AMD Polaris in Apple Mac, Sony PS4K design wins say reports

[jigger]

I would be very tempted to stop upgrading my PC and play on a console if I could buy a box for under a TV that offered 4K gaming.

How hard do people think a 4K Play Station would hit gaming PC?

[b0redom]

Depends on the games. I like RTS and FPS, and I don't really think either work very well on console.

Platforms like Uncharted etc, football, beat em up, fighting and driving games etc work just fine and are possibly better suited to a larger screen.

[jigger]

I was thinking more on price difference. Gaming PC's are becoming a very expensive hobby.

[shaithis]

I was thinking more on price difference. Gaming PC's are becoming a very expensive hobby.

This is why the PS4K almost certainly won't game at 4k. The hardware costs are too much for a console.

None of the console manufacturer sell at a loss any more.....and if your happy with 720p-scaled-to-1080p-at-30FPS, you can get the console experience on PC at roughly the same price....and I am fairly sure the PS4K will offer 1080p-upscaled-to-4k, again you don't have to spend a fortune to experience the same on PC.

[jigger]

This is why the PS4K almost certainly won't game at 4k. The hardware costs are too much for a console.

None of the console manufacturer sell at a loss any more.....and if your happy with 720p-scaled-to-1080p-at-30FPS, you can get the console experience on PC at roughly the same price....and I am fairly sure the PS4K will offer 1080p-upscaled-to-4k, again you don't have to spend a fortune to experience the same on PC.

I don't think prices are that high when buying chips in bulk.

Realistically what are we looking at from a 4K gaming PC? £1500-1600 for a system with AMD and 2000-2500 with Nvidia. I think the average PC gamer gets milked badly nowadays.

[shaithis]

I don't think prices are that high when buying chips in bulk.

Realistically what are looking at from a 4K gaming PC? £1500-1600 for a system with AMD and 2000-2500 with Nvidia. I think the average PC gamer gets milked badly nowadays.

You will always get milked in every market when your using cutting edge tech. 4k is cutting edge. No one really needs 4k gaming either, the trade-off between IQ and performance is too wacky atm....and again, if you believe those prices are bad because you think your going to buy a £300 console that can game at 4k, think again. Maybe in 4 years time.

[jigger]

I think the consoles come out at more like £500, but anyhow you seem to be completely missing the point.

[shaithis]

I think the consoles come out at more like £500, but anyhow you seem to be completely missing the point.

I'm not sure what your point is then.....When I went 1600p gaming in 2007, I had to buy 2 GPUs at £400 each. It's the same today with 4k. You want cutting edge? You pay cutting edge prices (and after 10 years of inflation, those top-end cards are now £500). If your happy with 1080p, you pay significantly less.

Or do you think everyone is putting bigger and bigger margins on PC gear and in fact, AMD and nVidia could afford to sell top-end cards for £200 each? Even though it costs them more each generation to magic up more performance.

And don't forget, EVERYTHING is more expensive these days.

[jigger]

My point is a 4K console is a very tempting prospect compared to building a 4K PC. If you can't see why then you must have more money than sense.

Also we have 5K monitors. 4K has been well surpassed.

I bought a 2560x1600 screen and that would have been around 2007. FYI a 8800GT was around $250 (IIRC £190). I'm not sure what cards you bought in 2007 for £400 each but you got ripped off. You do make a good point though. We need a massive drive on the performance per £.

[DanceswithUnix]

My point is a 4K console is a very tempting prospect compared to building a 4K PC. If you can't see why then you must have more money than sense.

I expect a 4K console will be made possible by the shrink to 16nm, the same shrink that will lower the cost of PC graphics cards.

But whilst people do indeed spend a small ransom on their gaming PCs, if you are on a budget you really don't have to. If you look at benchmarks like this:



That is a GTX960 on a variety of CPUs, and the system is so GPU limited that you would have to wonder at the wisdom of spending the extra £100 of an i5 over the cheap Athlon X4. That isn't cherry picking a chart either: http://wccftech.com/amd-athlon-a10-roundup/5/

You can chuck that Athlon on a £40 motherboard, and for some reason even when you can get a similarly priced Intel motherboard (my mum's Xeon is on a dirt cheap Asrock board so I know they exist) people get caught up in the specs that they don't really need and end up believing only a £120 motherboard will do. Perhaps at 4K an i3 might be a better bet.

Of course the £80 for a copy of Windows is I think these days laughable bad value, but sadly that walled garden is still quite intact so unless you only want to play The Talos Project under SteamOS you just have to stump up the money.

[jigger]

I'm not saying you can't find decent value with a PC, although probably not as much as a consoles offers or with a GTX960.

Once you start pushing resolution the price becomes horrendous and you need that unlocked silly priced i7 and £1000 Titan card. I mean come on, you could probably spend the cost of a console on a PSU for a top end system. Even at that point (many thousands of £££ lighter) you probably still can't enjoy everything at 4K and would be better saving a lot of money and looking at 2560x1440 or one of the new ultra wide screens.

[DanceswithUnix]

Some perspective here, we are talking about going from the ballpark performance of an R7 360 to an R9 380X in going from the PS4 to the rumoured PS4K. Hopefully when an R9 480 comes out that price performance will improve more.

Now I know the argument about driver optimisations for a fixed platform etc, but again looking at those graphs above it looks to me rather like the CPU is sat around waiting for the GPU to finish and cranking up the resolution is only going to make things more GPU limited and lower the advantage that the console has.

Now if a PS4 has the equivalent performance of a Titan, then you might have a point. But I'm just not seeing it.

[scaryjim]

... Now I know the argument about driver optimisations for a fixed platform etc, but again looking at those graphs above it looks to me rather like the CPU is sat around waiting for the GPU to finish and cranking up the resolution is only going to make things more GPU limited and lower the advantage that the console has. ...

Essetially, this. Pick through some reviews and realistically, taking account of optimisations, you'd need at least 390X levels of performance to drive games at 4k @ 60fps. That more than twice the raw graphical horsepower than the PS4 has. AFAIK there's going to be no great financial saving per transistor going to 14nm - we're past the point where the increased number of chips from a wafer paid for the additional complexity of the process, so if you stick twice the transistors in the chip you're going to increase the cost. Additional performance isn't free.

My best guess would be that they'll have two performance targets - 1080p @ 60fps with improved visuals to make the upscaled output prettier, or 4k @ 30fps with some of the quality reduced slightly where the higher DPI of a 4k TV/monitor will make up for the lower IQ. They should be able to do that at a 380Xish performance level, which is only around a 50% increase in graphical resources and sounds much more reasonable for keeping a similar (undoubtedly slightly higher) cost.

Ultimately though, it all comes down to what level of performance you're happy with and how you make your games. There are loads of PC games that will play perfectly acceptably at 1080p medium quality on the last 2 or 3 generations of AMD's APUs - because they don't use all the high-cost features that make the games look prettier but put massive load on the GPU. So I suspect that it will be technically possible to create PS4k games that will run at 4k @ 60fps. They're just not going to look like PC Witcher 3 on Ultra quality. Exactly where Sony end up setting their bars, we will have to wait and see...

[jigger]

You can't see how a 4K console would tempt people away from the PC? I would think thats pretty easy to see why.

I can't find the details of the chip I was looking at, but it was around 2400 shader and I think around 50 ROP's. It's beatable if that allows for 4k gaming, but it's defiantly a massive jump in performance and once Sony move I think microsoft will have to follow up with a faster Xbox. I don't think it will be long before 4K consoles hit the market.

[jigger]

Essetially, this. Pick through some reviews and realistically, taking account of optimisations, you'd need at least 390X levels of performance to drive games at 4k @ 60fps. That more than twice the raw graphical horsepower than the PS4 has. AFAIK there's going to be no great financial saving per transistor going to 14nm - we're past the point where the increased number of chips from a wafer paid for the additional complexity of the process, so if you stick twice the transistors in the chip you're going to increase the cost. Additional performance isn't free.

My best guess would be that they'll have two performance targets - 1080p @ 60fps with improved visuals to make the upscaled output prettier, or 4k @ 30fps with some of the quality reduced slightly where the higher DPI of a 4k TV/monitor will make up for the lower IQ. They should be able to do that at a 380Xish performance level, which is only around a 50% increase in graphical resources and sounds much more reasonable for keeping a similar (undoubtedly slightly higher) cost.

Ultimately though, it all comes down to what level of performance you're happy with and how you make your games. There are loads of PC games that will play perfectly acceptably at 1080p medium quality on the last 2 or 3 generations of AMD's APUs - because they don't use all the high-cost features that make the games look prettier but put massive load on the GPU. So I suspect that it will be technically possible to create PS4k games that will run at 4k @ 60fps. They're just not going to look like PC Witcher 3 on Ultra quality. Exactly where Sony end up setting their bars, we will have to wait and see...

But forgetting the huge cost, can you build a PC that can run games at 60FPS maxed out? I've had a look and it seems for the most part you can't.