curious. It was my understanding that, relatively speaking, HTML5 is pretty zippy- at least in the web space. Once it matures, along with CSS3, combined with JS we should see some amazing things being done natively in browsers without the vile presence of Flash.

HTML5 does feature some 3D rendering with Canvas, but would that really apply in the UI case?

 

The issue with HTML5 as console UI base is that you can't be sure about memory limits. All this web stuff is memory hungry and what is even worse - often may leak memory. On PC you have a lot of RAM, you have virtual memory and in the worst case you can just restart the browser. This won't work on console. It should be stable and work within tight RAM constraints. Especially in the case of PS4 which is "always on".

 

Yea but the PS4 UI is not a browser.

Using a HTML5 engine, specific for the task, I don't see why there should be any problems.
I like most of us haven't seen the full UI, so I'm making some assumptions which could very well be wrong.
Considering they know what the UI is, what it's doing, what it can and cant do, etc, I don't see why they can't have a solid HTML5 specific engine for the task.

Not rendering 1000s of different web pages, implemented in different ways, etc.

 

The old XMB displays tens of static icons in a fixed layout, and react to user input directly.

When you have live info integrated into the new UI, you need to fetch the latest (or cached) info from elsewhere. If you add CSS style sheet, DOM tree creation + traversal and layout processing, it will increase the overhead further.

The only exception in XMB is the "What's New" item which will initiate a request for latest info from the PSN server. That step will be slower too (but the result will be cached).

 

Assuming the Gaffer guy is correct, then yes HTML5 does adds some overhead. But there are mobile browsers which are optimized for small devices. The layout they use should be relatively simple compared to a full blown website.

 

i dont think the entire ui is html5, the gaf guy was talking about the live tiles being coded using html5/css/js and being hooked to psn for dynamic updating.

because were on the subject of the os and ui. what resources are reserved for the os? i've heard 1-4CU, 2 CPU cores and a varying amount of ram.