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The PS4 will arrive later this year (or early next) with the strongest launch line-up ever to accompany a PlayStation hardware launch.
"The launch line-up for PlayStation 4 – though I unfortunately can’t give the title count – is going to be stronger than any prior PlayStation hardware,” PS4 lead architect Mark Cerny told Gamasutra.
Elsewhere in the article Cerny details the reasoning behind the machine’s architecture and how he thinks it will address a number of challenges routinely faced by developers.
The most discussed feature of the new console is the 8GB of GDDR5 RAM it houses. Gaming PCs, by comparison, will typically have between 1GB-3GB of GDDR5 on their graphics card and then an additional 4GB-6GB of DDR3 for the CPU and other resources. In other words, a typical gaming PC has more than 8GB of Ram to draw upon.
What sets PS4 apart, Cerny argues, is that all 8GB of the GDDR5 is fully addressable by both the GPU and CPU.
"If [I had an 8GB PC] the CPU or GPU could only share about one per cent of that memory on any given frame,” he added. That’s simply a limit imposed by the speed of the PCIe.
So, yes, there is substantial benefit to having a unified architecture on PS4, and it’s a very straightforward benefit that you get even on your first day of coding with the system. The growth in the system in later years will come more from having the enhanced PC GPU. And I guess that conversation gets into everything we did to enhance it."
PS4’s last big mystery, however, is its custom AMD Jaguar APU which integrates both the main processor (CPU) and graphics (GPU) onto a single chip. And Cerny isn’t revealing too much about that just that.
"It’s ATI Radeon,” Cerny stated. Getting into specific numbers probably doesn’t help clarify the situation much, except we took their most current technology, and performed a large number of modifications to it."
