OldGamesRBest: Wait... so is No Man's Sky being made primarily for the PS4?
..the ps4 /is/ a pc with an amd graphics card and processor.
Apparently people have also successfully ran the game on a low-end intel cpu + amd graphics card setup. So the outstanding question of whether they're leveraging apu/opencl performance to a very high degree is.. solved.. It also fits with certain .. qualified assumptions.. that the only time the ps4 will leverage the apu graphics is through the overlay(for recording and so on), as per sdk specification, running through custom registers added on the hardware level. So that using this for anything else wouldn't actually be possible.
So if you look at things knowing that the ps4 has 8 cores where each pair of two share a cache (giving you 4 threads without response loss), is clocked dynamically towards 2.6Ghz (meaning it will likely stay at 2.2Ghz if you assume it works the same as any other amd rig from the same hardware). And that the graphics card is a 7870hd (which is a 7970m with lower clock rate.. a decent card at the time), roughly equivalent to a ...680m nvidia mobile card, or one of the more appealing newer r9 desktop cards at about half the watt-drain.
Then what we have is that the ps4 is a medium-end target that I would.. randomly guess (least safe guess so far).. would perform better than a dual core intel setup. But where apparently(this is rumor from demo-rig runs) any dual-core with hyperthreading, and any quad-core setup with a decent graphics card will apparently run it perfectly fine. That the actual processing requirement generally isn't extremely high.
So as much as I hate Sony, I wouldn't expect the ps4 version to be hampered in any way by obvious performance issues. But then again you likely wouldn't have that on a low-end pc either.
When the game comes out, though, it should be easy test if there are, say, situations when you approach planets, or when things are mapped out, etc., that favor 4 (or more) threads. Or if there are effects in the game that favor a graphics card over a certain limit (that you may or may not perhaps be able to turn off.. obviously, that's completely unknown, since - for whatever reason - game-reviewer folks in all magazines that pay/are advertisement funded, are handpicked to be atechnical and uncritical people who are easily distracted by bright lights and pre-made blog-post handouts that literally tell you what to write about the games, sentence for sentence).
But the baseline/recommended settings for the game (...or what the ps4 will run at) can safely be assumed to run perfectly fine on any i5 or amd a6 + a 580gtx/r9 290mx setup. Minimum requirements that are listed are also significantly lower than that.
..I'm imagining that higher resolutions and ability to remove blur and overlay transition filters on PC should make that version more appealing, though. Although, of course, this is something we know absolutely nothing about. For all we know there could be things hardcoded into the rendering pipeline that scale badly with resolution increases. Or favor scaling on lower resolution outputs. That's obviously completely unknown until Sony get their finger out and lets the game through their Q&A horror.
Although I'm sure it's a comfort that issues that affect the PC version and higher-end rigs - will be of absolutely no concern for Sony. So if you're hoping for the delay removing any potential issues like that, rest assured that that will not be the case.
Seriously, though - I'm just hoping that they haven't made quick "fixes" that Sony have requested into the main build. Or the game probably won't be "finished" for PC players until next year, if at all.
