You are not seeing the full picture, do you ?
I can see you're picture perfectly well. I just happen to disagree.
Console manufacturers always end up finding technical efficient solutions to do things at launch time, only very expensive PCs can do. It has always been like that.
True the xbox360 GPU was relatively more powerful in its time compared to the ps4 GPU. But what about :
- CPU - GPU interaction and bandwidth ?
- RAM quantity and Bandwidth ?
Both the xbox 360 and PS3 have much better communication between the CPU and GPU than even the latest PC's today. Nevertheless within a year of their launch the majority of cross platform games were looking as good or better on PC's and running at faster framerates. Fast, efficient communication between CPU and GPU is obviously going to benefit the consoles this generation as it did the last but it's not going to make up for a large raw power advantage. ERP mentioned earlier in this thread I believe to my own comments about how HSA might effect PC ports that there's not much that can't be overcome by doing things in a different way on a more powerful machine.
We are talking here about a UNIFIED 4 Gb of GDDR5 at 192 Gb/s (remember PC games use nowadays DDR3 RAM, how they could compete with first and second gen ps4 games designed with GDDR5 main RAM bandwidth in mind?),
if true thats incredibly monster RAM architecture, far a lot better compared to the PC landscape today
All that bandwidth will be used primarily for graphics rendering so I've no idea why you keep trying to compare it to PC system memory which is never used for graphics rendering. Obviously it should be compared to PC graphics memory in combination with PC system memory since together they perform the same function as the unified memory in the PS4. So today you're looking at up to 6GB running at 288GB/s combined with say 8-16GB of system memory running at 25.6GB/s
Exactly how is a 3.5GB pool (512MB reserved for the OS) at 192GB/s of shared memory faster or larger than that? The fact that it's unified will be advantageous but that's no different to the 360. Shared memory also brings it's own issues in that you have 2 (or even 3 in PS4's case) processors contending for the same bandwidth. Although the ease of development it brings to the table is a bigger advantage overall.
than the disappointing 512 Mb at 21.6 Gb/s of the xbox360.
There was nothing dissapointing about the Xbox 360's memory architectire back in 2005. It had double the unified memory space than most PC GPU's had graphics memory with only the very highest end GPU's matching it for size. Today we have PC GPU's which already have more graphics memory than the PS4 and we're still the best part of a year away from it's launch.
In terms of bandwidth it was 4x faster than PC system memory bandwidth and about half the speed of PC graphics memory bandwidth but of course it also had the hugely fast 256GB/s pool of edram which was over 5x faster than anything a PC GPU was running.
So with regards to memory size and bandwidth, the PS4 doesn't look to be in as good a position compared with PC's today (almost a year before it launches) as the 360 was in 2005 on the day it launched.
Also having a SOC with CPU+GPU on the same chip allow to overcome any previous bottlenecks of PCs PCI express interaction bandwidth between the CPU and GPU, and xbox360 didnt have that advantage compared to PCs in its time.
Yes it did. Not to the same extent as the PS4 with it's system on chip design but both PS360 had big advantages over the PC in terms of CPU <-> GPU communication. It wasn't a game changer though, just as it won't be this generation.
Sony clearly learnt a lot from its mistakes with ps3 (basically they learnt the hard way that memory architecture is key to performance, and GPUs are more important than CPUs if you want fancy graphics), and that shows with its Vita design and now even better with its very efficient PS4 design. Of course assuming that those rumors are true...
Let's face it. Your attempts at damage control not withstanding the PS4 will be much slower compared to PC's when it launches than the even the PS3 was when it launched (and PS3 came late to the party compared with the 360).
PS3 had Cell, PC's had dual core Conroes. They both had their advantages and disadvantages but one could at least make an argument that Cell was faster - much faster at many tasks. PS4 will have 8 Jaguar cores at 1.6Ghz. PC's will have quad Haswells sporting likely double the multithreaded performance quadruple the single threaded performance and more than quadruple the SIMD capabilty. If you throw in the GPGPU unit on the PS4 though then at least the SIMD performance becomes more even (although Haswell may well still have the advantage baseed on the current rumours). But that's a far cry from Cell with it's > 4x SIMD performance of PC CPU's in mid 2006.
The GPU situation is better than the CPU situtation but still worse than PS3's position in 2006. PS3 faced off against the 640MB Geforce 8800 GTX. A GPU which was 2-3x faster than RSX and had 25% more graphics memory than PS3 had total shared memory. The PS4 will have a GPU that is roughly half as fast as the top end GPU's of today but by the time it launches the 8xxx and 7xx series GPU's will be 6 months old. So not only will it well under half as fast as the fastest single GPU's but it will also be facing another round of GPU refreshes within 6 months. At least PS3 had a full year before something faster than the 8800GTX launched.
Memory wise the PS3 had about 1/4 the total RAM as PC's had system RAM. That's pretty much a match with PS4. The aggregate speed of that memory was around 8x faster than PC system RAM, again, same story with PS4. Compared to PC graphics memory, PS3 had 80% as much memory as the top end GPU running at 56% of the bandwidth. PS4 will have 58% as much graphics memory assuming the top end next gen GPU's sport 6GB running at 66% of the bandwidth of TODAYS fastest GPU's. It will obviously be slower compared to the next generation of GPU's.
So put all that together and what do you have? You have a system that's in a weaker position in almost every respect than it's predecessor was compared with PC's at the time of it's launch. And comparing to PS3 isn't really the best scenario since it came out 6 months after the 360 with the same level of performance. If the above analysis was done using the 360 then the new generation of consoles would have come out looking even worse in the comparison.
I grant you the new consoles will have architectural advantages borne from HSA and likely other secret sauce but it's an inescapable fact they're no-where near as powerful this generation as they were last in comparison to PC's. arguing otherwise is nothing more than wishful thinking.
