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Is the Console GPU FLOPs era going the way of the Bit era? I for one welcome our new GB/s marketing overlord

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onQ123

Member
Bits was so important in marketing until we reached 32-bits , for example Sony didn't make a big deal about PS1 being 32-bit even though that was the marking thing that was big in the 80's & 90's but it was probably the CDs that gave PS1 the marketing edge. Atari & Nintendo used 64 in their names but it was too late no one cared about bits anymore Dreamcast made sure to mention that it was 128-bit but it was dead Jim. PS2 was 128-bit but it was the DVD format that sold the PS2. The bit era of marketing faded away & the mention of FLOPs mostly went unnoticed until PS4 had 1.8 TFLOPs of GPU power then came the mid-gen consoles with 4 & 6 TFLOPs using it as a buzz word to sell consoles but neither one of them set the world on fire & now we are here with the new consoles one is boasting that it has 12TFLOPs & the other is boasting that it's SSD can move 5.5GB/s.


Is Xbox Series X wearing that 64 on it's chest? Will PS5 SSD be another PS3 Blu-ray drive? Find out next time on Dragon Ball Z
 
JareBear: Remastered

JareBear: Remastered

Banned
I think TF will remain the standard measure for general pixel pushing/settings maxing power. That’s the main marketing approach, for graphics/power enthusiasts especially.

SSDs getting faster and faster is great but even the XsX SSD is way faster than the SATA SSDs in my PC and those are fast as fuck compared to standard mechanical drives.

Both consoles have SSDs ultra fast enough to where neither should be a bottleneck of any sort

Edit:

also, just being real here, another SSD thread tho?
 
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prinz_valium

Member
onQ123 said:
You do know that there is memory bandwidth on the chips even faster than the RAM speed right? it's internal bandwidth & small so no one mentions it. now tell me why someone would be comparing the speed of RAM to the SSD?
Click to expand...

It's not
First of Cash performance metrics are typically not measured in GB/s and secondly they're slower

This is RDNA

J1LORk3.png
 
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thicc_girls_are_teh_best

thicc_girls_are_teh_best

Member
onQ123 said:
The RAM speed inproved by 2X - 3X & you think it's going to have a greater impact than the SSD? lol
Click to expand...

You realize that RAM is a volatile memory with byte-level read, byte and bit-level modify and byte-level writes, while the SSDs are using NAND which is a non-volatile memory with page-level read, and block-level writes, right?

Not to mention RAM has magnitudes lower latency, true random access, MUCH higher endurance levels for write operations etc. They are an apples-to-oranges comparison not even worth being compared to directly.
 
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onQ123

Member
thicc_girls_are_teh_best said:
You realize that RAM is a volatile memory with byte-level read, byte and bit-level modify and byte-level writes, while the SSDs are using NAND which is a non-volatile memory with page-level read, and block-level writes, right?

Not to mention RAM has magnitudes lower latency, true random access, MUCH higher endurance levels for write operations etc. They are an apples-to-oranges comparison not even worth being compared to directly.
Click to expand...

Yes I know all of that but the biggest improvements this generation is going to come from removing the bottleneck of the HDD. SSD is going to have a bigger impact than going from 176GB/s RAM to 448GB/s RAM.
 
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Grinchy

Grinchy

Banned
Oh, man, the days of arguing about bits on playgrounds at recess :messenger_tears_of_joy:

For some reason I just doubt that 10 year olds are arguing about TFLOPS like we did back in the day, but who knows. I don't spend enough time around kids to know. Someone has usually called the cops before the conversation gets that far.
 
Neo Blaster

Neo Blaster

Member
Genx3 said:
I was waiting for someone to say that!! I already knew that one was coming.

Problem is the fuel delivery system would be equivalent to your Ram in a console while the SSD or HDD is your Gas tank.
Click to expand...
Definitely not, the way you compare them it's like HDD/SSD are important just for their capacity, not speed. You can have 1 TB/s memory bandwidth, but it doesn't matter at all if data has not arrived there yet.
 
Genx3

Genx3

Member
Neo Blaster said:
Definitely not, the way you compare them it's like HDD/SSD are important just for their capacity, not speed. You can have 1 TB/s memory bandwidth, but it doesn't matter at all if data has not arrived there yet.
Click to expand...

But Ram is what delivers that fuel to the engine not the SSD. So fuel delivery to the engine would be Ram though the transfer rate of your SSD could somewhat be incorporated into that but to a far lesser extent than Ram.
Ram would be what affects game performance in a console not SSD speeds.
 
O

onQ123

Member
Genx3 said:
I know OP is being facetious but only a nut job would relate SSD speeds to the Performance of a console.

Its like using the size of your gas tank to prove your car is more performant than another one. :messenger_tears_of_joy:
Click to expand...

You probably thought you was making a good point but lol wrong!
 
Neo Blaster

Neo Blaster

Member
Genx3 said:
But Ram is what delivers that fuel to the engine not the SSD. So fuel delivery to the engine would be Ram though the transfer rate of your SSD could somewhat be incorporated into that but to a far lesser extent than Ram.
Ram would be what affects game performance in a console not SSD speeds.
Click to expand...
You're mistakingly assuming RAM is just the delivery system, but just like HDD/SSD, RAM is just a fast data storage. System performance is dependent on overall data transfer speed, not just RAM's: data must be grabbed from SSD and put inside RAM, then grabbed from there to feed CPU/GPU(there are other caches, but let's ignore them to simplify). General speed is as fast as your slowest component.
 
Genx3

Genx3

Member
Neo Blaster said:
You're mistakingly assuming RAM is just the delivery system, but just like HDD/SSD, RAM is just a fast data storage. System performance is dependent on overall data transfer speed, not just RAM's: data must be grabbed from SSD and put inside RAM, then grabbed from there to feed CPU/GPU(there are other caches, but let's ignore them to simplify). General speed is as fast as your slowest component.
Click to expand...

I'm not mistakingly doing anything.
I kept it simple for the purpose of the analogy.
I already know all those systems work together and Caches (your fuel injectors) are the memory closest to the engine in this case.
What you over looked is that the SSD is the least important and Slowest part of that whole process.
 
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Neo Blaster

Neo Blaster

Member
Genx3 said:
I'm not mistakingly doing anything.
I kept it simple for the purpose of the analogy.
I already know all those systems work together and Caches are the memory closest to the engine in this case.
What you over looked is that the SSD is the least important and Slowest part of that whole process.
Click to expand...
Slowest part, yes, but least important? Does not seem like that to developers, as it was the number one demand for them when Cerny was doing interviews. With slow storage, you have to waste time having to adapt game design and waste precious space on RAM to compensate for that.
 
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sendit

sendit

Member
Neo Blaster said:
Slowest part, yes, but least important? Does not seem like that to developers, as it was the number one demand for them when Cerny was doing interviews. With slow storage, you have to waste time having to adapt game design and waste precious space on RAM to compensate for that.
Click to expand...

Agreed. I'm not sure why everyone has a hard time understanding what Cerny presented. Instead of having the next ~30 seconds of data loaded in to the ram, developers can reduce this down to the next ~1 second thanks to the GPU having direct access to the SSD. We will find out in terms of what this means to game design going forward. Specifically with exclusives from both parties.

In short, more teraflops does not solve this problem.
 
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Genx3

Genx3

Member
Neo Blaster said:
Slowest part, yes, but least important? Does not seem like that to developers, as it was the number one demand for them when Cerny was doing interviews. With slow storage, you have to waste time having to adapt game design and waste precious space on RAM to compensate for that.
Click to expand...

Don't get me wrong, having a fast SSD is going to be great and is a very nice upgrade from this gen.
 
Danny Dudekisser

Danny Dudekisser

I paid good money for this Dynex!
Was flops ever the measure that bits was? Bits was like... some definitive shit back in the day. It was easily understood. Comparing teraflops is a modern-day cripple fight.
 
Genx3

Genx3

Member
onQ123 said:
The problem is that you're wrong the SSD will affect the graphics because it will be able to feed the RAM fast enough that devs can manage the memory better & have higher quality assets in the RAM.
Click to expand...

I can't argue this point because both Sony and MS have stated they'll be able to swap assets a lot faster however that is not going to change how we measure performance.
 
O

onQ123

Member
Genx3 said:
I can't argue this point because both Sony and MS have stated they'll be able to swap assets a lot faster however that is not going to change how we measure performance.
Click to expand...
Who said that it would change how we measure performance though?
 
Can't decide

Can't decide

Member
onQ123 said:
The problem is that you're wrong the SSD will affect the graphics because it will be able to feed the RAM fast enough that devs can manage the memory better & have higher quality assets in the RAM.
Click to expand...

Look, I'm no expert but this sounds like a load of waffle. Your storage isn't going to do anything for graphics, since when did HDDs/SSDs have processing power? Stuff is going to load a bit quicker, that's it, keep your expectations down.
I'll bet the difference in loading times between the two consoles will be small, too. Haven't noticed much after moving my games from SSD to NVME.
 
Radical_3d

Radical_3d

Member
I wish they were making the marketing of the next gen about GB/s. Both marketing campaigns are avoiding the issue that the jump in RAM speed is half the jump we had in the previous generation (for PS4, the XOne was a outliner).
 
O

Onocromin

Banned
People cared about -bit performance during the n64 Era, certainly. I'm not sure where this disillusion stems from. The only reason it fell to the wayside is because the manufacturers have distanced their-self from it. If people knew we were fast approaching the 5,0256 bit era ect - it would be a big deal.
 
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JareBear: Remastered

JareBear: Remastered

Banned
cyber69 said:
Agreed. I'm not sure why everyone has a hard time understanding what Cerny presented. Instead of having the next ~30 seconds of data loaded in to the ram, developers can reduce this down to the next ~1 second thanks to the GPU having direct access to the SSD. We will find out in terms of what this means to game design going forward. Specifically with exclusives from both parties.

In short, more teraflops does not solve this problem.
Click to expand...

Teraflops might not solve the problem, but an ultra fast SSD (which, believe it or not, the XsX has) does.

I don’t understand why it’s cool to pretend like the XsX’s storage bandwidth isn’t still blazing fast just because it’s slower than the PS5. The XsX’S SSD is not some bottleneck that will doom the console, far from it.
 
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polybius80

Member
the "XX bits" was a marketing tool, that kind of marketing works because people dont understand how it works and what it means, and by the time they understand part of it some things change, part of the marketing is trying to equate that quantity of bits/flops whatever to some graphic quality standard which dont really works(see Atari jaguar 64 bit and pc-engine 8 bit cpu ) it has a technical merit as more bit allow more memory adress but it wont give you the full picture of a system and what it can do
 
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