The Sony PlayStation 4 game console shares much of its hardware technology with the personal computer. We take a look at how it stacks up against a gaming PC in terms of price and performance.
The PS4 uses a graphics processing unit (GPU) based on the Radeon HD 7000 series of PC graphics cards designed by AMD. It has 18 compute units with 64 cores per compute unit, giving it a total of 1152 cores. This gives the PS4 a theoretical maximum performance of 1.84 TFLOPS which can be used for graphics, physics simulation, or a combination of both.
There are several known differences between the PS4 GPU and the AMD 7870 PC graphics card on which it is based. The first is that the PS4 drive has a dedicated 20GB/s bus that bypasses the L1 and L2 GPU cache to allow direct access to system memory. Direct memory access (usually abbreviated as DMA) in this case serves to speed up graphics by reducing the number of processes required.
It also has additional L2 cache support for concurrent graphical and asynchronous computing tasks thanks to the inclusion of a ‘volatile’ bit tag. This allows the machine to process graphics and computer code synchronously, without suspending one in order to execute the other.
Finally, the console unit has 64 fonts compared to two on the PC unit for compute commands. The purpose of this is to enable superior game engine integration for developers when writing games for the console.
Whether a PC is better than a PS4 depends on how you compare. In this article we analyze the comparison from the point of view of equality of costs. In a later article we will deal with the comparison on a total performance basis.
Comparable costs – PC vs PS4
If you look at a comparable cost, including the costs of the entire system, the console would easily beat the computer. A PS4 is around £350 while the comparable Radeon 7870 graphics card is around £150, but to this you should add the costs of the components to make up the rest of the computer such as motherboard, processor, memory, hard drive , case and software. To build a gaming PC somewhere around the cost of a Sony console, you’d end up with a system that is compromised for cost reasons at the expense of performance. This scenario would certainly leave you with a PC that can’t match the console in terms of graphics performance.
There are several reasons why this is the case. The first is that the game console has a huge advantage due to the lack of a resource-hogging operating system like Windows. A PC needs to be able to do many things, often simultaneously. To allow this, the operating system must be comprehensive and often needs a lot of free resources from the machines just to run. A console’s operating system will be a fraction of that of a PC or Mac computer, meaning much more of the power available in a PS4 is free to devote to running games. This allows PlayStation to get away with a lower overall spec while still maintaining performance.
The second is that manufacturers that produce consoles often sell at a loss due to the need to gain market share and outsell their rivals. This is especially true in the early stages of a console’s life when development costs are being recouped. PS4 vs Xbox One is one of the biggest sales battles in the technology market that looks set to continue for many years to come. Obviously, it is difficult to compete with a product that is subsidized by its manufacturer.
Cost is not the only consideration when comparing the two. Computer users often have the rest of their system in place, so more funds are available to spend on just the graphics hardware, while outright performance is the only consideration. Take a look at our next article, PS4 vs PC Graphics Comparison – Part Two, where we consider the absolute performance of PlayStation and PC.