Spec Analysis: PlayStation 4

Digital Foundry's take on the final confirmed spec, the capabilities of the hardware - and the surprise 8GB announcement.

[PLASTICA-MAN]

If you read the whole article, this confirms the PS4 games shown were developed with a less capable hardware in mind, and look what they pulled! I really can't imagine how the next wave of games will be!

Next-next-gen !

Edit: even some of Sony first party studios didn't know about the 8 GB of GDDR5:

https://twitter.com/mrengst...

[Qrphe]

PS4 has killer hardware. For Christ's sake, Elemental Demo and Agni's Philosophy can run on this thing!

[mandf]

The new Titan chip has 6gb of GDDR5 and PS4 has 8gb of GDDR5. If digital foundary doesn't know what's up most us aren't going to know. But it's fun speculating.

[Virtual_Reality]

''The new Titan chip has 6gb of GDDR5''

But at what price only in the GPU?

http://www8.pcmag.com/media...

[iamgoatman]

The 6GB of VRAM on the Titan is used solely by the GPU, the 8GB in the PS4 is it's total system memory, which has to be shared with the OS for example. Big difference.

[Ju]

Code will easily fit into the remaining 2GB. Code is not the issue, data is (code fits into a couple of MBs. I'd consider 100MB code a huge waste - or inefficient coding). And most of the data is textures. Hence the "wish" for 8GB vmem. Shared isn't a problem any more. You'd want to avoid excessive memory access in code anyway. Don't shuffle too much data with the CPU, let the GPU do it. Caches on the CPU will be important, but it has plenty of bandwidth to deal with.

Titan is much fast, has more bandwidth and requires a 600W PSU.LOL

BTW: There is currently no platform available which runs shared GDDR, let alone GDDR5. APUs use socket FMx which supports DDR only.

[Enemy]

I remember most of us saying we'd settle well with 4GB after hearing some 2GB rumors. In the end, we got 8GB GDDR5 RAM. Fatality. Naughty Dog wetting themselves already. Polyphony Digital and Sony Santa Monica checked into a hospital from the excitement.

[Tony-Red-Grave]

you know our good friend KY(GTs creator) must've personally jizzed on every ps4 after seeing those specs. BANZAI PS4 BANZAI GT6 BANZAI

[karl]

im sure his dream game is on his reach now..

i can be confident the best GT game is coming

[FlameBaitGod]

Guys omg, some of you are making fools of your self's lol, RAM and GPU and two different things lol

[mandf]

Tell that to digital foundary. I have no clue but neither do they or you. In some ways it's a hybrid. The cpu and gpu are custom not off the shelf parts and none of us know. Me or you included.

Sorry didn't mean to sound condescending.

[talisker]

No clue about what? It's 8 GB of shared pool memory available both to CPU and GPU (minus the system, so probably 7.5 GiB). You can push data from and to it with both. It's basically the same idea that X360 has now (plus 10 MiB EDRAM). Some PCs use the same concept for built-in GPUs but it's DDR3, not GDDR5 and 8 GiB of it is simply amazing.

Also remember that tech demos we saw were most likely built for 4 GiB. There isn't even a single mass-production graphics card for PC which has this much memory. All current games run with 1 GiB or 2 GiB at most.

People who compare this design to consumer PCs have no clue what they're talking about. PCI-E alone is a huge bottleneck. Latency of Windows, its drivers, DirectX, etc. Windows is like a huge parasite sitting on PC's capabilities. If there was a gaming OS, it'd be much different. But there isn't and maybe won't be (unless that's what Valve's been cooking).

More memory means: better textures, less pop-up, bigger in-engine maps with more content and detail, seamless additional functions (now PS3 OS is less than 100 MiB, they'll have 5 times more), more effects like physics and better AI. Fast memory is a great asset. I see Sony's learned their hard lesson from PS3.

As for those who try to talk about graphics. Look at, for example, Killzone Shadow Fall as the Resistance: FOM of PS4. I mean, look at R:FOM's graphics today and compare it to KZ3. This will happen again and it will be awesome.

[SephirothX21]

Remeber, gpu ram is different to motherboard ram. GX 680 ram is only 2gb. No game would need 8gb ram. The most important thing is speed and the PS4 gpu will run at 1.84 teraflops. The GTX Titan runs at 4.5 teraflops and can be overclocked. The GTX 790 releasing in the summer will probably have two titans in it putting it up to 12gb GDDR5 ram.

[PhantomPat]

It's easy to say that the graphic card of the ps4 doesn't match the gtx titan or the future gtx 790... but what king of price you will put for only one of these cards ???? 800$ - 1200$ ... at this price you don't have the rig for a computer you're talking about it's 2000$-2500$... the max price for a ps4 is what ... something like 500$ max 600$... what kind of computer at 600$ price can beat what the ps4 demonstrate ... no one in my idea ... we can't compare pc with console oh wow my graphic are about 20% better on my pc than your ps4 but i paid 4 times the price of the ps4 ... and the bad thing about this is if you want to follow the river in the pc world each year a better graphic card.. cpu are coming out... with a console you can do 5 years to the minimum... i'm a pc fan.. huge fan and each years i put a lot of money on it... but for saving money to have a similar and great experience sometimes i prefer console. I love fps for the pc ... but i didn't find a uncharted game on pc.

Sorry for the mistakes my english is not perfect.

[KwietStorm_BLM]

We know that its on one APU. Does that clear up your confusion?

[Ju]

I think we need to clear this $600 perception - even though judging by the comments everybody expects this. It will be in the range of $400-$500 (probably $449 small HDD, $549 big).

[Munky]

Directly from the article:

Watch Dogs was confirmed after the event as running on PC hardware with specs equivalent to the PlayStation 4, while Square turned up with a re-heated outing of its existing Agni's Philosophy demo (said to be running on PS4, but we're sceptical). Capcom's new Panta Rhei engine, running its new Deep Down IP, looked really impressive but again it was unclear how the tech would translate into a final PS4 game. Our worry here is that the spectre of the target render has given way to in-engine video running on another, more powerful platform.

[ThatXboxGuy]

That's nice.You can sleep soundly from now on, right? lol.

Until you see these running on PS4.Hopefully nextbox can keep up! It would be a shame if these games had to be held back for a weaker console.

[Studio-YaMi]

I knew watch dogs could run on PS4 like that footage we saw even though it was running on PC,it's common sense,the Killzone gameplay we saw came out neck to neck(if not better) than that battlefield 3 video we saw running on Ultra settings on PC,if Killzone : shadow fall can do that,running watch dogs on that same level of graphics as we were shown in the footage @ the PS meeting will be easy.

And To all people commenting,don't worry about the disagrees,most of them coming from PC & Xbox fanboys but mostly PC fanboys seeing that they lost many of their dedicated PC developers to console gaming on the PS4 (and maybe the new Xbox).

Agonizing,isn't it ? :)

[KwietStorm_BLM]

Any reason you specifically quoted that one piece out of the entire breakdown of specs in the article?

[Munky]

It was a reply to the original comment... Which is the complete opposite of what is stated in the quote.

[Sarcasm]

Yeah people don't understand the magnitude of 8GB of GDDR5 RAM. EIGHT GIGABYTES OF G D D R FIVEEEEEEEEEEEE.

And based on this article, they even mention how it is used different. In PCs, the only GDDR5 memory we have is in VRAM on our GPUs, which is blazing fast in comparison to standard DDR3 modules. The bottleneck is that the CPU and GPU has to communicate through PCIe. Although we do have PCIe 3.0, it isn't even remotely needed yet because developers haven't designed games for the PC that will saturate it.

The way the PS4 implements it is that it is Unified for both the CPU and GPU. So instruction sets and data are basically instantaneous. And if you research on the AMD APU's, fast memory can make a huge difference on that platform, which is why I think Sony took the approach.

And think about it people, use your brains. We're not even close yet to launch titles and they already look like that, imagine what a couple years down the line will bring.

If Sony Santa Monica could make God of War look the way it does on Split 512MB of RAM, imagine what they could do with a system with 16 times that amount of faster RAM. There is no more bottleneck, it is only up to their imaginations.

[jacksheen0000]

Wow, I m extremely impressed with the PS4's hardware capabilities.

In this article i read One things that caught my attention.
I did not know Sony have to order hardware components(ram) a couple years in advance to guarantee that they get total amount ordered.

I was thinking more like a couple of months/one years.

So that leave me to believe that Microsoft is stuck with what they ordered hardware wise. If true... 8 GB DDR3 is not going to cut it.

Ps4's 8 GDDR5 is going to mangle the 720's 8 GB DDR3 in term of power/data bandwidth/speed.

[mandf]

Yeah but Ms did a switch around with IBM last gen and pissed Sony off. Don't remember exactly google it.

[jacksheen0000]

well I guess you can say payback's a bit_h.

[MoveTheGlow]

http://betanews.com/2005/10...

"Meh" at best re: Sony getting angry over that. IBM was paid to quickly come up with a PowerPC-based chip for the upcoming 360 back then, whereas the Cell processor was in development for quite a while. I don't think they felt betrayed, they just moved on.

It looks like this console generation is about to be a whole lot clearer from what Sony put out there and what we've seen about the Xbox team's plans for the future. Sony is all about games, making stuff, and being creative this time around. Microsoft has been heading in the direction of creating a "one-stop shop" entertainment hub for a while.

Sony looks to be making a gamers' (and nerds', with all the creativity stuff going on) console. It'll be classy, and it'll be pricier off the shelf. Microsoft, at the moment, looks to be making a family (meaning a console for moms and dads also, not just kids) console to supplant the Wii. Look for a heavy focus on big-name broadcast content with the new Xbox, for example. It'll be cheaper, it'll be less powerful, but it'll include more subscription costs for non-gaming stuff. Stuff that regular readers of this site probably don't care about.

It's Lamborghini vs. Camry from where we are, and there's possibly room for both with Nintendo flubbing so badly. Maybe this won't be a console "war" as much as it is a diversification - PS4 as a games console, Xbox as a set-top box, and WiiU as a toy that plays wonderfully designed first-party games.

[akaakaaka]

well i will not buy a Xbox i'm sure of it but I will like the XBOX to have 8gb of gddr5 .. so third party games do not use the lower denominator :/ and use the full PS4 power.
let's just hope!
m$ pls keep up with the PS4

[MoveTheGlow]

That's a good point, considering what we saw this generation with disc storage capacity.

I don't think it's going to be as big an issue, though, since both of these consoles look to be extremely PC-like. Developers have learned from last gen's multiplatform errors, but so have console manufacturers - devs will most likely be looking to develop for high-end PC's, much like the PS4's architecture, and downscale from there to something mid-high like what we've seen so far about the Xbox.

If they're looking to be exclusively on a console, and not on stuff like Steam, they'll probably make a one-console game anyway, and lowest-common-denominator problems won't even be a problem... with the exception being a few Japanese studios, because Japan itself doesn't have much of a PC market. Yet.

[solidboss07]

I don't understand all of this talk about PlayStation as a game console , and XBox as an entertainment hub ect ect. Correct me if I'm wrong but Sony did both better than Microsoft with PS3, and look to do the same with the PS4.

[Virtual_Reality]

Any word about how many GHz the CPU is running on?

And also, can anyone provide information about how the RAM works? It have 8GB of GDDR5 but how many DDR of RAM is using?