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vg247-PS4: new kits shipping now, AMD A10 used as base, final version next summer

gofreak

GAF's Bob Woodward
Hmm, actually, GCN already has fixed function tessellator logic. So I dunno if it would make a lot of sense to have a 'block' of tessellation stuff sitting next to a GCN GPU vs tweaking or expanding what's there already. Unless the blocks are more logical than physical and one of them is a reference to tweaked/expanded tessellation silicon inside GCN.
 

THE:MILKMAN

Member
What the hell happened? A week ago it felt like we know nothing about the PS4, but now every other user has some insider information lol

It is convenient that as the speculation of the latest Durango rumours calmed down (and we all were wondering where all the Orbis rumours were)...boom new Orbis rumours come out.

Sony and Microsoft know what there doing IMO.
 

iceatcs

Junior Member
Well yeah but actually I think someone brought up to confirm old rumour from June 2012. And then we got discuss back on GDDR5 after lot of people refuse believe it
 

Mario007

Member
It is convenient that as the speculation of the latest Durango rumours calmed down (and we all were wondering where all the Orbis rumours were)...boom new Orbis rumours come out.

Sony and Microsoft know what there doing IMO.

Also according to the rumours MS is already going to manufacture the chips so they can't really change anything now, so Sony can let the ship leak as much as they want.
 
I would say special sauce is (Tim Sweeny) inspired. So, realtime lighting via voxel processor. Remember he said Unreal engine 4 needed 2 teraflops at least and its main point is real time lighting. The only way to make a 1.2 tflop apu behave like a 680 gtx in ue4 is put fixed hardware for the most intensive resource hog in that engine: lighting via voxel octrees algorithm.Remember how important is Unreal engine for MS and third parties. Real time lighting will make third parties game development easier as graphic programmers wont have to prebake shadows,lights,etc.
 

Gorillaz

Member
The next several months should be fun.

Definitely. All of these "leaks" and it's only Janurary lol. Hype train is in full effect.

I hope we get some more tech demos as well soon. Just rewatched Agni Tech Demo for the first time in months and got damn that was impressive. Still my fav in the bunch.
 

quest

Not Banned from OT
Surprising of how all the RAM talk has pretty much obscured discussions about the GPU.



oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh that'd be great... leave 4GDDR5 alone (for purely game development).

I think the ram will be the main talk once is all on the table. I think that will be by far the biggest difference. All rumors the CPUs and GPUs are very simliar. Hell a few suggest the same CPU lol. In a way them being so similar is kind of boring. What was cool about most gens is the completely different hardware and different results depending on the game. It be nice for developers but it makes owning both almost redundant.
 

Sid

Member
I think the ram will be the main talk once is all on the table. I think that will be by far the biggest difference. All rumors the CPUs and GPUs are very simliar. Hell a few suggest the same CPU lol. In a way them being so similar is kind of boring. What was cool about most gens is the completely different hardware and different results depending on the game. It be nice for developers but it makes owning both almost redundant.
The reasons for buying them will be exclusive software and services like live and PSN rather than hardware architecture.
 

quest

Not Banned from OT
The reasons for buying them will be exclusive software and services like live and PSN rather than hardware architecture.

No I agree but just a huge change from every other generation. I have been there since the Pong days lol. I really hope MS can step up its first party because right now leaning towards the PS4 because I like their first/second party more and PS+.
 
You're not going to be waiting very long for the rumors to stop.

I have a feeling stuff is going to get shown in mid February to early March.

No sources or anything, it just seems like thats when it will happen.



That is unless invites to some kind of top secret event have already gone out and you cant tell anyone without getting shot. right?

Might be controlled leaks tbh. Sounds like they are still holding back on a few key things apparently.

That or they shipped dev kits to a bigger chunk of outside developers.

The more people with kits = the more we hear about stuff.
 
No one has brought up DigitalFoundry's next-gen comments in this thread?

Our information from developer sources suggests that even Sony - with much to gain in promoting 4K gameplay bearing in mind its upcoming range of screens - is making no attempt to evangelise the new display format to third-party developers, with 1080p the target resolution for Orbis titles. As both the next-gen PlayStation and Microsoft's Durango have a hell of a lot in common from a technological standpoint (more on that soon), we'd also venture to suggest that 1080p is the target for this year's new Xbox too.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-4k-gaming
 

mrklaw

MrArseFace
Hmm, actually, GCN already has fixed function tessellator logic. So I dunno if it would make a lot of sense to have a 'block' of tessellation stuff sitting next to a GCN GPU vs tweaking or expanding what's there already. Unless the blocks are more logical than physical and one of them is a reference to tweaked/expanded tessellation silicon inside GCN.

This is why I can't work out what could speed thing up to such an extent.

dedicated AA unit?

What are the primary resource hogs in modern engines other than the basic shading/vertex transformations?
 

Iacobellis

Junior Member
I am sure we will get a very concrete leak like Project Cafe before E3, maybe even an official announcement. If it's not the Orbis, then it will definitely be the Durango. After the decline in PC sales and Surface being in such a slump, Microsoft needs to show the people what they have been waiting for.
 

Sid

Member
What's with the teasing? if the news sites already have info why not just post it? we'll give you hits so don't worry.
 

mrklaw

MrArseFace
If Sony want to spend some time at GDC talking in depth about how to code for PS4 and showing examples, as they often have in the past with PlayStation, then i guess they'd need to have the initial reveal ahead of that.
 

gofreak

GAF's Bob Woodward
This is why I can't work out what could speed thing up to such an extent.

dedicated AA unit?

What are the primary resource hogs in modern engines other than the basic shading/vertex transformations?

Well, I was trying to think of things at the top and the bottom of the render pipe. Would be easier to integrate I guess.

eDRAM's at the bottom, that's cool.

So then...geometry processing/tessellation at the top? That's what made me think of a tessellator, thinking that functionality had been wrapped into the general ALUs on GPUs, and that a fixed function unit could offer optimised perf. But turns out that functionality is fixed function in GCN still. Though, of course, they could have stripped that out and replaced it with other tessellation silicon with better perf, or tweaked/optimised what was there.

Maybe some other kind of common-case geometry processing for the top of the pipeline? I'm not sure what you might want to trade flexibility for performance for though, other than tessellation perhaps. Like...animation? Seems to me approaches to that might be a bit too diverse to dump into a fixed function block. Skinning? I dunno.
 

Iacobellis

Junior Member
If Sony want to spend some time at GDC talking in depth about how to code for PS4 and showing examples, as they often have in the past with PlayStation, then i guess they'd need to have the initial reveal ahead of that.

PlayStation Meeting could happen this month, and the PS4 could be revisited at Destination PlayStation in February. We still have a couple more weeks of January, the Vita PM was not formally announced until a few days before it happened.
 

mrklaw

MrArseFace
Fixed function anything is risky. Look at deferred rendering. Wasn't the 360 edram calculated to be enough for a 720p forward renderer (standard at the time) but then got left behind by the changes in engines.
 

Kagari

Crystal Bearer
I wonder if SE is going to show a FF Versus trailer for PS4 at E3.

Shinji Hashimoto, the game's producer, said the game will show up some time this year. E3 would be as good a time as any for it to appear on the world stage. I hope it does anyway... it's been a long 7 years...
 

THE:MILKMAN

Member
I bet everyone is waiting for that "one guy" to leak a lot more so everyone can just start talking about it already. Seems like a lot of itching to say more but can't.

Aegies as said before that devs have been bursting at the seams to talk about their next-gen games.

Sounds like they are about to get the go ahead?
 

gofreak

GAF's Bob Woodward
Fixed function anything is risky. Look at deferred rendering. Wasn't the 360 edram calculated to be enough for a 720p forward renderer (standard at the time) but then got left behind by the changes in engines.

Sure, but if you're really confident some task is going to be very common, you might want to parse it out and put into its own optimised silicon.

I guess confidence increases or decreases depending on how standardised a certain type of task has become. For example people don't blink so much at fixed function audio or decompression hardware...it's almost boilerplate.

Something like tessellation might be considered boilerplate too, and is fixed function inside GCN GPUs anyway. Maybe they wanted higher performance for that specific task than their GCN GPU target allowed?

I agree that some other candidates might be riskier though. But we're kind of poking around in the dark here :)
 

mrklaw

MrArseFace
I agree that some other candidates might be riskier though. But we're kind of poking around in the dark here :)

That's the fun.

We could do with some more experienced developers to suggest places in the rendering pipeline that would be ripe for specific hardware to speed up
 
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