@jbramburger said:
To prove how impossible some people are, everyone thought Sony were idiots for losing so much money on the PS3, taking a risk on a new disc standard that's now gone on over a decade with no signs of slowing, next to always-online which is still a joke due to obsolete bandwidth infrastructure. The Cell was a half-baked realization of the original hardware plans, but it still put out the most impressive looking and sounding console games last gen. Killzone 2 in 7.1 LPCM with 32 players was insanely chaotic fun.
As far as I know, the PS3 is still the only Blu-Ray player from 2006 that gets software updates and it played back high bitrate video better than my old PC with a Q6700 in it.
In short, the console has had the longest legs of anything before or after it. Fast forward to now with the PS4 being affordable and people think it's a joke on the other end of the spectrum, with Sony able to profit from it shortly after launch.
Will they find a happier medium down the road? Only time will tell. Technology is too fast-paced for anything to retain its value for very long. I bought my gaming PC a year before my PS3 Slim at about 3x the cost, and have put nearly as much into upgrades since just trying to stay ahead of the curve. Pound for pound, you could say I've gotten much more money's worth out of my PS3 for gaming. I like the added benefits of PC as far as customizations, and having the option to beef up graphics, but it's bound to get expensive if you keep chasing those best settings.
During PS3 era, I have Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 at 3.2 Ghz with AMD Radeon HD 3870 GDDR4 and it played Blu-ray videos just fine i.e. played blue-ray videos to the expected standards. http://www.hisdigital.com/un/product2-37.shtml
To the drive the GPU, running non-DX12 APIs needs a very fast single thread CPU performance. Q6700 (at 2.6Ghz) is not optimal for DX9/10/11 limitations.
My next PC CPU was Intel "Sandybridge" Core I7-2600.
The following desktop GPUs after 3870 was 4870 then 6950.
All my PC purchases are made against my income tax, which mostly nullified the my out of pocket PC expense.
1st gen chip size for PS3
GPU: 258 mm^2 (including memory controllers).
CELL: 235.94 mm^2 (including NB and memory controllers).
Total: 493 mm^2
PS3's GPU was substantially inferior to Xbox 360's Xenos GPU's 180 mm^2 i.e. complex shaders has to run on CELL's SPUs while Xenos handles complex shaders just fine.
1st gen PS4 chip size
GPU: 212 mm^2
CPU: 24 mm^2
Total: 348 mm^2 (including NB/SB and memory controllers).
At the same process node, ATI/AMD's transistor packing ability is far superior to IBM. Unlike NVIDIA Geforce 7/RSX, ATI X1x00 series GPUs are Fold At Home GpGPU capable via ATI's low level Close-to-Metal(CTM) APIs i.e. full speed 32bit FP with GpGPU capability. With Fold at Home GpGPU, X1900 flexed it's non-graphics compute power by beating CELL by 2X . The origins for PS4's low level API programming model already existed in ATI's DX9c/CTM GPUs. X1900 and Xenos are SIMD based GPUs just like current AMD GCNs. Radeon HD from 2900 to pre-GCN are VLIW based GPUs. Under AMD, it removed VLIW GPUs and unified console and PC GPUs under a single GCN architecture.
With PS3's 493 mm^2 chip budget, early PS4 like model could been built from 4 PPE 3.2 Ghz (8 threads, 24 mm^2 each PPE), X1900 (352 mm^2, delivers 2X compute power over CELL) and 256bit GDDR3 unified memory architecture. X1900 has 16 ROPS which is 2X over Xbox 360's 8 ROPS.
Log in to comment