Sony is testing the scalable platform idea with ps4 and ps4 pro . Depending on switch's popularity , ps5 generation may include a portable 400 dollar tablet hybrid with lower resolution target and a slightly higher specced home unit for 4k , 8k and tethered Vr purpose. Now sony might need to change the base architecture from x86 to arm for the scalability purpose. And as a platform not bound by a single hardware , sony can sell to both the portable and home markets with only supporting a single platform.
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If Sony were to release a successor to the Vita what kind of specs would it have?
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Wipeout 2048 runs at 1/4 the resolution and half the framerate compared to the Ps3 game. Plus it struggles to hold the 30fps on many of the Ps3 tracks. So, the 1/10 of the Ps3 power seems like a fair assessment.
Your opinion shows the importance of feature set of a GPU and RAM for assets. Even then, games like Conquer, Doom 3 and Riddick would't look out of place as (higher-end) Vita games, specially if they upgrade the textures to use the extra RAM.
Vita sold around 10 million from wikipedia but I don't have the exact numbers. If they did poorly again and sold similar with the successor assuming they make $20 profit per console after BOM, shipping and packaging is covered and no-one of the 10 million users ever buys a game on it (basically impossible) they'd make $200 million net after 6 years going by Vita numbers and sales. So it just comes down to getting the fixed (i.e. Sunk) costs back and having it total under $200 million or thereabouts. It's about 250 million if the vita is around 13 million. FinFET makes this impossible to do cheaply (Have a look at Sigma Designs and how they won't do FinFET because they'll never make their money back and are waiting for FD-SOI). unless AMD has a SOC ready (thus reducing their fixed costs as they won't have to develop the cores themselves and it just goes under the BOM i.e. increases variable costs).
I don't know how x86 to ARM will work on the Vita 2.0 but if Switch is getting ports easily enough then it should be easily possible for PS4 games to end up a new Vita albeit at 720p and some reduced quality settings.
Is there any estimates on the PS Vita Slim's BOM?
Pasedo
Member
So I was referring to its Direct console competitors such as Xbone and Wiiu. It's 50% more powerful than Xbone and several times more powerful than Wiiu. This is probably the main reason more people flocked to it because it was the superior console for 3rd party console gaming. Well that was certainly my reason.
Pasedo
Member
For me they oversold the Vita and the tech was not ready at that time for a real console gaming on the go experience. It's most ambitious game Killzone Mercenaries although a game I enjoyed, was still not a true home console experience on the Go. Today with the Tegra X1 this is possible and can truly be marketed as so. If they produced something that without a doubt is powerful enough to get all PS4 games and 3rd party games ported to it, I'm sure it will be a much different situation for them. It seems the market has changed and are more demanding of performance and power.
Oh-boy! Can't wait to pay $50 a month so I can play my games on the go for half a dozen hours.
I'd assume you'd be using some sort of family sharing plan with the device.
Or just tether with the phone.
The main issue with streaming is if things don't improve by 2020 in terms of data caps which is a real concern. Speeds won't matter too much since it's likely they'll still be using 6 Mbits or less (720p with 30 or 60 fps depending on game) just with AV1 instead. 4G is about 40ms latency in real life (10ms in theory); 5G latency is 1ms theoretically so maybe 10 ms in real life?
Worst comes to worst the rest of the world moves on while the USA stays behind since it seems that you guys in the USA have the short-end of the stick in mobile networks. And with friends like AT&T who needs enemies xD
Hence why I mentioned the possibility of hardware assisted emulation for the lower-end consoles (PS2/PS2) to reduce reliance on streaming. It'd mainly be the PS3/PS4/PS5 that would be streaming assuming no ports. Or porting the ports from the PS3 to PSVita to Vita 2.0. Or PS4 to Vita 2.0.
Tegra X1 is a dead end esp. if they're releasing it in 2020. No-one wants to deal with Nvidia's bullshit - even Tesla is only using the hardware and writing their own software (atm using CUDA but I'm certain they'll be able to switch if needed) just to ensure Nvidia doesn't pull any crap like MobilEye did. For Tegra you generally have to buy the whole SOC as Nvidia dictates or nothing.
Nintendo must have gotten a really good deal on the chips + software support. Maybe Nvidia helped redo all their dev tools or something like that.
For a gaming console this is a bad idea since it locks you into doing things Nvidia's way if using Tegra. Using PowerVR they can work alongside Imagination Tech. and adjust the design as optimally as possible for their use case e.g. the amount of clusters for the GPU. Getting HBM or HMC using HSA for example I can't see Nvidia making a custom SOC just for Sony just to use HBM/HMC... Or reducing CUDA cores or something like that.
CEJames
Member
We want a native Uncharted 4 & Horizon & The Order: 1886 capable handheld and we want it NOW!
Neither of those fix the issue with the sheer amount of bandwidth video streaming consumes vs realistic mobile data cap per dollar in the foreseeable future.
At Youtube's bit rate of 4.5Mbps for 1080p video (which honestly is probably too low for a game streaming service), 6 hours of streaming would consume over 12GB of data. That's like 4 times my current monthly mobile data cap and realistically I don't expect things to change dramatically within the next few years (given how little bandwidth mobile services have to work with, it's in the best interest of the providers to keep data caps low and prices high).
This is the funniest shit I've ever read. Do you have anything to back up what you said or is it mere
You're saying something that was involved between Tesla and Mobileye is the reason Tesla doesn't trust Nvidia. How is it Nvidia's fault and, if you're saying Tesla is using their own software, then how were Tesla getting screwed over by Nvidia in the first place?
I repeat, you are implying that Tesla doesn't want to deal with Nvidia's "bullshit" over something that they weren't​ involved with.
Pasedo
Member
A side thought. If Sony was to use the X1 it would be a perfect chip to port the PS3 library to with some enhancements. I was reading an article on Doom 3 on the Shield TV and porting it across sounded easy because the X1 supported OpenGL and there was little adjustment necessary. If this is the case it would be much cheaper for publishers to get content on the machine. Perhaps even market it as the Playstation 3 Portable. PS3 has an amazing library and if I could play these games on the go I'd be extremely happy. Remasters seem more and more popular these days which suggests people still like playing these older games. If it's remastered as a Portable edition how good would that be. Hardware wise this will also be much cheaper for Sony to produce and to sell to consumers.
Nikodemos
Member
The X1 is a hot-running power-hungry chip. Its only real advantage is graphical power. That's what Nintendo wanted, and accepted all the compromises (actively-cooled handheld, poor battery life).
If Sony want to still have a foothold in the dedicated handheld segment, they must first accept their place as a distant second to Nintendo, and plan accordingly. That means no flagship SoCs, no proprietary tech, and low cost of entry. Furthermore, they need to show something they didn't with the Vita: the willingness to support it.
I've just read about the new Snapdragon 660. 14nm, 4x A73, 4x A53, dual-channel LPDDR4, Adreno 512. Seems like a decent fit, although they might need to fuse off the A53s (like Nintendo did with the X1), since the 600 series is clustered instead of kernel segregated (why the heck do they still use clustering in big.LITTLE configs?).
If Sony want to still have a foothold in the dedicated handheld segment, they must first accept their place as a distant second to Nintendo, and plan accordingly. That means no flagship SoCs, no proprietary tech, and low cost of entry. Furthermore, they need to show something they didn't with the Vita: the willingness to support it.
I've just read about the new Snapdragon 660. 14nm, 4x A73, 4x A53, dual-channel LPDDR4, Adreno 512. Seems like a decent fit, although they might need to fuse off the A53s (like Nintendo did with the X1), since the 600 series is clustered instead of kernel segregated (why the heck do they still use clustering in big.LITTLE configs?).
Thats my bad. I shouldn't have linked or implying Nvidia to MobilEye to Tesla.
Tesla doesn't want to rely on ANYONE period to prevent vendor lock in - that's been made clear by them hiring Jim Keller for a likely custom SoC.
Tesla and MobilEye had a falling out that is reported all over the place. Funny enough Intel bought MobilEye a few days ago.
As should be clear from Switch just dropping in a chip without tweaking is a bad idea for battery life. But this could also be because of only using 20nm which I can't entirely blame Nvidia for doing - it's not like Nintendo was going to pony up the $$$ for a FinFET port or buying X2 chips.
^All of this. Although I think they need to ensure the CPU to be up to scratch so they don't have cutback ports. GPU not so much with 720p.
The X1 definitely runs hot like the majority of mobile SoCs however, it's a little silly to say that they were making compromises on the highlighted.
Poor battery life? They fit a 4310 mAH battery into the body of the Switch, it takes up this much space and is even padded to absorb some heat:
Compromising on making the handheld actively cooled? I don't think you want thermal throttling. I guarantee you if they didn't stick a fan in there, people would be complaining of slowdown in Zelda BotW due to the device running hot which would throttle performance to make sure the Switch doesn't overheat and melt the chips.
Those aren't compromises. If you wanted to make a valid point, it is that they stuck with a 20nm SoC rather than shrinking it down to a 16nmFF which would have allowed better performance gains or reduced power consumption.
So either the handheld mode could have been clocked higher than 196.6 GFLOPS or, be kept the same clock speeds which would have caused the battery life to be improved due to the device not needing to use up ~7W+ per hour.
I hope so, because I'm in the biggest city in the biggest country in Latin America and the internet is still nowhere near that.
huzaifa_ahmed
Neo Member
Hello. Just figured the most powerful mobile GPU's on the market (Tegra Parker, PowerVR 7900GT) run around 7-800 gigaflops, correct? PS4 being about 2.25x that...turn down the res to 720p (from usually 1080) & so we have a mobile phone-esq GPU running similarly to PS4 at 720p (or possibly lower). The CPU...I'm not sure - how does the Galaxy S8's CPU compare? PS4 & Xbone were quite weak there, right? Similar to laptops, no?
RAM can be 8 GB of LPDDR4X. Screen at 720P is perfectly reasonable, however I think some games (particularly ports/emulation of older games) would benefit from higher-res rendering? Like maybe 900P. But this is all simple fantasy. No need to compete with the Jones's for its own sake.
If these specs are still not good enough...worth keeping in mind that MGS5 ran on low settings at sub-720P on 200 GFLOPS machines. High at similar res should be possible 800 GFLOPS.
To recap, however:
Most powerful GPU: PowerVR GT 7900
CPU: similar to Galaxy S8 (or whatever releases next year)
8GB LPDDR4X
720P or slightly higher native res & target res.
3-5 hours battery life? Galaxy S8 does it.
This is all similar to Xbone-PS4 at much lower res.
RAM can be 8 GB of LPDDR4X. Screen at 720P is perfectly reasonable, however I think some games (particularly ports/emulation of older games) would benefit from higher-res rendering? Like maybe 900P. But this is all simple fantasy. No need to compete with the Jones's for its own sake.
If these specs are still not good enough...worth keeping in mind that MGS5 ran on low settings at sub-720P on 200 GFLOPS machines. High at similar res should be possible 800 GFLOPS.
To recap, however:
Most powerful GPU: PowerVR GT 7900
CPU: similar to Galaxy S8 (or whatever releases next year)
8GB LPDDR4X
720P or slightly higher native res & target res.
3-5 hours battery life? Galaxy S8 does it.
This is all similar to Xbone-PS4 at much lower res.
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