Will next-gen consoles outperform the fastest gaming desktops?

[ambam]

I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this question, but I read that the hardware in the next-gen of consoles will be many times faster than the fastest gaming desktops in the world.

When the Playstation 3 and XBOX 360 were released many years ago, and the hardware it contained was not available for PC's for an entire year following the console releases.

I can't imagine how you could put chips that are many times faster than 4-way SLI superclocked GTX 680's and a Core i7 3960X @4.7GHz (for example) in such a small console system container without the chips melting or catching fire.

Are there any details yet about the hardware specifications of the next generation of consoles from Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft?

 

[jaideep1337]

I don't think next gen consoles will be that powerful. Consoles are usually cost effective gaming machines so I don't think they will have a GPU more powerful than 4 way SLI 680s or 7970s.
They are made to last a few years so they might have a GPU equivalent or faster than a 7970/680. No more than that or else they will become too expensive.

 

[jasont78]

i thought i read somewhere about using amd apu's with their hybrid crossfire, dunno though to be honest, the gear they put into consoles is never that good its just that they can heavily optimise for the hardware being a closed platform. they dont have to compromise for the millions of different hardware configurations that pc's do. so no wont be even near the best pc's i would think maybe a low/mid range system not to say they they cant make it look ok

 

[nvalhalla]

From what I have heard, the PS4 will use a modified AMD A10, so not even close.

 

[markiz]

They will be many times weaker obviously, for the reasons you already gave yourself

 

[k1114]

Spec wise the components were not better. Take the ps3 for example, it's gpu is based off the 7800 cut down similar to a 7600, "coincidentally" the gpus available at the time. It only has 256MB of Gddr3 vram and was in fact weaker than the higher end gpus at the time. But how is this still capable of matching graphics of modern day (higher end) pcs you ask? Simple, the console has a more direct access to it's hardware vs. pcs. And the games can be programmed to be optimized exactly for that hardware because all ps3s are the same specs. Both of them use a cell cpu architecture which isn't really used in pcs so I won't go into that. But specs were never high, they have to keep the costs down.

You can just google 720 or ps4 spec rumors, it's been jumping around a bit.

 

[chimera201]

Since console is a fixed platform it is heavily optimized to run games. PCs have different configurations and its drivers are heavily unoptimized. There's where consoles gain performance.

But the brute force of PC system is way ahead of consoles even at the time of ps3 , x360 launch. Console games are run at lower resolutions . Most of them are run at 720p with no AA or FXAA or 2xMSAA. MGS4 was at 1024x768