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Next-Gen PS5 & XSX |OT| Console tEch threaD

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Bo_Hazem

Banned
Here an elavorate strawman to defend DF from a personal opinion :). Thats embarrassing.

I am going to talk about DF everytime I want to. I live in a democratic country, I hope you too.


Now, put me on ignore if you dont want to hear my opinions and move on! Dont quote me to tell me about what I have to talk about.

3v3n6z.jpg
 

ethomaz

Banned
DF is gonna DF.

I expected an interview with Cerny asking him more detailed and technical questions about different custom silicon choices he had on PS5, we ended up with poorly constructed video that never touched on PS5 strengths with Rich flailing his hands and spending 20 minutes out of 23 on his skepticism on variable clocks, one minute in Tempest 3D audio and the remaining 2 begging for likes and subscribes.

Oh wait: Does the article include more info than the video? If true than this is major fuckup and shady practice by DF.

The scored an interview with Cerny and they filtered the output because they know more people will opt for the video only.

Shady but I need the read the article first before giving a conclusion on this.

Edit: Yup, video content had less info skipping the SSD and I/O discussion, major shady fuckup by DF.
Maybe they did not interviewed Cerny again? Because looks like just what said said in the Road of PS5 but a bit more detailed.
 

Andodalf

Banned
Mostly what we know, interesting to hear Cerny say directly that games that don’t optimize for their power cap will see less performance. Aren’t the games that need the most power the games that need the most performance? He makes it out like using a ton of power is something bad a game does, but the biggest offender on PS4 was God of War, a fantastic game. At the end of the day I think it won’t matter, as devs can just use the smart shift equivalent to move power from the CPU to GPU, but it’s still odd that he basically calls out games that use a lot of power.
 

Ascend

Member
What I find to be suspicious is that all of these claims about developers having said that the PS5 has issues don't specify any developers or any articles that cite them. There are no sources.
Would a dev want to lose a platform of potential sales by openly talking badly about Sony or the PS5?
 
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I said from the beginning that the whole boosting thing is a sign of heating issues. And I'm not a dev nor do I have any internal insight. I simply know about hardware, power and cooling.

That doesn’t make any sense.. if they were having issues they would settle for a much lower clock wouldn’t they. Or you are saying that the 2.23 GHz is plain bulshit and they will go with much lower clocks in reality?
 
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travisktl

Member
What I find to be suspicious is that all of these claims about developers having said that the PS5 has issues don't specify any developers or any articles that cite them. There are no sources.
Right? There were tons of quotes from Sony developers right after the Cerny event praising the PS5's capabilities, and saying the best features haven't even been shown off yet. Cerny himself said he visited all of their studios, took the devs criticism to mind, and they developed a system that could get game code working in less than a month. On top of that, we heard about Sony spending more money on their cooling system for the PS5 to make sure overheating issues were taken care of. Everything this guy and a few other people are saying is completely contradicting what we've been hearing over the past few months/weeks.
 

Fun Fanboy

Banned
What I find to be suspicious is that all of these claims about developers having said that the PS5 has issues don't specify any developers or any articles that cite them. There are no sources.
We shall see in the coming days maybe. Seems like a newer type post. Maybe this is what sets it off and we see. Also, this is why I asked if there were any devs on GAF. We could hear from them if they're working on PS5 stuff. Although, maybe they wouldn't be able to say anything about that.
 

Tarkus98

Member
Would a dev want to lose a platform of potential sales by openly talking badly about Sony or the PS5?
Logically then they wouldn’t say anything public at all and instead go back to Sony and work through any issues directly with them.
At least that is what I would do.
 

BluRayHiDef

Banned
YouTuber Red Gaming Tech says that he's heard from a source that Sony has yet to reveal the PS5 because...

1. Sony's design of the PS5 is so innovative, partially due to having an exotic cooling solution, that Sony thinks that people would doubt that they could mass-produce it if they reveal an in-house assembled unit. Hence, Sony wants to reveal the PS5 via a factory-manufactured unit.

2. Sony believes that revealing the PS5 as part of a special event during which they'd also reveal the price and demonstrate games running on the console would be more impactful than revealing the console otherwise.

3. Sony is not ready to show real, tangible footage of games running on a mass-produced unit of the PS5.

Start at 4:45.

 
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I took a few minutes to extract all Mark Cerny's quotations from the Digital Foundry article. Including all what it was omitted in the DF Video.

Lets combat the FUD with FACTS :)

PlayStation 5's boost clocks and how they work

"Because there are no more unknowns, there's no need to guess what power consumption the worst case game might have." "As for the details of the cooling solution, we're saving them for our teardown, I think you'll be quite happy with what the engineering team came up with"

"We don't use the actual temperature of the die, as that would cause two types of variance between PS5s." "One is variance caused by differences in ambient temperature; the console could be in a hotter or cooler location in the room. The other is variance caused by the individual custom chip in the console, some chips run hotter and some chips run cooler. So instead of using the temperature of the die, we use an algorithm in which the frequency depends on CPU and GPU activity information. That keeps behaviour between PS5s consistent."

"The behaviour of all PS5s is the same." "If you play the same game and go to the same location in the game, it doesn't matter which custom chip you have and what its transistors are like. It doesn't matter if you put it in your stereo cabinet or your refrigerator, your PS5 will get the same frequencies for CPU and GPU as any other PS5."

"The time constant, which is to say the amount of time that the CPU and GPU take to achieve a frequency that matches their activity, is critical to developers.". "It's quite short, if the game is doing power-intensive processing for a few frames, then it gets throttled. There isn't a lag where extra performance is available for several seconds or several minutes and then the system gets throttled; that isn't the world that developers want to live in - we make sure that the PS5 is very responsive to power consumed. In addition to that the developers have feedback on exactly how much power is being used by the CPU and GPU."

"Power plays a role when optimising. If you optimise and keep the power the same you see all of the benefit of the optimisation. If you optimise and increase the power then you're giving a bit of the performance back. What's most interesting here is optimisation for power consumption, if you can modify your code so that it has the same absolute performance but reduced power then that is a win"

"The CPU and GPU each have a power budget, of course the GPU power budget is the larger of the two.". "If the CPU doesn't use its power budget - for example, if it is capped at 3.5GHz - then the unused portion of the budget goes to the GPU. That's what AMD calls SmartShift. There's enough power that both CPU and GPU can potentially run at their limits of 3.5GHz and 2.23GHz, it isn't the case that the developer has to choose to run one of them slower."

"There's another phenomenon here, which is called 'race to idle'. Let's imagine we are running at 30Hz, and we're using 28 milliseconds out of our 33 millisecond budget, so the GPU is idle for five milliseconds. The power control logic will detect that low power is being consumed - after all, the GPU is not doing much for that five milliseconds - and conclude that the frequency should be increased. But that's a pointless bump in frequency."

"So, when I made the statement that the GPU will spend most of its time at or near its top frequency, that is with 'race to idle' taken out of the equation - we were looking at PlayStation 5 games in situations where the whole frame was being used productively. The same is true for the CPU, based on examination of situations where it has high utilisation throughout the frame, we have concluded that the CPU will spend most of its time at its peak frequency."

"Developers don't need to optimise in any way; if necessary, the frequency will adjust to whatever actions the CPU and GPU are performing," Mark Cerny counters. "I think you're asking what happens if there is a piece of code intentionally written so that every transistor (or the maximum number of transistors possible) in the CPU and GPU flip on every cycle. That's a pretty abstract question, games aren't anywhere near that amount of power consumption. In fact, if such a piece of code were to run on existing consoles, the power consumption would be well out of the intended operating range and it's even possible that the console would go into thermal shutdown. PS5 would handle such an unrealistic piece of code more gracefully."

"All of the game logic created for Jaguar CPUs works properly on Zen 2 CPUs, but the timing of execution of instructions can be substantially different." "We worked to AMD to customise our particular Zen 2 cores; they have modes in which they can more closely approximate Jaguar timing. We're keeping that in our back pocket, so to speak, as we proceed with the backwards compatibility work."

The proprietary SSD - how it works and what it delivers (OMITTED)

"I'm still working on games. I was a producer on Marvel's Spider-Man, Death Stranding and The Last Guardian.". "My work was on a mixture of creative and technical issues - so I pick up a lot of insight as to how systems are working in practice."

"Let's say an enemy is going to yell something as it dies, which can be issued as an urgent cut-in-front-of-everybody else request, but it's still very possible that it takes 250 milliseconds to get the data back due to all of the other game and operating requests in the pipeline.". "That 250 milliseconds is a problem because if the enemy is going to yell something as it dies, it needs to happen pretty much instantaneously; this kind of issue is what forces a lot of data into RAM on PlayStation 4 and its generation."

"Marvel's Spider-Man is a good example of the city block strategy. There are higher LOD and lower LOD representations for about a thousand blocks. If something is used a lot it's in those bundles of data a lot"

"Telemetry is vital in spotting issues with such a system, for example, telemetry showed that the city database jumped in size by a gigabyte overnight. It turned out the cause was 1.6MB of trash bags - that's not a particularly large asset - but the trash bags happened to be included in 600 city blocks.". "The Insomniac rule is that any asset used more than four hundred times is resident in RAM, so the trash bags were moved there, though clearly there's a limit to how many assets can reside in RAM"

3D Audio - the power of the Tempest engine

"If the HRTF discussion is a bit brain bending, there are a few concepts regarding sound localisation that are a bit simpler to describe, namely the ILD and the ITD.". "The ILD is the interaural level difference, which is to say the difference in the intensity of the sound reaching each ear. It varies by frequency and location; if the sound source is on my right, then my left ear will hear low frequencies less and high frequencies a whole lot less, because low frequency sounds can diffract around the head but high frequency sounds can't - they don't bend, they bounce. And so the ILD varies based on wherever the sound is coming from and the frequency of the sound, as well as the size of your head and the shape of your head. The ITD - the interaural time delay - is how long it takes for the sound to hit your right ear versus your left ear"

"Clearly, if the sound source is in front of you, the interaural time delay is zero. But if the sound source is to your right, there's a delay that is roughly the speed of sound divided by the distance between your ears. The HRTF that we use in the 3D audio algorithms encapsulates the ILD and ITD, as well as a bit more."

"The way we know whether our algorithms aren't working well is through the use of pink noise, it's similar in concept to white noise (which I think we're all familiar with). We use a sound source that is pink noise, and move it around, if we hear the flavour of that sound source changing as it moves that means there is an inaccuracy in our algorithms."

"The reason for the overwhelming HRTF processing diagram in the presentation was that I wanted to get out in front of you the complexity of what's required for accurate processing of a moving sound, and through that the rationale for why we constructed a dedicated unit for audio processing."

"Essentially, we wanted to be able to throw an indefinite amount of power at whatever issues we faced. Or to put that differently, we didn't want the cost of a particular algorithm to be the reason for choosing that algorithm, we wanted to be able to focus simply on the quality of the resulting effect."

"GPUs process hundreds or even thousands of wavefronts; the Tempest engine supports two.". "One wavefront is for the 3D audio and other system functionality, and one is for the game. Bandwidth-wise, the Tempest engine can use over 20GB/s, but we have to be a little careful because we don't want the audio to take a notch out of the graphics processing. If the audio processing uses too much bandwidth, that can have a deleterious effect if the graphics processing happens to want to saturate the system bandwidth at the same time."

"When using the Tempest engine, we DMA in the data, we process it, and we DMA it back out again; this is exactly what happens on the SPUs on PlayStation 3.". "It's a very different model from what the GPU does; the GPU has caches, which are wonderful in some ways but also can result in stalling when it is waiting for the cache line to get filled. GPUs also have stalls for other reasons, there are many stages in a GPU pipeline and each stage needs to supply the next. As a result, with the GPU if you're getting 40 per cent VALU utilisation, you're doing pretty damn well. By contrast, with the Tempest engine and its asynchronous DMA model, the target is to achieve 100 percent VALU utilisation in key pieces of code."

"We're beginning to see strategies for game audio where the type of processing depends on the particular sound source.". "For example, a 'hero sound' (by which I mean an important sound, not literally a sound made by the player hero) will get 3D object treatment for ideal locality, while the majority of the sounds in the scenes go through Ambisonics for a higher level of control of sound level. With that kind of hybrid approach, you can theoretically get the best of both worlds. And since both of these are running through the same HRTF processing at the end of the audio pipeline, both can get that same marvelous sense of presence."

How PS5's 3D audio connects to your audio hardware

"With TV speakers and stereo speakers, the user can choose to enable or disable 'TV Virtual Surround,' so the audio pipeline needs to be able to produce audio that does not have the 3D aspects that I was talking about.". "Virtual surround sound works in a sweet spot, and the user might not be seated in that sweet spot, or the user might be playing couch co-op (hard to fit both players in the sweet spot), etc. When virtual surround sound is enabled, HRTF based algorithms are used. When it is disabled, a simple downmix is performed - eg the location of a 3D sound object determines to what degree its sound comes from the left speaker and to what degree it comes from the right speaker."

"Once we're satisfied with our solution for these two channel systems we will turn to the issue of 5.1 and 7.1 systems.". "For now, though the 5.1 and 7.1 channel systems get a solution that approximates what we have now on PS4, which is to say the locations of the sound objects determine to what degree their sounds come out of each speaker. Note that 5.1 and 7.1 channel support is going to have its own special issues, in my talk I mentioned that with two channel systems the left ear can hear the right speaker and vice versa - it's even more complex with six or eight channels! Also note that if a developer is interested in using the Tempest engine power to support six or eight channels, game code is aware of the speaker setup so bespoke support is quite possible."

Source:
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-playstation-5-the-mark-cerny-tech-deep-dive
 
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SonGoku

Member
sounds a bit like “power of the cloud” :messenger_beaming:
Kinda but no, the main difference is that those assets generated on servers/computers will come preloaded on the disk/download
Here the cloud helps developers with creation
So.... the node can be 7nm and a high percentage of the APU use the standard workhorse DUV, but the critcal layers (likely around the gate and things that most effect power / frequency) can use the much more precise EUV....mmmm.
7nm+ (N7+) is just using a few EUV layers for critical parts the upcoming 5nm and 3nm nodes will employ more EUV layers
It is not design compatible with the next node, so highly unlikely they use EUV.
You mean 6nm? in that case N7+ already offers all the same benefits
But from a cost reduction perspective i can see them going with N7P because its a more mature process and then switch to 6nm for "free"
 
Hi! Long time lurker here. I decided to register just to guess the TF of PS5. Playstation has been my main console ever since the first one and I'm going to buy PS5 at launch along with a brand new 4k tv.
Ok, here's my thoughts. I think the PS5 will be around 10-10,5 TF. This goes against the insiders here but it's my guess anyway. I think xbox will have the TF-advantage. Real world performance will be almost identical between them anyway.
That's my guess, maybe we will get answers tomorrow? I'm hyped and I think it will be a great gen!

Yes you did.

Tell us more. So it's silent you heard? How does it look like?
 

Cobbet

Neo Member
Another insider in the house now eh? Those have gone well here lately. :p
Me? Well I registered the day before the GDC-talk just to contact Osirisblack about his numbers. Turns out my source was right. Check my history and you´ll see. But it's okay, I don't really care and I will not post anything more about it. I think both consoles are great and I'm looking forward to the new gen. :)
 

travisktl

Member
YouTuber Red Gaming Tech says that he's heard from a source that Sony has yet to reveal the PS5 because...

1. Sony's design of the PS5 is so innovative, partially due to having an exotic cooling solution, that Sony thinks that people would doubt that they could mass-produce it if they reveal an in-house assembled unit. Hence, Sony wants to reveal the PS5 via a factory-manufactured unit.

2. Sony believes that revealing the PS5 as part of a special event during which they'd also reveal the price and demonstrate games running on the console would be more impactful than revealing the console otherwise.

3. Sony is not ready to show real, tangible footage of games running on a mass-produced unit of the PS5.

Start at 4:45.


This makes much more sense from a marketing standpoint than Sony panicking behind the scenes and scrambling to try and figure out how to save themselves this coming gen. Microsoft has been very up front about everything involving the Series X and has put Sony in a weird place with gamers at the moment, so them taking their time to make sure they absolutely nail a reveal event makes much more sense.
 

Ascend

Member
YouTuber Red Gaming Tech says that he's heard from a source that Sony has yet to reveal the PS5 because...

1. Sony's design of the PS5 is so innovative, partially due to having an exotic cooling solution, that Sony thinks that people would doubt that they could mass-produce it if they reveal an in-house assembled unit. Hence, Sony wants to reveal the PS5 via a factory-manufactured unit.

2. Sony believes that revealing the PS5 as part of a special event during which they'd also reveal the price and demonstrate games running on the console would be more impactful than revealing the console otherwise.

3. Sony is not ready to show real, tangible footage of games running on a mass-produced unit of the PS5.

Start at 4:45.


1. Is it really more exotic than the XSX? Because the form factor of it has raised a few eyebrows, obviously, since it's quite different from the norm.
2. That makes sense
3. Doesn't this indicate that the PS5 was not yet ready to be mass-produced? Maybe they changed something at the last minute... Maybe?
 
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PaintTinJr

Member
Mostly what we know, interesting to hear Cerny say directly that games that don’t optimize for their power cap will see less performance. Aren’t the games that need the most power the games that need the most performance? He makes it out like using a ton of power is something bad a game does, but the biggest offender on PS4 was God of War, a fantastic game. At the end of the day I think it won’t matter, as devs can just use the smart shift equivalent to move power from the CPU to GPU, but it’s still odd that he basically calls out games that use a lot of power.
I'm pretty sure developers only have control indirectly through deterministic workloads.

And no(AFAIK) they’ll get a higher boost clock, along with the theoretically greater performance from the equation 2 x 64 x Clock x CU count, as the PS5’s method of driving wasted power through the lower number of conductive transistors, to reduce wasted energy as heat build up. But in reality they will have achieved less work done than the unboosted clock scenario. Unboosted means the PS5 is providing greater real-world performance – as the majority or most of the majority of transistors in the GPU are conducting and passing electricity, hence no additional wattage available in the PS5’s fixed power envelope for that work at a boosted clock.
 

M1chl

Currently Gif and Meme Champion
Bois and girls, I've watched the DF video, which should based on what it's said inside it, contains some additional clarification and one part came to my mind, that Rich said that there are no annoucements about VRS and Mesh Shared. I know something about Geometry Shader and I am not saying that underlining architecture could not do that, but it seems like Sony possibly does not have visible API for it inside that "Playstation SDK" Could someone clarified?
 
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