Is the PS4 a similar leap in tech as the PS2 was?

Obviously the PS3 was the biggest leap for a generation, but I'm pretty sure the PS2 wasn't more of a leap than the PS4 is.

What is the peak polygon performance for the PS4, or is that irrelevant in this day and age?

Pretty sure the PS2 was quite weak in terms of performance however it had what the others did not, good games.

I think the parallels are there when it comes to graphics performance.

PS1 was like the Gen1 of proper 3D modeled game environments but the PS2 was a powerful enough machine to "fine-tune" your standard 480i/480p television set. It was essentially the final stage of standard definition with some limited capability of doing HD in some games.

PS3 was a Gen1 HD console. It struggled with HD resolutions and a lot of those games we thought were impressive are going to look downright drab in the years to come because the PS4 is a truly 1080p capable console. It even seems to be breaking through to VR gaming (which is just now in its super early phases the way HD was in the PS2 era.

My answer is no and here are the reasons why. The difference between PSone and PS2 were in leaps/bounds compared to the PS3/PS4. All this generation showed us is better graphics but not much else.

They all had good games

Just some of them had 5 or less games a year

But by golly, those 5 or less games were amazing!

Now... We're lucky if any of the consoles gets one good game a year let alone five........ This gen sucks butt.

the ps4 is a ps3.5

ps2 leap was real.

the leap from ps1 to ps2 was noticeable. ps3 to ps4...not so much....but from what i heard, the gen leaps are almost the same as far as the at least 10x more powerful....but thats just what i heard

the PS2 was a monster. don't think most of the kiddies here were old enough to remember.

and you base this on what?

are you thinking of from DreamCast to PS2?

No the leap the ps2 had was much bigger than what we have with the ps4. The PlayStation 2 was roughly 15-20x as powerful as the ps1. The PlayStation 4 is roughly 8x as powerful as ps3.

PS4 - 8 cores AMD CPU@1.7ghz, 1840 GFLOP GPU, 8GB GDDR5.

PS3 - 3.2Ghz Cell broadband engine, 176GFLOP Nvidia RSX. 256mb DER3 256mb XDR.

PS2 - 233mhz emotion engine, 48mb ram, gpu????

PS1 - 32 bit cpu, 2mb system ram, 1 mb video memory.

Wasn't the leap in power between the ps2 and it's predecessor really huge? If I remember correctly. Larger even than the leap between the ps2 and ps3.

No, the leap from the PS2-PS3 was far bigger than PS1-PS2, especially when you take into account PS3's ability to handle shaders.

PS1 = 0.1 Gflops (CPU)

PS2 = 6.2 Gflops (EE+GS)

PS3 = 228 Gflops (RSX+Cell)

PS4 = 1.94 Teraflops (CPU+GPU)

The PS2 wasn't a monster. To be honest the Dreamcast already showed a big enough graphical leap to make the PS2 not seem that impressive in comparison when it first came out. It took a couple of years before we saw games on the PS2 that looked a lot better than anything we saw on the Dreamcast.

Also, I started playing games in the 80's with the Atari 2600 and NES, so I was definitely old enough to remember the PS2.

then xbone is xbox 360.1? is that what the one means?

Well... I do remember being very impressed with MGSII and FFX early that gen. It was a significant jump from the PS1. But I guess PS2 to 3 was a bigger jump. I can still enjoy games on the PS3 without caring much about the graphics, and I do own a PS4. When the PS3 was released and I got one, I didn't want to go back, no game made me play on the PS2 again. For me at least, that says a lot. I'd guess this was maybe the smallest leap I've seen until now.

Both the ps3 and the ps4 are not big leaps in graphics. They are both super charged versions of the ps2. The ps1 was a pixelated mess hampered by horrible load times. The ps2 was a huge leap over that, and quite a bit more powerful than the Dreamcast as well.

PS1 was super weak, so the jump to the PS2 was quiet big. Bigger than PS3 to PS4.

PS3 definitely was a huge leap over the PS2. Shaders made a big difference in visuals.

funny how everyone is giving different answers. I'll just say that it depends on how you look at it. If you are just comparing console to console the leap is honestly about the same. But if you are comparing to what is out their on the market the leap isn't what it was in the past. No new hardware was broken out with these new consoles. Everything they are doing had already been available on PC for some time. PS360 had some very impressive hardware at the time. So it depends on how you want to look at it.

The PS4 is actually a fairly big leap from PS3. Unfortunately the last console generation was so long that the hardware available has out stripped any advantages gained by the tech leap. Ultimately this leaves the PS4 fairly weak in regard to modern high tech kit. 2 years out of date, on release, is a long time in the hardware world.

I'm sure devs will do good things with it, eventually (maybe) but with PC now looking at 1080p (for me, running most games at 1080 I'm getting well over 100 fps with full settings) as old news and 4k coming as standard on the horizon, the gap is far too great for it to keep up.

With PS1, developers were just getting a handle on how to do 3D worlds and camera angles with controls. I wouldn't say it was a huge leap because of 3DO and PC tech at the time. Dreamcast was a pretty sudden leap, mostly with polygons, especially at a time when the best looking PC game was Unreal and many GPU's were no more than 600,000 polygons. PS2 was another huge leap and after that we haven't seen such large leaps within even twice the amount of time, it's been more evolutionary than anything. By the time Xbox, 360...etc came out, PC's were already there with games to show it and even compared to PS2 was just evolutionary steps by comparison to the 3DO, DC and PS2 leaps.

It depends what you're asking. According to this, PS2 was 62 times more powerful than the PS1 but the PS3 was only 35ish times more powerful than the PS2... Of course raw numbers the PS2-PS3 gap is bigger

They have all been pretty substantial.... but I think going from PS2 to the 360 would be the biggest leap.

According to your numbers the PS2 is 62x the PS1, the PS3 is 35x the PS2 and the PS4 is 5-6x the PS3. So the largest increase was the PS1-PS2.

Sure if you are only going to judge by G-flops, but I was more impressed with the leap in graphics the 360 - PS3 provided. PS2 just could do more of what the PS1 could do. Polygons, textures, resolution, disc capacity. PS3 did all that as well but also added Shader support which no previous gen console supported. Shaders made the graphical leap bigger than what the raw gflops would tell you.

Not from the looks of things initially.

No, way less.

Which makes me wonder how they made the game BLACK look as good as it does on ps2.

PS3 to PS4 is like Dreamcast to Xbox.

Dreamcast = 26MB's of Ram and 1.6 Gflop CPU + GPU.

Xbox = 64MB's of Ram and 7.6 Gflops CPU+GPU. 2.4x more ram and 7x better gflop performance compared to Dreamcast.

PS3 = 512MB's of ram and 200 Gflops GPU

PS4 = 8GB's of ram and 1.84 Teraflop GPU. 16x more ram and 9x better gflop performance compared to the PS3.

Don't care about that. Im looking at the evolution of the character models and environments.

From a technical standpoint the leap from PS3 to PS4 was the biggest. However, the resulting change in graphics is much less noticeable. The PS3 could render a character down to their pores. Going farther than that doesn't lead to that much of a perceptible difference.

Me too. The holy grail of graphics is realistic lighting and we won't really get that until consoles can do ray-tracing in real-time. I'm guessing the PS5 will be able to handle ray tracing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tw1l_C4kXrg

PS1 to Dreamcast was a pretty big jump, especially since the dreamcast came out in 99. Dreamcast at 480p in VGA mode is really impressive, even today.

Soul Calibur 480p video at 60 FPS

Im not gon jump in on the whole power debate what i will say though is that there have only ever been 2 consoles that truly gave me that WOW!! moment.

The first was the N64 when i first sat down and played mario 64, the environments and characters seemed so completely solid and colorful it was more like controlling an animated cartoon than a game.

The second was the DC and turning on Sonic Adventure for the first time, the crisp quality of the graphics along with the colors and general clean look to everything was amazing at the time to me having grown up with atari and various 8bit home computers.

I love and have owned all of the Playstation consoles but none of them have ever given me that same moment of genuine WOW!!.

The leaps were smaller and smaller over the generations.

When PS1 and PS2 first released, there was simply nothing on PC that can compete in graphics immediately. Didn't take long to catch up, but those consoles certainly had a lead in tech.

When PS3 released, high-end PCs were already outperforming it.

When PS4 released, even mid-range PCs costing just as much as a PS4 in components are outperforming it.

The cost of components are dropping year after year, yet this so called "leap" to PS4 is simply pathetic. It can only be explained by laziness and greed.

Short answer..

No.

Hell no. It's an appropriate leap in RAM but the processing power is disappointing ... and on X1 it's shameful.

Halo on Xbox wowed me. Not just the way it looked, everything about it.

An ACTUAL edit: I get a kick out of this site routinely saying I've edited comments that I never edited. I figured this would be fixed by now but I guess GS isn't concerned about the forum's bugginess.

Instead of looking at it as a mhz thing, which you cannot do since you can only compare clockspeed across identical processor microarchitecture a better thing to do would be to compare average textured/gouraudshaded polygon count per scene/frame or per sec:

There are spec sheet listed statistics, but you really have to go by what you were seeing developers achieve on PS1/PS2

Games were rendering between 1000-4000 polygons per frame at 30fps in PS1 Games.

Not sure about ps2, but this would be a much better metric for performance comparison between ps1 & ps2.

So basically the leaps are getting smaller and smaller over the generations, from a raw performance perspective and ps2 was the biggest leap over it's predecessor. Also the tdp has increased each generation but this one were it actually decreased instead. We are never going to see ~50x performance increase again unless some revolutionary new processor technology comes along.

Visually, games aren't that different from PS3 games. I know it's still early into the gen, but still yet.

Well, no. 50X ain't gonna happen, that'd be insane. But considering that there was an 8 year gap between this gen and last gen I expected a 10X processing improvement. Instead it's 7X for PS4 and 5X for X1.

I think any gen so far, has had more or less the same hardware leap. Looking at RAM, for example, you always see a 16x increase.

Games already looked good last gen, so it's harder to notice the improvements. This gen is all about more reflections, particles, better performance, etc..

Going with the same kinda architecture they have now these consoles should have had 24 compute units instead of 12 and 18 and 12 Jaguar CPU cores instead of 8 (And X1 needs GDDR5 instead of DDR3). Doing that would have probably raised the price by $100 but I think people would have been very happy with them that way.

It's big enough alright and we're only seeing the beginning of it.

LOL. What a silly thread. The PS3 wasn't that much more powerful than the 360.