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Sony Principal Graphics Engineer confirms PS5 has custom architecture that is based on RDNA2. (Update: Read OP)

noise36

Member
Nothing new here is there, series X is more powerful than PS5 which is why Sony marketing brought the SSD special sauce meme into play. Can't win in one frame of reference just talk about something else, marketing 101.

Ultimately though MS need to bring us games which do the talking about the advantages of their system, same for Sony.
 
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UBCiGEq.jpg



I can't seem to find that tweet from him. Can anyone provide me with a direct link like this one?

 

Pallas

Member
So, I can’t see any proof that Leonardi actually wrote the contents of that message. The dude on Twitter asks him if it’s true, and the only thing he says is true is that he did indeed play Tsushima until 5am.

So, unless anyone can say different, if they’ve searched better, there is a chance the comment in the message is fake?

🤷‍♂️

Edit: can’t find the tweet about ML either...

Not willing to believe any of this, unless I see the actual, original tweets on Twitter. Sorry, but this does seem like console war bullshit at the moment, with faked tweets and messages.
I can't seem to find that tweet from him. Can anyone provide me with a direct link like this one?


Didn’t Gavin Stevens Gavin Stevens say it was a private/direct message between the two? In which case it wouldn’t be viewable publicly.
 

Dodkrake

Banned
Why would Sony fire someone for telling the truth over information that has already been out there since the github leaks? Like he said, this doesn't affect NDA as it has all been public knowledge up to this point.

You are obviously not aware how NDAs work. And how do you know it to be the truth when both Cerny and Lisa said RDNA2? Go back to discord, your arguments are weak.
 

kyoji

Member
Didn’t Gavin Stevens Gavin Stevens say it was a private/direct message between the two? In which case it wouldn’t be viewable publicly.
one of the images i debunked isnt even a private message though its a response as if hes talking to someone in a reply thread. also keep in mind rosario or whatever even says he cant talk about ps5 other than whats already been disclosed. SO i guess he changed his mind quickly?
 

Pallas

Member
Which one?

The lack of ML or the RDNA2 1.5 one?

Here's the lack of ML one which was a response to someone else.

UBCiGEq.jpg


That's the one I can't seem to find in his Twitter.
The mention of RDNA 1 and 2/1.5, if you were asking about the other screen shot then my bad. I didn’t back read much, thread went too fast. lol I just remember Gavin having a private conversation with the Sony engineer.
 
But PS5 uses RDNA CU's. Regardless of what features may or may not be missing, it uses the same RDNA CUs. So those same IPC gains get attributed to the PS5 too.

Supposedly, to some degree, they are not the same CU (if this true).

RDNA2 performance/TFLOP > RDNA1 > GCN
 
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DaGwaphics

Member
8 pages on a Twitter DM that can't be verified? Must be a new record. :messenger_tears_of_joy:

Hopefully in a week or so we can get back to my favorite toy has better games than your toy. At least that's a topic I'm capable of trolling participating in.

How is ML integrated in AMD chips anyway, I know nVidia has the tensor cores?
 

TLZ

Banned
The GPU is Navi-based, so there isn't any ML stuff on it.
This part I don't get. Both consoles' GPUs are Navi. That's the latest. Yet the XSX has ML. So what does being Navi have anything to do with it?
 
This part I don't get. Both consoles' GPUs are Navi. That's the latest. Yet the XSX has ML. So what does being Navi have anything to do with it?

People generally refer to RDNA1 GPUs as Navi. RDNA2 GPUs are referred to as Big Navi or Navi 2X.

Edit: another possible meaning is distinguishing RDNA/Navi from CDNA GPUs. CDNA has something resembling tensor cores like RTX does, and these are not on RDNA1/2.
 
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MurfHey

Member
His grammar is fine. English may not be his first language. And it's "grammar", not "grammer".

You got me on my spelling, touche. But go over this actually tweets. He has flow in all of them. This just seems off. I really don't care if its a hybrid system, I'm getting both systems as I am fortunate enough to have the funds to do so. If I wanted the best I would just go back to pc but I enjoy consoles so much more these days.. People are going crazy over this and its just getting old. Who cares what platform someone decides to play on for real..

They are both plastic boxes that play games. People need to stop with the playground antics and just be happy we are getting new systems.
 
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kyoji

Member
Is the tweet got deleted?
Even if tweets get deleted as long as there was a link to the tweet itself twitter will time stamp and show that a tweet was deleted. Some of the "tweets" are just photo spoofs from a anime twitter handle though with no source tweet, which is where the problem is. I'm not even going to go on about how the original poster of those images is a rabid fan of the other console, hmmm.. but what do i know eh. Not my job to defend Sony nor do i care, its just incredibly funny how Sony has to be viewed as a much weaker console or whatever narrative for Xbox to be successful.

This is just my 2cents but i think there will be a lot of disappointed folks on here when the chips all fall and we really see what these systems are capable of and the difference turns out to be minutiae. All the flops talk etc just something to re-energize a fanbase that Xbox seems to have forgotten about in the present compared to its counter part.
 
You got me on my spelling, touche. But go over this actually tweets. He has flow in all of them. This just seems off. I really don't care if its a hybrid system, I'm getting both systems as I am fortunate enough to have the funds to do so. If I wanted the best I would just go back to pc but I enjoy consoles so much more these days.. People are going crazy over this and its just getting old. Who cares what platform someone decides to play on for real..

They are both plastic boxes that play games. People need to stop with the playground antics and just be happy we are getting new systems.
I'll be getting both as well. I want to play ALL good games. Thats the best way to go.
 

BluRayHiDef

Banned
Think it's clear now that Sony, for various reasons, shifted a focus to SSD I/O in a way they felt befitting their design. The question is if this was in reaction to feeling they went with a GPU architecture design more in line with RDNA1 as its base, or if this is something they had planned from the absolute beginning?

Not having ML present, if true, is so crazy enough to me I'm willing to say it might be the latter. But it does mean the Series systems have more advantages in the GPU department than simple percentages can indicate.
That's exactly what happened. They realized they shit the bed with RDNA1 and since it was too late to redesign the architecture they shifted focus to improving the SSD both in terms of hardware and PR. This is what I've always suspected. They got caught with their pants down.

Bollocks. Mark Cerny focused on I/O and high-speed storage in regard to designing the PlayStation 5 from the very beginning of the design process, because he designed the PlayStation 5 based on in-person talks with game developers about what they wanted in the PlayStation 5.

You guys are spreading FUD. Stop.
 

Redlight

Member
...People are going crazy over this and its just getting old. Who cares what platform someone decides to play on for real..

They are both plastic boxes that play games. People need to stop with the playground antics and just be happy we are getting new systems.

The thing is, it feels like a 'gotcha' moment only because of how passionately people denied that RDNA 1.5 was a possibility in the first place. RDNA1.5, RDNA 2, RDNA 2 with RDNA 1 features? I don't think many of us know what that will mean in practice.
 

NullZ3r0

Banned
No, not really. Again, aside from a couple rather glaring things, that Twitter post is saying PS5 is custom RDNA2, which we knew from Day 1. We also knew Series X was custom RDNA2, also more or less from day one.

What's always been up for contention is what does that "custom" really entail, because we don't quite know what all the standard/generic RDNA2 features are. And even things we can try saying are standard/generic, after some looking it'd appear that could be down to a specific platform holder's partnership in bringing it to standard (such as Mesh Shaders likely being adapted at the behest of Microsoft).

The reason "custom" RDNA2 has always been a hot issue is because, at least regarding PS5, we have had Ariel and Oberon leaks that moreso fit the profile of RDNA1, particularly Ariel. 40 CU limit (same as RDNA1), mention of Primitive Shaders (same as RDNA1, albeit notably customized by Sony), mention of Geometry Engine (also RDNA1, though it's probably present in RDNA2 under the same name so that really doesn't tell us anything), etc.

Of course you can counter-balance that with confirmation of hardware-based RT, something RDNA1 definitely doesn't have, and even further with mention of cache scrubbers which aren't in RDNA1 or standard RDNA2, but could be present in RDNA3 PC GPUs as something Sony brought to the table, similar to Mesh Shaders in RDNA2 PC GPUs and Series GPUs brought forward by Microsoft. Seeing mention of no VRS by this graphics engineer doesn't really surprise me; speaking semantics VRS is MS's terminology for such a technique and they may have an implementation specific to them. Seeing though that Foveated Rendering is a basis of inspiration for VRS and FR was already in PS4 Pro for PSVR support, Sony might have an evolved implementation of FR in PS5 that's roughly similar to VRS, but with some differences.

(*Also regarding Oberon, its listing as RDNA1 can be rationalized as referring to an Ariel iGPU regression testing profile. Oberon was a major revision after all, and had at least two smaller revisions following it.*)

That's a bit similar to talk of if they have an equivalent of SFS; there isn't any evidence pointing to it, but the closest equivalent would be some evolution of PRT, which was already in the PS4. Worth stressing though is that PRT and SFS are not necessarily equivalents to one another as SFS seems like a very evolved offshoot that takes PRT as a foundational inspiration and went off from there. Even if there's a PRT "2.0" in PS5 there's no guarantee it's doing what SFS is doing, part of the reason being they may not need it when you look at their own focus of the SSD I/O and how it's prioritizing big bandwidth to try moving data in and out of RAM as quickly as it can, regardless of the type, up to a reasonable compression level. SFS is a much more discriminate approach that probably requires a bit more familiarity by devs to get a handle on, but mastery of it should yield very effective use of the Series' SSD I/O and memory systems to stay closer to PS5's SSD I/O despite what the paper specs show.

Really I think the more alarming thing here is no mention of ML being present, as a few other posters have mentioned. Not even having FP16 is a surprise. Another poster kept mentioning about there being RDNA1 cards with ML on them, but I think those were niche cards, not the mainline, mainstream offerings. It's plausible the Sony graphics engineer was referring to the main cards in what they said, which would be true, since for RDNA2 AMD've spun off compute-focused designs to CDNA2 cards, they mention this in their shareholders call back in...early March I think it was?

I can only imagine things like ML missing because Sony needed to prioritize importance of features vs. silicon budget and maybe they felt making room for things like cache scrubbers were more important and would benefit their design over having ML support that maybe could be done anyway (albeit less efficiently) in software on the GPU. Who knows. I just find omissions like that extremely surprising and it does bring into question about what other possible RDNA2 features could be missing or, present yet not as a big focus in the design of PS5.

So, uh, hopefully Cerny or someone else high up on the engineering team start doing a couple of interviews that can specifically clear the air on this. If it's "bad" news, then they need to try spinning discourse to something else or find a more clever way to dispel growing doubts, like with a visually arresting gameplay demo, real-time, played by a real person.

Or something (granted, I do just kinda want actual gameplay footage for next-gen now, even beyond Microsoft's show because after the 23rd, who knows when we'll get more from either).
There is no such thing as "RDNA 2 features". Its a framework that has power efficiency and other performance benefits as a foundation and a malleable set of features. For example, if AMD liked the cache scrubbers from the PS5 GPU or the Tempest Engine stuff, they may be included in future RDNA 2 cards. If a feature like ML is missing from a card, that doesn't mean its not RDNA 2.

That's my point. Its fair to say that PS5 GPU is missing features, but you cant say its not RDNA 2.
 
The mention of RDNA 1 and 2/1.5, if you were asking about the other screen shot then my bad. I didn’t back read much, thread went too fast. lol I just remember Gavin having a private conversation with the Sony engineer.

I know I can't find the DM since it was private. But the one about the system lacking machine learning was public and I can't find the tweet for some reason.

I don't have any experience with Twitter so maybe that's why I wasn't able to find it. Which is why I was asking for a direct link so I could see it for myself.
 

farmerboy

Member
The thing is, it feels like a 'gotcha' moment only because of how passionately people denied that RDNA 1.5 was a possibility in the first place. RDNA1.5, RDNA 2, RDNA 2 with RDNA 1 features? I don't think many of us know what that will mean in practice.

The designation is somewhat irrelevant. They are both custom gpu's. For crying out loud, they could even be rdna 1.98 v 2.05.

Machine learning would be cool though, I hope both have it as it looks like a pretty cool tech.

As for vrs, I don't think the ps5 will have it strictly speaking, as I think they'll have some sort of equivalent instead, in the geometry engines.
 

LordOfChaos

Member
The thing is, it feels like a 'gotcha' moment only because of how passionately people denied that RDNA 1.5 was a possibility in the first place. RDNA1.5, RDNA 2, RDNA 2 with RDNA 1 features? I don't think many of us know what that will mean in practice.

Yep. Consoles have long been a blend of the near term generations of GPUs features that the console maker prioritized. What does this mean for end performance? Really hard to say, and from the outside, only cross platform games will be our closest tell.

With RDNA 2 available to Microsoft, one would assume it was available to Sony as well, so who really knows why they chose this path, what they may have customized, if the silicon budget from using some elements of an older core design was to save it for something else.

People should define what they're talking about when saying it's missing ML though. This isn't a dedicated accelerator or something, it's reduced precision on GPU ops. This is what the Series X states for ML:

Xbox Series X supports Machine Learning for games with DirectML, a component of DirectX. DirectML leverages unprecedented hardware performance in a console, benefiting from over 24 TFLOPS of 16-bit float performance and over 97 TOPS (trillion operations per second) of 4-bit integer performance on Xbox Series X. Machine Learning can improve a wide range of areas, such as making NPCs much smarter, providing vastly more lifelike animation, and greatly improving visual quality.

24 Tflops of 16 bit, i.e double rate compared to full precision FP32. We know the PS5 supports FP16 too, PS4 Pro already does. What it's missing from here is further reduced precision from Int4, which would be nice for a few things.

Really I think the more alarming thing here is no mention of ML being present, as a few other posters have mentioned. Not even having FP16 is a surprise.

The PS4 Pro had FP16/RPM where even the One X didn't, I'd be really surprised if the PS5 didn't...There have been a number of things people started claiming it didn't have only for it to have had them (ray tracing, etc), and that's on Sony marketing to ramp it up.
 
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Neo_game

Member
It is a custom chip, so they can choose what they want. I do not know why people are freaking out on this. It is not like the PS5 chip is missing some important feature that is going to make any noticeable difference anyways. The worst case scenario for PS5 is going to be 1800P vs 2160P or if PS5 is running at 1440P then X will be 1800P or something. I think both console are going to use some different resolution scaling algorithim.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Someone, please explain to me the advantage of Machine Learning.

TLDR; games look better even though they are being rendered at lower resolutions because A.I is smart and fast enough to predict what the next frame will look like. no need to calculate what the frame every second. the a.i's prediction has gotten so good you can leave it to the gpu and in some cases it will fill in gaps that even the regular frame calculation might not.
 

longdi

Banned
Nothing new here is there, series X is more powerful than PS5 which is why Sony marketing brought the SSD special sauce meme into play. Can't win in one frame of reference just talk about something else, marketing 101.

Ultimately though MS need to bring us games which do the talking about the advantages of their system, same for Sony.

IF we looked back at DF coverage of PS5 and Series X, it seems the answers were under our nose, this while..

Series X talks about custom Zen2 security and virtualisation, sustained power, customed ML with 49TOPS (rtx2080 has 57TOPS), full DXR RT1.1 support, mesh shaders, SFS hardware

PS5 talks about boost clocks justification, ssd and 3d audio
 

TGO

Hype Train conductor. Works harder than it steams.
People won't listen. A friend of mine sent me some dumb stuff about how the I/O is actually faster on Xbox after all.

I told everyone here that people relying on big boy Tfloppys was a bad idea. Now they all think they understand technology!
I've never seen anything like it, even with the Tera Flops advantage they have to fabricate more advantage's to make them feel better
Maybe they don't truly believe those Flop's are enough 🤔
 
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