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Recent PS4 SDK update unlocked 7th CPU core for gaming

ZeEUfyU.jpg

I thought that means the PS4 can perform Hirudora now? :p
 

koutoru

Member
So is this in effect now? And this won't benefit games already released?
Correct. Any games that haven't been programmed to take advantage of this seventh core will get no use of it being unlocked.

This isn't like when RAM is freed up on the system and already existing games can actually take advantage of that.
 

TheStruggler

Report me for trolling ND/TLoU2 threads
I'm stupid when it comes to this shit so as a gamer, what kind of improvements do you think we will see in future games on the ps4?
 

Bishop89

Member
Correct. Any games that haven't been programmed to take advantage of this seventh core will get no use of it being unlocked.

This isn't like when RAM is freed up on the system and already existing games can actually take advantage of that.
Can they patch these improvements? Not that I think any devs would go through that effort, just hypothetically speaking
 

Renekton

Member
That thing competes with Core M in IPC, per core. It's a little crazy. Though it might be a bit unfair to x86 chips since the ARMv8 ones, particularly Apples, do so well in encryption it drags the whole score up a bit. But since it uses a geometric mean it shouldn't be that much.

Point being, Core M is much better than Atom per core, Jaguar is maybe a little better than Atom optimistically, clock for clock, core for core.

So the A9, it's probably actually doing a bit better than the consoles on a single core basis, though yes, having 7 cores still puts them well ahead.

If Apple got core happy and threw quad Twister cores in the Apple TV, with that large heatsink and no battery to worry about to keep up clocks...Then the consoles would be very rapidly encroached upon.

Then for GPU the A9X is already around what, 400-ish Gflops? 90% increases per year for two years would have it awfully close...
Two of the basis for the A9X "miracle" are the geekbench number which is oriented around mobile plus our conjecture that it somehow scales very linearly to desktop workloads if Apple simply wants to.
 

Sjefen

Member
Very nice! Uncharted 4 gonna use this??

I would think so:

Naughty Dog is home to the ICE Team, one of Sony’s World Wide Studios central technology groups. The ICE Team focuses on creating core graphics technologies used by all PlayStation developers. The ICE Team has been involved with the development of the PlayStation®4 since its inception, including hardware design, graphics libraries, performance analysis tools, and developer support (hardware evangelism).
 

koutoru

Member
Can they patch these improvements? Not that I think any devs would go through that effort, just hypothetically speaking
Hypothetically speaking, sure.

But you usually wouldn't try to make those types of changes to your game after it releases.
 
I would think so:

Naughty Dog is home to the ICE Team, one of Sony’s World Wide Studios central technology groups. The ICE Team focuses on creating core graphics technologies used by all PlayStation developers. The ICE Team has been involved with the development of the PlayStation®4 since its inception, including hardware design, graphics libraries, performance analysis tools, and developer support (hardware evangelism).

Oh hells yeah. Cant wait!!!! Thnx for explaining :)
 

Renekton

Member
I would think so:

Naughty Dog is home to the ICE Team, one of Sony’s World Wide Studios central technology groups. The ICE Team focuses on creating core graphics technologies used by all PlayStation developers. The ICE Team has been involved with the development of the PlayStation®4 since its inception, including hardware design, graphics libraries, performance analysis tools, and developer support (hardware evangelism).
Or they already planned for 7th core availability since very early on :]
 

Lonely1

Unconfirmed Member
Geekbench scores should be taken with a grain of salt. According to those scores the A9 is close to a 2.5Ghz Core i5-2520M, which of course isn't realistic.

Here's another article with a different set of benchmarks where the A9 trades blows with a Core 2 Duo E6700, which I believe is more in line with the real performance of the SoC.
 

dogen

Member
Having a CPU that's significantly worse than what's in today's cellphones is a "beast" now?

Significantly worse? Maybe if you're talking about apple chips. I don't think the new qualcomms or even samsungs are THAT much better.


Eh. As "pathetic weak-ass mobile shit" as the PS4 CPU is (that's what we usually hear from the PC people, paraphrased), I'm pretty sure it can easily do PS2 emulation on 6 cores. Probably on 1 core if the emulator is well-written.

Emulation isn't something you can just split over a ton of cores. You can handle some things on different cores like pcsx2 does, but I don't think that will scale well all the way to 6 cores.

On the other hand, I also doubt you could do it on 1 core. I don't know... It's easy to say, oh the ps2 only runs at 333MHz and the ps4 cpu runs at 1600, but obviously it's a lot more complicated than that. Maybe they could, who knows..
 

kyser73

Member
Maybe Sony's OS team have development roadmap planned until end of gen now, and have been able to nail down the CPU budget to allow for this.

If that's the case memory allocation will be next.
 

dlbeast

Member
Correct. Any games that haven't been programmed to take advantage of this seventh core will get no use of it being unlocked.

This isn't like when RAM is freed up on the system and already existing games can actually take advantage of that.

So a game like Witcher 3 couldn't have a downloaded update to take advantage?

oops just saw my question answered.

To add any games that suffer fps issues from the past it would be awesome if they used it to code in an update to give it some fps love.
 

gossi

Member
So is this in effect now? And this won't benefit games already released?

Only new titles would use. SDK updates take a year or more to make it into use. Game engines, game design, QA etc. So games later in 2016, in particular 2017 may use.
 
Pretty funny that people scoffed at the idea of the Xbox One getting an advantage from extra CPU core and a slight overclock. Now all of a sudden the PS4 might have an extra core available and it's release the Kraken.

Geekbench scores should be taken with a grain of salt. According to those scores the A9 is close to a 2.5Ghz Core i5-2520M, which of course isn't realistic.

Here's another article with a different set of benchmarks where the A9 trades blows with a Core 2 Duo E6700, which I believe is more in line with the real performance of the SoC.

Nah Apple has overcome the laws of thermal dynamics and made a CPU that's as powerful as an i5 at a 10th of the power consumption.
 

Pimpbaa

Member
Correct. Any games that haven't been programmed to take advantage of this seventh core will get no use of it being unlocked.

This isn't like when RAM is freed up on the system and already existing games can actually take advantage of that.

Any ram freed up won't be used by old games either. They expect only a certain amount if ram to be available and are programmed only to use that amount. Any new features added to SDKs for consoles will never benefit older games unless they are patched to do so.
 

Pimpbaa

Member
Pretty funny that people scoffed at the idea of the Xbox One getting an advantage from extra CPU core and a slight overclock. Now all of a sudden the PS4 might have an extra core available and it's release the Kraken.

PS4 had a lot more to gain since its GPU is held back a great deal by the CPU going by what similar specced video cards paired with better CPUs are doing on PC.
 

Denur

Member
Or they already planned for 7th core availability since very early on :]
I would assume that they designed their multi-threaded game engine in such a way that it is basically independent of the number of cores. All they would have to do with a variable amount of cores, is to tweak some global variables like the fixed frame rate size, number of AI and other CPU related stuff.
 
Why are people talking about Twister as if it's comparable to Jaguar? On a per core basis perhaps but so far Twister has had no plans for higher than a quad core setup which means comparing per core performance doesn't give an accurate representation of differences in performance when looking at an 8 core processor like the Jaguar found in current gen consoles.
Whatever they can use to try shitting over the current gen consoles. Which is hardly necessary really, since we already know the CPU in the current gen consoles is probably a weak point.
 
Games...never.

Movies, Yes.

Yeah, I definitely expect movies.

While it'd probably be super super rare it might be possible on games. Perhaps some smaller or indie games might be able to do it. Back when it came out the Trine 2 devs actually said that they supposedly could have ran it in 4K on PS4 if Sony had enabled 4K output on the system.
 

RexNovis

Banned
Whatever they can use to try shitting over the current gen consoles. Which is hardly necessary really, since we already know the CPU in the current gen consoles is probably a weak point.

Yes we do. Nobody is really debating that. Which is why it's odd that people would bend the truth to make them look worse. I mean what the hell is the point? It's not like exaggerating the performance deficit is going to change anything. The consoles are still going to have their same processors and console gamers will still buy consoles. Moaning about their potential accomplished absolutely nothing.
 

Hermii

Member
Nice! I hope they unlock some more ram as well before Uncharted 4 comes out.

Do developers know in advance the timing of these things, so they can take it into account?
 
Yes we do. Nobody is really debating that. Which is why it's odd that people would bend the truth to make them look worse. I mean what the hell is the point? It's not like exaggerating the performance deficit is going to change anything. The consoles are still going to have their same processors and console gamers will still buy consoles. Moaning about their potential accomplished absolutely nothing.
Well I'm sure it helps some people feel better about themselves. But that's more an indictment on the individual rather than the PS4 or XBOne.
 
Any ram freed up won't be used by old games either. They expect only a certain amount if ram to be available and are programmed only to use that amount. Any new features added to SDKs for consoles will never benefit older games unless they are patched to do so.

I'd be surprised if this were the case. You'd design your game with a certain memory allocation in mind, but at runtime it's going to ask for memory to be allocated and will use it if it's there. If it isn't then you get contention between processes and it impacts performance.

Depending on engine design the same may be true of extra processor cores: if the engine requests available CPU resources from the OS and then shunts work to them, some engines may 'see' the extra core without being updated.
 

kyser73

Member
So how much recoding would you need to patch a game to take advantage of whatever performance uplift you get from the extra core?

I'm guessing it'd change from game to game, and the main calculation behind doing it would be time&effort/gain...unless there's an educational process there which would make it worth doing.
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Hopefully they get the firmware team on the RAM reductions too like how they did PS3. Didn't PS3 go from 120MB reserved for the OS to like 40MB after a few years?

CPU and RAM wise, given the PS4 does not have to worry about snap like features, you can assume the game is either backgrounded or full screen using the full system resources minus a known set of system services (notifications, custom background music, PS Store downloads and uploads, etc...) some of which are backed by a secondary CPU with its own private memory pool (background video recording, streaming, etc...). Although going to areas like the share screen is quick, the game is paused and control given to the OS including the bulk of system resources, CPU cores included.

Essentially, the OS has likely at least two modes of operation: shrinking when the game is full screen with only game companion that need to run (streaming a game and keeping the chat comments coming and the watchers notification, etc...) and reclaiming resources whenever brought in full control again. The system is never running complex and resource hogging operations when the game is active and viceversa.
 

gossi

Member
So how much recoding would you need to patch a game to take advantage of whatever performance uplift you get from the extra core?

I'm guessing it'd change from game to game, and the main calculation behind doing it would be time&effort/gain...unless there's an educational process there which would make it worth doing.

It depends on the game, but usually game devs only have a very small team supporting for a few months after release, for DLC elements. To have to rework the engine core and QA again for a tiny performance boost 99% of players aren't going to notice makes no business sense.

This will come into play a year or two away on new releases. It's already used on Battlefront on Xbox One, hence why the audio cuts out when you snap apps and screenshot (the 7th core is also OS shared, on XB1, and with BF they moved audio processing to core 7).
 
Excellent. Unlocking the 7th core means they can finally bring me Asura's Wrath HD.

Just to paint the picture more completely, one Jaguar module [4 cores] spends 15W at default 1.6GHz cock. PS4 and Xbone have two of those modules each.

Oh mang, these threads always devolve into a dick-measuring contest.
 

FranXico

Member
It is off-topic because another core won't make the ps4 4k. It can render 4k but don't expect good graphics.

I would buy again Echochrome 4K. But then again, I would need a 4K TV first.
1080p games must look horrible in a large 4K TV.
 
It's big news. Microsoft needed to shout this out but as the ps4 has superior graphics and sales they don't need to be loud.

Good on you Sony.
 
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