4.2 Updates from Q&A with Yoshida

[Tridus]

the ps4 isn't that powerful, they were just able to optimize for it, i'm not really surprised they think it has issues, especially since, in the CPU department, the PS3 was stronger.

No, it's not. People love to say mythical things about the PS3 CPU, but the PS4 crushes it at everything except very specialized tasks for lower cost. Why do you think Sony threw out the PS3's cell architecture entirely with the PS4 instead of iterating on it (and for that matter, why do you think IBM abandoned it)?

Answer: Ask any developer who had to work on it about how great it really was and get ready for them to rant.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

No, it's not. People love to say mythical things about the PS3 CPU, but the PS4 crushes it at everything except very specialized tasks for lower cost. Why do you think Sony threw out the PS3's cell architecture entirely with the PS4 instead of iterating on it (and for that matter, why do you think IBM abandoned it)?

Answer: Ask any developer who had to work on it about how great it really was and get ready for them to rant.

as a CPU, the Cell is superior. the GPU and memory is what held the PS3 back in modern applications.

There are still some ps3 games that look better than modern titles.

About the 33rd largest supercomputer in the world right now is the US Air Force Research Laboratory's (AFRL) newest system, which has a core made of 1,760 Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles (2010)

[Tridus]

as a CPU, the Cell is superior. the GPU and memory is what held the PS3 back in modern applications.

There are still some ps3 games that look better than modern titles.

Again... no, it's not. On paper it's a great CPU. But it's design makes it very hard to actually bring all that power to bear. Getting all six SPEs in use at once was a really challenge in games when each one only has 256KB of RAM to work with and many game tasks don't parallelize well. That's why it did so well in HPC environments that can be paralleized extremely effeciently. (If a SPE had to go to main memory frequently it needed the main CPU to do that, which killed performance.) The Air Force loved PS3s because they could do a lot of heavy lifting with commodity parts, but the Air Force wasn't using a cluster of them to try and run a game.

Sony used to say in the early days "nobody has unlocked the full power of the PS3 yet!" as if that was a good thing. It was because the workloads didn't lend themselves to it, whereas PC and Xbox 360 CPUs could be slower by GFLOPS measurements but actually run games faster because they could keep more hardware active more often and all their CPUs could access main memory without needing to wait on another one.

That's one of several reasons why the PS4 looks a lot like a PC internally. Typical game workloads need faster single thread performance over being able to do a zillion parallel operations. That's also why Intel CPUs beat AMD CPUs at games despite how great Ryzen and Threadripper are at other tasks: FFXIV and stuff like Civ VI don't benefit from having 8 cores because they don't have enough parallel workload. They benefit tremendously from a few faster ones.

As for how something looks, that's largely down to artistic direction. A good art director can make a little look like a lot. But you couldn't make 4k HDR Horizon Zero Dawn on the PS3's CPU. You simply don't have the horses to do it.