Guerrilla Games technical director Michiel Van Der Leeuw says Sony’s long-awaited Playstation 4 (PS4) isn’t hobbled by “performance bottlenecks.”
Indeed, according to Van Der Leeuw, the systems boasts quite a lot of PC architecture, but isn’t any less of a console because of it.
“We’ve got the right amount of memory, video card; everything’s balanced out. It was a very conscious effort to make sure that – with the speed of the memory, the amount of compute units, the speed of the hard drive – there would not be any bottlenecks,” he told Edge magazine.
“I think it was for more than a year that we knew the main ingredients and there was just discussion after discussion trying to find a bottleneck. Take a look at this design; try to find the bottleneck.”
It should be noted that Van Der Leeuw’s comments echo those recently made by Epic VP Mark Rein who said Sony’s decision to incorporate off-the-shelf PC components in the Playstation 4 (PS4) was a good one for devs and gamers alike.
“I think it’s a very smart move on Sony’s behalf to build this sort of enhanced PC architecture and then put so much in it. Let’s not forget it has 16 times the memory we had in PlayStation 3 – that’s not insignificant. Knowing that every machine has that… we can do crazy, ridiculous stuff with that,” Rein told CVG.
“The other exciting thing is that… when you think about Windows, even Windows for most people is tied to about 2GB of addressable memory space. This really opens up beyond what most PCs can do, because most PCs are running a 32-bit version of Windows. It’s like giving you the world’s best PC. The kind of stuff that they announced that they’re doing, the level of convenience and things like that, they’re making a really perfect gaming PC.”
As TG Daily previously reported, the PS4 is powered by an AMD CPU and GPU. According to reports, the console boasts 8 x86-64 CPU cores, while the GPU is based on the next-gen Radeon graphics engine, capable of 1.84 teraflops of performance power. Because it is an APU, both the CPU and GPU reside on the same physical die, sharing 8GB of GDDR5 memory.
The console is also packaged with a redesigned controller that features a touchpad on the front, a share button, a headphone jack, a light bar for player identification and tech to sense a player’s depth and 3D position.
