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Inside Playstation 4 Pro: How sony made the first 4k games console

Aceofspades

Aceofspades

Banned
The PRO is shaping up to be an impressive upgrade for PS4.

Whats even better is Sony facilitating the work for devs by keeping Jaguar and similar GPU setup and Ram. They don't have to code for every version, they can just add enhancements to current code for PRO version.
 
F

FlutterPuffs

Member
Maztorre said:
Half-Life 1 supported arbitrary resolutions and framerates day 1, because that is how you design software in a sane way when you know there will be multiple iterations of hardware. Sony could have done this too, but they didn't, so here we are, with a system clocking itself down so it can replicate framerate issues from the original hardware.
Click to expand...
Uh.

I don't get this argument. Youre asking Sony and game developers to have hindsight on a console they haven't even made yet.

Honestly it's giving me a headache.
 
Electret

Electret

Member
Terrific article with a lot to digest. Interesting that there are multiple ways to get to 4K. Sony is really fortunate to have Cerny at the helm for hardware design.

Also, a mini-megaton:

"Mass Effect Andromeda has two very different strategies. They have checkerboard for 4K and they have a separate mode for high quality graphics at 1080p."
Click to expand...
 
K

Kayant

Member
Maztorre said:
Half-Life 1 supported arbitrary resolutions and framerates day 1, because that is how you design software in a sane way when you know there will be multiple iterations of hardware. Sony could have done this too, but they didn't, so here we are, with a system clocking itself down so it can replicate framerate issues from the original hardware.

And trying to compare PC "compatibility issues" covering any number of configurations of hardware from different vendors, to an iterative improvement of fixed hardware from the same manufacturer, is complete nonsense too.

It's just sloppy planning, especially when every multiplatform developer is already accounting for a much wider variety of hardware vendors on PC.
Click to expand...
I personally don't see it as sloppy planning. The point is they are known to give very low access to hardware so devs can optimize their code to be very specific if they choose to and things may not work as planned if they just allowed to run on PS4 Pro. I mean isn't that one of the main reasons of having fixed hardware?
 
F

Fisty

Member
Maztorre said:
Half-Life 1 supported arbitrary resolutions and framerates day 1, because that is how you design software in a sane way when you know there will be multiple iterations of hardware. Sony could have done this too, but they didn't, so here we are, with a system clocking itself down so it can replicate framerate issues from the original hardware.

And trying to compare PC "compatibility issues" covering any number of configurations of hardware from different vendors, to an iterative improvement of fixed hardware from the same manufacturer, is complete nonsense too.

It's just sloppy planning, especially when every multiplatform developer is already accounting for a much wider variety of hardware vendors on PC.
Click to expand...

OK but that has never been the case with consoles. Why would devs do that if they had zero indication that's what was going to happen? Why would Sony drop a megaton announcement like that on devs before the PS4 launched and expect it not to leak everywhere? How would Sony have been 100% sure what their plans are for 2016 in 2013? Would devs have been as accommodating if they had to do this extra work while they shifted their tools and stuff to x86 for some "maybe" scenario?

That's a lot of guesswork. Just like expecting every unpatched PS4 game to work flawlessly on different hardware would be.
 
Frostman

Frostman

Member
Electret said:
Terrific article with a lot to digest. Interesting that there are multiple ways to get to 4K. Sony is really fortunate to have Cerny at the helm for hardware design.

Also, a mini-megaton:
Click to expand...

Yeah this is big. I really wanna know when Sony are going to start pushing this more. How's BF1 going to support it?

Having more options in a game like ME:A is a really good sign for the future.
 
R

RootCause

Member
Regarding power consumption. When playing games without a patch, will the system draw the same power as the og ps4? or will it draw as much as the slim?

I know it's a bit silly. :p
 
Unknown?

Unknown?

Member
icespide said:
why do people keep referring to the Xbox One S as if it provides some kind of huge performance boost? It's barely a tangible boost
Click to expand...

Exactly the XO S is still weaker than the OG PS4 it is the same hardware just upclocked this new GPU is not the same hardware upclocked. People this isn't rocket science.
 
K

kyser73

Member
Great in-depth article that will be completely ignored by many who post in this thread with 'Hur-dur slow ram' type comments.

Also OnQ vindicated re: FP16!

The VR stuff is really interesting, as I'm assuming the multi res bit refers to the screen area that remains unviewed by the lenses but still has to be rendered.

I like Cerny's approach to engineering - efficiency & tuning to get more from what you have rather than just 'Moarpowah!'.

Sanpei said:
4K native gaming with this machine ?

LOL
Click to expand...

There are already about a dozen titles supporting native 4K at launch.
 
M

Maztorre

Member
Kayant said:
I personally don't see it as sloppy planning. The point is they are known to give very low access to hardware so devs can optimize their code to be very specific if they choose to and things may not work as planned if they just allowed to run on PS4 Pro. I mean isn't that one of the main reasons of having fixed hardware?
Click to expand...

It's not fixed hardware anymore though, is it? They're releasing an upgrade next month. You can't have it both ways without causing issues like this.

This isn't a deal breaker for me, but I've gone from being somewhat interested in the idea of iterative hardware to only begrudgingly buying this system to get the exclusives. The idea of buying "premium" hardware that then hampers itself to accurately portray lower performance is just poor design, whether Nintendo does it with the N3DS or when Sony does it here. If you know you're going to release multiple arbitrary hardware configurations then you should design your abstraction layer so developers can account for arbitrary hardware improvements. They're doing it already elsewhere!

Fisty said:
OK but that has never been the case with consoles. Why would devs do that if they had zero indication that's what was going to happen? Why would Sony drop a megaton announcement like that on devs before the PS4 launched and expect it not to leak everywhere? How would Sony have been 100% sure what their plans are for 2016 in 2013? Would devs have been as accommodating if they had to do this extra work while they shifted their tools and stuff to x86 for some "maybe" scenario?

That's a lot of guesswork. Just like expecting every unpatched PS4 game to work flawlessly on different hardware would be.
Click to expand...

Do you think devs have a roadmap for all future Nvidia hardware? Or that they release a patch for every new video card released in the PC market? They don't, because abstraction takes care of that while the end user sees a performance gain on better hardware.

The only "extra work" was ever on Sony's end, by building it into the abstraction layer offered on PS4. Building it in to enforce good practice (e.g. not tying game logic directly to framerate) would have made these issues nonexistent down the road. Again, this is an already solved problem on multiple other gaming platforms, consoles are not a special case.
 
K

kaching

"GAF's biggest wanker"
Maztorre said:
Half-Life 1 supported arbitrary resolutions and framerates day 1, because that is how you design software in a sane way when you know there will be multiple iterations of hardware. Sony could have done this too, but they didn't, so here we are, with a system clocking itself down so it can replicate framerate issues from the original hardware.
Click to expand...
Why is it on Sony then and not the developer, if that's the "sane" approach? Regardless of knowing the exact roadmap, it was clear that future iterations of PS hardware from the PS4 onward weren't going to delve into more exotic architectures anymore and stick to the more off-the-shelf industry architecture, so why did Sony need to mandate anything about the software design that isn't mandated on the PC side where devs seem to figure it out perfectly well on their own?
 
I

icespide

Banned
Sanpei said:
4K native gaming with this machine ?

LOL
Click to expand...

ahem

PLASTICA-MAN said:
Here is the list of the official announced games:

- The Last Of Us Remastered (Native 4K@30FPS with the best shadows)
- Smite (Native 4K@60FPS)
- The Elder Scroll Online (Native 4K@30FPS)
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition Edition (Native 4K@30FPS)
- Mantis Burn Racing (Native 4K@60FPS / Native 4K@30FPS for 4 player split-screen)
- Wheels of Aurelia (Native 4K@60FPS)
- Futuridium EP Deluxe (Native 4K@60FPS)
- forma.8 (Native 4K@60FPS + 8xMSAA )
- Rez Infinite (Native 4K@60FPS)
- Hustle Kings (Native 4K)
- Thumper (Native 4K)
- NBA 2K17 (Native 4K@60FPS + HDR)
- Bound (Native 4K@60FPS + MSAA x2 upscaled from MSAAx8 in normal gameplay / in VR mode: rendering to 4K internal screen which is then supersampled to 1080P display in PSVR + new effects like volumetric lights + sharper shadows)
- Viking Squad (Native 4K@60FPS).
- Pro Evolution Soccer 2017 (Native 4K@60FPS)

List of logical native 4K games, but not official (until devs officially develop the PS4 PRO version of the game: meaning those games may end up in the official list or just stay as regular PS4 games):

- VizionEck (Native 4K@60FPS)? Not officially announced on PS4 PRO yet because the developer Mike Armbrust doesn't have a PS4 Pro devkit yet but "but for a while it was running 4K native on standard PS4"
- Trine games (Native 4K@60FPS)? If devs support PS4 PRO. I am assuming this since Trine 2 could run in 4K@30FPS on regular PS4. "The PS4 PRO update may never come", but who knows

Apps which already started supporting 4K on PS PRO:

- Youtube

Reddit thread here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PS4/comments/569zot/ps4_pro_4k_native_games_will_update_the_list/
Click to expand...
 
A

amstradcpc

Member
So:
-1 GB of DDR3 added for apps in the backgroung freeing up 1 GB of GDRR5, giving half for UI in 4k and half for games.
-two Vega arch features: hardware scheduler and 2 half precision ops instead of 1 single precission making it in fact a 16 bits 8,4 tflops machine.
-custom Sony's ID buffer with spatial info of objects in frames that allows better spacial and temporal antialiasing techniques plus checkerboard or other upscaling techniques.
-Other customs features(multi-res support for VR?) will be explained in other articles.
-New gen will be a clean sheet with new CPU and memory arch.So it will be Zen+HBM whatever.


It seems like smart design decissions were made.That two Vega features can punch this GPU way above its weight.
And that ID buffer will be abused by devs for incredible techniques.
 
M

morpix

Member
madmook said:
Damn, why can't they let old games use the extra horsepower automatically, like XB1 S. Must be some sort of technical hassle. I'm just thinking of how PCs work where if you have more power you'd just get a higher framerate, and the game wouldn't otherwise be affected.
Click to expand...

Sony seems to allow more to-the-metal access than MS. The fact that bugs can arise due to faster/slower CPU timings can only occur with low level access, and that's probably why.
DirectX essentially solves these sorts of issues, as the devs interface with an API or HAL rather than hardware itself.
 
R

RedlineRonin

Member
Fantastic read. I don't claim to have understood all of it, but it seems impressive what Cerny's done.

Also very surprised to hear Richard seem awfully impressed with the checkerboarding methodology.

I can't wait for some more FFXV footage so we can see what they've done with the extra power. Super excited to pick one of these up.
 
G

gofreak

GAF's Bob Woodward
Gamasutra article:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/283611/Inside_the_PlayStation_4_Pro_with_Mark_Cerny.php

There’s also a primitive discard accelerator which “improves the efficiency with which triangles that are too small to affect the rendering are removed from the pipeline” and a work distributor, something Cerny says is critical once your GPU gets to a certain size because it functions as “a centralized brain in the GPU that intelligently distributes and load-balances the geometry being rendered.”

“The work distributor in PS4 Pro is very advanced,” he claimed. “Not only does it have the fairly dramatic tesselation improvements from Polaris [AMD’s GPU architecture], it also has some post-Polaris functionality that accelerates rendering of scenes with very small objects. “
Click to expand...
 
GameSeeker

GameSeeker

Member
Maztorre said:
Half-Life 1 supported arbitrary resolutions and framerates day 1, because that is how you design software in a sane way when you know there will be multiple iterations of hardware. Sony could have done this too, but they didn't, so here we are, with a system clocking itself down so it can replicate framerate issues from the original hardware.

And trying to compare PC "compatibility issues" covering any number of configurations of hardware from different vendors, to an iterative improvement of fixed hardware from the same manufacturer, is complete nonsense too.

It's just sloppy planning, especially when every multiplatform developer is already accounting for a much wider variety of hardware vendors on PC.
Click to expand...

You are misunderstanding how PC's do forward compatibility. Back in the days of DOS, games wrote directly to the hardware and didn't take advantage of new hardware and would often break when new, faster CPU's or GPU's were used. I owned many, many DOS games that broke with new HW. Hence new hardware, often had a backwards compatibility mode.

Microsoft designed Windows to solve that problem by forcing games to use Windows API's (e.g., DirectX) that talk to a device driver that then talks to the hardware. With Windows, Half-Life 1 relies on DirectX and hardware device drivers in order to run at higher resolutions/framerates.

Consoles provide lower level hardware access than Windows and so will never have the same path for forward compatibility.
 
D

dragonzdogma

Member
So that I can understand this could someone talk to me in bits?

For example sega genesis was 16 bit
then came the 32x

So is that what a PS4 pro is , like some sorta 32x?
 
N

Nzyme32

Member
Marcellus Wallace said:
Technically it doesn't output in 4K, correct?
Click to expand...

This is the problem with this conversation though. The first HD consoles were not always rendering in HD, same for Full HD, same even now after all that with the current consoles, and now the PS4 Pro is advertised as a 4K console when it isn't rendering at 4k the vast majority of the time or unless you have an entirely static scene and don't move, you'll get nears as you could. Without doubt it is still a big step up from the current consoles and at least makes some use of 4K capable TVs and an excellent price. I'd bet even the Xbox Scorpio won't fully stick with 4K, but that is the marketing message and no one seems to care otherwise.

I think you have to live with it.
 
cyen

cyen

Member
Zombie James said:
It'll be interesting to see how they preserve backward compatibility given his comments about having to stick wish Jaguar for the Pro.
Click to expand...

I really hope they change their Minds, Xbox 360 games are running quite well on xbox one considering that one has a PowerPC cpu and the other a weak sauce x86 cpu.

I preferer ms approach when it comes to console generations.
 
Wishmaster92

Wishmaster92

Member
"On PS4 Pro, we do things differently, when you stop using Netflix, we move it to the slow, conventional gigabyte of DRAM. Using that strategy frees up almost one gigabyte of the eight gigabytes of GDDR5. We use 512MB of that freed up space for games, which is to say that games can use 5.5GB instead of the five and we use most of the rest to make the PS4 Pro interface - meaning what you see when you hit the PS button - at 4K rather than the 1080p it is today."
Click to expand...

wtf well what about for people with 1080p sets playing in 1080p mode? Why not make the full 1gb usable for us.
 
A

androvsky

Member
Zombie James said:
It'll be interesting to see how they preserve backward compatibility given his comments about having to stick wish Jaguar for the Pro.
Click to expand...

This could be a step towards fixing that, since Sony's now forcing every new PS4 game to be compatible with different clock speeds. Just having two different power targets should help a great deal towards finding timing bugs, adding future targets shouldn't be nearly as difficult.
 
A

amstradcpc

Member
AlucardGV said:
is the 16-32 thing really that simple? sound strange to me it can jump from 4.4 to 8 tf
Click to expand...
Nintendo Switch's gpu if is tegra x1 like makes it (mobiles gpu in general where half precision is generally enough and saves bandwidth and registers space).Tegra X1 is 0,5 tflops single precision(32 bits) and 1 tflop half precision(16 bits).
 
L

lowhighkang_LHK

Member
What I learned from this thread is how people just read the selected choice quotes the OP put up and not the actual article that is infinitely more descriptive. It would be better if the OP didn't put up choice quotes to promote people to actually read articles for once and give eurogamer credit for putting it together.

I understand The risks of bugs and such when forcing unpatched base ps4 games, but why not give us the choice. If it runs better with no issues. Great. If it runs buggy on pro mode then we the consumer can set the Pro to base mode.
 
R

RoboPlato

I'd be in the dick
Fantastic article

It answered a lot of the questions that I had about the hardware and techniques in play

Leadbetter did the best job communicating the improvements that the Pro had after the meeting so I'm very glad he was the one interviewing Cerny here.
 
Aceofspades

Aceofspades

Banned
quoting myself from june 2016

People always forget that Sony is thinking also about developing games time for these machines, Introducing new CPUs can add more burden on the devs.

PS4 is already successful, Sony wants minimal efforts in porting the games to the NEO ( if any). Thats why sticking to the same APU is best business decision.
Click to expand...

and reading this piece really cemented my opinion that sticking to upclocked Jaquar is the best business decision they can make. just to make developing games super easy and seamless for devs.

PRO providing the following at $399 is the most impressive package I have seen in a gaming console.

-1TB HDD
-SATA 3 for utilizing SDDs
- Extra RAM for smooth app swiching and added Ram for games.
- VR benefits
- 5GHz wilress band (available for slim also)
- 2.3x the GPU power to current PS4 (for higher res than 1080p - possible native 4k for some games)
- Added benefit for 1080p owners with supersampling and better IQ and framerates due to higher clocked CPU/GPU.

and for devs:
- easy and seamless porting between versions ( one code work for all) with easy enhancements to PRO version.

very impressive work done by Sony, and $399 makes it a no brainer for me.

EDIT: really interesting quote by Cerny
We showed Days Gone running on PS4 Pro at the New York event. That work was small enough that a single programmer could do it. In general our target was to keep the work needed for PS4 Pro support to a fraction of a per cent of the overall effort needed to create a game, and I believe we have achieved that target.
Click to expand...
really great news for devs :)
 
R

RedlineRonin

Member
lowhighkang_LHK said:
What I learned from this thread is how people just read the selected choice quotes the OP put up and not the actual article that is infinitely more descriptive. It would be better if the OP didn't put up choice quotes to promote people to actually read articles for once and give eurogamer credit for putting it together.

I understand The risks of bugs and such when forcing unpatched base ps4 games, but why not give us the choice. If it runs better with no issues. Great. If it runs buggy on pro mode then we the consumer can set the Pro to base mode.
Click to expand...

This is an interesting point. I think most people would argue that the entire point of consoles is their simplicity as compared to PCs. You put in a game. It just works.

Offering what you've laid out above is certainly an option, but definitely pushes further from that simplistic ideal, and closer to the space PCs serve today. The same will go for the Scorpio. And it's not limited to just the base versus not idea; it's the same idea if I'm getting to pick between 4K/30 and 1080p60.

We seem to be headed for a very interesting time in gaming, that's for sure.
 
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