(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); PS4 isn’t just a high-end PC, says Guerrilla Games



Guerrilla Games’ technical director Michiel Van Der Leeuw has dismissed the notion that PS4 is little more than a high-end PC, suggesting that those describing the console that way are ‘trolls’ and ‘fanboys’.

Speaking in an interview, Van Der Leeuw explained that his studio was heavily involved in the creation of PS4’s arcitecture, and while it might be more PC-like than its predecessor, it is still very much a games console.

Referring to those calling PS4 a PC in a fancier box, he said: “That’s difficult because people are trolling, right. What do you say to a troll? You don’t feed the trolls, that’ll make them grow.”

“I mean, it has always been a piece of high-end hardware that we put in a box, we find exactly the right components that complement each other and make a really good gaming experience. This is exactly the same thing – it is a console. The fact that the best pieces of hardware are also devised from, or optimised versions of, the stuff we find in PCs doesn’t make it any less a console. I can imagine if you find people with a vested interest to say PC gaming has won, they will find lots of great arguments in the fact that we use some of the same parts. But you know that’s just fanboys on the internet, I guess.”

Van Der Leeuw went on to explain the differences between PS4 and a high-powered PC. “A PC is a number of parts which also has bridges in between where there are inefficiencies that may not be exactly the right match. We’ve got the right amount of memory, video card, everything balanced out. I know 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 that we put in, that there would not be any bottlenecks. So the amount of pixel-pushers that you have, the amount of memory, the speed of your compute units make sure that you don’t hit any of the weakspots of the hardware.”

This balancing of PS4’s architecture and the use of complementary components make it simpler to work with, said Van Der Leeuw. “Whereas if you have a PC very often your buffs, or your express buffs are very slow compared to your video RAM which is GDDR5 and your main RAM then is even slower than that, but you compensate by sticking buffers in there… there’s a lot of things to contemplate in the fact that it is a replaceable-parts architecture. This [PS4] is where all of the parts are designed to work together, naturally.”

He added that Guerrilla was part of a constant iteration process with PS4′s innards. Guerrilla made at least five different major changes to the graphics chip, CPU and on the bandwidth between the different components, to define and then eliminate any disruption in performance.

“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,” he added. “We actually had parts of both Killzone 3 and very early Killzone 4 art assets running through simulators to try to find out how it would behave on our speculative hardware that didn’t exist – trying to find bottlenecks in the hardware that we could fix before we could even think about the chip.”



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this is fine and all but it is also coming from a 1st party developer. they by in no means are going to say anything bad or point out its faults. 3rd party developers on the other hand do not have their hands tired up in politics from their parent company.
i do welcome hearing news like this from developers but i would like to hear 3rd party developers most notably, the ones that are going to decide where if its going to be just a port to ps4 from the Xbox.
on the other hand i am really excited to hear any kind of news, whether its from an older article or new news from inside its own company or from outside sources. thank you for posting.

well the new killzone has stunning graphics so I reckon they know what they're talking about

oh of course, i never said that they didn't know what they were talking about. i was just referring to internal politics that's all. they cant say anything bad about their own partner or point out its flaws. i was simply saying i would like to hear from outside sources as well.
surely 3rd party developers know the insides and outs of this system by now since they are now working on games for it. also, yes i know the system isn't even out yet and the developers are restricted with what they can talk about until then, i just am looking for an outside perspective that is all.

All hardware has bottlenecks it nice to see Sony are not making the same mistake PS3 had with bottlenecks. Should take longer to reach it and give more room.

dw wasn't aiming it at you mate aha

lol, sorry i thought you were considering my previous comment.

I don't think the PS3 has even had its limits reached yet, it probably has been close though but due to the complex nature of programming for the CELL processor it makes it harder to reach that point.

I feel like they know what they are talking about as well, especially after watching the shadow fall trailer. That game is gonna help PS4 hit the ground running.