The PlayStation 4 could employ a multiple-tier subscription service, offering different levels of access in a style similar to a cable television company, Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida tells The Guardian.
"We could have gold, silver or platinum levels of membership, something like that," Yoshida says. "We can do subscription services when we have more content especially now that we have the Gaikai technology available. With one subscription you have access to thousands of games that's our dream."
Yoshida says the PS4 will have more digital content than its predecessors, at least: Every game will be available as a download, while some will still be sold at retail. This makes it easier to host smaller games such as Jonathan Blow's The Witness, and it supports a broader range of payment models, such as free-to-play or subscription based games.
"We're shifting our platform more and more to the digital side," he says. "PS4 will be similar to PS Vita in that every game will be available as a digital download, and some will also be available as a disc."
Yoshida previously confirmed that current gen PSN games won't run natively on PS4, though emulation or cloud service plans aren't out of the question.
I assume/hope this was a joke? Even if Jaguar is used in netbooks, which one has 8 of them at 1.6GHz? Netbooks may have dual core ones, that's 4x less cores.
And the Radeon 7800 is pretty damn good for a console, it's not the highest end but they have costs to consider, and consoles can do more with the same hardware as PCs thanks to being dedicated to gaming and developer optimization/lower level programming.
I'm actually rather enthused by what's in the PS4, at least the GPU will never be memory bandwidth bottnecked, most of us don't even have half that GDDR5 on our graphics cards. Most probably not even a quarter of that. The chip will limit it before the memory, but I'm sure they'll be able to do incredible things with it.
Yeah, and if that was pre-rendered those guys must have had hell of a time emulating crappy player..Even played it on Jimmy Fallon's show.
I don't get why people are complaining about the video card. Did you see what they squeezed out of the crap in the 360 / PS3? The 7850 is an absolute excellent choice and will easily be good for a long time to come.
The processor is my only gripe. Sure it has 8 cores but they're relatively weak cores. I'm wondering if they realized that their processors on the previous gen well outweighed the video capabilities so they scaled back the CPU too far and flip flopped the scenario.
But, I'd rather have a weaker CPU than a GPU.
I don't get why people are complaining about the video card. Did you see what they squeezed out of the crap in the 360 / PS3? The 7850 is an absolute excellent choice and will easily be good for a long time to come.
The processor is my only gripe. Sure it has 8 cores but they're relatively weak cores. I'm wondering if they realized that their processors on the previous gen well outweighed the video capabilities so they scaled back the CPU too far and flip flopped the scenario.
But, I'd rather have a weaker CPU than a GPU.
The next big difference is I don't think anyone wants this generation to last as long as the previous one. We might get four or five years tops out of it, which is doable with the hardware they have.
The CPU is strangely weak. 1.6Ghz? What is this, a phone?
Not really. The CPU is only as weak as the supporting cast these days. Once you cut out the "bloat" of a general purpose OS, and add in the necessary high performance parts in terms of memory and GPU, a couple 1.6GHz cores is plenty. Most of the time your 4.6GHz overclocked PC sits idle.
The question then becomes, why EIGHT cores? Especially when your typical game will only ever use at most three (one for main logic, one for physics and one for audio). Most will even only use one or two.
Look at what happened with the 360 and PS3 and you'll understand. The roadmap was laid out a long time ago. Sony and MS want these boxes under EVERY TV in EVERY LIVINGROOM, whether you're a gamer or not. These will be set top boxes, playing games, downloading media, uploading crap to Facebook, DVRing junk you'll never watch, streaming your last 30 seconds of gameplay, playing your Netflix, Pandora, etc.
If you missed it in the presentation, there's a ton of non-game related crap that will ALWAYS be going on in the background on these boxes. They'll be finding ways to fill up those cores that have absolutely nothing to do with Metal Gear and Mortal Kombat. But you can bet they'll involve your wallet.
Make your own PS4 equivalent computer. AMD to sell a cut down version of Sony's Playstation 4 APU
but given that AMD will be selling the commodity version of the chip minus Sony's technology, perhaps for the first time the industry can see just how much work console designers such as Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo do beyond the standard hardware available to consumers to squeeze out more performance.
Make your own PS4 equivalent computer. AMD to sell a cut down version of Sony's Playstation 4 APU
What I'd be interested to know is why they went for 8 x Jaguars instead of say 2 Piledriver/Steamroller modules (ie 4 cores)?
My guesses:
1. Die space, and therefore cost.
2. A Jaguar at 1.6 GHz is probably still faster than a Cell SPU at 3.2 Ghz. They now have 8 of them.
3. It lets them reserve one of the 8 cores for the OS. Reserving 1 out of 4 Steamroller cores would be a waste (that being said, why not something truly heterogenous - 2 steamroller modules and 1 jaguar core?)
4. Power budget. Perhaps Jaguar is more efficient in terms of IPC per Watt than SteamRoller is? More heat in a console dramatically increases the chance of hardware failure, ala RRoD.
Honest question though, if they had already decided they were going to go x86, what else where they going to go with instead? Intel? I doubt they have any desire to just hand out designs of their CPUs to be fabbed somewhere else which means, no chance at making a SoC, which then means multiple chips, increasing BOM. Plus, they are 100% financially solvent and are less likely to make an attractive deal.
I'm talking about features aside - pure computing power. Not features that can be announced and then disappear. That was the gist of the post as the OP was complaining - use-less features he didn't care for. Based on both consoles Dev kits and the fact that Sony's matches their rumored specs I'm working under the assumption the Xbox 720 will match its rumored specs (I know thats a leap but its what we have to work with her). The rumored specs of the 720 vs the known specs of the PS4 show the PS4 as having better hardware capabilities. Re-reading my post it does come off a lot more fan-boyish then intended. I just wanted to point out (and I've seen it in a lot of media outlets today) that people keep focusing on all of those gimmicky features rather than the fact that the PS4 will be a very powerful and easy to develop for console.