Sony’s ICE team programmers are basically a bunch of talented developers that work on the core graphics technologies for the PS4. One such developer is Cort Stratton who is a senior programmer on Sony’s ICE Team.
On his Twitter feed he revealed a few interesting tid-bits about PlayStation 4 games development and how his recent contributions will make things run faster.
“Finally wrote that ASM I was looking forward to. Early results: PS4 surface tiling/detiling on the CPU is ~10-100x faster now. SIMDlicious!.” he Tweeted.
Stratton wrote a code that will push tile performance on the PlayStation 4′s CPU by 10-100 times faster. Note that improvement in performance will result into tiles being switched faster which also means less processing time. But the developer also needs to use the appropriate tile size since larger tiles will obviously use more processing time. It’s a balance, you see.
He also revealed that the previous code was bad and was a just copy reference from the hardware documents. “It was pretty bad. Pretty much a copy of the reference code from HW docs, evaluated in full per fragment with a memcpy at the end,” he tweeted.
More info at source: http://gamingbolt.com/ps4-ice-team-programmer-surface-tilingdetiling-on-the-cpu-is-10-100x-faster-now
I sort of understand, but I'm not technical enough. Can someone highlight some in-game examples where this would benefit performance?
The author's article got it wrong.
Surface tiling most probably refers here to the subdivision of geometric objects into smaller geometric objects.
"Tiling" is generally a term that easily leads to confusion since it refers to very different things in different contexts. Another common confusion is the equivocation of tiled-based rendering with tiled resources.