Quote:
Originally Posted by fleury
the full power of the PS not fully being taken advantage of yet, why the new refresh?
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That's been Sony marketing since launch day of the PS3 telling you that lie. There's really no such thing. The PS3 is very underpowered at gaming because of memory limitations that there is no "full power" that could be unlocked from the Cell processor. It's been 7 years since the console has been released and people still think that games still don't look as good as they could because developers don't know how to use it?
It's the 256MB of video memory and Nvidia G70 (equivalent to a PC higher end graphics card from 8 years ago) that causes everything to have bland and muddy textures and limited draw distance.
The PS3 is in fact so bad at graphics and the Cell processor proved so cumbersome for developers out of the gate that Sony is lucky to be able to leave it behind.
Ever wonder why the Xbox 360 was able to gain so much ground and why PS3 versions of multi-platform games usually look worse? It's because the cell architecture is very difficult for developers to come to grips with. If you lose developers, you lose good titles or you end up having inferior looking ports. That has dogged Sony since the PS3 has been launched.
There probably is some power in the Cell processor that can still be taken advantage of but the RSX chip (Nvidia G70) is holding everything so far back, there's really no point. Sony's old president wanted the Cell to be a new computing standard but the problem was that while it is actually a very interesting processor for computing (The US airforce networked a couple hundred PS3s running Linux together to build a super-computer), it's actually terrible for gaming and game developers who are used to having large memory caches instead of having limited memory they have to constantly stream into from a complicated core architecture.
As a result of this, developers are wasting more time optimizing, lowering texture resolution, limiting draw distance, displaying fewer polygons, having smaller maps, etc. to get a decent frame-rate out of the PS3 rather than "unlocking" any potential out of the architecture.
Sony needed this badly because developers never liked the PS3's hardware and if you lose developers, that's the death knell of any gaming system in terms of market-share.
That's what happened to Nintendo when they came out with the N64. Sure cartridges have their technical advantages but they were expensive and had limited ROM space therefore games had low quality sound, limited samples, low-resolution textures, etc. that wasted any processing power the N64 ever had. Developers decided they preferred having a cheap media and large capacity of CDs and that's why the PSX took off so fast in the first place as all the big name companies put their flagship games on the PSX.
The PS3 had 256MB of GDDR3 memory. The PS4 has 8GB of GDDR5 memory. That's 32 times the memory of the PS3. That's going to make a huge difference. You can also add in the fact that new GPUs have more transistors than most CPUs and general purpose computing on GPUs (GPGPU) erases any advantage the cell processor could have had for things like physics processing, etc.