God I love my PS4 - it has to be the peak of this class of machine. I can't imagine how it could be improved upon without going beyond the "box under the telly format". Incredible piece of machinery. I can't imagine the PS5 will be much more than an upgrade.
In my opinion the second best console is the PS2. I love Nintendo but they're more like toys than hard core gaming and entertainment machines. PS2 up until PS4 was pretty much the pinnacle, but I think the way PS4 improved upon it is the development platform, and the online experience (which even so does require some improvement). I still play games on the PS2 from time to time and they still feel viable as offline single-player experiences and I could imagine development for the PS4 could continue for 20 years or so and still be producing great and relevant games.
Where to from here? VR is one obvious route but may I suggest a HN-friendly alternative? Hows about selling a more open system that allows end-users to tinker and contribute themselves? I think in order for this to be viable in terms of protecting the profitability and stability of the ecosystem there are some business and technical challenges but I would love to see them take this direction. They've dabbled before with the Yaroze system and Playstation Linux … both had their business operational issues but hardly insurmountable?
EDIT - can't respond below any more so I just have "one more thing" to say:
> PS4 is famous for being the cheapest sony home console relatively speaking
and what exactly is the problem with that? This is a feature not a bug. The PS3 was a novel system with exotic hardware but it suffered from some very serious flaws. It's reliance on proprietary technologies meant it was harder for developers to work with. It never took off as a result and is little more than a footnote in the lineage's history. A learning experience if you will.
Surely an extension of making something easier for professional developers to get to grips with is making something that hobby developers (and other classes of creative) can get to grips with?
Yes! This is what I was driving at. Looping history back to the days of the C64, Amiga, Spectrum etc. where home tinkerers could make a massive contribution to the ecosystem. These were the gaming consoles of their day. Yes there were the NES and Atari 2600 but the popularity of something like the C64 is something that modern console vendors (especially at the PS4 price-point) should be falling over themselves for.
But realistically, how much extra would the end users be able to add? I understand those were great days and people could do a lot just by knowing where to soldier and etc. Not sure it'd work the same way tbh.
Creative tooling has come a long way in 40 years. We’ve got blender, unity, sketchup etc - even minecraft now that I think of it. I’m not talking about BASIC and assembly but basically opening up the platform for the development of this kind of tooling and charging to use it the same as they do gaming presently and controlling the distribution similarly
The PS(4) hardware and its exclusive software exist to sell each other. I don't think there is any desire to complicate that relationship from Sony's perspective.
You’re confusing Sony with Nintendo there. Sony have always been very open to third parties, albeit it in a very tightly controlled way. Would make sense to deploy their model massively
The PS3 ran Linux at the beginning. That went nowhere for Sony apart from a lawsuit when it got patched out and consoles getting racked for cheap compute at the beginning.
I don't remember the specifics apart from the GPU being inaccessible which just made it a PowerPC server. But i suspect that experience killed off the idea internally for quite a while.
Maybe it would be a last resort if the Playstation does lose out to game streaming (not that i think it will).
There is no such thing as a failed experiment. It sucks to be the guys who lost out when Sony decided they didn’t want to support their Linux base any more but at that stage they’d gotten what they want out of it. Sony has a history of engaging with the hobbiest community in a tight and controlled manner and their’s no reason to think they might not bring this on another notch in a later generation. Albeit in a tight and controlled fashion, but just open enough to get engagement, as is their way.
I'm sure phones had better GPUs 3-4 years ago than the PS4, and more RAM
When i enter the notification quick tab it takes 30-40 seconds to show the message I've received, then another 10-15 to accept it.
Currently one single game, COD:MW consumes the entirety of the space on the device. From launch it wasn't ever going to be enough. You need to keep <x> space free because the update->patch->relink process needs to duplicate the game.
The menu system is also insane and makes no sense.
The PS4 Store App has to be one of the most poor implementations of something so simple i have ever seen. And despite enabling every level of security possible i still get DM spam that could be detected by a python 1 liner.
On the COD:MW lobby screen alone the console appears to turn into a 747 on take off.
Games are frame locked at 60fps - awful by PC standards and in a world of crossplay, a disadvantage. Performance limitations also limit FOV settings etc etc.
The controller battery life is terrible and it doesn't have bluetooth audio.
> may I suggest a HN-friendly alternative? Hows about selling a more open system that allows end-users to tinker and contribute themselves?
> I'm sure phones had better GPUs 3-4 years ago than the PS4, and more RAM
Means nothing though, where is the software? These supposedly dated and under-powered machines are still where the production of some of humanities not only most ambitious art of the last 100 years but most profitable art is being produced.
>I'm sure phones had better GPUs 3-4 years ago than the PS4, and more RAM
I'd like to see that phone. The PS4 was slightly weaker than my AMD 7870 at the time. If I could get the performance of a 7870 on a laptop without a discrete GPU that would be amazing.
Turns out it's grim. Even a snapdragon 855 doesn't even reach a single TFLOP... [0] If you want to wait until the end of July you can get a phone that breaks the first TFLOP (snapdragon 865)
Meanwhile the ancient 7870 had 2.56 TFLOPS (which is what I am equating the PS4 with). Twice the performance of the unreleased snapdragon.
Going from 4 years ago to a GPU that hasn't even been released yet not even scratching the performance of a PS4 turns your entire comment into a big disappointment.
Yes there is room for improvement, but this is what I mean that these are further iterations on the same platform. The "Ghost in the Machine" however remains the same. Hard to see how that can be improved upon! The noise of the thing is crazy!
> I'm sure phones had better GPUs 3-4 years ago than the PS4, and more RAM
They really, really didn't. And still don't. And won't for a good while yet.
Cell phones work in a power envelope that is basically 1/50th of what PS4 uses. Assuming that power consumption/unit of work done drops by half every two years (and it doesn't), it would take a decade for a PS4 in a cell phone power envelope to become feasible.
The very newest cell phones have GPUs with more raw compute power than the PS4, however they still typically have less than half the memory bandwidth, and that raw compute power is only usable for very short bursts.
To be fair, Call of Duty games are notorious for their poor coding and design. I never have the issues with any other games that happens with COD. Not sure if it's an odd dev team, or if they really trying to wrangle performance out of the hardware that makes them do all these kooky things.
There's a very common complaint that COD requires double the game size free space to download updates, regardless of the update size itself. This is ridiculous and not something that is common to other games.
> When my PS4 Pro is playing stuff like TLOU2, it sounds like it's going to start hovering off my TV cabinet.
I have the CUH-7200 PS4 Pro model which is apparently the quietest model and it's insane how loud that thing gets when I played TLOU2.
The copying times for updates/patches is equally bad with downloading taking a few minutes and copying times taking more than 20mins. There's clearly alot of room for improvement - At least Sony have realised this as the PS5 will have a SSD instead of a HDD.
I ended up buying the standard PS4 6 months ago because I had less than fond memories of the noise my first-gen PS3 made. I don't have a 4k television so it seemed like a good decision even though a Pro would have been nearly the same price.
The newest PS4 slim is silent and TLOU2 graphics are still incredible.
Cleaning out the dust makes a massive difference. The PS4 actually allows easy access to the fans and vents by popping off the top plastic without voiding the warranty.
I have read many complaints online of people calling the PS4 noisy. I have a PS4 slim, and it is very quiet, the optical drive is by far the loudest part of the machine.
They must, I've been playing TLOU2 on my ~1 year old PS4Pro and it's very quiet, almost silent. I've never heard it make much noise on any game, even when ambient temps creep into the mid 80's.
It depends how you have it placed, too. I played on a 2 year old Pro and it was extremely loud, but I have it stuffed in a media center cubby, so it's always suffering from low airflow.
You are probably missing the fact that PS4 became obsolete the same year it was launched and it couldn’t be otherwise.
They can’t change the console capabilities, because games would not take advantage of it, as a ps4 game need to run in all ps4 versions.
If you want to upgrade the hardware, you have to launch a new product, as they are doing with ps5.
It’s all about having a stable ecosystem which allows developers to spend hundred of millions and be sure to reach all ps4 users. And milk that cow for years.
The same will happen with ps5: incredible machine at launch, obsolete within 1 or 2 years, but will remain in the market as is for 7-8 years while development houses (and users) reap the benefits of the ecosystem.
Sony’s PS architect/chief Kutaragi always had that kind of bright future thing, like “today we are sailing out on this new PlayStation platform and by the end of this decade the whole nation will be driven by this open machine and its groundbreaking processors doing every tasks beyond our imagination”.
And I thought he was full of it, and PS was always very obviously just another game console, and he’s also the culprit of why PS2 fat had IEEE1394, why PS2 compatibility sucks even against its own variants, why PS3 sucked in general, why there isn’t much gap to be perceived on the chart between launch day prices of PS3 and Wii, why there were some Cell based PCIe boards that were more or less space heaters, maybe also why Vita got RAM slash, also probably why Microsoft tried digital home hub concept in XB1 only to have the always funny division chief seek for new opportunities, and his absence is probably why PS4 and PS5 are just almost completely sane no nightmare gaming consoles...
Anyway Kutaragi was the PS guy from PS1 through PS3 and I guess that’s what you’re talking about.
I love my PS4 but.. it's really slow. From turning on to getting in a party will take minutes, especially when loading the friends list and their profiles. Beyond this, getting everyone into the same lobby is also tedious due to host issues. I don't know if the Xbone has similar issues but I remember the 360 being able to sign in, be in a party with my friends in under 30 seconds and it just worked.
Xbox is better but still not as good as the Xbox 360 imo. In terms of software (excluding games), it feels like both consoles took a major step back this generation.
Aside: Voice controls got a lot worse with Cortana than what was available in the Kinect, not that anyone cares about that in 2020. ‘Xbox pause’ was magical in 2012. Universal search was better in Xbox 360, too.
I don’t know why they took such a major step backward with the new design, but everything got a lot more slow, clunky, and difficult to use. Made the whole thing feel like a downgrade.
It does feel like a downgrade. I would have paid more if I could have picked optional features. I'm not sure if they don't get that people don't buy a console to play the dashboard, give it to me barebones and lightning quick.
Really? I thought this at the start as well, but downloading games is fast, I have a wired connection (20MBd/15MBu) that I feel like is pretty solid. I also wondered if it was just my drive getting full, but I have about 180gb of space.
> Hows about selling a more open system that allows end-users to tinker and contribute themselves?
The appeal of a console is that it's an appliance - you can just plug the thing in, not worry about any of the technicals, and go play games with minimal fuss. If you are an enthusiast of such things and inclined to tinker, I think making a Mini-ITX PC to stuff under your TV mostly effectively already covers this niche? You can pick out your parts to your liking, it will be small, it can run Linux, play VR, and be programmed and customized effectively to however much of your system you can grasp.
And Sony, who has spent like 80 years making locked down media formats for their consumer audio/video/gaming appliances that compete against industry standard formats, is unlikely to ever be the company that makes an open gaming platform.
C64 shipped something like 20 Million units over its lifetime. You could use it as a gaming machine (many did) - or you could go further if you wanted to. The appeal of consoles to many in the industry is that it was locked down and you could ringfence your revenue but that's not to say you couldn't address these issues with modern commonly available technologies like digital signing and cryptography. Basically like what Apple is trying to do but that could certainly be improved upon in terms of implementation.
> C64 shipped something like 20 Million units over its lifetime. You could use it as a gaming machine (many did) - or you could go further if you wanted to.
How is this state much different from installing Steam on a PC with a couple controllers and sticking it in your living room, besides the C64 being extremely cheap and (as far as I know) not as customizable?
Cheap and providing a long lived homogenous platform. Apple do this to a certain extent but not at the price point. You can customise with peripherals.
I would argue that the PC is (or will be) a longer lived platform, with homogenized interfaces that let it stay in the game far better than the C64 could dream of. My budget 8 year old PC - which initially had the cheapest CPU I could possibly buy for the socket - is able to handle itself admirably well, even on newest generation games because of how far progressive PC upgrades can carry things these days. Meanwhile, I'm confident there is likely a complete chasm in what could be accomplished on a C64 with peripherals vs a cheap 386 PC Clone released just 8 years later (or an 1990 Amiga, or a Mac for that matter). And even a Mac of comparable price from the same era as my own PC would have been a shelf piece far earlier than this PC will be.
PCIe slots can carry you pretty darn far, and if you can use a Genesis cartridge, you can upgrade a PCI slot. For instance, on mine I added: USB 3.2, an NVMe slot, and a new graphics card. If I wanted to, I could throw in a faster network card. I could easily use the latest generation graphics cards without issue. I can play a game with at least 60fps in 4K. The only thing that really limits you is the CPU socket and the memory. Even then, after a few years you can throw in the highest end (or near highest end) server CPU for dirt cheap and some better and larger sticks RAM for not so bad a price either.
> The appeal of a console is that it's an appliance - you can just plug the thing in, not worry about any of the technicals, and go play games with minimal fuss.
Also there was certainly a chasm in capability between the 386 and c64 but the games weren’t there and you would have had to spend a lot more. At that stage anyway we had Amiga which really wasn’t surpassed by PC architecture until maybe the late 90s
Because of online cheating I doubt Sony will ever open up like they did for PlayStation Linux. My guess is they'll just clamp down harder to differentiate from PCs which can't deliver the same consistency. Of course the PCs openness is what breeds so much innovation.
Not even close, in fact PS4 is famous for being the cheapest sony home console relatively speaking. PS3 costed more and was sold with losses.
PS4 was made with very cheap hardware in mind, and the next generation seem to be committed to cheapness as well. For those prices a PC gets better hardware and well, it's also counts as a PC.
Even a PS4 Pro is weaker than a One X, and both are behind a cost effective PC. and most games don't even run at a 60 fps which used to be the case 2 generations ago. Worse than not running at 60 is stuttering, for most games 30 is more than enough, but when the console can't keep that rate it is annoying to see framerate drops.
I agree. The PS2 is great. It's the bare minimum needed to achieve a good 3D experience. PS3 and PS4 are good because they add more horse power but the controller is almost the same and the single player games that can be created on these consoles are not that different from what was possible on the PS2. The PS3's strong points mostly revolve around online multiplayer.
> I love Nintendo but they're more like toys than hard core gaming
Some of us really love our toys. Playing MarioKart or Super Smash Bros. with my kid makes both of us happy. I used to have a PS2 and owned quite a collection of titles but I think playing Nintendo games is a joyous experience that PS2 and its titles never delivered.
I agree with you that I don't think the PS5 will be a major upgrade. It may be a hardware refresh but that's about it.
I think that you may be brining up a valid point we have a standards body to define the standards and labeling for the capacity of a gaming machine. (That would prevent games from always demanding the absolute latest hardware). However, a lot of the issues with the PS4 is you have sony trying to control _everything_ in the hen house. (Think of this like the Symbian vs Android situation) Android took off because it wasn't one manufacturer having control over the OS.
> Android took off because it wasn't one manufacturer having control over the OS.
Yet iOS really started that market and maintains its customers exactly because it's a single company controlling the OS (and doing it rather well, to be fair). And while its market share isn't that of Android, it can hardly be called a failure.
> As soon as Apple runs out of an audience that platform is dead.
That's true for any platform, isn't it?
I mean, I see your point about an open platform, but on something that's intended to 'just work' like a PS, trading openness for guaranteed working games and known-good [enough] quality is fair enough. The platform only needs to keep its side of the promise (and not be a monopoly, which would open another can of worms).
In my opinion the second best console is the PS2. I love Nintendo but they're more like toys than hard core gaming and entertainment machines. PS2 up until PS4 was pretty much the pinnacle, but I think the way PS4 improved upon it is the development platform, and the online experience (which even so does require some improvement). I still play games on the PS2 from time to time and they still feel viable as offline single-player experiences and I could imagine development for the PS4 could continue for 20 years or so and still be producing great and relevant games.
Where to from here? VR is one obvious route but may I suggest a HN-friendly alternative? Hows about selling a more open system that allows end-users to tinker and contribute themselves? I think in order for this to be viable in terms of protecting the profitability and stability of the ecosystem there are some business and technical challenges but I would love to see them take this direction. They've dabbled before with the Yaroze system and Playstation Linux … both had their business operational issues but hardly insurmountable?
EDIT - can't respond below any more so I just have "one more thing" to say:
> PS4 is famous for being the cheapest sony home console relatively speaking
and what exactly is the problem with that? This is a feature not a bug. The PS3 was a novel system with exotic hardware but it suffered from some very serious flaws. It's reliance on proprietary technologies meant it was harder for developers to work with. It never took off as a result and is little more than a footnote in the lineage's history. A learning experience if you will.
Surely an extension of making something easier for professional developers to get to grips with is making something that hobby developers (and other classes of creative) can get to grips with?