PS4 and Other News

Day 1: Sony Love and Time Travel

     So I am blagging for the first time today. Why? Because I am a nerdy writer; it's in the job description. Sadly, however, I have never done this before, so I will attempt to the best of my abilities to entertain you with my stories and pictures of all things nerdy and relating to those who enjoy writing as a hobby. Starting now, I shall bring you wondrous news relating to video games, sci-fi, movies (especially movies) and T.V. shows, and much much more. (This is becoming more like a news article) So here I go, blog one.
     As MOST of you know, the PS4 was announced on the 20th, and it has already received mixed reviews on the internet and in magazines and in every other medium imaginable. From what I've seen, the reviews have mostly been written in hate. I, as a long-standing SONY fanboy, have read about the PS4 and am exited about what could be.
     Sony has announced the specs and some of the software capabilities of the PS4 (yes I'm going to bold print PS4 every time, and I have to say that I may have joined in the mass of gamers who sang out in an immaculate chorus of "Meh..." It sounds weird, what with its 8gigs of RAM, its double x86 cores, based from AMD's "Jaguar" processing unit, its RADEON HD 7850 graphics card, its improved blu ray drive (6x faster), and its USB 3.0 capabilities, what does all this techno Mumbo jumbo even mean to all of us? Well, the 8G's of extra RAM allow for MUCH higher quality game aspects such as improved AI (which we've needed for a long time) and higher graphics resolution and larger world capabilities. This is a 15.625x increase over the much smaller 512 RAM PS3, and that is a big plus in my book. Another really cool thing (Though it may sound disappointing) is the new RADEON graphics card. Though the card only pushes 1.84 TFLOPS (roughly the amount of a mid-range GPU), it is still fully capable of running 720-1080p games, but it does disappoint in the inability to run the 4k resolution in some games. Sony displayed their graphics capabilities by partnering with Quantic Dream (An Amazing Game Studio responsible for Heavy Rain and KARA) to show its new capabilities which far exceed 20000 polygons. The graphics will only be a slight improvement over the current "1080p rendering"(I place this in quotes because I have yet to play a game in full 1080p graphics on my PS3), so that is a minus in my book. The USB upgrade is long overdue, so that one is a plus (I don't really need to go into any detail about that one), but "what about the cores," you may ask. The new PS4 will have two 8core x86 64 bit processors, but let me stop there and explain that. The x86 processor has roughly the power of a ultrabook or a macbook air style computer, less powerful than a traditional gaming PC. This sounds disappointing because we were expecting a huge increase in raw power available in the PS4, but, do not be disappointed my friends, because the PS4 will make up for the lack of raw power by coupling this lower quality processor with its Blu Ray hard drive and RADEON x86 chip. All three of these components are optimized for the best performance possible from the new system, and, don't you forget, I mentioned that they are equipping this bad boy with TWO, count'em, TWO 8 core processors. One will process all the information in the foreground (I.E. games, movies, and pictures) while the second processor will be used to process all of the information in the background (i.e. downloads, video recordings, and uploads.
     With all of these hardware specs announced, what sort of software will the PS4 support? SONY announced an improved GUI, the ability to record and edit game video directly onto your system, live stream content for others to watch, live video chat during live stream sessions, and controller passing over the internet (if I read it correctly, I could be wrong). SONY has already announced release titles such as Infamous: Second Son, Killzone something, Final Fantasy (enter huge number here) and a few more titles (Link to full list here), but all in all, it looks like a very good system and I am exited about the release.
     In other news, I am working on a Time Traveling project for my physics class, and I'm not allowed to simply put "it's a bunch of Wibbly Wobbly, Timey Wimey stuff", so I will post new pictures and findings as I go...like this one: A man has successfully created a particle acceleration field that can affect the entropy and speed of an object. This means that the object is moving faster or slower than the objects surrounding it. It sounds like a really cool idea, and I'd like to see it developed further. Link Here That guy looks like Doc Brown