James Sawyer Ford
Member
There's a significant amount of custom hardware in the PS4's design specifically to aid compute.
Originally people thought that this would be at the expense of rendering, but as it turns out it seems as though this is not the case. Mark Cerny stated that there's idle shader ops regardless of how far rendering is pushed, and that these idle shaders can be used for compute purposes - taking a substantial load off the CPU.
This is similar to what developers experienced last-gen with the cell's SPU's, expect in many cases it was the opposite -- they used CPU resources to aid rendering. I can see Sony's first party studios really diving into GPU compute to get the most out of the PS4, analyzing areas where there's idle performance that could be used in various ways just like they had to do with the CELL.
We haven't heard much about the Xbox One in terms of its GPU design, but it doesn't look like any special architecture was added in order to augment GPU compute.
While this advantage may not be seen initially, it could be a large distinguishing factor in a few years, particularly when exclusive Sony studios take advantage of it.
Sadly, I'm not sure how much third parties will really delve into this aspect of the design since they have to juggle multiple platforms.
Originally people thought that this would be at the expense of rendering, but as it turns out it seems as though this is not the case. Mark Cerny stated that there's idle shader ops regardless of how far rendering is pushed, and that these idle shaders can be used for compute purposes - taking a substantial load off the CPU.
This is similar to what developers experienced last-gen with the cell's SPU's, expect in many cases it was the opposite -- they used CPU resources to aid rendering. I can see Sony's first party studios really diving into GPU compute to get the most out of the PS4, analyzing areas where there's idle performance that could be used in various ways just like they had to do with the CELL.
We haven't heard much about the Xbox One in terms of its GPU design, but it doesn't look like any special architecture was added in order to augment GPU compute.
While this advantage may not be seen initially, it could be a large distinguishing factor in a few years, particularly when exclusive Sony studios take advantage of it.
Sadly, I'm not sure how much third parties will really delve into this aspect of the design since they have to juggle multiple platforms.