EA: PS4, XBox One Are a 'Generation Ahead' of Gaming PCs
Now those are fighting words, mister.
Rajat Taneja, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Electronic Arts, conjured up an article on LinkedIn of all places talking about the technology behind Microsoft's new Xbox One console. He claims that both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are somehow five years ahead of the most extravagant PCs today due to their system-on-chip (SoC) architecture.
"These architectures are a generation ahead of the highest end PC on the market and their unique design of the hardware, the underlying operating system and the live service layer create one of the most compelling platforms to reimagine game mechanics," he states.
Seriously? Did he just say that? He goes on to say that benchmarks on just the video and audio performance alone are 8-10 times superior to the current generation consoles. "The compute capabilities of these platforms and the data transfer speeds we can now bank on, essentially removes any notion of rationing of systems resources for our game engines," he adds.
Of course, he then talks about the company's IGNITE and Frostbite engines, and how they have been tailored to take full advantage of the new console hardware. In a FPS like Battlefield 4, that combination means more detailed gameplay, behavior and awareness for characters and more detailed appearance down to the lighting and clothing on the soldiers. In sports titles, gamers receive a dose of human intelligence that simulate instincts, awareness and unpredictability that’s more like real-life sport.
"These next-gen platforms create dynamic, living worlds," he said. "Your game could change overnight depending on actions by other gamers around the globe. Your player stats and information can be updated in real time with real-world player stats and injury reports. These consoles are also inherently more social – something that didn’t matter much when the last consoles came out eight years ago."
As Destructoid points out, the "hype train is at full speed now the Xbox One and PS4 are both public knowledge, and Electronic Arts is riding first class." The article reads like one big advertisement for the publisher, and may even come across as offensive to those who know consoles will never surpass PC… unless the PC is extinct, of course. Nvidia said there will always be a place for the high-end desktop, and we're right there with them in that opinion.
Why? It should be obvious: the PC market continues to progressively advance whereas new consoles are launched every five or so years. If anything, it's the mobile industry that the PC and console sectors should be worried about, as its advancement slope if by far a lot steeper than the PC segment. That said, until we actually get our hands on both consoles, or at least see the actual full list of specs, we're going to remain highly skeptical of EA's claims regarding next-gen versus PC.
oh wait you're serious let me laugh even harder
BWAHAHAHAHA
oh wait you're serious let me laugh even harder
BWAHAHAHAHA
He must be trying to create a push for the lucrative console market over the PC.
Update. It is possible he is referring to the new consoles in combination with the cloud computing back-end. If so, I wonder if this is the 'Radeon Sky' that AMD was working on. To my knowlege no consumer GPUs are making use of this feature yet.
My i7 3770k oc to 4.7ghz, 32gig Dual Channel DD3 2133mhz RAM, with SLI Geforce GTX 680 is a generation behind the Xbox One and PS4? That EA dude should unhero himself..
While the next gen consoles will definitely bring a lot of improvement to console gaming, they are in no way ahead of PC gaming.
There are several reasons for this. Both of the new consoles use a Unified Memory Architecture (UMA). That means that the same memory is accessible to both the CPU and GPU. That means that techniques involving the use of both processors on the same data could be significantly faster on the consoles than they are on your PC. It also means that game developers can use a large portion of the available system memory for storing high-res models and textures if they choose. Even high-end PC graphics cards don't usually have more than 3GB of memory today. So there could be issues with running out of video memory in the PC versions of games.
The second factor is resolution and image quality expectations. A lot of people who buy an expensive gaming PC don't want to play at 1080p, and they want to run with higher levels of AA and other settings to enhance the image quality. That doesn't apply to 1080p TVs however that are significantly further away from the player. So while it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, you may need more graphical horsepower to drive your PC display that's 30 inches away than your TV that's 10 feet away.
And then finally of course there's the oft-stated issue of overhead. Because PC hardware can be combined in a variety of configurations, access to the graphics is provided through a compatibility layer like DirectX or OpenGL, which in turn interfaces with the drivers for the videocard, before finally getting to the hardware. That allows the game code to - for the most part - not have to worry about exactly what hardware the game is going to run on. You can play most games regardless of what CPU or GPU you happen to have. However, the existence of those layers also introduces overhead, reducing performance.
On a side note, why doesn't the comments section on the article page itself support paragraphs? It removes all of the line spacing, making long posts look like a wall of text. You have to go to the forum-type interface if you want line spacing.
EA certainly doesn't need any more bad press; Taneja did his company no favors here.