In business, the number one priority is to sell products. Obvious enough, and how do you sell products? There are many ways to go at it, and one of the most effective ways is developing a slogan.
In video gaming, that is no different. Contrary to many misconceptions, they are not a charity organization. Their primary motive is to make revenue, and any pretense that the company cares for you is pure PR and self motivated.
That brings me to this point. The PS4 had the easiest job for any marketer, play Mr. Contrarian to the Xbox One and leech off of their negetive publicity. 8GB of GDDR5 RAM is one marketing slogan, $399 price point is another. x86 architecture which means cheaper and easier to port from PC. AMD Jaguar CPU with 8 cores.
They are impressive specs, yet Killzone Shadow Fall is struggling to run at 30 FPS, Drive Club is barely clocking at 30 FPS. At the same time, Mario Kart 8 is running at 60FPS at 1080p (reportedly). Shin'en has recently came out in an interview stating that aspects such as EDRAM can help make use of less RAM demand to render at 1080p. It resulted in Neo Nano Assault running at 60fps/720p using ONLY one core.
Does the sum of the PS4 architecture add up to a better experience, or is the 8GB of GDDR5 nothing more than a marketing gimmick?
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