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While I'm sure the PC fans among you will be ready to tear this news piece's comment section to threads, there are others who might disagree with you. One such man is Avalanch founder Linus Blomberg, who believes the GDDR5 will give the PS4 a real edge.
While I've argued recently that 8GB isn't quite a standard in PCs yet – and got hammered for it on Facebook – GDDR5 is something that has only been reserved for GPUs until now. Partly this is because it's not really seen as that necessary at this time, but clearly Sony has found a way to leverage that power – unless it's just future proofing.
In an interview with GamingBolt, Blomberg said that this sort of memory was “a perfect fit for the types of games we do, and we’re confident we’ll bring open-world gaming to a whole new level because of it”. And that ultimately, with 8GB of GDDR5, it would mean, “that the PS4 will out-power most PC’s for years to come.”
KitGuru Says: Of course he's suggesting “most,” PCs, not all PCs, or your PC in particular. In that respect, I've got to agree with him. A lot of PC gamers use abominably slow machines – I guarantee every one of you with an SSD loads faster than 90 per cent of other gamers – so they're very likely to be outclassed when the PS4 launches. For years and years, maybe not, but a couple, sure.
I’m sure there will be dozens of hardcore gamers that will be incensed by the headline, but the intelligent ones will read this and agree that yes, the PS4 specs probably do outclass the ‘average’ PC gamer – the GPU alone is a 7850/7870 clone after all, which is better than the ‘average’ gamers GPU, especially when programmed ‘direct to metal’.
That said, the PC is still easily the most capable platform in pure performance, and there are almost certainly people out there with Titan SLI setups that have more power on tap than the PS5 let alone the 4. Its just a question of when that level of power becomes affordable, and thus mainstream for everyone else.
@Tom P: Titan SLI to have more power than the PS5? Yeah I don’t think so, what SLI combo from 2006 can stand against the PS4? PS5 will most likely come out by 2019/2020 given the normal console lifecycle stays true, by then technology will be so much more advanced that GTX Titan won’t even compare.
@Tom the PS4 actually doesn’t even have a GPU. it has an APU which is a combined CPU/GPU. and i doubt it will perform at the same level as a 7850/70, maybe match a dedicated 7770 1Gb card. it will perform better than a basic gaming PC but only for the first year or 2 but that is only because it will have games that are fully optimised for the hardware unlike PC games.
@James: You do realize that the Titan is the newest top of the line graphics card from Nvidia that contains 6gb of GDDR5 in the card. This is a $1000.00 GPU. Running them in SLI would cost 2 grand just for the video cards and would definitely be future proof for a decade or more. However, it is overkill beyond overkill. They would be waste of money due to the fact that there is not a CPU made that could keep up with that GPU setup. The CPU would be the bottleneck to how well these GPU’s perform.
@danny and you do realise that the PS4 has 8GB GDDR5 conected to its APU in inified memory right? thats more than the titan Has! 😉
@highdef and so if someone runs 3 GTX titans in 3way SLI that would give 18 gb of gddr5 (6×3=18) , the fact remains that there is already hardware available that is more powerful than the ps4 albeit too expensive for 99% of gamers.
Im not knocking the PS4 by any means as i do believe it will be an awesome machine and the lovers of consoles will be very happy indeed, as will PC gamers as when new gen consoles are released that will mean the end of being held back by game developers who only want their games to run well on consoles so the PC gaming community has to suffer.
Some of the games that have been released lately have not quite lived upto their full potential due to current console (hardware) restrictions. The next gen hardware that will be present in PS4 and Xbox 720 (whatever it will be called) will allow developers to make huge leaps forward in gaming/graphical advancement, a scenario in which we are all winners.
Really, does RAM bandwidth have any impact on performance? If the PS4 does have an advantage over PCs I highly doubt it would be because of it’s RAM bandwidth, it would be because of other components (APU) and optimisations. In terms of size 8GB is quickly becoming the norm, perhaps it’ll take a year or so longer until it’s fully mainstream. Overall, I doubt the RAM will have a significant impact
@highdef
Unified memory is used to drive the entire system. The entire 8 gb will not be dedicated to graphics. It will most likely dedicated 2-3 gb depending on the game and no higher than 4 gb.
@grumpy trooper. Im actually not saying that the ps4 will be more powerful that 3way SLI titans at all not to mention the price difference..See whats really interesting is that no PC to date has GDDR5 and Sony are claiming 8gb of unified memory shared for APU and delivers 170GB/s of bandwidth that is massive! All im saying is PC has its bottlenecks through its PCIE..even if you have A TITAN gpu if the BUS between your gpu and cpu dont have the bandwith means the PS4 will be faster…
like to point out, the PS4 GPU is 1.84teraflop compute power, and CPU is 8 core LOW speed CPU with 1.6 to 1.8GHZ 8 core’s, what this mean’s is due to slow CPU and instructions, GDDR5 RAM is there to compisate for it. now also got remember all features PS4 has Streaming and Download wile play and video and mic chat wile gaming. these will all be running as background task behind the game. so im going lay it out flat for you all, this will not beat a PC .
4 cores for streaming content to uplay mic and video chat and other features that PS4 announced 4 for the dedicated gaming, due to low instruction of the cpu, large amount bandwidth is needed to help with speed and time, also got remember latency of GDDR5 is very bad. may has huge bandwidth but it’s slower in terms of latency to DDR3.