The PS4 is holding back game development, says A Way Out Creator

You want the honest truth? This machine is not so strong as you think, (Gestures to PS4)

This is like a five-year-old PC. If consoles were as powerful as PCs are today, you would see all different games. Most of the work developers put out there is to make them work on consoles.

  

Games are developed to work on the least powerful target hardware possible, which means that the game needs to fit into the CPU, memory and GPU requirements of the weakest console that the game will release on.  

Right now the PS4 is the weakest modern home console in terms of CPU grunt, running at 1.6GHz whereas the Xbox One uses a similar SOC with a 1.75GHz CPU (almost a 10% performance boost). Yes, the PS4 is much more powerful on the GPU front (around 40%), but this does not allow the PS4 to deliver much more than a resolution bump.  

This factor will also get in the way of multi-platform releases on the Nintendo Switch, given its use of a mobile SoC with 4 ARM Cortex A57 CPU cores, again lowering minimum CPU requirements.  

While most console gamers argue about the relative GPU performance of console, it is really the CPU and memory limitation of modern consoles that are holding back the release of larger, more complex games. Most PS4 Pro and future Xbox One X games will not run at 60FPS due to lack of GPU power, but a lack of CPU power, allowing them to give players a resolution boost over each console’s standard counterpart but not a true gameplay or framerate improvement apart from a few exceptions.   

In simple terms, lower GPU performance in consoles can be countered by lowering some graphical settings or game resolutions on consoles, but little can be done for consoles without enough CPU grunt. Here the only option is to somehow make a game less complex, which will lead to developers making sacrifices on certain aspects of the game to allow it to work on console hardware.

Most PS4/Xbox One games will look nigh identical aside from changes in game resolution, which is mostly due to the fact that both console offer similar amounts of CPU and memory resources, this makes porting relatively simple compared to previous generation consoles.  

The reason why many call the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X “stock-gap solutions” is not due to their lack of GPU horsepower, but their lack of improvements on the CPU front. These new consoles offer what is, for the most part, an overclocked version of their predecessor’s CPU, which will then mostly go underutilised due to the need for “base hardware compatibility” with PS4 and Xbox One. This is why these consoles can only offer relatively minor gameplay improvements over their older counterparts. 

I wouldn’t say that the PS4 itself is holding games back, especially given the fact that the Xbox One has a weaker GPU and a CPU that has a mere 9% clock speed increase. Both are a limiting factor in their own ways, though at this time it doesn’t look like we will be seeing either an Xbox Two or PS5 anytime soon. 

 

 

In the past console generations were shorter, allowing older hardware to the quickly replaced by new hardware to facilitate the development of increasingly complex games with huge leaps in graphical fidelity with every hardware generation. 

Today console generations are much longer, with new stock gap solutions like PS4 Pro and Xbox One X working to extend this current console generation to the same length as the PS3 and Xbox 360 before it, which means that we shouldn’t expect a “new console generation” anytime soon. 

 

You can join the discussion on the PS4/Xbox One’s impact on game development on the OC3D Forums.