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Digital Foundry: the complete Xbox One architects interview

no angel said:
I don't understand any of this hardware talk. Can someone tell me (theoretically) what sort of differences we will notice between xbone and ps4 multiplats? How noticeable do yu think they'll be? I know this is probably a difficult question to answer but I'm really torn on which preorder to keep ( impending baby means I can only justify one!), my head says ps4 but I have friends who live a few hundred miles away going for the xbox and I'll miss not being able to play with them. On the flip side I'll feel gypped that I'll be playing a gimped version of the game. Decisions decisions... :(
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Nobody really knows until the games come out, on paper PS4 has the raw power advantage but that's never a guarantee that it will show to any huge degree in multiplatform games.

And I wouldn't worry, I've spent the last seven years playing the 'gimped' versions of the big releases and apart from being utterly disgusted by the disastrous Bayonetta port (and some enemy-heavy parts in the Orange Box when the frame rate went further south than my gran's tits) I haven't had such a terrible time. Unless you put both version side-by-side you can adjust to a shittier frame rate, or fewer shrubs in most games.

I can never forgive my PS3 for that Ghostbusters rug though. It was worse than the time I played Ghostbusters on my mate's C=64 and loved the intro so much I asked for the Spectrum version for Christmas.

I mean listen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-0-Us_jumQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz5VvMItHmM

/gutted kid
 
Cidd said:
Lmao at the 14+4 CU claims although it's already been disputed a million times.

What I find funny is even if the 14+4 CU split was true that's still 18 CU vs 12 CU

14+4 CU vs 12CU

That some how make things balance?

WTF am I reading?
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I like playing along with it, the first question to ask is: So Sony games will have better physics and AI? to which they obviously reply no which allows you to infer that they must also use 4 CU's for GPGPU and you end up at a 14 vs. 8 CU for a PS4 75% graphical advantage, it's all stupid, but it generally keeps people quiet about the 14+4 split.
 
e-gamer said:
That's not my point.

I'm not interested about how many CUs have been around.

I'm interested to understand how sonyboys see Cerny debunked only the 14+4 among all the +9877863248732642768e246% leaks.
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but it became your point when you told me i was wrong...so i want clarification as to how exactly my assertion was wrong...i ask you once again...

HOW MANY CU's ARE AVAILABLE FOR GAMES ON THE PS4?

as for Cerny debunking it...

you've been provided with the link and the words directly from Mark's mouth...nothing is set in stone...they simply provided "extra" ALU as an incentive to use some of the CU's for GPGPU...even the slide you point to states that 14+4 is simply a balance that they (Sony) has seen work...

and once again, EVEN if it were a set in stone split 14CU for rendering, 4CU for GPGPU it still leaves you with 18CU's available for games...4 of them are just used for things like physics and AI...

which then gives you nightmare scenarios for MS...

- if MS chooses to use all 12 of their CU's for rendering...then all of their physics/AI has to be done on the CPU
- if MS chooses to match the PS4 with 4 CU's for GPGPU, then it leaves only 8CU's for graphics rendering
 
gtj1092 said:
In what way do they look technically superior?
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Chobel said:
In his eyes
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bishoptl said:
the light, the heat
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inpHilltr8r said:
in his eyes, it is complete
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cusacksayanything.jpg
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This whole neoGAF thing is really, really underrated some times....
 
Cthulhu_Steev said:
Nobody really knows until the games come out, on paper PS4 has the raw power advantage but that's never a guarantee that it will show to any huge degree in multiplatform games.

And I wouldn't worry, I've spent the last seven years playing the 'gimped' versions of the big releases and apart from being utterly disgusted by the disastrous Bayonetta port (and some enemy-heavy parts in the Orange Box when the frame rate went further south than my gran's tits) I haven't had such a terrible time. Unless you put both version side-by-side you can adjust to a shittier frame rate, or fewer shrubs in most games.

I can never forgive my PS3 for that Ghostbusters rug though. It was worse than the time I played Ghostbusters on my mate's C=64 and loved the intro so much I asked for the Spectrum version for Christmas.

I mean listen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-0-Us_jumQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz5VvMItHmM

/gutted kid
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Lol I can just imagine your face!

Thanks for the reply :)
 
e-gamer said:
That's not my point.

I'm not interested about how many CUs have been around.

I'm interested to understand how sonyboys see Cerny debunked only the 14+4 among all the +9877863248732642768e246% leaks.
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He didn't need to debunk the rest because most were already accurate and he never got called out on them. That one about the 14+4 was always loose to be fair. But I still don't get your point or your stance. Just seems you like to post misinformation and then beat around the bush when called out on it.
 
I just got brain cancer trying to read his blog, he thinks that the GPU is now based off R9 280x which has the "beefed up CUs" of the R9 290x and all the chips added together gives the Xbone 4.5-5TF of power.
 
2dshmuplover said:
My point is, I've never known a point in history where it's not been made quite clear which console is more technically capable, right from the very onset. Why is it different now?

The suggestion is that developers aren't pushing the machines, (which applies for both) but surely Sony want the graphics to impress? They must be aware that graphics sell machines to the average gamer?

There's developing titles and there's developing titles, are we talking AAA first party/exclusive titles here which are effectively selling the next-generation to us? because that is really what we are discussing.
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When has there been a point in recent history where 2 consoles release within a week of one another from the same console generation with nearly the same hardware architecture with many cross-generational shared multiplatform releases? In the past several generations, consoles of the same hardware generation have been released a year apart or at least many months apart.
 
mitchman said:
Seagate Laptop Thin SSHD 1TB
SATA 6Gb/s with NCQ for interface speed, 64MB, 5400RPM, 2.5"

Cheap too.
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Finalizer said:
Check his post again - he was looking for 64GB of cache. Something big enough for a BD's worth of a game to sit in. 64MB is nothin'.
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I looked around a bit more and WD announced a 500 GB one with 24 GB of NAND earlier this year, which they said should be available "sometime this year". Still no signs of it being on sale so hopefully they'll be here by the time PS4 launches.

http://reviews.cnet.com/hard-drives/wd-black-sshd-1tb/4505-3186_7-35567266.html
 
e-gamer said:
That's not my point.

I'm not interested about how many CUs have been around.

I'm interested to understand how sonyboys see Cerny debunked only the 14+4 among all the +9877863248732642768e246% leaks.
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At this point, you don't even have a worthwhile argument. You're just yelling at the wind over nothing in particular.

Look, I'll help you out a bit - VGLeaks themselves put up a handy article concerning the source of the 14+4 number.

We understand that Sony found that using 4 CUs in GPGPU tasks can be more efficient and with better overall results than using all of them for rendering tasks, but they don’t stop developers to use them only for rendering or GPGPU, as they wish depending on the game demands. It’s not mandatory at all. Sony is only providing more resources to the developers.
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If you want to debate the merits of using all 18 CUs for rendering vs. dedicating some (4) for GPGPU, that's another discussion. Don't try to peddle the 14+4 hard split myth.
 
Finalizer said:
If you want to debate the merits of using all 18 CUs for rendering vs. dedicating some (4) for GPGPU, that's another discussion.
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vgleaks said:
We understand that Sony found that using 4 CUs in GPGPU tasks can be more efficient and with better overall results than using all of them for rendering tasks,
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Surely this is horseshit from VGLeaks? How can Sony admit to it being more efficient to augment the rest of the system by sacrificing a few CU's for other tasks, it flies in the face of the gist of the MS rebuttle in this thread.

Am confused now..
 
e-gamer said:
That's not my point.

I'm not interested about how many CUs have been around.

I'm interested to understand how sonyboys see Cerny debunked only the 14+4 among all the +9877863248732642768e246% leaks.
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I honestly have no idea ehat your trying to say. And stop writing 98384748364748%. The ps4 is capable of producing 50% more flops, that is undisputed. These numbers are confirmed by boh companies.
 
e-gamer said:
That's not my point.

I'm not interested about how many CUs have been around.

I'm interested to understand how sonyboys see Cerny debunked only the 14+4 among all the +9877863248732642768e246% leaks.
Click to expand...
Read this post:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=84195543&postcount=96

The two posts that are quoted will explain this. What Cerny was saying does not contradict wording on the vgleaks slide, but that wording did not mean what you probably thought it meant. Here, I'll repost quotes:

What that slide is saying (and yeah, it's old info, so who knows by now) is that the rest of the GPU hardware is optimally matching the typical rendering throughput as if there were 14CUs. So if you use 18CUs just for rendering, the takaway is that that you'd run into some other bottleneck which would prevent the amount of the speed boost you'd expect from those CUs. So the idea is that the developers would be encouraged to use those 410GF for compute instead - for stuff like what the resogun is doing for instance, raytraced reflections or whatever else.

What that slide is not saying is that the mentioned 4CUs have anything about them that's different in terms of hardware or implementation. You can use them all for rendering, but the idea is that the few of them would be better utilized if they're used for compute.

I wish we'd hear some developers experience with real life hardware on this front.
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It doesn't mean that. Every CU is the same.

All that's being said is that for a typical game targeting a given res (let's say 1080p) - however they're defining typical - there's more CU time available than you might strictly need for just graphics. Or to put it another way, there's possibly CU time going to waste in 'a typical game'. That past a certain point you're probably going to be bound by some other part of the pipeline anyway, and throwing more CU at the problem past that point will see less than linear returns. And so you may as well throw CU time at other tasks in that case.

But as Cerny said, it's not a formalisation in hardware of any split or any target for devs. If a game's graphics pipeline was compute heavy, the graphics pipeline alone could scale well beyond that suggested amount of CU time. For devs, their mileage may vary - it's extremely software dependent. However Sony is trying to encourage devs to throw in compute tasks because it could be a disproportionate competitive strength for PS4.
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If you revisit the vgleaks slide with this explanation, you'll see that it makes sense that it was written the way it was.
 
Finalizer said:
At this point, you don't even have a worthwhile argument. You're just yelling at the wind over nothing in particular.

Look, I'll help you out a bit - VGLeaks themselves put up a handy article concerning the source of the 14+4 number.



If you want to debate the merits of using all 18 CUs for rendering vs. dedicating some (4) for GPGPU, that's another discussion. Don't try to peddle the 14+4 hard split myth.
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e-gamer latest posts before today are from July 2011, I don't think he cares too much about his account or rational discussion.
 
Actually haha, I expected that reaction to be fair. For the record I don't believe anything on his site, I wouldn't of used that picture had it not had the tweets from the IGN editor which was the point of the post. If I could of found them separately then I would of used them but that was just easier.
 
2dshmuplover said:
Actually haha, I expected that reaction to be fair. For the record I don't believe anything on his site, I wouldn't of used that picture had it not had the tweets from the IGN editor which was the point of the post. If I could of found them separately then I would of used them but that was just easier.
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His last dying words...

RIP.

e-gamer said:
No

Cerny never debunked anything. He said about the rumor, but no numbers were given about PS4 GPU by Sony, except the gflops.

And also that subjects could change without previous information.

All those +98893743897432% specs were given by VGLeaks.
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e-gamer
+98893743897432% Banned
(Today, 02:28 PM)
 
2dshmuplover said:
Actually haha, I expected that reaction to be fair. For the record I don't believe anything on his site, I wouldn't of used that picture had it not had the tweets from the IGN editor which was the point of the post. If I could of found them separately then I would of used them but that was just easier.
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The posts from the IGN guy are actually about Sony using Devkits, as in final silicon, as in the actual APU and entire PS4, just in a different shaped box behind the scenes with Journalists. Sony literally showed up at IGN with a PS4 to put the record straight. Scott Lowe has no knowledge regarding whether or not the PS4's in those pictures were the real deal.


annnnd he's gone.
 
2dshmuplover said:
Actually haha, I expected that reaction to be fair. For the record I don't believe anything on his site, I wouldn't of used that picture had it not had the tweets from the IGN editor which was the point of the post. If I could of found them separately then I would of used them but that was just easier.
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Hmm banned?

But I would love for you to explain how you knew IGN's tweet was on misterxmedia's site to begin with?

When I go looking for random tweets by an IGN editor, I think I might google it or something first, maybe check his twitter feed

I didn't even know that was one of misterxmedia's blog pieces at first

Because I don't read his blog as often as you clearly...
 
Snubbers said:
Surely this is horseshit from VGLeaks? How can Sony admit to it being more efficient to augment the rest of the system by sacrificing a few CU's for other tasks, it flies in the face of the gist of the MS rebuttle in this thread.

Am confused now..
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I wont get into the whole debate over the hardware balance thing - you can go delve into the Gaf thread specifically dedicated to that article to get your fill of that - but my takeaway from various comments has basically been this: devs can freely use all 18 CUs for rendering and get the expected ~linear increase in graphical horsepower; however using GPGPU stuff can get just a bit more out of the GPU in its whole because of the whole fine-grained GPGPU approach.

From Eurogamer,

Now when I say that many people say, "but we want the best possible graphics". It turns out that they're not incompatible. If you look at how the GPU and its various sub-components are utilised throughout the frame, there are many portions throughout the frame - for example during the rendering of opaque shadowmaps - that the bulk of the GPU is unused. And so if you're doing compute for collision detection, physics or ray-casting for audio during those times you're not really affecting the graphics. You're utilising portions of the GPU that at that instant are otherwise under-utilised. And if you look through the frame you can see that depending on what phase it is, what portion is really available to use for compute.
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Another explanation from our very own W!CKED:

W!CKED said:
PS4 is capable of a feature that Cerny calls "asynchronous fine-grain compute". On older GPUs you have a command processor that has a graphics pipeline for rendering and a compute pipeline for GPGPU. You can only do either rendering or GPGPU efficiently, both at the same time is pretty ineffecient.

AMD's GCN GPUs have asynchronous compute engines (ACEs). Basically, these ACEs are like additional compute pipelines for GPGPU. You can use them instead of the compute pipeline in the command processor. As a result, the latter will be able to focus on maximum rendering performance. A HD7970 has 2 of these ACEs, it can take care of 2 compute jobs at the same time. PS4 has 8 ACEs and can take care of 8 compute jobs at the same time.

To minimize the overhead for graphics rendering, you want to split your compute load into as many small jobs as possible (fine-grain) and "feed" it to your shader cores when they're not fully utilized during rendering jobs (which happens all the time on modern GPUs). Therefore each ACE has compute queues. A HD7970 only has 2 queues (one queue for each ACE), a PS4 has 64 compute queues (8 queues for each ACE). That means programmers can queue up to 64 different compute jobs at the same time in PS4. The 8 ACEs will choose the right jobs at the right time based on pre-defined dependences and according to Cerny you will not notice a penalty for graphics rendering since the ACEs wait until some part of the GPU is underutilized.

Mark Cerny also said, that he expects studios to use this feature to the full extent in two or three years.
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EDIT: And 2dshmuplover & e-gamer joint the bone-yard.
 
Add this for the ps4 shaders : "There are a broad variety of techniques we've come up with to reduce the vertex bottlenecks, in some cases they are enhancements to the hardware," said Cerny. "The most interesting of those is that you can use compute as a frontend for your graphics."

This technique, he said, is "a mix of hardware, firmware inside of the GPU, and compiler technology. What happens is you take your vertex shader, and you compile it twice, once as a compute shader, once as a vertex shader. The compute shader does a triangle sieve -- it just does the position computations from the original vertex shader and sees if the triangle is backfaced, or the like. And it's generating, on the fly, a reduced set of triangles for the vertex shader to use. This compute shader and the vertex shader are very, very tightly linked inside of the hardware."
 
2dshmuplover said:
Actually haha, I expected that reaction to be fair. For the record I don't believe anything on his site, I wouldn't of used that picture had it not had the tweets from the IGN editor which was the point of the post. If I could of found them separately then I would of used them but that was just easier.
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I know why he was banned but in my heart I wish it was for wouldn't of.
 
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