Isaac Newton would be proud.
According to Canada.com, AMD Chief Graphics Product Architect John Gustafson predits that the PlayStation 4 will have the most realistic physics on any platform. He went on to explain that the system's uniform design and 8GB of GDDR5 will make development easy while improving the capacity for visually remarkable games.
The PS4's specs have remained impressive even after dissection, but there's one soft spot: the CPU. It's an 8-core processor, which is a technology that even high-end gaming PCs haven't mastered. In the current hardware climate, quad-core processors with high efficiency are outperforming their higher-core siblings. Some of that has to do with code optimization, but on the other hand having less do more has proven more successful than AMD's 'throw tons of cores on the die' strategy.
When it comes to physics, an enormous amount of calculations are required. These are typically calculations performed by the CPU with one of the only sole exceptions being Nvidia's PhysX technology. If the PS4's CPU is around where it's hypothesized to be, there's no way it'll be better at calculations than even the low-end of Intel's line-up.
However, there is one bright spot. Consoles have shown that their focused nature pays off in big ways. Uncharted 3 and Halo 4 looked remarkable despite running on ancient hardware. If the hardware is incapable, then that's the end of the discussion, but gaming developers have consistently shown ways of pulling every ounce of juice out of console hardware.
There are some games on PC that deliver some amazing physics, such as Borderlands 2 with PhysX enabled, but there isn't anything out that that is completely unchallengeable. Maybe Gustafson is right; we might see the PS4 produce physics that make us want to shoot walls and throw objects around the environment for our first time in years. If there's one thing I've learned it's to never doubt a console's potential to push itself beyond what the numbers say is possible.
