Jonathan Blow: PS4 easier to develop for than PC
- Posted March 11th, 2013 at 13:56 EDT by Mike Harradence
- 12 Comments
Jonathan Blow, the creator behind Braid and The Witness, has suggested the PlayStation 4 is easier to develop games for than PC, thanks to its increased RAM.
Speaking with EDGE, Blow championed the console’s speed and made it clear Sony's new machine is packing some serious muscle under the hood.
“For The Witness we’re mostly interested in the base machine and how fast it is – the fact it has faster RAM than a PC, which really helps in shuttling graphics resources around, and since it’s not running a heavyweight operating system like Windows that gets in the way of your graphics,” said Blow.
“Rendering stuff through Windows has an impact on performance. Since a console is just about games, that doesn’t happen, and the equivalent game will run faster. And if you can target to specific hardware you can make it run faster, too.”
PS4’s ‘Share’ button in particular intrigued Blow, who said of the feature:
“In general, as a platform feature, it’s super interesting,” adding: “One thing that most game developers have become really aware of is that over the past couple of years on YouTube the whole livecast and commentary thing is really huge.”
“A lot of people are paying a lot of attention to it now and it’s interesting to see what happens if you base an entire console around it. That’s what’s crazy about PS4 – it has a chip that’s always recording to a maybe two-minute buffer. After something cool happens, it’s there in the buffer. That’s the sort of thing that’s really going to change the way something’s used.”
Blow’s next project, The Witness, is a launch-window exclusive for PS4. Sony’s new home console will be released in holiday 2013.
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JP88
- 2:29pm EDT - March 11th, 2013
- 3
@1
Key word: "can"
Doesn't mean they will get 32GB. Heck theres probably not a game available that would require more than 4GB of RAM. Developing a PC game requiring more than that would be treading on thin ice as you might be alienating certain consumers unwilling to upgrade their PC's. Being able to develop with even 5GB's of the PS4's 8GB's of RAM, after accounting for OS and graphics output (though I doubt the OS would require more than 512MB), should allow for some innovation
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mystik4l06
- 2:38pm EDT - March 11th, 2013
- 4
@baho Continue reading and maybe you will understand what he is talking about. Maybe, You are just not able to comprehend. The 8GB dedicated to graphics on the PS4 is more than what a PC can offer now. The line cuts off at 6GB for dedicated Graphics RAM which right now power houses are mainly only using DDR3 in which the PS4 is DDR5. If you do not know the difference between DDR3 and DDR5 its mainly the increase of bandwidth in which is processor can communicate with the GPU or CPU in this case the GPU. 32GB of DDR3 is basically somewhere around 10GB of DDR5 (I am not precise just an estimate). Using less resources to do the same job and that much faster. Also, Another point he spoke about is the Windows dilemma. In order for your game to boot up or anything like that it has to be compatible with Windows and be able to work together with its infrastructure to even be able to boot up. The PS4 or ANY other console on the market does not need to do this. It's basically like a DVD player. You have an interface to access the content you throw in the disc and it will play it. It does not need anything special except for the drive to be able to read the coding within the disc and be able to project it onto the screen. Yes, The PC WILL be better because of new hardware releasing yearly as opposed to consoles. I recently built my PC with 16gb of ram a radeon hd 7970 3gb video card a 120 gb SSD quad core ivy bridge unlocked processor to overclock in the future. My 16gb of ram DDR3 is nothing compared to the PS4 DDR5 8GB. It will be faster and better. Also for some computers to even upgrade your ram you need to find out whether your board can even support it. If it doesn't then guess what? You will need to buy a new board just for that and MAYBE the new board will not support your current GPU/CPU due to new hardware. Then in the end you will need to build a brand new PC. Which if you want a powerhouse will run you ATLEAST $2000 MINIMUM. If you want a ordinary gaming PC then just buy one already built for about $1200 or less as i have seen many nice ones on newegg.com for about $700-$900 than can run Crysis full settings but probably at 30fps and will notice some lag when moving quickly throughout the maps due to not being able to render faster than the speed you are currently moving in the game. My point is do not bash ANYTHING if you do not know how it works in depth instead of just going by "numbers." Numbers are not always everything because, You may have a super computer and have a regular HDD that can only process information at 5500RPM which will roughly translate it to MAYBE 30Mb/sec then you will bottle neck your whole system making the system useless or unbearable to use due to the system not receiving the information fast enough from the HDD hence why SSD are becoming more mainstream and affordable.
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baho
- 4:12pm EDT - March 11th, 2013
- 5
mystik4l06 learn to paragraph, nobody will read that wall of text. PS4 does NOT have 8gb of dedicated VIDEO ram! And it never will have it!
From those 8gb of ram u can bet ~1gb will be reserved for the OS features and another 2-3gb for other ingame tasks. The most ram will be dedicated to videocard alone would be 4gb or so.
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joeyjoejoeshababadoo
- 6:32pm EDT - March 11th, 2013
- 7
@4, I read the first sentence and then realized you wrote a run-on novel. Include a TL;DR if you're going to do that.
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sony1978a |
Aked- 9:14pm EDT - March 11th, 2013
- 8
@1 My PC has 16 gig of RAM, you have to understand, we are using DDR3, The PS4 is Using GDDR5, also you need to know that GDDR Ram is very Fast and Expensive, That’s why the fastest Video card on the market today is GeForce GTX TITAN witch only have 6144 MB of GDDR 5, now the PS4 has 8, and is Unified memory, meaning is used as system memory, you imagine having that memory as a system Ram in your PC, good luck you can’t afford it, maybe in future.
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pirulee
- 10:05pm EDT - March 11th, 2013
- 10
@baho
The article mentions increased in speed not in space. Learn to read.
PS4's ram is DDR5 (a ram speed not available for cosumers today, it will be in the future).
Mr. Blow said it was much faster to load and unload resources into the ram thanks to its speed having much better CPU performance. And that makes sense.
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Gameoholic007 |
Demented007- 1:30am EDT - March 12th, 2013
- 11
In comparison, 4GB of GDDR3 = 1GB of GDDR5. Its 4x the speed. Every version of DDR that comes out is double the speed than the previous. =)
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