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EPIC buys RAD Tools

Does it matter if Epic worked with Microsoft longer?

We should be looking at how Sony and Microsoft are currently working with them more than anything.
I made a response to the Epic collaborating with Sony longer comments. I just recall them providing input on the X360 and if I am not mistaken that console was older than PS5. I hope good games come from what ever Epic is working on seeing how important the engine is to the industry.
 
I made a response to the Epic collaborating with Sony longer comments. I just recall them providing input on the X360 and if I am not mistaken that console was older than PS5. I hope good games come from what ever Epic is working on seeing how important the engine is to the industry.

I believed they told Microsoft to go with more ram for the 360 just like they gave input in the PS5s I/O system. It's pretty much the reason why they are talking about the PS5 I/O so much and praising it since they helped create it. Nothing to do with the console wars it's just collaboration between these two companies.
 
I believed they told Microsoft to go with more ram for the 360 just like they gave input in the PS5s I/O system. It's pretty much the reason why they are talking about the PS5 I/O so much and praising it since they helped create it. Nothing to do with the console wars it's just collaboration between these two companies.
I agree and no one said anything about console wars. I was simply asking about the point of whether or not Epic had a longer working relationship with Sony or Microsoft.

I had mentioned Gears of War and their input on the X360. Did Epic provide similar input on the PS3 or any of Sony's earlier consoles? I am well aware of their PS5 collaboration.
 
I agree and no one said anything about console wars. I was simply asking about the point of whether or not Epic had a longer working relationship with Sony or Microsoft.

I had mentioned Gears of War and their input on the X360. Did Epic provide similar input on the PS3 or any of Sony's earlier consoles? I am well aware of their PS5 collaboration.

The PS3 was designed by Ken Kuturagi. He didn't go to the lengths that Mark did with developers with the PS4 and PS5. That's one of the reasons why the hardware was pretty terrible for developers.

The PS4 and PS5 were designed with input from developers. It would be fan boyish to assume they had some input with the PS4s design. But I haven't read anything about that. It seems like the I/O will be pretty big for UE5 on all platforms and they choose to talk about their collaboration with Sony on it. It's due to this work why it was demonstrated on the PS5. Again not saying anything negative on Xbox here.
 

REDRZA MWS

Member
You're right about that. Cerny did say that Developers are a huge part in the PS5s design. I wouldn't be surprised if they influenced many different aspects of the systems design. His trips to see different developers was extremely important.



The PS3 taught Sony on how important it is to get developer feedback. Ever since that platform it's been a main focus for them.
Much more like the PS3 was the last brainchild of Crazy Ken, and his proprietary hardware making life difficult for devs. Father of PlayStation needed to go ASAP.
 
Much more like the PS3 was the last brainchild of Crazy Ken, and his proprietary hardware making life difficult for devs. Father of PlayStation needed to go ASAP.

Mark was a really good choice for Sony after that. With the ease of development of the PS4 and the PS5 I don't think developers are complaining about the difficulty of development. Really impressed with how he designed the PS5 thought.
 

Papacheeks

Banned




*insert Mark Cerny gif*


Now that collaboration with Epic makes a ton of sense, especially when they re-wrote parts of UNreal 5 for SSD use/optimizations. Now it looks like they may use this for all games by epic, but also possibly their delivery service on their store front. Maybe we see fast install times through epic store for games?
 
To some degree yes. 100%. But Sony and Epic have a VERY close relationship. So close that Sony partically owns EPIC now. I think Sony paid like $250 Million to be a part owner of Epic. So, that relationship of course will always benefit Sony more.


"Sony has made a $250 million investment in Epic Games, the two companies announced on Thursday. The deal means Sony gets a 1.4 percent interest in the game development studio and publisher and gives Epic a valuation of $17.86 billion"
 

MonarchJT

Banned
To some degree yes. 100%. But Sony and Epic have a VERY close relationship. So close that Sony partically owns EPIC now. I think Sony paid like $250 Million to be a part owner of Epic. So, that relationship of course will always benefit Sony more.
that's not how the things works plus ..it's very very very very very VERY unlikely that naughty dog and Guerrilla abandon their proprietary engines (naughty dog game engine and decima) respectively ...
ps. also ssm have their own engine
 
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that's not how the things works plus ..it's very very very very very VERY unlikely that naughty dog and Guerrilla abandon their proprietary engines (naughty dog game engine and decima) respectively ...
ps. also ssm have their own engine

That's not why Sony worked with Epic though. It's not that 1st parties are going to abandon their engines in favor of epics. It's just that Sony is just making sure a 3rd party engine actually uses the PS5s I/O to some extent. Developers making games with the UE5 will definitely have an easier time taking advantage of the PS5s I/O.

This isn't just to fuel fanboy wars like your suggesting (aka propaganda).
 
The PS3 was designed by Ken Kuturagi. He didn't go to the lengths that Mark did with developers with the PS4 and PS5. That's one of the reasons why the hardware was pretty terrible for developers.

The PS4 and PS5 were designed with input from developers. It would be fan boyish to assume they had some input with the PS4s design. But I haven't read anything about that. It seems like the I/O will be pretty big for UE5 on all platforms and they choose to talk about their collaboration with Sony on it. It's due to this work why it was demonstrated on the PS5. Again not saying anything negative on Xbox here.
I'm aware of all of this. I was only asking about the the longer working relationship someone said Epic had with Sony. I also don't care if you want to say something negative about the Xbox many posters on this forum do. It's like a right of passage.
 
I'm aware of all of this. I was only asking about the the longer working relationship someone said Epic had with Sony. I also don't care if you want to say something negative about the Xbox many posters on this forum do. It's like a right of passage.

I'll say something negative or positive about Xbox and PlayStation when the systems deserve it. It's not a right of passage like your saying.

It's ok to criticize platforms here. I constantly criticize Sonys BC in case you didn't notice.

Doesn't that blow your mind?

Anyways it almost sounds like you want me to criticize Xbox. Is that your intention?
 
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MonarchJT

Banned
That's not why Sony worked with Epic though. It's not that 1st parties are going to abandon their engines in favor of epics. It's just that Sony is just making sure a 3rd party engine actually uses the PS5s I/O to some extent. Developers making games with the UE5 will definitely have an easier time taking advantage of the PS5s I/O.

This isn't just to fuel fanboy wars like your suggesting (aka propaganda).
all to have something to show that manages to impress when they showed the console (the techdemo did it) + clearly what u was saying. It's very likely that we will see the best use of the engine by the coalition as always have been till now and recently with hivebusters
 
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Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
That's not why Sony worked with Epic though. It's not that 1st parties are going to abandon their engines in favor of epics. It's just that Sony is just making sure a 3rd party engine actually uses the PS5s I/O to some extent. Developers making games with the UE5 will definitely have an easier time taking advantage of the PS5s I/O.

This isn't just to fuel fanboy wars like your suggesting (aka propaganda).
Agreed, it makes sense to ensure that the biggest middleware providers are on board and have all the help they need to take advantage of the new technology you have provided. I assume that Unity and the Frostbite devs also got a lot of love and early dev kits too.

Especially with I/O revolutions such as what XSX|S’s XVA and PS5’s SSD+custom I/O controller and co-processors stack bring for consoles (an end to end optimised HW stack, see macOS Big Sur and the M1 SoC by Apple to see what vertical integration brings... one example of many and even taken outside the console space), you need a bit of a rethink on how you store, stream, and load assets to properly take advantage of all that extra speed... this is the challenge to virtualise resources that has been attempted several times before.

Sony clearly took it to heart and looked at it end to end: from the HW (customised where needed to remove bottlenecks and overheads), to the system API’s/DevTools, to data processing utilities and libraries (like Oodle Texture and the investment in ensuring free licenses for all PS4 and PS5 devs), to middleware like UE5.

UE5 is much more than a rendering engine or physics engine or AI, it is a complex system of many layers that enable the entire development process for games, UE5 is also a middleware that deals with streaming and processing data, it has exporters from DCC (Digital Content Creation) tools the artists work with (you NEED to ensure that the artists have an easy workflow and they can generate optimised assets ready to be easily imported and used inside the games with the least amount of time invested in it as possible... you need to iterate quickly and efficiently). Look at all the companies Epic bought to ensure their tools were included and available by developers.

UE5 deals with the whole developers, designers, and artists experience from a 360° view. Not working closely on UE5 and making such an expensive bet on custom HW and SSD solutions would have been likely to fall flat on its face and a very costly mistake.
MS’s went for an approach where they hedged their bets on the SSD (fast enough and with a good new API to allow for efficient data transfer at a speed that was still a big jump over the previous generation, but invested the rest of the R&D budget on raw performance in CPU and GPU side with higher clock frequency for the CPU, faster peak bandwidth for RAM [with some limitations], and more CU’s in the GPU... stuff that is easier to see utilised by devs without as much investment in R&D which has been their modus operandi for a while... look Xbox One and PS4 Pro to see what could happens when you expect devs to invest extra time to unheard performance... in some cases it works out and in some others they do not bother).
 
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mckmas8808

Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
From what I remember it was a lot of money for small amount of Epic... "The investment gives Sony a 1.4 percent stake in Epic", apparently


"Sony has made a $250 million investment in Epic Games, the two companies announced on Thursday. The deal means Sony gets a 1.4 percent interest in the game development studio and publisher and gives Epic a valuation of $17.86 billion"

You guys are missing the point. It's not that Sony only owns 1.4% of Epic. It's that Sony sees the $250 million into Epic as a great way to continue their close relationship. Sony gave them that money after YEARS of Epic working directly with Mark Cerny to design the PS5 from the ground up. That's important for us to know and it makes their relationship that much more special. Epic buying RAD again takes this relationship to the next level. EPIC and SONY are intertwined at this point to make sure both succeed at the highest order. This much is becoming clear.

that's not how the things works plus ..it's very very very very very VERY unlikely that naughty dog and Guerrilla abandon their proprietary engines (naughty dog game engine and decima) respectively ...
ps. also ssm have their own engine

It's exactly how it works. And it's not able Sony 1st party devs being forced to use UE5. Not at all (though I'm 100% sure "more" smaller\mid sized Sony 1st parties will start using UE5). It's about the "TOOLS" man.
 
all to have something to show that manages to impress when they showed the console (the techdemo did it) + clearly what u was saying. It's very likely that we will see the best use of the engine by the coalition as always have been till now and recently with hivebusters

That could be true but then again it really depends if the PS5s I/O is as good for UE5 as Epic says it is. All I can think of is Sony Bend using UE5 to make a PS5 game. Days Gone wasn't exactly a bad looking game with UE4.

 
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x@3f*oo_e!

Member
[..]

MS’s went for an approach where they hedged their bets on the SSD (fast enough and with a good new API to allow for efficient data transfer at a speed that was still a big jump over the previous generation, but invested the rest of the R&D budget on raw performance in CPU and GPU side with higher clock frequency for the CPU, faster peak bandwidth for RAM [with some limitations], and more CU’s in the GPU... stuff that is easier to see utilised by devs without as much investment in R&D which has been their modus operandi for a while... look Xbox One and PS4 Pro to see what could happens when you expect devs to invest extra time to unheard performance... in some cases it works out and in some others they do not bother).
This "xbox didn't spend R&D money on non CPU+GPU" analysis is just plain wrong, as is the downplaying of the importance of SSD to xbox - they have been aware of the need for a high performance SSD from the beginning of the design process - did you never see the hot chips talk ? it was a key point in their talk.


The whole talk can be seen here
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
This "xbox didn't spend R&D money on non CPU+GPU" analysis is just plain wrong, as is the downplaying of the importance of SSD to xbox - they have been aware of the need for a high performance SSD from the beginning of the design process - did you never see the hot chips talk ? it was a key point in their talk.


The whole talk can be seen here


I did not say they did not spend money on I/O although this is what you read into what I wrote somehow. There is a difference between “not spending on” and “not prioritising something above other things”... my post was not downplaying the importance of the SSD to the XSX just like I do not think pointing out how the GPU has been designed for the XSX and not for PS5 would downplay the importance of execution resources for shaders and RT for Sony.

Re-read what I posted please (I watched that material before, but still they are nice to see again). I agree the SSD was very important for MS too and I am sure the believe they got out of it what they set out for... that is it. I did not say it was not if again you read what I wrote.

Neither system had an infinite budget and you are undervaluing how complex ramping up XVA and building a dev environment around that is. MS pushed the data I/O angle far and built SW (hello Direct Storage) and HW components (BCPack decoder, SFS and other GPU changes to make streaming easier for devs, etc... but since budget is not infinite and their designed had another big target, amongst others, which was raw performance (Phil gave them a clear target of more than doubling XOX’s GPU performance) and they needed to invest R&D budget in making that happen and be sustainable (higher CU count requires higher memory bandwidth and since they wanted to use this system for Xcloud too they needed a fast memory solution apt at working on those setups too hence custom GDDR6 memory with ECC support).

Sony has other goals and allocated their budget differently which results in some of the consoles differences we see (they had to take a different approach to CPU and GPU performance and that also has effects on the cooling solutions they went with, etc...).
 
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x@3f*oo_e!

Member
Re-read what I posted please (I watched that material before, but still they are nice to see again). I agree the SSD was very important for MS too and I am sure the believe they got out of it what they set out for... that is it. I did not say it was not if again you read what I wrote.

Neither system had an infinite budget and you are undervaluing how complex ramping up XVA and building a dev environment around that is. MS pushed the data I/O angle far and built SW (hello Direct Storage) and HW components (BCPack decoder, SFS and other GPU changes to make streaming easier for devs, etc... but since budget is not infinite and their designed had another big target, amongst others, which was raw performance (Phil gave them a clear target of more than doubling XOX’s GPU performance) and they needed to invest R&D budget in making that happen and be sustainable (higher CU count requires higher memory bandwidth and since they wanted to use this system for Xcloud too they needed a fast memory solution apt at working on those setups too hence custom GDDR6 memory with ECC support).

That's not what you wrote first time round.

MS’s went for an approach where they hedged their bets on the SSD [..] but invested the rest of the R&D budget on raw performance in CPU and GPU side [..] faster peak bandwidth for RAM [..] stuff that is easier to see utilised by devs without as much investment in R&D which has been their modus operandi for a while...

"invested the rest of the R&D budget on raw performance in CPU and GPU side". No mention of specific hardware for decompression or anything.

Quote :
stuff that is easier to see utilised by devs without as much investment in R&D which has been their modus operandi for a while...
"without as much investment in R&D"

really. ?
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
That's not what you wrote first time round.



"invested the rest of the R&D budget on raw performance in CPU and GPU side". No mention of specific hardware for decompression or anything.
I am not here to present MS’s PR in every post or to protect the sensibility of people who feel insecure at the mere thought that XSX may not be the fastest and bestest thing ever at everything they read into things ;).

You are also happily selective quoting as you remove the part where I wrote “Especially with I/O revolutions such as what XSX|S’s XVA [...]”, not my fault if you do not see that or you do not know the XVA pillars (one of them being the BCPack decoder): https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/07/14/a-closer-look-at-xbox-velocity-architecture/

"without as much investment in R&D"

really. ?

Of that part of the SoC just as much as Sony did not invest as much R&D in multi generation BC backwards and forward compatibility with a fully virtualised CPU and GPU and a hypervisor OS sustaining a GameOS and General/Windows OS sitting side by side. So what? It is what it is mate.
 

onesvenus

Member
It seems some of the RAD developers are going to work on Nanite

oJ0d0vq.png
 

mckmas8808

Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
Jon Olick was trying to push virtualised geometry back in Carmack’s Id as the company was working on MegaTexture tech.

Oh this is good then! It's megatextures a cousin of Nanite? Like the idea or philosophy of both related?
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Oh this is good then! It's megatextures a cousin of Nanite? Like the idea or philosophy of both related?
MegaTexture was one virtual texturing implementation (did not cover geometry) optimised to minimise draw calls while freeing artists from single texture size constraints (or so was the promise) with a nice unified approach.

To achieve it they had to make a lot of concessions (no fully dynamic lighting in RAGE for example) and bake time for the maps (cycle time between artist change and change previewable in games got a lot lot longer).
 

x@3f*oo_e!

Member
You are also happily selective quoting as you remove the part where I wrote “Especially with I/O revolutions such as what XSX|S’s XVA [...]”, not my fault if you do not see that or you do not know the XVA pillars (one of them being the BCPack decoder): https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/07/14/a-closer-look-at-xbox-velocity-architecture/

Sorry I've never heard the acronym XVA before , I must of skimmed over it.

...

Your originally post is full of emotionally charged language - Sony "took it to heart", while MS "hedged their bets" Just calling you out on this. The post if full of black and white assertations that are probably just your head canon. There were no disclaimers on those statements in the original post.

Its good that you do now.
 

onesvenus

Member
MegaTexture was one virtual texturing implementation (did not cover geometry) optimised to minimise draw calls while freeing artists from single texture size constraints (or so was the promise) with a nice unified approach.

To achieve it they had to make a lot of concessions (no fully dynamic lighting in RAGE for example) and bake time for the maps (cycle time between artist change and change previewable in games got a lot lot longer).
I hope Nanite doesn't come with such drawbacks. It seems clear that with their talk about no LOD authoring there will be a huge preprocessing step.
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Your originally post is full of emotionally charged language - Sony "took it to heart", while MS "hedged their bets" Just calling you out on this. The post if full of black and white assertations that are probably just your head canon. There were no disclaimers on those statements in the original post.
I do not think I needed disclaimers and I did not made blanket random emotional statements.

I am unsure how you can complain about emotionally charged language (which is all in your head, sorry to say that... there is nothing emotional about “hedging your bets” which is a rational behaviour as I expanded more in the followup post) and reply like you did here and before (which seems like projecting).
 

x@3f*oo_e!

Member
I do not think I needed disclaimers and I did not made blanket random emotional statements.

I am unsure how you can complain about emotionally charged language (which is all in your head, sorry to say that... there is nothing emotional about “hedging your bets” which is a rational behaviour as I expanded more in the followup post) and reply like you did here and before (which seems like projecting).
If you're going to make blanket statements about R&D spend (info I suspect you don't even have - which is kindof the point ) - yes - some disclaimers would be nice
 

kyliethicc

Member
The PS5 decompression unit currently is the only one specialized for Kraken, but any platform can support it via software.

Provided they bought a license to use it, of course.
Makes sense. So PS4/XOne/XSX might need to use its CPU if it wants to use Kraken (de)compression, while the PS5 has dedicated hardware just for that.
 
I'll say something negative or positive about Xbox and PlayStation when the systems deserve it. It's not a right of passage like your saying.

It's ok to criticize platforms here. I constantly criticize Sonys BC in case you didn't notice.

Doesn't that blow your mind?

Anyways it almost sounds like you want me to criticize Xbox. Is that your intention?
No man I want to know if Sony had a longer working relationship with Epic over Microsoft like I said. I pointed to the X360 collaboration. I mentioned Gears. Did Epic over similar input to Sony with PS1-3 like they did the PS5?
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
If you're going to make blanket statements about R&D spend (info I suspect you don't even have - which is kindof the point ) - yes - some disclaimers would be nice
I did not make absolute blanket statements and I am not sure I came to unreasonable conclusions while you picked and chosen hastily some elements of my post and went on the attack with the amusing simultaneous accusation (as if you were sure of it) that I made emotionally charged blanket statements.

I am not sure I have ever stated to have internal confidential financial data from either company, but you can still apply some deductive reasoning (you can shield behind the Trillion dollar corp and infinite budget available for XSX as much as you want and pretend they had no restrictions, but then you could not justify any trade offs they made to cost components despite the effect it would have: see split memory bandwidth). I also do not see why it is unreasonable to reason out that given comaparable dies (similar size, same manufacturing from the same supplier, etc...) that pushing for a much bigger GPU and having basic ah an identical CPU to PS5 that not making the chip even bigger meant resources were not dedicated pushing for I/O speed beyond what they obtained nor we have seen any sizeable additional HW resource dedicated to it beyond the BCPack decoder.
KDQ3vn5.jpg

Then again it is not a nasty remark against XSX: they need things such as cache scrubbers less because they have invested in a far higher bandwidth RAM solution, they have a 2x slower SSD data pipe to feed (less than that if you think about the leak of both decompressor or units) which means they are able to tolerate the extra CPU overhead left better, they have SFS support on the GPU that helps them automate texture data streaming in HW while PS5 has a different patented solution that seems to take advantage of these additional I/O co-processors).
I made statements not about the absolute spends nor about exact quotes but based on the available data, published data and presentations made on the tech by each camp (and additional statements by people like Sweeney and the engineers that presented the tech demo), the price range of the devices (S included), the published specifications, and what we are all seeing.

I am not sure I came to unreasonable conclusions either while you picked and chosen hastily some elements of my post and went on the attack with the amusing simultaneous accusation (as if you were sure of it) that I made emotionally charged blanket statements (in support of a single console and hurting the feelings of XSX fans and/or engineers watching).
 
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Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
No man I want to know if Sony had a longer working relationship with Epic over Microsoft like I said. I pointed to the X360 collaboration. I mentioned Gears. Did Epic over similar input to Sony with PS1-3 like they did the PS5?
No, I do not think they did. See PS2 and PS3 design, which were created in isolation by a very secluded team (see various Cerny interviews on the subject), where PS4 and PS5 got a lot more third party input (again refer to Cerny’s famous dev tours with PS4 and now PS5... the way I see it when developers are asked for input and they see it taken on board for real they are more willing to collaborate in the future hence why I think Sony was more involved with third parties like Epic earlier on just as MS had always been).
 
No, I do not think they did. See PS2 and PS3 design, which were created in isolation by a very secluded team (see various Cerny interviews on the subject), where PS4 and PS5 got a lot more third party input (again refer to Cerny’s famous dev tours with PS4 and now PS5... the way I see it when developers are asked for input and they see it taken on board for real they are more willing to collaborate in the future hence why I think Sony was more involved with third parties like Epic earlier on just as MS had always been).
I figured that but I wanted to be sure. Well MS certainly uses the Unreal engine on several of their products so it will be interesting to see if Sony does the same seeing how they have this newish working relationship with Sony and Sony has invested in Epic.
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
I figured that but I wanted to be sure. Well MS certainly uses the Unreal engine on several of their products so it will be interesting to see if Sony does the same seeing how they have this newish working relationship with Sony and Sony has invested in Epic.
Sony already does and has been making customisations to it, see Days Gone. I see AA and small AAA from some of their studios to do more with UE than the big big ones like Guerrilla, Insomniac, and Naughty Dog for example.

I think Sony’s investment in UE is bigger than just gaming, but even gaming wise it is to possibly work on cheaper deals to get say a free license or big discounts for devs and to collaborate more closely (good faith investment more than a big controlling share) on UE5 to make sure their bold bet on SSD tech pays off. It would have been quite dumb not to do that to be fair, glad they executed well on this so far.
 

mckmas8808

Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
Sony already does and has been making customisations to it, see Days Gone. I see AA and small AAA from some of their studios to do more with UE than the big big ones like Guerrilla, Insomniac, and Naughty Dog for example.

I think Sony’s investment in UE is bigger than just gaming, but even gaming wise it is to possibly work on cheaper deals to get say a free license or big discounts for devs and to collaborate more closely (good faith investment more than a big controlling share) on UE5 to make sure their bold bet on SSD tech pays off. It would have been quite dumb not to do that to be fair, glad they executed well on this so far.

100% THIS!
 

x@3f*oo_e!

Member
I did not make absolute blanket statements and I am not sure I came to unreasonable conclusions while you picked and chosen hastily some elements of my post and went on the attack with the amusing simultaneous accusation (as if you were sure of it) that I made emotionally charged blanket statements.

I am not sure I have ever stated to have internal confidential financial data from either company, but you can still apply some deductive reasoning (you can shield behind the Trillion dollar corp and infinite budget available for XSX as much as you want and pretend they had no restrictions, but then you could not justify any trade offs they made to cost components despite the effect it would have: see split memory bandwidth). I also do not see why it is unreasonable to reason out that given comaparable dies (similar size, same manufacturing from the same supplier, etc...) that pushing for a much bigger GPU and having basic ah an identical CPU to PS5 that not making the chip even bigger meant resources were not dedicated pushing for I/O speed beyond what they obtained nor we have seen any sizeable additional HW resource dedicated to it beyond the BCPack decoder.
KDQ3vn5.jpg

Then again it is not a nasty remark against XSX: they need things such as cache scrubbers less because they have invested in a far higher bandwidth RAM solution, they have a 2x slower SSD data pipe to feed (less than that if you think about the leak of both decompressor or units) which means they are able to tolerate the extra CPU overhead left better, they have SFS support on the GPU that helps them automate texture data streaming in HW while PS5 has a different patented solution that seems to take advantage of these additional I/O co-processors).
I made statements not about the absolute spends nor about exact quotes but based on the available data, published data and presentations made on the tech by each camp (and additional statements by people like Sweeney and the engineers that presented the tech demo), the price range of the devices (S included), the published specifications, and what we are all seeing.

I am not sure I came to unreasonable conclusions either while you picked and chosen hastily some elements of my post and went on the attack with the amusing simultaneous accusation (as if you were sure of it) that I made emotionally charged blanket statements (in support of a single console and hurting the feelings of XSX fans and/or engineers watching).
In terms of additional hardware -
  • Xbox hardware decompression includes zlib, BCpack . The throughput is correspondingly less than PS5 pretty much in the ratio of the RAW SSD throughputs. (eg quoted figure have been 4/5 Zen2 core equivalents for xbox vs 9 Zen2 core equivalents for PS5)
  • There is a dedicated audio block with the same function as Tempest engine - direct comparison is difficult but PS5 is supposedly "equivalent to 8 jaguar PS4 cores" (104 GFlops), whilst xbox is supposedly "greater to all Xbox One X CPU cores" (>150GFlops)
  • There's also hardware multimedia block - eg video codec encode/decode etc
  • There's also some crypto hardware.
Total size of this block is roughly the same as 4 core Zen CCX + its cache.

Obviously PS5 has the faster SSD and so has faster hardware decompression. I don't have info on absolute die size.

I'm not sure I agree with the idea that aiming for bigger GPU with xbox had a negative effect on SSD performance - SSD performance is good on Series X with all the necessary supporting hardware, and xbox die size is ~43mm2 bigger than PS5, so there isn't a direct trade off needed for that bigger GPU area. Clearly Sony had a special research project on SSD that got them hardware that is 1-2 years ahead of the general curve.
 
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Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Not sure why this is becoming a post launch XSX vs PS5 specs war, heck of a thread detail Batman...

In terms of additional hardware -
  • Xbox hardware decompression includes zlib, BCpack . The throughput is correspondingly less than PS5 pretty much in the ratio of the RAW SSD throughputs. (eg quoted figure have been 4/5 Zen2 core equivalents for xbox vs 9 Zen2 core equivalents for PS5)
  • There is a dedicated audio block with the same function as Tempest engine - direct comparison is difficult but PS5 is supposedly "equivalent to 8 jaguar PS4 cores" (104 GFlops), whilst xbox is supposedly "greater to all Xbox One X CPU cores" (>150GFlops)
  • There's also hardware multimedia block - eg video codec encode/decode etc
  • There's also some crypto hardware.
I know what you are quoting, I am familiar with the slide:
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You are quoting there every possible audio and I/O chip including again the HW Decode block (zlib + BCPack), security and cryptography, etc...

Audio wise they do not specify the clock frequency so first is that FP Ops per cycle or FP Ops per second where they compare it to XOX? Regardless, you are comparing FP performance estimated for fixed function blocks which is meant as “equivalent performance required to match the HW on a general purpose unit according to our estimations” (aside from one of these components, CFPU2, which is a programmable Audio DSP capable of 16 single precision FP Ops per cycle, 2x 4-way SIMD vector units where you would imagine them doing Fused Multiply Adds to reach that peak throughout value).

Even if you were believe that PS5 has no other fixed function DSP for audio on top of Tempest Engine you still come up short as we are talking about 64 FP Ops per cycle with the Tempest Engine running at GPU clocks (2.23 GHz) which would mean 142.72 GFLOPS.
This is an extra customised GPU unit with programmer level DMA control (you can manage your own loca memory and efficiently move data in and out like you did on PS3 SPU’s) and where all of that performance is programmable.

Counting fixed function non programmable HW nVIDIA was telling user that PS3’s GPU was rated at about 1.8 TFLOPS. Still, it is quite unlikely that Tempest Engine is the only audio unit forcing audio to be software only (considering the spatial audio duties for regular games and VR ones) Tempest Engine is meant to add to what PS4 already offered (they essentially wanted not to need a new sound processor in a breakout box like PSVR).

Obviously PS5 has the faster SSD and so has faster hardware decompression. I don't have info on absolute die size.
Neither do I, but we have the description in detail of the I/O paths of both systems and we know they have different demands. XSX has a 2.4 GB/s SSD with peak output from the HW decompressor units to be about 6 GB/s total (zlib + BCPack) while PS5 has a 5.5 GB/s SSD with peak output from the Kraken HW decompressor unit to reach up to 22 GB/s (admittedly in not super frequent cases but projected figures from the makers of Oodle Texture and Kraken themselves seem to suggest average numbers with Oodle Texture optimised assets could be much closer to the the tens of GB/s figure than people were expecting: http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2020/09/how-oodle-kraken-and-oodle-texture.html average compression ratio of over 3 to 1 so over 16 GB/s).
PS5’s SSD is also custom in terms of how it handles requests being able to map them across 6 priority levels (finer grained QoS) instead of most NVME SSD’s 2 levels and they indicated that to use an off the shelves SSD as extended internal storage you would need an SSD slightly faster than 5.5 GB/s to ensure their controller can map its 6 priority levels to the 2 provided by the disk controller to ensure the performance figures expected by the applications are respected and match the internal SSD performance with the added storage too.

MS has not mentioned anything additional coherency engines, cache scrubbers, dedicated CPU’s and additional SRAM cache in the SSD I/O controller. MS did not detail the SSD I/O controller beyond the decompression engines quickly glanced over the rest (no detailed layout or overview) while Sony spent quite a lot of time on it comparatively:
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I'm not sure I agree with the idea that aiming for bigger GPU with xbox had a negative effect on SSD performance
Good I am not saying that either (but you still have this very triggered defensive angle for some reason), I am not saying it had an effect on GPU performance the same as the focus on the SSD and storage I/O did not have a negative effect on the GPU CU’s.

Both systems had different targets and a certain budget to allocate to reaching that. It is possible and likely that the overall target influenced how they would achieve other targets or what they would focus on. MS has good engineers, they could have pushed for an even faster SSD with lower latency, but the solution they obtained was deemed good enough for their overall platform and other things got priority (final designs speak for themselves).

- SSD performance is good on Series X with all the necessary supporting hardware,
Nobody is saying SSD performance is not good on XSX, I said it is good just that PS5 invested even more and reached a much higher peak in this area. Now they need to prove it was worth it.

and xbox die size is ~43mm2 bigger than PS5, so there isn't a direct trade off needed for that bigger GPU area. Clearly Sony had a special research project on SSD that got them hardware that is 1-2 years ahead of the general curve.
Sure, but 43mm2 bigger with 26 more CU’s (PS5 is “estimated” at around 308 mm2 for a 40 CU’s design and XSX has 56 CU’s, each has disabled CU’s, and we do not know the size of the CU’s in PS5 and in XSX, but we can see how big the GPU portion of the die is). We also know they have a wide memory interface and I suspect those GDDR6 memory controllers to take more space to/make for a bigger die. I think the due size difference is covered well by the extra CU’s and the wider memory bus solution with space to spare (look how comparatively smaller the beastly Ryzen 2 CPU cores, cache aside, are).
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