The PlayStation 4 was officially announced today. You can watch the event here if you wish. Many of the hardware specifications rumors turned out to be true. The big surprise was the confirmation of 8GB of GDDR5 RAM. Early rumors were pegging it at 4GB so it was a surprise to see Sony double it.
Why is RAM so important? Because memory limitations were the source of feature parity and performance issues for many consoles. And if they were going to add all those sharing features and suspend features, having more RAM can only help. This means they’re not cutting into developer RAM.
The most impressive moment to me was the appearance of Mark Cerny as the PlayStation 4’s System Architect. Unlike with the PlayStation 3, the west has taken the lead on the PlayStation system hardware. This makes me feel more confident about the future of PlayStation Network services and developer relations.
By moving to x86-64 and “off the shelf” PC parts, the PlayStation 4 will be much more developer friendly. I’m hoping this enables developers to quickly ramp up and get quality games in the early years and not repeat the growing pains of the PlayStation 3.
Overall I was very impressed with what Sony showed. They showed more games than I thought they would and they spent the right amount time on the hardware, features, tech demos and games. Great job, Sony.
For more official info on the PS4, check out these PDFs:
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