The Official Playstation 4 Thread - News and Info

[thaKEAF]

Just pre-ordered Watch Dogs, Madden 25, NBA 2K14 and Battlefield 4. I'm ready for this feast.

 

[Ronald]

[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auMNMK3vRgM[/ame]

 

[Mowgli]

 

[Mowgli]

In case you missed it.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E3--Q68eek]The Order 1886 'E3 2013 Full Trailer' [1080p] TRUE-HD QUALITY E3M13 - YouTube[/ame]

 

[Mowgli]

Shuhei Yoshida Re-Confirms no Power Brick for PS4, Console Size is "Very Close to the 2nd Gen PS3, and PS4 is Slimmer" (Update) - PlayStation LifeStyle

Update: Shuhei also answered some Twitter questions by stating that his favorite genre is action-adventure, the PS4 stand will be sold separately, and, when asked if the DualShock 4 analog stick would “still get that layer of slime like the PS3′s did when you didn’t use them for a while?,” he replied with:

The material is different from DS3′s, so hopefully not.

Original Story: We’ll try to hide our jealousy a little bit right now, but the guys at IGN were able to get their hands on the PlayStation 4 console, showing it off in the latest episode of Up at Noon (which pales in comparison to Morning Wood).

Very early on in the video, Colin Moriarty talked a little bit about the power situation with the PS4, mentioning that he didn’t know if the system might include a power brick. Quick to remind everyone that it doesn’t have one, Shuhei Yoshida, President of Sony Worldwide Studios, said, “The power is inside, so no brick outside.” This response also fits right in line with the image of the PS4 box contents, which didn’t feature a power brick of any kind.

As for the approximate size of the PS4, Shuhei put it into PS3 terms by saying, “It’s very close to the 2nd gen PS3, and PS4 is slimmer.” Also, for the headphone jack on the DualShock 4, Shuhei confirmed that the headphone part of any pair of headphones would work, but for the mic, “it depends.”

 

[Artificial Intelligence]

.......................

 

[satam55]

Every1 should watch this. He goes into more detail than in the February PS4 event.

 

[Mowgli]

PS4 Demo The Dark Sorcerer: Even More Impressive Technical Specs Unveiled, and a Little Mystery | DualShockers

A few days ago I wrote an article that unveiled a few of the impressive technical specs of The Dark Sorcerer tech demo by Quantic Dream, and today we learn more of the elements that contributed to turn what basically was treated as a “old man face” joke right after the PlayStation meeting in which the PS4 was unveiled into an extremely impressive demonstration of power that dropped many jaws at E3.
For convenient reading, I’ll add the new elements to what we already know in a single list, to give a proper overall vision of the specs, that were gathered from notes by our writers present at the demo’s showing at E3, this video, an article on the Japanese website 4Gamer, the official PS blog and couple tidbits from Quantic Dream’s official website.
The demo ran in 1080p native resolution. Texture resolution was 1080p as well.
The framerate was not optimized at E3, and ran between 30 and 90 frames per second.
The demo used only 4 GB of the PS4′s 8 GB of RAM.
The DualShock 4 can be used to dynamically move the camera position and switch lighting (between studio mode and film mode) within a single frame.
The set uses about one million polygons.
Each character takes a little less than one million polygons and 150 MB of textures (there’s a reporting discrepancy here. See at the bottom of the list).
The textures for the skin and face models were actually obtained by scanning the face of actors actually cast for the project.
The sorcerer is played by David Gant, the Goblin by Carl Anthony Payne II, the Demon by Christian Ericksen and the Director by David Gasman.
The vertex density of the 3D models is comparable to the CG used for film making.
Each character uses 40 different shaders.
The scene uses Volumetric Lightning, allowing individual beams of light to be displayed when the light shines through the environment.
Color Grading and Full HDR ensure that colors are truly vivid and realistic.
All particle effects are simulated in real time and emit light/create shadows.
Limb Darkening is used to naturally darken the edges of the screen.
Effects that would normally be applied in post production like Lens Flare, True 3D Depth of Field and Motion Blur are implemented in real time based on an accurate optical simulation.
Camera lens distortion and imperfections are also simulated.
Physics-based real time rendering is used for reflections and done by the rendering engine. When the lighting changes, the shaders don’t, but the reflection effect still changes dynamically based on lighting. This is a technique that was previously possible only for pre-rendered CG at this level of detail.
An advanced technique named Subsurface Scattering (SSS) is used to simulate the shading of the skin. It involves letting the light penetrate translucent materials and then scatter and refract a number of times at irregular angles and exiting the surface again a different points. It’s another technique that was previously only used in CG.
The same Subsurface Scattering effect is used for the green skin of the goblin, the the wax of the candles and the crystal of the wand as well, despite the fact that the final result is entirely different.
To simulate the effect of wetness of the eye surface, the engine applies to it a mirrored image of the surrounding scene.
The cornea and pupil are actually modeled in 3D inside each eye.
Each hair is drawn separately instead of being a texture applied to a polygonal model.
All clothes, accessories and hair (including the feathers in the sorcerer’s collar) are physically simulated in their motion and interaction with the environment, like they were worn by a real actor
Each human model has 380 different bones: 180 in the face, 150 for the body and 50 for the exoskeleton. This is three times the number of bones used in Heavy Rain and twice the number used in Beyond: Two Souls.
The performance capture studio used for motion and facial capture has been built internally at Quantic Dream and uses 64 cameras tracking 80 markers attached to the face and 60 to the body.
The demo has been created by using the PS3 development pipeline used for Beyond: Two Souls, as PS4 development tools still weren’t available.
There’s also a bit of a mystery that we are still unable to solve. The article on the Official PlayStation blog talks about a little less than a million polygons per character, but our team reports that during the presentations at E3 “only” 60-70,000 polygons were mentioned. The other sources agree with that notion. I included the official PlayStation blog number in the list above, as it’s the most “official” source we have, but the discrepancy seems strange. We reached out to Quantic Dream for a clarification on the issue, and we’ll keep you updated if we hear anything relevant.
That’s quite a wall of text…I know. but that’s what you get when you try to describe a rather large leap in technological innovation. Now we just have to wait and see what Quantic Dream will be able to do with this kind of technology and proper PS4 development tools. One thing is for sure: seeing the demo in action it’s hard not to be excited for the next generation.

 

[Mowgli]

Why 8gigs of gddr5 was chosen and how it works with that ps4 for Tech heads.
Mark Cerny Explains How the PS4′s 8 GB GDRR5 RAM and Bus Work and Why They Were Chosen | DualShockers

The PS4′s loving dad (or at least one of its fathers) Mark Cerny did a lot of thinking on the console’s architecture even before the first piece of circuitry was printed, so who can better explain how the much touted 8 gigabytes of unified GDRR5 RAM work in conjunction with the bus, and why that solution was implemented?
While speaking at a conference during GameLab 2013 in Barcelona Cerny did just that.
First of all, he explained that third parties were consulted on what they would have liked to see in a next generation console. The number one piece of feedback from more than thirty development teams was about the RAM (not surprisingly, considering how the limited RAM of the PS3 affected third party development during the current generation), and it was not what Cerny thought it would be:
Turn out that the number one piece of feedback was that they wanted a system with unified memory. That means just one pool of high speed memory. Not the two that are found on PC or on PlayStation 3.


Then he explained the new philosophy that stood behind many of the technical choices made at the base of the PS4′s architecture and specs:
I took a simpler approach: in some way it was like Nolan Bushnell’s famous philosophy for designing arcade games. He said that they should be easy to learn but difficult to master. By that he meant that anyone should be able to put a quarter on that arcade machine and have fun playing it immediately, but there needed to be enough depth to the game that it would take months for the players to fully develop their skills and to master it.

My variation on this was that the hardware should have a familiar architecture and be easy to develop for in the early days of the console life cycle, but also there needed to be a rich feature set which the game creators could explore for years. to put a more specific timeline on that, perhaps some solid features for year one and some very interesting additional features, perhaps more speculative, for year three or four of the console life time.

Another way to express this is that we didn’t want the hardware to be a puzzle that the developers would need to solve in order to make quality titles.


And then, from the philosophical he moved to the technical, so you better get some coffee because we’ll have to try to wrap our brains around this (and maybe it’s just better to take Cerny’s word for it):
The architecture that we ended up with for PlayStation 4 uses a 256 bit bus and a type of memory found in top-of-the-line graphics cards called GDDR5. The combination of this wide bus and this fast memory gives 176 gigabytes per second [of bandwidth], which — many of you will have to take my word for it — is quite a lot.

With that much bandwidth, straightforward programming techniques usually result in some pretty impressive graphics.

Now, we knew that there was an alternative architecture that would be a bit easier to manufacture. In this architecture we would use a narrower 128 bit bus which would drop the bandwidth down to 88 gigabtes per second, which is not particularly good in next generation terms, and therefore would really hurt the graphic performance. So we then used some very fast on-chip memory to bring the performance back up.

If we used eDRAM for this on-chip memory, we knew that bandwidths of as much as one terabyte per second — that’s a thousand gigabytes per second — would be achievable. The catch though, is that the on-chip memory would need to be very small, and each game team would need to develop special techniques in order to manage it.

To compare these two architectures, the one on the left has 176 gigabytes per second for any access, the one on the right 88 gigabytes per second if the data is in system memory or a thousand gigabytes per second if the data is in that tiny eDRAM. At first glance the architecture on the right looks far superior to the one on the left, and sure, it takes a while to figure out how to use it, but once you understand how to use that little cache of eDRAM, you can unlock the full potential of the hardware.


Surprisingly, especially considering the PS3 precedent (or maybe not surprisingly at all, as Sony learned from its mistakes), the choice didn’t fall on the second solution:
But, to our new way of thinking the straightforward approach on the left is definitely advantageous. It gives us excellent day one performance, and we can find other features for the programmers to explore in later years.

In other words, it may be counterintuitive, but 176 is much larger than 1088.

As a result of this “less is more” choice the “time to triangle” (the time necessary to create a graphical system able to match the capabilities of the hardware) has gone back down to the 1-2 months that were necessary for the first PlayStation, from the 6-12 months needed for the PS3, benefitting developers, that already have engines compatible with this PC-like architecture, and indie developers. That terabyte per second of bandwidth may have sounded very tempting, but I bet quite a few devs are now thanking Mark Cerny for deciding against it.

More time to make that PS4 version hotter while devs fumble around with that Trash box architecture.

 

[Mowgli]

Microsoft says specs dont matter.

As the week comes to a close, Daily Reaction wouldn’t be complete without discussing a baffling comment made by an exec. Today, Seb and Dan discuss whether the PS4 and Xbox One’s specs are “meaningless” in what will surely be a pointless argument.

Seb: So here’s what happened: Xbox product planning head Albert Penello told OXM that technical comparisons between Xbox One and PS4 are “meaningless” as their “games and experiences are going to be every bit as good as, if not better” than those on competing consoles.

The problem is that Sony decided to go out and publish a bunch of numbers, which are in some ways meaningless… because this isn’t like 1990, when it was 16-bit versus 32-bit.

As a matter of fact, they actually go out and they talk about how proud they are about their off-the-shelf parts. Our guys’ll say, ‘we touched every single component in the box and everything there is tweaked for optimum performance.’

For me, I’d rather not even have the conversation, because it’s not going to matter. The box is going to be awesome. The games are going to be awesome. I heard this exact same argument last generation and it’s a pointless argument, because people are debating things which they don’t know about.

Ugh. It’s like Microsoft enjoys slowly loading a gun, pointing it at their foot and firing. Of course specs are important, of course comparisons are important, and of course the games are important. We could end the Daily Reaction right here, it’s that obvious, but let’s get into the nitty gritty.

We should probably get the comparison out of the way first, because people do actually know what they’re talking about – they do know that the PS4’s RAM is faster, and that the GPU is better. That’s the real reason why Microsoft is making this statement, but it’s just silly.

Here’s why specs are important: certain games do need a lot of power to actually be possible, while others just look prettier (which is fine), and it makes things simpler for developers. Great games can exist on any platform, but strong specs make the potential to have these quality titles all the higher.

Yesterday, Mark Cerny talked about the PS4’s creation and one of his focus points was “time-to-triangle”, the time it takes a developer to create the base for a game that matches the hardware’s graphical power. The PS1’s time-to-triangle was 1-2 months, the PS2 was 3-6 and the difficult-to-develop-for PS3 took 6-12.

The problems with the PS3 crippled its developer support, caused third parties to hate making games for it, titles to be visibly worse and costs to spiral. Worse, it constrained innovation.

The PS4’s time-to-triangle is, apparently, 1-2 months. Not only will that be great for dev costs, it will allow for experimentation with gameplay ideas at a far earlier stage, meaning that innovation can be a lot cheaper, and risks will be a lot less. This is important to the industry, and how it evolves. Talking about specs and games is not a mutually exclusive topic, one helps lead to the other.

Saying specs are meaningless is downright stupid, and, if they really are, why the hell do we need new consoles?



Dan: Yeah, it is obvious that Microsoft are trying to downplay the numbers, simply because the numbers do not lie – so let’s see what they say:

The Xbox One: (Memory) 8GB of 2133MHz of DDR3 (Memory Bus) 256bit (Memory Bandwidth) 68.3 GB/s
The PS4: (Memory) 8GB of 5500MHz of GDDR5 (Memory Bus) 256bit (Memory Bandwidth) 176 GB/s
Simply by looking at these specs you can see that there is a major issue with the stats for the Xbox One, as the PS4 has over 2x the amount of Memory Bandwidth – which is the amount of information that can travel down the channels, giving more output

The one thing that most people seem to disregard is that Microsoft has included eSRAM (Embedded Static Random Access Memory) on the Xbox One as a means to potentially give it a boost. There will be 32mb of eSRAM which is capable of processing 102 GB/s, meaning that in the a best case scenario the XBO could overall be able to do 176 GB/s worth of processes. But, as the eSRAM is still only able to handle 32mb at any single instant, even while fast, it could still only be able to have 32mb of memory at a single instant compared to the PS4’s much heftier memory.

Now, there is still some controversy as to whether the eSRAM will be simply be used for cache or if it will in fact be able to be managed through software, so we will have to see if Microsoft really can close the gap Sony has on them.

Other issues that seem to be popping up for the eSRAM are numerous rumors of it having to be underclocked due to heating problems, something that would basically destroy the output of the XBO and that there are complications with the dye, meaning that, come launch, stock of the system could be limited (which could be why GameStop is limiting XBO pre-orders but not PS4 ones).

There you go, the numbers, now what do they mean? Well actually nothing, if programmers are not able to use them within reason, as was the problem with the PS3 during its early years. Now, Sony and Microsoft have streamlined the process and used the x86 architecture, a common structure for PC developers, meaning that the ‘time-to-triangle’ will almost be nothing. Which also means, that as the years go on, developers will have a significant amount of time to harness every bit of power from each console and that any lead one has over the other will be a defining factor for the later end of next-gen.

So yes Microsoft, numbers alone don’t mean everything… but you are still planning to hit the market with an overpriced, underpowered console and those numbers do mean something.

http://www.playstationlifestyle.net...ay-ps4s-spec-advantage-draws-attention-to-it/

 

[winb83]

the whole concept of streaming games from previous systems is rubbish and i won't pay a dime for it. i'll be keeping the PS3 and buying a slim PS2 or playing PS2 games on PCSX2.

 

[Grand Conde]

winb is so dark and edgy it blows my god damn mind. Dude is just full of fascinating opinions.

 

[Rekkapryde]

 

[LastEmperor2k2]

People lose me when they become these spec warriors.

PS3 specs were much more impressive than 360's and that system couldn't run a Fallout/Skyrim gave for shyt.

 

[marcuz]

[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe9CTBpp5Y0[/ame]