Tripolygon
Banned
PS4 supports it in hardware (AMD GPU), in fact if you listen to the audio recording from Develop 13 where Neil Brown a senior team leader at SCEE's R&D, talks about providing APIs for developers to take advantage of it.
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"GPU compute is the new SPU" - Will this be a big advantage for PS4 long-term?
- Thread starter James Sawyer Ford
- Start date
I read lots of tech articles talking about the architecture, and this came post 360 launch, I don't recall MS personnel discussing it at E3 or at the reveal.
@Danhese007 Notice I said DX 11.2 "compliance", in other words the GPU doesn't even have to use DX but could still be in compliance. What's special about DX11.2 supporting it is all the engines and middleware created in DX11.2 could port a lot easier to X1 as opposed to programming from the ground up in Libgcm.
Microsoft was the ones who sent the tech specs to IGN to counter Sony. They both went back and fourth about things like FLOPs
Actually the Flops reveal by MS was not a counter, they went first and proudly announced 1TF and 720p support as standard for all games only to be trumped by Sony's 2TF announcement and 1080p as standard for all games... Obviously bull*** and purely to trump MS which was also BS to begin with, well at least the TF number since 720p support was honest.
Guess they learned their lesson not to get into a tech battle with Sony, especially if you're conference is first LOL. But trust me when I tell you that at E3 when Geoff Keighly interviewed J. Allard or anyone from MS, they would completely dodge, even Cliffy B. was hosed during his Gears of War demo, they kept interrupting him while he was playing, it was quite ridiculous, meanwhile on the internet side, Major Nelson created some ridiculous graphs that no one believed anyway, and making one now showing ESRAM at 192GB/s bandwidth would have the same effect anyway, not sure why you would want to see those, they wouldn't be fooling anyone.
Tripolygon
Banned
No, you used it as an exclusive Microsoft enhancement they could be parading.
and you replied with
Its not, PS4 supports it in hardware and in software so they also could be parading it but they are not.
Wickerbasket
Member
Don't know what?
Zombie James
Banned
GPU compute is the direction things are going across the industry so it should get more widespread use than SPUs.
You are trying to paint a feature available in hardware and software on both platforms as being potentially Xbox exclusive.
Middleware will obviously be targeted at both next generation consoles, why you think DirectX is some kind of game changer is beyond me, especially with OpenGL being much more advanced nowadays than it was a few years ago.
Danhese007, read my posts carefully especially my reply to Netbuf at the end of page 1, what I mean is that Xbox One's GPU has modern enhancements regardless if PS4 has it as well, they're both modern architectures after all.
The difference is Sony has been very vocal about their architecture, they have always been like this, meanwhile MS has been more sheepish and this is just more of the same.
Major Nelson releasing some graphs showing eDram vs the PS3's overall bandwidth was not MS being vocal about their specs last gen, and it wouldn't make a difference if they did the same today showing eSram at 192GB/s vs 176GB/s, they wouldn't be fooling anyone anyway imo.
The difference is Sony has been very vocal about their architecture, they have always been like this, meanwhile MS has been more sheepish and this is just more of the same.
Major Nelson releasing some graphs showing eDram vs the PS3's overall bandwidth was not MS being vocal about their specs last gen, and it wouldn't make a difference if they did the same today showing eSram at 192GB/s vs 176GB/s, they wouldn't be fooling anyone anyway imo.
If the main competing platform has the same advanced feature set, but in better form, marketing these specifics would be counter-productive and would only serve to hurt public perception of the Xbox by highlighting the fact that it is weaker.
Maybe because they don't have a Mark Cerny to talk about it? I don't know, but it doesn't automatically mean that AMD didn't work with MS to get them the most up to date architecture on a low power budget console GPU. We'll have to wait until NDA's are lifted and AMD can talk about what's inside Xbone.
James Sawyer Ford
Gold Member
None of the leaked Xbox One documents suggest is has additional hardware (like the PS4) for compute, above and beyond what is there for current GCN architecture.
Microsoft has also been quick to mention Move Engines, Cloud, eSRAM, etc...
Microsoft has also been quick to mention Move Engines, Cloud, eSRAM, etc...
Right, so there's no point in really getting into these talks if architecturally they're very much similar, I think that the real difference comes from the additional compute units and ROPs, but architecture wise they're very close, afterall AMD designed both and I would assume that both would have a tweaked GCN.
Tripolygon
Banned
I'm sorry for the misunderstanding then but Sony has not just been vocal about their hardware, they have been vocal about specific enhancements made to their hardware. Something even AMD is not willing to talk about as features of upcoming GPU which is the fine grained compute control which leads me to believe those are joint changes made by AMD and Sony. People totally will buy the eSRAM 192GB/s vs 176GB/s chart, earlier this year people thought you could add bandwidth from main RAM and eSRAM, even recently people from MS said Xbox1 has ~200GB/s bandwidth and people ate it and enjoyed it right here on GAF.
Xbox 360 got unified shaders before PC GPUs. Turned out to be a key technology trend that everyone uses as standard now.
PS4 looks to be getting asynchronous compute before PC GPUs (should be coming in the next generation of AMD GPUs). Should similarly be a big feature across the board in the next few years. All be interesting to see whether the Xbox has that too, and if not, whether it is adversely affected by its omission.
PS4 looks to be getting asynchronous compute before PC GPUs (should be coming in the next generation of AMD GPUs). Should similarly be a big feature across the board in the next few years. All be interesting to see whether the Xbox has that too, and if not, whether it is adversely affected by its omission.
There weren't any leaked documents that mentioned specifically how much ram was reserved for PS4 games, there certainly was for Xbone, so because PS4's OS used up 1GB, one could quickly assume that the rest and the whole 7GB could be used for games, but again that's just an assumption based on information that doesn't exist, doesn't mean it's true, it's just speculation.
We just need to wait for more specifics of Xbone's architecture before we can say it's just plain jane GCN 1.0 and not at least a tweaked GCN architecture.
GPU compute is very much a real advantage, all future games will move towards it so Sony was very smart in adding addition CUs for compute, it's a real advantage of PS4 vs X1, not the GDDR5, not the added queues but the added compute units and rops, ram just supplies bandwidth and if both architectures are fed properly, it comes down to what the CPU/GPU are doing and PS4's GPU is simply doing more. What I've been trying to say and I apologize if not clear enough is that I believe AMD has made tweaks to GCN for both X1 and PS4, I just don't think MS has been vocal at all about their architecture just as they haven't in the past, all the unified shader, MEMEXPORT talk came later but was not mentioned at all in the reveal or at E3.
Tripolygon
Banned
False equivalency.
Both consoles CPU and GPUs have been leaked in detail right from the start, people just didn't know what those extra ACEs were for. We assumed a 14+4 split for graphics and compute and went as far as to argue PS4 is marginally more power than Xbox1 because of the 14+4 split suggested in the leaks. On a different note, OS footprint decreases as we go deeper in the generation, Sony never divulges OS footprint so even if they told you, it will decrease so its a moving target. Hardware specs and features don't move once they have been set.
Ubisoft also said this...
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-how-the-crew-was-ported-to-playstation-4I
Clearly the PS4's GPU can do things the other consoles can't.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-how-the-crew-was-ported-to-playstation-4I
Clearly the PS4's GPU can do things the other consoles can't.
Ricerocket
Member
What about this from AMD?
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer...a-cut-down-version-of-sonys-playstation-4-apu
They will be selling an APU with Sony mods later this year and one without. Kinda says all those GCN+ mods Cerny calls it their own won't make it to X1.
I am aware of all the changes made to the PS4, I've read Mark Cerny's interviews, all I'm saying is that there's no reason to believe that Xbone's GPU architecture doesn't have any custom modifications of their own, basically all console GPUs have had their own fair share of customization.
http://majornelson.com/2005/05/20/xbox-360-vs-ps3-part-1-of-4/
http://majornelson.com/2005/05/20/xbox-360-vs-ps3-part-2-of-4/
http://majornelson.com/2005/05/20/xbox-360-vs-ps3-part-3-of-4/
http://majornelson.com/2005/05/20/xbox-360-vs-ps3-part-4-of-4/
Part 3 especially should be an interesting read for you ;P
BleachAndPepsi
Banned
Oh please. The only reason J. Allard didn't go on and on (and on and on) about the 360's capability was because Microsoft had Larry Hyrb do it instead (http://majornelson.com/2005/05/20/xbox-360-vs-ps3-part-1-of-4/).
If they had something to say about Xbone, they'd've said it. Instead, we get "numbers don't matter," "we intentionally designed it not to be the most powerful," "infinite power of the cloud," and a load of other nonsense.
Edit: GAH! Beaten by seconds! Damn you, gruenel!
Tripolygon
Banned
That statement simply means Xbox one and PS4 are different so as a 3rd party developer, they can't invest too much resources into doing specific things on either platform to push either further than the other that is why they use PC as base code and not PS4 or Xbox 1.
And they will run well without crippling performance and destroying the experience like PhysX seems good at doing.
No, he specifically refers to POWER in PS4's GPU. Read it again
BleachAndPepsi
Banned
Wait, so the part where he specifically references how powerful the PS4 GPU is, then mentions how, since it's a cross-platform game, they can't go crazy on PS4-specific enhancements, is actually talking about how both platforms are totally rad and nearly equal?
I need to learn to read better, I guess.
Horsemama1956
Member
In a PS4 centric article?
Tripolygon
Banned
Title of article
I'm sure if the title was "how-the-crew-was-ported-to-playstation-3" he will be saying how PS3 has a powerful CPU but they can't do too much with it because it is a multi platform game. Replace PS3/4 with Xbox360/1.
Tripolygon
Banned
You need to learn to read between the lines.
To be clear, i'm not saying the PS4 is not powerful nor am i trying to reduce the compute capability of PS4 GPU.
Both the Xbox One and PS4 can do GPU compute (since both of their GPUs are capable of it), it's just that the latter has been significantly modified to take full advantage of it. IIRC standard GCN has 2 queues vs 64 in the PS4. Cerny mentioned it in an interview with Gamasutra. There will probably be big benefits for any developers taking advantage of this. Once again we're going to see Naughty Dog, SSM, etc... knocking folks off their feet.
That said, I only expect Sony's first part developers to do so. That quote from Reflection reveals how most multiplat devs will approach the situation: They won't use PS4 specific features, despite being curious/eager to use that extra power.
That said, I only expect Sony's first part developers to do so. That quote from Reflection reveals how most multiplat devs will approach the situation: They won't use PS4 specific features, despite being curious/eager to use that extra power.
BleachAndPepsi
Banned
Yeah, that must be it.
So do me a favor and answer the following two things either yes or no, just to be sure we're not chasing our tails here. Because I have a feeling this debate is pointless.
1) Do you deny that the PS4's GPU is, to the best of our knowledge, more powerful/capable than the GPU in the Xbox One?
2) Are you claiming that that Xbox One's GPU is capable of graphics that the PS4 GPU is not (again, to the best of our knowledge)?
If the answer to both of these questions is "no," we have nothing to debate. Plus, it means that maybe, just maybe, when the dev quoted above talked about the power of the PS4 GPU, he wasn't just being diplomatic. He was saying it's got some kick that the Xbox One's doesn't, but they can't harness a whole lot of it because it's a cross-platform title (which is basically exactly what he said...).
PdotMichael
Banned
Nope, the CPU and GPU of the Playstation 4 are just plain superior.
It's not a second Ps3 vs. 360 but we have a Playstation 4 which is superior in any ways compared to the Xbox One.
BleachAndPepsi
Banned
I was under the impression that the CPU was more or less the same in each. Wrong?
We have no official word on the CPU of the PS4 outside of 8 jaguar cores but I'd be surprised if they were different at this point. We also don't really know the CPU reserve for the OS but signs seem to be pointing to it also being two cores, same as XBO.
There is a small chance that the PS4 CPU has a very slightly higher clock speed than the XBO one since there was a Japanese APU architecture map that wrote the clock speed as "1.8+GHz?" but that is seriously open for interpretation. It could mean they were estimating, guessing, or that 1.8GHz was the lowest possible. We just don't know.
1.6GHz, same as XBO, makes the most sense to me since then the frequencies would be a perfect multiple match with the GPU (800MHz) for asynchronous tasks but there's a chance that the newer APU model in the PS4 won't need to have that requirement.
Tripolygon
Banned
I'm not going to get into a silly hardware power debate with you. My comment has nothing to do with how powerful PS4 is or isnt its more about quoting a developer in an article specifically talking about PS4 and using it as some proclamation of how powerful PS4 is over Xbox one.
Whatever you say man.
Codeblew
Member
AMD created an OpenGL extension for tiled textures before MS copied it for DX. http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/AMD/sparse_texture.txt. So PS4 has it as well.
If GAF would like to hear a little story:
Before PS4 and Xbox One were revealed, I remember having frank discussions with plenty of "insiders" while I was doing an observorship in Washington.
I talked to too many people (IRL and on GAF) who pretended to be somebody else, or were parroting information handed from tertiary sources. Eventually I found a few people who were spot on, and some who provided me with concrete evidence (the names of the Onion/Garlic, specific title names in development, and sheets that have still yet to leak).
However, what is relevant to the discussion was the paranoia at the time. Microsoft, I, and the rest of the developer community sternly believed Sony was going to go with 4 GB of GDDR5. Developers, engineers, and programmers all wrote off the PS4 as having a huge handicap with a distinct compute edge. However, unanimously they agreed mutliplatform titles would perform better on Xbox One.
I was having dinner with a GAF member / Microsoft employee before the February 20th Sony event, who told me Sony would be at a distinct disadvantage and should have bet the farm on RAM. Later in the week, BruceLeeRoy (who I personally know in real life) and I had both heard from a source that Sony had upped the RAM on PS4.
Bruce and I had numerous phone discussions about how this was possible, I contacted Jschrier from Kotaku, and even Richard Leadbetter, because this source who had provided me with 100% information in the past, was telling me that Sony upgraded the RAM (he didn't tell me how much). Not a single person corroborated.
In any case, internally at Microsoft before PS4 was announced they had a document which had expectations for PS4. The most interesting line was this:
"Estimate PS4 performance to be roughly 12-16X PS3".
They didn't mention anything about RAM, but I heard no one expected 8 GB GDDR5.
Fast forward to post February 20th and thats when the rumor mill and insiders became a little bizarre. I heard things like Microsoft had optimized hardware for dynamic resolutions, frame interpolation (120 hz modes to fake a 60 fps), and the magical power of the cloud. I gave up eventually, and E3 had come to pass.
It's been a wild ride, but I still remember the day February 20th happened, I received a text from an employee at MS that read: "GG MS". You are on GAF, and you know who you are.
Before PS4 and Xbox One were revealed, I remember having frank discussions with plenty of "insiders" while I was doing an observorship in Washington.
I talked to too many people (IRL and on GAF) who pretended to be somebody else, or were parroting information handed from tertiary sources. Eventually I found a few people who were spot on, and some who provided me with concrete evidence (the names of the Onion/Garlic, specific title names in development, and sheets that have still yet to leak).
However, what is relevant to the discussion was the paranoia at the time. Microsoft, I, and the rest of the developer community sternly believed Sony was going to go with 4 GB of GDDR5. Developers, engineers, and programmers all wrote off the PS4 as having a huge handicap with a distinct compute edge. However, unanimously they agreed mutliplatform titles would perform better on Xbox One.
I was having dinner with a GAF member / Microsoft employee before the February 20th Sony event, who told me Sony would be at a distinct disadvantage and should have bet the farm on RAM. Later in the week, BruceLeeRoy (who I personally know in real life) and I had both heard from a source that Sony had upped the RAM on PS4.
Bruce and I had numerous phone discussions about how this was possible, I contacted Jschrier from Kotaku, and even Richard Leadbetter, because this source who had provided me with 100% information in the past, was telling me that Sony upgraded the RAM (he didn't tell me how much). Not a single person corroborated.
In any case, internally at Microsoft before PS4 was announced they had a document which had expectations for PS4. The most interesting line was this:
"Estimate PS4 performance to be roughly 12-16X PS3".
They didn't mention anything about RAM, but I heard no one expected 8 GB GDDR5.
Fast forward to post February 20th and thats when the rumor mill and insiders became a little bizarre. I heard things like Microsoft had optimized hardware for dynamic resolutions, frame interpolation (120 hz modes to fake a 60 fps), and the magical power of the cloud. I gave up eventually, and E3 had come to pass.
It's been a wild ride, but I still remember the day February 20th happened, I received a text from an employee at MS that read: "GG MS". You are on GAF, and you know who you are
.HHhhhhhnnnnnnggggggg
I'm drooling at the prospect of this being accurate.
Thuway said:
I've been saying for a while that I think Microsoft will use display planes and other various methods to be able to lower resolution without it being as noticeable. A full 1080p HUD would make something like 1600x900 resolution less noticeable due to no exaggerated blur on the text.
Really interesting post overall. Good to have you back and sharing again, Thuway. I hope this weekend didn't piss you off to the point of pulling a Phil Fish.
It's probably something very obvious, but what does "GG Microsoft" mean?If GAF would like to hear a little story:
*cut*
It's been a wild ride, but I still remember the day February 20th happened, I received a text from an employee at MS that read: "GG MS". You are on GAF, and you know who you are
The interpolation thing has existed for a while, just not used in any games. DF did an article on an application of it in Force Unleashed 2.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-force-unleashed-60fps-tech-article
GG MS obviously means they're buying Guerrilla Games. They even jumped the gun in annoucing it
"Good Game Microsoft".
He expected, that no matter what, Xbox One to have the technical edge on third party multiplats. When the 8 GB of GDDR5 was announced, there was zero advantage Microsoft would have with raw performance.
Still though, another interesting tidbit. After he PS4 unveiling, the folks at Microsoft were even more confident in Durango's reveal. I don't think they ever expected the backlash that came in their wildest dreams.
He expected, that no matter what, Xbox One to have the technical edge on third party multiplats. When the 8 GB of GDDR5 was announced, there was zero advantage Microsoft would have with raw performance.
Still though, another interesting tidbit. After he PS4 unveiling, the folks at Microsoft were even more confident in Durango's reveal. I don't think they ever expected the backlash that came in their wildest dreams.
Man-is-Obsolete
Member
Sony's biggest advantage isn't even on a spec sheet. It is their internal support and great network of 1st party teams that puts them on top of everyone else. Imagine being a dev at Sony and having Sony Santa Monica, Naughty Dog, Mark Cerny, etc at your disposal to share their knowledge of the hardware. If I was a dev, working for Sony would be the dream right now. they have the most talent and take the most risks.
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