Playstation 4 Post-Release Examination

[Prophecy2k]

Sony have made their latest system with a good focus on gaming and not so much on other functionality, so far this strategy has proved very successful for them, as sales have been strong. The hardware itself using x86 has been considered by many to be easy to develop for, only it appears that Sony have lost their insistence of power-by-any-means. In the first year it appears that not too many first-party games are being released, with their competition buying up exclusive rights to big new games.
Will Sony dominate this generation like they did with the PS2, or will they fall from grace as their competition continue to push harder with software updates and exclusivity deals? Maybe their complete gaming narrow-mindedness will have a sales limit.

Sony’s software updates have been very slow and tend to have very little of substance, maybe this will begin to hurt for owners over the next few years. Is the time right to include Project Morpheus in their strategy?

Actually, outside of Titanfall which the market pretty much proved wasn't as big as it was artificially hyped up to be, I don't think there's a single exclusive MS has bought up that anyone could concievably call "big". So far its all just buying up timed exclusivity on smaller indies and DLC, 2nd party development on niche games like Sunset OverDrive and Scaleforge. Not much different all in all from Sony.

OT: I agree that there's still a lot of media features on PS3 that Sony needs to pull their finger out and get sorted for PS4. But I would say that their seeming lazer focus on gaming above all else is a strength, since it was such a focus that made MS so successful with the Xb360, as all their launch apps and software/hw features were geared around gaming and effectively enriching that experience.

So far, for gaming PS4 provides a much slicker gaming interface for me than the PS3. And the games look and play phenominally. I appreciate that any cooperation only has finite resources, so as a consumer I can be patient to an extent to wait for more software features. However I would agree with everyone that its been far too long now to have not gotten a single meaningful fw update for the PS4. So Sony needs to hurry up and manage that MUCH better, before they start to look as if their platform is stagnating next to MS' ever evolving software platform on the XB1.

It's not likely to make existing owners sell their PS4s, but it might startfactoring into the decisions of those looking to upgrade to a new-gen console from their old one.

 

[Grall]

I saw my first XB1, at its new price, advert last night. It looked pretty cool. The guy was lounging on his sofa telling his Xbox to 'play Titanfall', 'Xbox snap TV', 'Xbox record that'.

'Xbox win the game'...while I continue lying here on my sofa.

Btw. Bought an xbone controller for my PC today. Haven't unwrapped it yet, but I'm childishly excited... Of course, I forgot there's probably no micro-USB cable included in the box, and I have no spares, so I'd have to scavenge my PS4's cable for now to actually USE the controller... *Ahem!*

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I dont think Sony will be able to keep up momentum if they dont upgrade adequately the PS4's capabilities as a media box as time goes on.

I think if Sony had any evidence at all (like usage statistics from PS3s connected to PSN) that suggest a significant number of people were using their PS3 for playing back media on DNLA servers, or playing MP3s, then that function would have been a high priority for PS4. Hell, my Bravia TV has iPlayer, YouTubes and DNLA platform!

 

[Nesh]

I think if Sony had any evidence at all (like usage statistics from PS3s connected to PSN) that suggest a significant number of people were using their PS3 for playing back media on DNLA servers, or playing MP3s, then that function would have been a high priority for PS4. Hell, my Bravia TV has iPlayer, YouTubes and DNLA platform!

I believe that such information were either not collected or were simply not taken into account when designing the PS4. Its mind boggling that even 3D BR isnt supported when its pretty much not an exotic function anymore. 3D is becoming a standardized supported function on TVs.

I am really not sure what kind of procedures are needed to support such formats and functions considering how standardized they have become but eventually went unsupported by the PS4

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I believe that such information were either not collected or were simply not taken into account when designing the PS4.

Nah, I can't believe that that a) didn't collect it or ignored it. Have your read the EULA you click through occasionally:

4. COLLECTION OF INFORMATION/ AUTHENTICATION

SCE may retrieve information about your hardware and software for authentication, copy protection, account blocking, system monitoring/diagnostics, rules enforcement, game management, marketing purposes, tracking user behavior and other purposes. The information collected is not your personally identifying information.​

The point of this is to collect info about how users use their products so they can make better and more focussed products in the future.

Its mind boggling that even 3D BR isnt supported when its pretty much not an exotic function anymore. 3D is becoming a standardized supported function on TVs.

Agreed, that's a weird omission.

 

[Nesh]

Nah, I can't believe that that a) didn't collect it or ignored it. Have your read the EULA you click through occasionally:

4. COLLECTION OF INFORMATION/ AUTHENTICATION

SCE may retrieve information about your hardware and software for authentication, copy protection, account blocking, system monitoring/diagnostics, rules enforcement, game management, marketing purposes, tracking user behavior and other purposes. The information collected is not your personally identifying information.​

The point of this is to collect info about how users use their products so they can make better and more focussed products in the future.

I understand that they collect data. But it doesnt specify explicitly every functions which leaves some room for speculation. But if they did collect all data, then either not enough people were using these functions or they decided to change focus regardless of how many used it (thats what I ment when I said ignored the data) or probably there are procedures and costs asscosciated with the inclusion of these features we arent aware of that make the implementation not as smooth as we d expect. Considering they did not even include the 3D function I suspect an omission for reasons unknown that arent necessarilly associated with lack of usage. Surprisingly even the XB1 omited some of these functions even though its focus as a media box were apparent which may be an indication of something preventive

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I think they had stats that showed it wash't a widely used feature. I mean, break it down. How many people use their PS3 to playback media? Of those, how many have the media on a NAS or other networked device? How many of those have bothered to setup a DNLA server or maybe they started it and gave up after the NAS spent hours grinding away indexing the media? How many people saw real potential and bought a separate box and put XBMC or Plex on it?

Or have a recent Samung/Sony TV with DNLA capability built in? Frankly I would much prefer to use my Bravia remote than a Dual-Shock - although I have the Bluetooth Blu-ray remote for PS3!

I don't know but it just seems like it may have been a fairly small group. I also find it hard to believe they had data and just ignored it. They've been trying to hard to appeal to the widest segment. If a lot of people were using it, it'd be a no brainer to include functionality that they even build into their TVs!

 

[Nesh]

I think they had stats that showed it wash't a widely used feature. I mean, break it down. How many people use their PS3 to playback media? Of those, how many have the media on a NAS or other networked device? How many of those have bothered to setup a DNLA server or maybe they started it and gave up after the NAS spent hours grinding away indexing the media? How many people saw real potential and bought a separate box and put XBMC or Plex on it?

Or have a recent Samung/Sony TV with DNLA capability built in? Frankly I would much prefer to use my Bravia remote than a Dual-Shock - although I have the Bluetooth Blu-ray remote for PS3!

I don't know but it just seems like it may have been a fairly small group. I also find it hard to believe they had data and just ignored it. They've been trying to hard to appeal to the widest segment. If a lot of people were using it, it'd be a no brainer to include functionality that they even build into their TVs!

Here is what I wonder though. MS also collects usage data and based on their reasearch they concluded that people do want an all in one entertainment box. Yet the XB1's media lacks in very many areas as well

 

[temesgen]

Either MS and Sony user data and customer surveys vary dramatically or they have completely different strategies on what to charge for and what to provide access to.

I think its kinda hard to believe that Sony's music service was available at launch but they didn't think consumers would want to use multimedia services and play back MP3s....

My sense is that both companies know consumers want to be able to access their private library of content but they are both probably thinking with some prodding they can get us to change our behavior.

 

[Deleted member 86764]

I find it really frustrating that I need to press 'invite' a bunch of times to get a friend to join a party in games like COD. You press it once from within the game, then a PS menu takes about 15 seconds to load, then you press invite again. Just makes the process very slow.

 

[iroboto]

I find it really frustrating that I need to press 'invite' a bunch of times to get a friend to join a party in games like COD. You press it once from within the game, then a PS menu takes about 15 seconds to load, then you press invite again. Just makes the process very slow.

Oddly the problem is persistent across all platforms that I know of. Regardless of how streamlined or not the solution is. X1 parties people tend to not be able to join games or voice is dropped etc. when it's perfect there are no complaints but there are just a lot of times it's not the case. I could go on about PC having similar issues but that's only really problems with battlefield lol.

 

[Megadrive1988]

I think over the next 6-12 months Sony will add things that a significant number of people want, such as DLNA, MP3 support, and a few other media / app related things. Perhaps we'll eventually see 4K video playback in 2015 or 2016. Maybe. Maybe Not.

I don't expect a massive overall of PS4's OS / UI / features in the near future, just some needed additions in the mid-term.

I'm guessing that, soon will come the time that Mark Cerny and his team at SCEI will do the postmortem on PS4, asking third party devs what they liked and what they did not like about PS4 hardware, development, OS, features etc.

I'm sure the feedback will be much better than when he did the same a year or two after PS3's release (2008 I think?) Ease of development probably could not be too much better with PS4.

What developers will most likely be asking for, for a next gen PS5, will probably be the x86 CPU architecture again (but bigger, more capable cores coupled with higher clockspeed) and AMD graphics architecture (beyond GCN in PS4/XB1 and GCN 2.0 on PC) with a lot more performance / CUs / shader-processors / TFLOPS, fillrate, etc.

Hopefully somewhere within those inevitable talks will be the discussion of 3D stacked DRAM on the GPU with TSV like what Nvidia is doing with Pascal and Volta.

Having more or less 1 TeraByte/sec of bandwidth (NV's figure for Volta as of early 2013) seems like it might be very important for rendering games at native 4K (3840 x 2160p) at decent framerates (30 to 60 fps depending on any given dev's target, for any given game).

Obviously that's 4 times the number pixels of native 1080p, and before any advancements in actual graphics complexity, lighting, shaders, tessellation, AA, post processing effects, etc. etc. For future generation game engines and improvements on existing ones (i.e Unreal Engine 4.X, Frostbite 4, etc).

And also, enough performance for, perhaps, a next generation implementation of Project Morpheus VR. Meaning an improvement on whatever the consumer VR is released for PS4 say in late 2015.

That is, if VR on PS4 is successful. If it is, then I'd imagine an improved VR headset might possibly be released alongside the PS5. Unless the consumer version of Project Morpheus for PS4 is good enough to be used with a much more powerful PS5. Just food for thought, as is this entire post.

So for PS5, the likely things they'll have to consider are:
-4K Ultra HD games, enough APU (CPU+GPU) performance for it.
-main system memory, memory bandwidth
-next generation graphics / rendering / animation, etc etc
-VR, the same as consumer PM for PS4, or to improve it further.
-Backwards compatibility
-HDD size, SSD?
-Overall what can be reasonably & feasibly done with silicon from AMD in a $399 console by Fall 2019, on one of the future fabrication processes / nodes that is smaller than the now-upcoming 20nm process.

 

[loekf]

Perhaps we'll eventually see 4K video playback in 2015 or 2016. Maybe. Maybe Not.

Netflix 4K support would be nice, but probably will need a HW H.265 decoder. Not sure if the
Orbis SoC's VCE has that built-in. AFAIK, the HDMI interface is rev 1.4, so probably HDCP 2.0
support will be difficult (if enforced by Netflix).

smaller[/i] than the now-upcoming 20nm process.

I don't see SSD happening. Sony and MS will always go for a HDD with the lowest cost per MB. Of course, the current 500 GB is a joke given that high-end games require 30-50 GB install size. It
will only be more.

I'm not sure about 4K UHD rendering. Can we really expect most TV sets to be UHD capable in
e.g. 5 years from now ? Don't think so. Still of course a nice AA bonus if the rendering is done at 4K and downscaled to 1080p.

I also don't expect PS5 to come in no sooner than 2019. You could argue whether local rendering is still required, but probably the investments to have pretty good rendering farms in a data center is way too high. Maybe you can kind of cache a game locally leaving the installation in the cloud so you can have a relatively small local HDD/SSD.

 

[kalelovil]

Netflix 4K support would be nice, but probably will need a HW H.265 decoder. Not sure if the
Orbis SoC's VCE has that built-in.

AFAIK it does not, but it seems like something GPGPU could solve (at a considerable power cost compared to a fixed function h265 decoder).

 

[Arwin]

I don't expect 3D games to go up much in resolution next gen, if at all. If they do, it will be because VR took off and it works better with 2x FullHD or something.

 

[Megadrive1988]

I would actually be glad if native console game resolution did not go beyond 1080p in the next cycle, as more performance & HW resources could be directed toward better, more complex graphics and a higher percentage of games released could run at locked 60fps on HD sets.

If VR is pretty successful and looks as though it might be about to go completely mainstream towards the end of the PS4 cycle, PS5 will have the performance to make VR shine and games at the absolute ideal framerates / refresh rates / Hz / Etc without having to compromise graphics nearly as much as with PS4 VR games where developers can probably only make use of PS3+ or PS3++ like graphics since anything below 60fps with VR is completely unacceptable.

 

[SlimJim]

About the 'missing features'; I completely agree that PS4 should at least have PS3 level parity, hell even throw in .MKV support, but my guess is that they deliberately focussed on games at this moment.

There were a lot of people who bought a PS3, but didn't buy games and only watched blu-ray discs. While the console is in the launch year, by not having good media features, they for those customers to wait or stick with their PS3s, and in a way, guarantee that a PS4 buyer is more likely to buy games, which helps because at this moment, the console is barely at break-even (factoring in advertisement costs, etc).

 

[London Geezer]

Well I wouldn't mind if there was actually a lot to play on it! As it stands, it's 'gaming focused' with not much to play, and a level of media features that force me to keep my PS3 around. Such a complete eye sore.

 

[Deleted member 86764]

Considering there's so much of the system's resources that are dedicated to the OS features, it doesn't feel like it's actually being used yet. No sign of it happening either.

 

[Arwin]

Well I wouldn't mind if there was actually a lot to play on it! As it stands, it's 'gaming focused' with not much to play, and a level of media features that force me to keep my PS3 around. Such a complete eye sore.

Probably a matter of taste, because I think the library is growing quite steadily. I think I already have more games than I have had on previous systems in the first two years combined (money is probably a factor, but still ). Killzone, NFS, AC4, Tomb Raider, Infamous, Zen Pinball, Trials, Trine 2 (PSN free), Stick it to the Man, etc. all games that I have, and there's lots more (I don't have the Battlefields, Fifa, Call of Duty, etc.)

I agree though that the OS RAM reserves are yet to be 'explained' other than by 'games don't seem to need more right now'.