Good to be back. My analysis of ps4 reveal

[natureman3]

Hi everyone.
Some here may recall me from the hotly debates from 2006, when ps3 launched.
Just to catch up a little, my ps3 collected a bit some dust until i discovered ps+ and the walking dead and those alone ignited again my interest.

So we are soon going to get our hands on the new ps4. As some here, I watched the unveiling and 95% of the comments made on internet on it. Let me get this straight : I'm hyped.

Here are what I liked the most :

1 - reduced time to actually launch a game. All the features going in this direction are great and it's at the core of ps4.

2 - Enough RAM : I remember the fond times I had on this exact forum 7 years ago, hoping for 1 GB in the ps3. Now, 7 years later, I'm happy. At last.

3 - Not relying on other product adoption : no more blu-ray launch, HDTV adoption. That is a huge thing.

4 - a system who really cares about its dev support.

5 - the specs, which seems balanced and well designed

7 - Controller is nice too. nothing to say.

8 - the games. What was shown was globally great. KZ4 looked phenomenal (but no 60 fps so no buy from me for this shooter). Infamous looked promising. Intrigued by the new platformer.

all in all, ps4 ticks all my requests from this gen. So i'll 100% buy it.

The features not yet revealed i hope for are :
- total support for any video files. Enough ps3 media server and a pc between my nas and my ps3.
- a lots of indie/ smaller games ala journey, SSDHD, Soldnier X2,
- I want RTS with KB support and all genres to be present on my ps4.

Well, it was a perfect for me. Really.

[radgamer420]

Not buying a game just because its not 60fps? Smh. Whatever happened to buying a game because its good and alot of fun to play? Killzone looked so amazing that I wasnt thinking about whether it was 30fps or 60fps. Oh well, its your loss.

[Nitey]

Yah mostly agree with you. I will still buy KZ even though I would have liked it to be 60

I'm hyped too and think Sony gave as good a first presentation they could have when you consider we have GDC, PAX, E3 and TGS left for the year

[KillingSpree0]

If the game runs smooth without skipping shouldn't matter, have the specs for the game already been leaked out or said?

[scotty79]

Agree mostly but having just sold a wiiu on the back of the announcement the most important thing for me is the large numbers of 3rd parties willing to dev for ps4 (lots already with something in the works already).

[rycexboi]

Welcome back, yeah before the ps3 was released, this forum was like on fire. But I can somewhat understand why, since no one really knew what to expect from ps3 whereas ps4, we kind of got hints and what not.

[Lefein]

For me, KillZone is in a box that I like to call a "thematic shooter." It crazy eye candy that you play for the atmosphere and "feel" it gives you. I think it goes well with being a console FPS because it is so incredibly hard to get the twitch-kill formula right on a console without feeling like a CoD or Halo ripoff. For fast buttery FPSes, there's just no substitution for keyboard and mouse controls. What Killzone does is take it's own formula and deliver really goddamn well on it. 30fps is fine imho, but I am massively biased towards PC for this genre generally speaking.

As far as everything else, though.. Yeah, like 100% definitely Sony is moving in the right direction with the PS4. I know at the beginning of the PS3 generation I was die-hard about the direction of exotic technology and "to the metal" development formula that was so successful for the PS2. In the face of what MS had done, however, it became clear to me that Sony did go in the wrong direction with the PS3 and the fight was unnecessarily close between the two, not to mention costly and damaging.

I think if Sony sticks to their guns, they have a formula that's not just good for themselves but good for gaming itself. The developers definitely seem ready to pour some code into the thing and if they are excited, I am excited!

[YoungMullah88]

Not buying a game just because its not 60fps? Smh. Whatever happened to buying a game because its good and alot of fun to play? Killzone looked so amazing that I wasnt thinking about whether it was 30fps or 60fps. Oh well, its your loss.

please dont get him started! i remember buddy from back then....glad the ps4 is tickling all the right spots for you nature lol

[natureman3]

Not buying a game just because its not 60fps?

it's the difference between GOW and Castelvania, the difference between Virtua fighter 1 and 2. For action games like FPS, 60 fps is compulsory for me so that I enjoy them properly. Other genres, no problem with 30 fps. And yeah, i'm pretty hardcore on that aspect.

[mynd]

As far as everything else, though.. Yeah, like 100% definitely Sony is moving in the right direction with the PS4. I know at the beginning of the PS3 generation I was die-hard about the direction of exotic technology and "to the metal" development formula that was so successful for the PS2. In the face of what MS had done, however, it became clear to me that Sony did go in the wrong direction with the PS3 and the fight was unnecessarily close between the two, not to mention costly and damaging.

I think if Sony sticks to their guns, they have a formula that's not just good for themselves but good for gaming itself. The developers definitely seem ready to pour some code into the thing and if they are excited, I am excited!

Its just got so big and expensive to develop games these days, gone are the days getting to grips with exotic tech. x86 has decades of development behind it, and developers will use it to leverage everything they can out of the PS4.

I've always been critical of the Cell architecture, in that I always felt it was highly inefficient (for game programming) , but the PS4 is such a major step in the right direction, I can not criticize the tech or the unit itself. Good gaming times ahead....

On the plus side Japanese developers will finally be dragged kicking and screaming into PC development, and that will benefit everyone, including PC gamers.

[Tetsu]

2 - Enough RAM : I remember the fond times I had on this exact forum 7 years ago, hoping for 1 GB in the ps3. Now, 7 years later, I'm happy. At last.

Those were some funny days. A few of us were harping on the likely need for PS3 to have a full gig of ram, but we were shouted down by a lot of fans. And to the non-tech savvy, it does make sense when you have the memory capacity of PS2 multiplied times thirteen or so. "More ram... why!" Well, the rest of us understood why, as developers milked that split 512MB for all it was worth. It made games like Killzone and Uncharted still some of the best looking and playing games out there, not to mention GT5 even with its issues. But developers still were wishing for that one gigabyte.

Like LeFein, I was all gung ho for PS3 and the Cell Engine too, as developers gave it a mostly warm welcome, bolstered by promises that SONY and first parties were sure to offer all kinds of advice and tech help in a community that shared their key techniques. And then they began coding, and some of the grousing began to bubble up as they found themselves in a similar situation as in PS2, with a system designed more for egghead engineers capable of understanding its arcane structure and quirks. One dev was quoted as saying that the PS3 was still going to have to be approached almost like a PS2 with more, faster ram, and require a lot of carefully scheduled data shuffling between Cell, RSX and system cache. It evidently wasn't that hard to suffer a transfer collision that crashed everything. Fortunately, the coders prevailed and we got the games of our dreams, at least for the most part, as I was crazy happy with what they delivered.

But PS4, dare I say it, seems to be the game changer we were hoping for. Hardly a disparaging word - save for MS and some western game journos. The ones who count, the developers, are enthusiastic, and early real time demos coded for half the available ram are gorgeous, loaded with objects with all kinds of realistic properties attached, and breathtaking cinematic worlds painted to the horizon. What they do with it in the first year will be epic. What they do after that may well be limited solely by their imaginations.

[Coconut_Crunch]

Its just got so big and expensive to develop games these days, gone are the days getting to grips with exotic tech. x86 has decades of development behind it, and developers will use it to leverage everything they can out of the PS4.

I've always been critical of the Cell architecture, in that I always felt it was highly inefficient (for game programming) , but the PS4 is such a major step in the right direction, I can not criticize the tech or the unit itself. Good gaming times ahead....

On the plus side Japanese developers will finally be dragged kicking and screaming into PC development, and that will benefit everyone, including PC gamers.

From what I read from IBM isn't the Cell mainly for servers. So in that case the designer of the PS3 was kind of a derp.

[Coconut_Crunch]

double post.

[natureman3]

Those were some funny days.

I do remember you. Hi Tetsu.

What is surprising is that Sony survived ps3, and that is an enormoius acheivement. Kutagari could really have killed the Sony group. ps4 looks really promising and well designed.

Let's see and have some popcorn.

[Syphon_Filter]

I just the PS4 with it, Uncharted 4, Battlefieled 4, Killzone, and no metters if they are running at 20, 40, 100, 200, and zero.

[K2D]

Much the same as you. It's good to be back!

Migrated over to PC because of social features and modding. So I'm really happy with the addition of xross game chat.

[Coconut_Crunch]

I can play games at 30fps, it doesn't bother me nor does it cross my eyes at all.

[DeviousOne]

Welcome back! Nice thoughts sir!

[MonkeyClaw]

I can play games at 30fps, it doesn't bother me nor does it cross my eyes at all.

I think for some games 30fps is just fine, but certain games like racing games, FPS, etc. just need to be at 60fps in my opinion because you need to have fast reaction times and having higher frame rates severely helps with that!

[Serinous]

Not buying a game just because its not 60fps? Smh. Whatever happened to buying a game because its good and alot of fun to play? Killzone looked so amazing that I wasnt thinking about whether it was 30fps or 60fps. Oh well, its your loss.

Agreed.

I never quite understand it... It is obvious to the human eye when something is 30fps vs 60fps? Maybe i'm a n00b in this so please help me understand.

[MonkeyClaw]

Agreed.

I never quite understand it... It is obvious to the human eye when something is 30fps vs 60fps? Maybe i'm a n00b in this so please help me understand.

Most definitely, I can easily tell the different when playing a game a 30fps vs 60fps, and when playing FPS games or racing games having it run at 60fps makes a huge difference (at least for me). Now don't get me wrong, it doesn't make those games unplayable at 30fps, but on games that require fast reaction times the extra fps do help! I think the human eye can dissern up to around 85Hz (85 fps) if I remember correctly, some people can tell the difference of even higher rates, but for most people anything over 60fps is just overkill.

[Serinous]

Most definitely, I can easily tell the different when playing a game a 30fps vs 60fps, and when playing FPS games or racing games having it run at 60fps makes a huge difference (at least for me). Now don't get me wrong, it doesn't make those games unplayable at 30fps, but on games that require fast reaction times the extra fps do help! I think the human eye can dissern up to around 85Hz (85 fps) if I remember correctly, some people can tell the difference of even higher rates, but for most people anything over 60fps is just overkill.

So would you say anything below 30fps is consider almost unplayable? Range of 30fps to 60fps is normal, with 60fps being optimal in terms of gaming experience satisfaction?

[Aquanox]

8 - the games. What was shown was globally great. KZ4 looked phenomenal (but no 60 fps so no buy from me for this shooter). Infamous loo

Hey man, Welcome back.

I'm not sure 60fps is going to be a target in this generation of consoles... I would go ahead and bet things wont change much in this regard compared to the past generation. Except from COD and action games like DMC and others, I'd expect this gen to stick with 30fps and improve visuals, and upgrade to 1080p.

It's a fixed platform after all and it devs can make a game run at solid 30fps it will still be good.

[admartian]

Not buying a game just because its not 60fps? Smh. Whatever happened to buying a game because its good and alot of fun to play? Killzone looked so amazing that I wasnt thinking about whether it was 30fps or 60fps. Oh well, its your loss.

lol this.

Which is why I always laugh at the finely tooth combs that gamers seem to carry around these days. Makes some sense if you're in the PC gaming arena.

[MonkeyClaw]

So would you say anything below 30fps is consider almost unplayable? Range of 30fps to 60fps is normal, with 60fps being optimal in terms of gaming experience satisfaction?

Truly depends on the game, for most I would say in the range of 30-60fps with 60fps being optimal. I will end up giving Killzone a try, the only thing I didn't like about Killzone 2 (never tried part 3) was the sluggish control, but that game even though it was a FPS was more than playable at 30fps.