Hi everyone,

I was wondering if the PS4 will ever be worth getting. I've always had a PlayStation since they started coming out. Despite being a PC gamer, I've always enjoyed many of the console games as well. This generation seems very troubled though. I'm wondering if the whole console generation will be gone long before its time (usually 5-7 years). Right out of the gate many people are seriously complaining about low graphics, poor FPS, 720p resolution upscaling and general underpowered hardware issues. While 1080p/60fps is possible, it is only so with great sacrifice and does seem impossible without dumbing down graphics. It's only been a year now and already consoles have been failing to live up to even the most basic display standard (1080p) that movies, television, and PC games have long since adopted for the better part of the decade.

Here are my thoughts:

1) PS2 was 100x more powerful than PS1, perhaps even 200x more powerful if you count the second Emotion Engine Core it utilized

2) PS3 was easily 33x more powerful that the PS2 at very worst for processing power alone. Graphics capabilities were even greater

3) However, the PS4 is clearly struggling to be even 1.5-2x more powerful than the PS3. There is no gain in CPU power, perhaps even a slight loss

-------------------------Facts about PS4 vs PS3----------------------------------

---Both have 8 cores of CPU, however the processor on the PS3 (30 year old CPU tech) was actually set at 3.4GHz while the PS4 has its limit set at 1.6GHz with modern CPU tech from AMD with APU design. Both are probably par but something tells me the Cell processor was superior since it had many dedicated single core units, while the APU design for PS4 is bottlenecked by RAM limits and old graphics.

---The PS4's RAM is tremendously faster, but it's been proven that faster RAM means almost nothing in gaming. It does sport 8GB of it with an "on-paper" 160GB/s of bandwidth potential, but only 5.5GB is usable. The GDDR5 type was a nice touch, but it's scarcely a saving grace with such an underpowered GPU (below). The problems the PS4 currently has all boils down to the GPU, with the RAM and CPU doing almost nothing to help alleviate the real issue. The PS3 only had 256MB RAM set at 800MHz.

---Lastly, the graphics card is about par with an AMD 7970/7990, which is over 2 years old right out of the gate. This still represents a huge boost in power over the PS3, however the PS3 basically had a dumbed down NVIDIA 8800 with 256MB VRAM which at that time the was top of the line. Sony took current GPU tech and customized it for console usage to meet their $400 pricetag. The PS4 however did not do that at all. They took severely old tech and jammed it all in there with a "fake" 8 core APU with great RAM that does nothing to help the poor GPU. The PS4's potential could have been very surprising if Sony did not skimp in the ONLY real area that matters with gaming-- the GPU, where 90% at least of all gaming is computed.

So the graphics on paper should be substantially better, but the power needed for 1080p PLUS better graphics would seriously have required double GPU resources. My gut tells me that if this console generation lasts a couple more years then either people will just have to accept the limitations or developers are going to have to get insanely creative with optimizations and low-resource rendering techniques.

What are your thoughts?