So recently I decided to get some consoles to expand my reviewing reach, it's be about 7-8 years since iv'e had a console as I primarily play games on my PC, my PC is very high end with my specs as follows.
GTX1080Ti
32GB Kingston HyperX Fury DDR4 Ram
i7 7700k
2TB HDD 256x256 SSD
NZXT Kraken X52 240mm AIO Liquid CPU Cooler
MSI Z370 SLI Plus Motherboard
Suffice it to say my PC is a god damn beast that runs anything on the market in 4K, I built my PC a few months ago and have been enjoying it everyday as most parts are cutting edge(except for my processor) so how does it compare to the Playstation 4 exactly? well I have some thoughts and opinions on it that I thought i'd share with you guys, now before I start i know what you're going to say "A Console will never compare to a high end PC" but just hear me out.
Anyway here's some of my thoughts and opinions on the PS4.
Streamlined
One thing I am enjoying about the PS4 is the streamlined nature of the console, insert a disc and away you go(kinda) this also has to do with the actual games themselves but the product is probably the most user friendly piece of hardware iv'e come across in a long time, in the sense that it's supposed to be a media center as well as a gaming machine, I had basically no idea on how to use the PS4 and was dreading what I thought would be update central, settings and applications tweaks and other console related shenanigans, needless to say I was wrong.
Connecting everything for the first time I only had 2 real things to do, put in a name for my account and connect to the internet, there was a slight update to start off with but then it was just ready, anyone who has built a computer before and done a fresh install knows that it can sometimes take hours to get everything in it's right place, however the PS4 did basically all of the heavy lifting for me at the expense of a little time wasted.
While the same could be said about the PC, the installation of games on the PS4 was also fairly streamlined, a disc inserted and click install however the waiting time was a little bit long as obvious the PS4 hard drives aren't as good as current gen SSDs or HDD's however i wasn't expecting lightening speeds on a console but i was still pretty impressed as a 20(50gb raw) game was installed in about 25 minutes, which brings me to another smaller point about the PS4.
Very Decent Compression
One thing the PS4 does great is their compression ratio for games/settings/user config's, Horizon Zero Dawn was roughly 54GB raw but was compressed to about 20GB usually when you're dealing with a compression ratio over 50% it can take up to an hour for even extreme current gen machines, however the PS4 managed to get it done in under 25 minutes, which I think is pretty awesome given the PS4' hardware specs are outdated by over 6 years now(4 years since release) I often wondered how consoles handled unpacking massive games and how much time it took, i automatically assumed it could take hours and certainly wasn't expecting 25 minutes for a 50GB game.
People who use high end and normal gaming PC'S may know the term "The game drives" as a lot of people will partition specific parts of their hard drives and designate them solely for gaming as some games can unpack into extremely big files, for example XCOM 2 is about a 25-40GB download and expands into around 70GB, obviously PC's have more space so they can deal with "loseless" files and audio to get the full experience, another reason I thought consoles would suffer graphically and mechanically.
But I was pleasantly surprised, there seems to be a very good compression aspect ratio for hardware storage vs hardware load with only some minimal downscaling in terms of graphics and FPS, Horizon Zero Dawn is an amazing looking game in the cut scenes and most people might not notice that the backgrounds for the movie cinematics are basically non existent or heavily blurred and de-rended, it's a pretty ingenious way to combat the limited hardware of the PS4's drives and graphics card.
Also I apologize for that massive wall of technical jargon, but I am trying to do a hardware review and give you as much information as possible, even if it's confusing as hell.
Graphic Quality & FPS ratio.
One thing iv'e always been a downer on for consoles is the graphical quality and stability of the game visuals, in this department I was kinda right, not entirely but for the most part, it's hard to differentiate between a PC and a Console in the graphics department, especially since I run a very powerful rig that plays in Ultra on everything and is usually a setting that doesn't appear in Console games, so I tried to be objective as possible when it came to my first outing on my PS4 and I did notice a few key details i want to point out.
Non stop sharpening
One thing i loathe in games is sharpening, at max you want to have around 50% on at any give time, the playstation games iv'e played have had sharpening boosted through the roof, there's a couple of reasons for this such as facial animation, environment accentuation and boosting the overall graphic "quality" of the visual by looking, you guessed it, sharp, however it does have a downside, to my eyes it seems like you could cut yourself on every hair follicle, rock and piece of grass, personally i'm very against it and there's no way to turn it off so in that regard it gets a big thumbs down from me.
But I do understand what it's used for, since the PS4 has a limited graphical capability it does enhance the scenes in the game to make them more vibrant when you get closer to them but I feel this is more of a showcase item than a graphical feature as things seems better from far away and the closer you get to them the more they change and become super defined like you're tripping balls and staring at some grass in real life, but it is effective and as I said I personally am not a fan of sharpening so from an objective point of view I think this gets a thumbs up.
Dizzying Motion Blur.
Lets be real here, Motion Blur has never been a liked feature by anyone, it's disorientating, it looks terrible and makes you feel like you're falling down a hill, sadly with most PS4 games there's no way to turn this off, or at least not one iv'e found yet, coupling this with the overbearing sharpness of the graphics and you go from blurred shadows to super defined animations in the space of a second and it's very disorientating and actually made me feel a little bit sick playing it on my 60 inch TV, it could be better on smaller Tv's I don't know, but overall just stop putting motion blur in games, human eyes don't work like that and forcing this ration on them is just god damn annoying.
Even from an objective point of view this gets a downvote as there's no real...cinematic? enhancement to come from this, it's more just distracting and it's often put in games to keep frame rates smooth on their limited hardware.
Reduced LOD and Distancing.
I can't really be angry at this one since it kinda has to happen as the PS4 essentially has an overclocked 2GB graphics card, obviously they can give a lot more power to the graphics card to play games a lot more stably however at the end of the day it is still a 5 year old piece of tech and they do have to work around that, one of the biggest uses of a graphics card in games with far draw distances is projected textures in the distance and being able to see things, the PS4 and the games iv'e played drastically reduce this to free up some space for more pinpoint graphic orientation in the scene you're in.
Personally i'm not a fan but I do understand it, and maybe Horizon Zero Dawn wasn't the best game to base this on when the last open world game I played with Witcher 3 in 4K with the extreme settings mod which essentially turns the game into an actual human eyeball in terms of detail acquisition and the distance you can see and how well things are detailed in the near distance, medium and far far FAR distance, but again we are dealing with an old piece of tech that has limitations and can't be upgraded past a certain point, so I can't really fault it.
One thing that is interesting though is the reduced LOD(Level of Detail) is done extremely well and I now understand why a lot of PS4/XBOX1 games aren't ported to PC, the scenes(game levels/cinematics/quests etc) are built around the graphical capability to give it maximum effect which does make a lot of games look really good, much more so than you would get on a PC with the same specs, in that regard I really have to hand it to Sony it's a pretty genius way to use limited tech into essentially fooling the player that the game is more detailed than it actually is, for a better example think of it like this.
When you look at something in a playstation game it's fully rendered at high quality, then when you look at away it simultaneously de-renders the previous area to focus on rendering the scene you're looking at, it was a very popular way of making games back in the early 10's on PC with one of the first games to use the de-rendering scale being Crysis back in 2008, so overall I actually give their reduced LOD compensation a very big thumbs up for an ingenious fix that seemingly doesn't exist since it does it so well, and yes obviously there is fair bit of pre rendered assets in these games that make it a lot easier, still though, big thumbs up.
Critical Review and Reception.
Overall i'd say the Play Station 4 is a very decent piece of hardware given it's age and technical specs, I'm not a fan of charging full price for what is essentially a old piece of tech in terms of their games but it is what it is, you can't win em all and that's why god created sales and bargain bins, but it is a..."cheaper" alternative to buying a high end PC, overall though you probably lose a lot more money in the long run as buying a full priced $80-100 as opposed to a $40-60 dollar price tag with PC games owing to the fact they aren't exclusives and don't require a specific rig to play.
But for the price I got it at, $400 AUD, it's a relatively decent piece of gaming hardware that does do it's job well and isn't horribly aging like the consoles of old have after a few years, you could argue that the quality of games is slowing down but I do think that the PS4 has been made of some pretty ingenious design to get the maximum quality out of it with only a moderate loss of control and graphical quality when compared to a standard current gen gaming PC, probably the biggest win for me is the compression ratio of games and the streamlined nature of the device that can be used by literally anyone.
While i'm not a fan of the controllers I can see now why a lot of games are built the way they are when you're using a controller that doesn't have as pinpoint accuracy and design as a mouse and keyboard and why things like auto aim and a more "dedicated" scope of gameplay is aimed for on console games and exclusives.
Either way It's very popular for a reason and even though I personally don't see the benefits of it over a high end gaming PC, i do see why some people prefer a console that you simply switch on, put in a disc and play the games without distraction, taking all these things into consideration it's easy to see why the PS4 is one of the best selling consoles of all time.