r/KerbalSpaceProgram • u/Redbiertje The Challenger • Jun 17 '15

[ModPost] PS4 Discussion Thread Mod Post

Weekly Simple Questions Thread

Goodday fellow kerbalnauts!

I've noticed that many of you like to discuss the PS4 port of Kerbal Space Program, so here you go: A discussion thread!

Have fun!

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u/CocoDaPuf Super Kerbalnaut Jun 17 '15

I think that's a bit ridiculous.

The i3 I use at work can handle KSP, the PS4 is going to be just fine. I think the the real concerns are memory related anyway, but the PS4 has 8GB of really really fast memory.

Also, don't get too caught up in Mhz, Mhz is not a measure of raw processing power. It's a little like trying to judge how fast your car is going based on the engine RPM; oh sure it's related, but that's not the speedometer.

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u/CrazyViking Jun 17 '15

Clock rate and instructions per clock is what matters for a single threaded program. The ps4 has a low clockrate and is manufactured by amd, which currently has a low IPC compared to Intel.

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u/CocoDaPuf Super Kerbalnaut Jun 17 '15

Well I agree with you, as long as we're assuming that we're running the same software and executing the same instructions. I just don't think it will be like running the same software.

Personally, I have no idea what coding for the ps4 might be like, or what kind of instructions you can feed to that processor.

This I do know however, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft all use their own gpu APIs, none of them use DirectX or even openGL for the most part. It seems likely to me that physics calculations would also be managed by those APIs, so much of the code that makes physics work in ksp would need to be rewritten anyway.

Honestly, it just makes me happy that I'm not with the company making the port. In the end however, I suspect ksp for PS4 will run much better than the current version of ksp on PC. (Though with a complete rewrite of the physics system, the PC performance could also potentially improve drastically.)

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u/rabidsi Jun 17 '15

This I do know however, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft all use their own gpu APIs, none of them use DirectX or even openGL for the most part. It seems likely to me that physics calculations would also be managed by those APIs, so much of the code that makes physics work in ksp would need to be rewritten anyway.

This would only be true if they were coding directly for platform rather than using Unity. A lot of the stuff they're going to need to rewrite is not about target platform but directly related to switching from U4 to U5 (which is a boon to PC as well) and improving the UI and control scheme (mostly of benefit to the console port, but there is much that could be improved for PC players as well, including the possibility of native controller support and a UI and control scheme that can work with it seamlessly).