by Hugh Summers
I’m sure many people in today’s society dismiss the gaming industry as a petty pastime or simply a childish form of entertainment. I completely disagree; in today’s society, the gaming industry provides not only entertainment and economic values, but it fabricates a basis for social interaction. Of course, one can argue that much of this interaction is via the internet, but in theory it helps you to get to know new people. Yet this argue is more about the progression of gaming in terms of technology rather that sociology.
As many gamers may know, 2012 was a significant year for gaming as PC gaming excelled, benefitting Valve Corp. greatly. Valve created Steam, a platform for purchasing and running PC games. Nowadays, people are beginning to move onto PCs, me being one of them; this is due to the graphical advantages of PCs over the outdated Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Yet this is where the significance of 2013 comes in; the concept new consoles have been released.
On the 20th of February, Sony provided the media and, later, the public, a glimpse at the PlayStation 4. Known as “Orbis”, Sony showed us the technological specs of the console which seem pretty good for something which is guessed to be sold at around the £400 mark. Yet after all the presentations for their new games, we never actually got to see the console, most likely due to the fact that Sony has been rushed ever since rumours of the console were released. From a business perspective it is easy to see why; it is important to keep momentum yet this is why, in my opinion, Sony revealed the console far too soon. Microsoft appear to be waiting until the E3 gaming convention in the summer to show us the new Xbox, a far better approach; by doing this they really do have momentum on their side. After the presentation of the Xbox, it will only be a matter of months before its release, ensuring that at its release, the new Xbox will be at the peak of public attention.
Anyway, here are the specs for Sony’s new PlayStation:
I know that to many of you, this will all seem like technological mumbo jumbo, so let me defragment this for you.
The specs are quite poorly worded and are in theory, trying sound better than they actually are. An eight core processor is good, yet there are now smart phones which contain an eight core processor (of course they are of a much lower power) so from the start we can see there is nothing amazingly revolutionary here. Yet the specs are in generally, pretty good; it contains DDR5 Ram, a very fast and efficient upgrade from your standard DDR5 but again, nothing revolutionary. Once again though, the graphics card is simply referred to as “AMD next generation Radeon based graphics engine” which really provides no real insight into how powerful this machine is. I’m sure the PS4 will be very impressive on release, yet currently, many computers still possess better gaming capabilities than this. I predict that within a year, it will be obsolete, much like the Xbox will be. I know this all seems very biased, yet I do own a console as well as a computer and I would have to say that I’d take a good gaming desktop over a console any day; for one, you can continuously upgrade a computer. Yet gaming desktops are pricey, so these consoles are brilliant value for their specs.
So, if you are an avid gamer yet are a little short on cash, buy a console and I’m sure you won’t be disappointed (even if Orbis won’t even support Sony’s new 4K TV’s!).
An 8 core phone processor is different from an 8 core pc processor as it is based on the Arm as opposed to amd x64 chipset. This runs at about 800-1200 mhz as opposed to 2.4 ghz (2400 mhz) upwards per core. this is why it required cooling and is not suitable for phones. This is very impressive since the equivalent ( and far more expensive) Intel x64 'i7' has 4 cores. This machine however has a substandard graphics card and processors as they seem to be custom (stripped back) versions of AMD's Bulldozer and Vision Series cpu's and gpu's
ReplyDeleteI've only just moved onto PC gaming from PS3 this year. I'm still learning a lot about specs and am about to upgrade my laptop (it can only just run Arma 3) and agree that it is far superior to console gaming in many ways.
ReplyDeleteYou can upgrade a PC as and when you want to but with a console, which are normally around for about four years before they release a new one, you just have to wait until a new one comes out.
ReplyDeletethat is the same as the phones of yoday you cant just upgrade your phone as you want while you can upgrade your p.c. but it doesn't get all the games that xbox and the playstations get so that ballances out
DeleteI love playing on the PC you can do everything on it more than a ps3 or 4 and an xbox, in my opinion pc is way better than the ps4 and xbox.
ReplyDeletepc gaming is good though I find consoles to be more entertaining
ReplyDeletegames r gonna cost £80 thos so even if it is amazing people are gonna be paying double for games
ReplyDeleteSony haven't actually set any prices for games and that price would be way too much considering that if you buy 4 games that is already £320.
Deleteso is the xbox going to be more advanced than the pc because after reading this i thought of buying a ps4 but i dont know if to move to pc gaming instead thanks for making this blog
ReplyDeleteThe let down of the PS4 is 1. because sony have revealed the console far too soon and therefor will not be able to get the most sales 2. because the memory should be more than 8gb as that could not hold all the content for few years and then you would have to spent even more money on a memory card. Whereas if you made on with maybe 50gb it could hold a lot more.
ReplyDeleteYou have put down for point 2 that the memory is only 8GB. This is not hard drive space this is RAM. The hard drive is where it stores all the game data and downloaded things which will probably be over 80GB although it does not say in the picture. The RAM stands for Random Access Memory which keeps all the open tasks on it and when you close the task it is deleted from the RAM is deleted. The less RAM you have the fewer tasks you can open at the same time eg. with 1GB RAM you could open a game but it could not open anything else because there is not enough memory. So 8GB is actually pretty big for this device.
Deletexbox for the win!!!!!!!!!
ReplyDeleteI have Steam and it seems completely useless(at least to me).
ReplyDeletePc has steam which is an amazingly easy and efficient way to download games and add-ons. The games on steam are normally cheaper by a long way and then get even cheaper if you buy them in a holiday. Steam might also release their own console called "The Steam Box" which will cost about half the price of a cheap gaming PC but will be able to access the Steam store and download games from it and play games with good graphics and smooth FPS (Frames Per second)
ReplyDelete