Sony announces PlayStation 4
One of the titles discussed at the event was Ubisoft's much anticipated WatchDogs which will be heading to the next generation console.
The limited technical specifications revealed show that the next generation console will feature a custom eight-core CPU, a GPU capable of generating 1.84 teraflops of processing power and 8GB of system memory. The GPU and CPU are both being manufactured by AMD.
Announced at a New York press conference, what the machine will look like is still however a mystery, although the new console's controller was discussed.
The Dualshock 4 controller will feature a touchpad on the face of the device and a lightbar built in to the rear to allow its movement to be tracked with a camera. Sony also boasted about the "share" button, allowing players to instantly upload recent footage to social media sites.
There will also be possible integration between Sony's Vita handheld and the next generation console with the Vita being able to function as a second screen and additional contorller.
The Playsation 4 will leverage the cloud technology from Gaikai, a cloud gaming firm which Sony acquired last year for $380m. Players will have the option of allowing their friends to access their consoles in some form of gaming remote assistance to either help them out or simply spectate their progress.
Backwards compatibility appears to be off the cards for the new machine, although Sony is apparently exploring the option of allowing Playstation 3 games to stream on the console through the use of Gaikai's cloud platform. It is unclear if the lack of backward compatibility includes all of Sony's previous consoles or just the Playstation 3.
Titles discussed at the press event included WatchDogs from Ubisoft, Killzone Shadowfall, Infamous: Second Son, Bungie's newly announced Destiny and surprisingly Blizzard's Diablo 3 which will also receive a Playstation 3 port.
A price for the new console was not discussed, but Sony did state that it was aiming for a "holiday 2013" release, implying that the first launches will start in December this year.
This announcement makes Sony the second of the big three to launch its next generation efforts with Nintendo's Wii U being first out of the gate last December. Fans of Microsoft's console will now be eager to hear what's next for the Xbox.
Rumours of specifications of next generation Playstations and Xboxes have been doing the rounds of late with a suggestion that the new machines will work to clamp down on the second-hand game market. Nothing from Sony's announcement has lent any weight behind this suggestion.
Previous Article
48 Comments
Discuss in the forums ReplyIt was hard to read the rest of the article after this, since I had to do it through a gigantic facepalm.
Hopefully there will be only a month or two of spam before Facebook or Sony make it possible to filter out the junk
The "Share" button is just embarrassing, is this really what people want on their consoles? Didn’t get a Playstation 3 probably wont get this one but looks OK i suppose. Wonder how MS will match up with theirs? When is that rumored to be announced?
Here's hoping that we'll see better quality PC ports now that the lowest common denominators are being updated hardware wise...
Agreed, I felt it was overdone and I can see it being overused. Meh, the masses will love it.
Biggest point for me was the new streaming to Vita. Looks interesting if it's pulled off right.
The PS3 already has facebook integration; that isn't new. My understanding is that the Share function is more about multiplayer gaming than social media, as per the 6th paragraph in the article. That is how it is being reported elsewhere anyway.
Still curious about the price though, 8 GB of GDDR5 doesn't come cheap and I don't think Sony has the means to sell this console at a heavy loss.
We're an elitist bunch of a**holes aren't we ;)
I don't hate it, quite like it, but not enough info to make a sound judgement yet.
Not surprised there's a lot of Diablo 3/Blizzard hate - D3 is a super hardcore bunch who were let down by D3 PC
The PS4 will still be pants though. :p
Don't have space for more boxes in my cabinet, it's one out, one in.
As a PC gamer with no interest in consoles, the PS4 should be a good thing overall for the games industry :)
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-02-21-sony-tells-eurogamer-playstation-4-will-not-block-used-games
1. Usual memory capacity increase in-line with previous generational jumps
2. AND this is WAY more important than people realise - Unified Memory Architecture. The previous NUMA was pretty much one of the largest bane of ports from 360 to the PS3 despite what people said about Cell. Although Cell wouldn't have helped :D
Because SONY has a patent (application) for that :
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2013/0007892.html
Yeah but with no PC overheads to worry about, it should perform better than a 7870, probably closer to those limited edition 7870's which are failed 7950's.
..and that 8Gb of GDDR5 is very impressive.
Because PS4 & Xbox 720 going to be just x86-64 multicore machines, with standard DX11 GPU, (4 years old PC specs it seems), means us PC games will get 64bit, multicore, DX11 games also. After waiting 10 years :P
How is it 4 year old PC spec? The AMD "Jaguar" architecture is yet to be released in the mainstream by AMD and the 8GB GDDR5 and GPU specs certainly aren't 4 years old.
More than likely true. But you can bet your bottom dollar that the likes of EA, Activision and any other publisher will do their best. Think single use activation codes with all games, so even if you buy a used disc, you still have to buy a new activation code. In fact, that's already the case for most online multiplayer games. I see the Publisher as the true evil in this arrangement we have.
Not bothered about the sharing functionality. At all.
BUT, buffering of the last (unknown number of) minutes of gameplay which at the touch of a button can be hardware encoded in the background while you're still playing? As a Battlefield gamer first and foremost, this is good news, since DICE didn't see fit to treat us to Battlerecorder.
The key thing though is that the architecture is very PC friendly, ports with a few extra quality notches could look incredible.
Why do you think there is going to be DX11 games? You know that it's most likely going to be OpenGL type instead right? They aren't just giving you a PC here in disguise as much as the design has converged in your eyes.
In a way it is further from the PC than before what with the new memory architecture. It's just that x86 has got you all excited.
The fact being thought that it is going help linux, and dare I say it, mac gaming more than windows gaming I'd imagine.
So I'm not sure what you've waited 10 years for. You had a PC all this time surely? And there was no law about owning one platform was there?
I thought it was supposed to be, thought I imagine it would be a similar state to 1080p gaming on current consoles, wonder if Sony have a scaler this time around?
8Gb is total memory available, yes? Then I doubt it.
I know it's not apples to apples, but that's like expecting a modern PC with a 2GB GPU and 6GB RAM to run 4K.
You will get the odd game that looks awesome in a few years after release.
There is no Api overhead on consoles, they are all coded to hardware so its not going to help or hinder development of pc games.
Developers on the pc side have seen games like wow and Diablo 3 sell millions of copy's by catering the lowest commen denominator.
There is less than 10 64bit exe games less than half of them come with it as standard.
32bit games will be the norm till windows 64bit becomes the default OS which we are still 3-4 years away from as xp still has half the market.
That was never the intention though, was it? The intention was to offer 4k support for movies, which is possible. It'll probably take Maxwell to drive that many pixels at a playable framerate in a game, as even the best current PC cards can only do it at meagre frame rates on high settings.
9.66% running XP in latest Steam HW (Jan 2013) survey . 64 bit users above 65% and over 50% have 4GB or greater system ram . They will probably start releasing with the 64bit exe now. They'll probably have to if the PC games aren't to look worse than the console versions.
Pretty much, with the hardware it got it will be able to keep up to sometime around 2015-2016, then we either get PS5 or the "bad console ports" argument over again. Unfortunately, PS4 will be with us until 2018-2019.
I'm a bit behind current gen PC specs at the moment. I'm curious to know how this PS4 compares with what's on the PC market and the upcoming releases. I did read about the GTX Titan, but I'm interested to know where this console lies on the current scheme of things. PS3 when it came out was I think two maybe more years behind in terms of GPU technology (as far as I remember at least) and well I thing PC Games have suffered as a result having poor ports and poor implementation of PC-spec games because it was more profitable to make console games with less demanding mechanics.
cpu wise ; well since sony pulled a fast one with the ram (rumour said 4GB , sony said 8GB) , the rumour mill says an octo core AMD `Jaguar` @ 1.6ghz , but as with the ram , it could very well come clocked in higher
Current generation is the PS3, next generation is the PS4. It would be a tall order to power the console with technology that doesn't exist yet.
"Apparently Sony will NOT block second hand games" this is something that all game makers should be made to adhere to especially with games sold through that pile of sh*t that is Steam who refuse to activate a game more than once so totally killing used games, this is done I assume because the game makers have demanded it?
The last console I bought was a PS2 and since PC gaming I'm not interested in them as a mouse and k/board is way better than pad but, if in the future the only way to play used games is via a console then I might just be tempted, it's not just that I only buy used games but I happen to think it's pretty outrageous that a perfectly good used game is rendered useless and worthless because game makers have declared it can't be reactivated and the extra game content needed to play the game can't be d/loaded, it's such a shi**y attitude >:(
I have discovered that you can actually use a decent gaming k/board and mouse on an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 (and probably future consoles) by using a XIM3 console input adapter, interesting
Ozmor-GxXiE
1. It probably will have 8 cores, AMD even make a chip with 8 cores now anyway
2. We don't use 8GB on PC because consoles don't have 8GB and many pc's also don't.
3. 8GB of GDDR5 memory probably won't come cheap to sony. The gtx titan 'only' has 6GB although that it all for the GPU.
But PC games will still look better, but you'll have to pay much more than now to beat it.