Sony Reveals More PS4 and Dual Shock 4 Details

Yesterday, Sony gave a presentation explaining a bit about the new PS4 hardware, the development environment (Windows 7 based IDE), and the changes to the Dual Shock controller. From the article: "The system is also set up to run graphics and computational code synchronously, without suspending one to run the other. Norden says that Sony has worked to carefully balance the two processors to provide maximum graphics power of 1.843 teraFLOPS at an 800Mhz clock speed while still leaving enough room for computational tasks. The GPU will also be able to run arbitrary code, allowing developers to run hundreds or thousands of parallelized tasks with full access to the system's 8GB of unified memory. ... The DualShock 4 controller that's standard on the PS4 eliminates one feature that was seldom used on the PS3 —the analog face buttons..." The trackpad will support two touch points, the rumble motors can be controlled more finely, and the analog sticks were tweaked for "reduced dead zone and better feeling tension that grips your thumbs."

Comments

Re:Anyone ever use

[Colonel Korn]

the analog face buttons? I gave up pretty quick on them after using them to play Mad Maestro on the PS2. Didn't even realize they were still in the PS3. I do wish Sony would stop adding pointless features to their game pads. It's not so much that the features bug me as I'd rather they spend time/money somewhere else. Plus it'd be nice if the gamepads weren't $60 bucks. On the plus side the PS4's gamepad looks cheap to produce.

I think the useless touchpad will drive up the price.

Re:What's the point of buying a Sony PC?

[Anonymous Coward]

PCs don't get to run Sony exclusive titles. People like them, a lot. It's the same for the other consoles, it's about the games, not the transistor configurations. The new xbox will also return to x86 architecture. Going to moan about that too?

Re:Nuh uh

[Hatta]

No hardware compatibility, no emulation == no buy.

Why not? Don't you already have a PS3 you can play your PS3 games on? It's a brand new console. Backwards compatibility didn't help the Atari 7800, and it didn't help the Sega Genesis much either. Why spend so much effort engineering in backwards compatibility when you can just play your old console?

When DVDs came out, I didn't bitch that they weren't backwards compatible with what I already had. I kept my VCR and watched my tapes on that when I wanted to, and watched DVDs when I wanted to do that. What's so hard about that?

Promising backwards compatibility and then removing it is a shitty thing to do to your customers. Being up front about the lack of a feature that's barely useful is doing things right for a change.

Used

[tepples]

I don't have a PS3.

Then why do you have PS3 games that you would use with backward compatibility? Or would you be buying used games?