The PC gaming community is a stubborn crowd, and I can confidently make that claim because I consider myself part of that cadre of gamers. Although consoles have come an insanely long ways over the last two generations or so to match up with PC’s, there still is a gap in a few ways and genres; the most specific gap in my oh so slightly qualified opinion is in the RTS, or Real-Time Strategy genre. I couldn’t even fathom trying to play Red Alert or Starcraft 2 with a controller; I have got to have a mouse and keyboard or we’re gonna have some issues. Are we understood? But then you’ve got extremely prominent video game industry executives that drop the line-blurring bombs like the PS4 is the “perfect gaming PC”. Say what? Hit the link below for all of the details.
PS4 Praised as “Perfect Gaming PC”
In a recent interview at ComputerandVideoGames.com, Epic Games VP Mark Rein spewed out a number of intriguing quotes, all centering around Sony’s shift in hardware production to include more off the shelf PC components, which Mr. Rein has tabbed as, “very smart”. Mark went on to add:
“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.”
Mr. Rein also hit on the surplus of memory that will line the interior of PS4’s everywhere, and what that will mean:
“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.”
Quotes from gamers, bloggers (except those that are slightly qualified!), etc, in the gaming industry are a dime a dozen, and usually just represent fanboyism. Quotes from a high-level executive at a top tier development firm are something completely different, and in my opinion hold a lot more water. The Epic Games VP went on to add the quote of the day:
“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.”
After the PS3’s launch oh so many years ago (is it 7 now?), many pundits claimed that the graphical increase from generation to generation would rapidly begin to slow down, as the hardware had all but been maxed out to what could be done visually. With Mr. Rein’s comments now in hand, maybe that common prediction will not be the case.
Time will tell, I suppose. MTF as always.