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[Xenon]

Best gif ever!

edit: It pretty much nails my thoughts on these threads.

 

[jaypah]

best gif ever

almost spit out my coffee at the end.

 

[phosphor112]

Ah, was trying to find that "second page" it's a separate article... Must read.

 

[Galacticos]

For the sake of competition, I hope so.

No. screw parity.
Parity means another endless fanboy war.
We need a clear winner in the hardware department.

 

[jaypah]

No. screw parity.
Parity means another endless fanboy war.
We need a clear winner in the hardware department.

yeah, because that'll stop the fanboy war.

 

[specialguy]

@PhatSaqs : if those rumored specs are accurate then yes the PS4 is far ahead in every department.

Except CPU speed and power, RAM quantity, disc read speed (likely), memory latency (it will trail there, DDR3 latency<GDDR5) etc...

I think, maybe someone more knowledgeable can explain better, but in a way the CPU will be the true limiting factor anyway. The GPU cannot actually create vertices/geometry or something like that. So it can improve some things yes, but not the most fundamental ones. Like a prettier coat of paint on the same building analogy.

So the PS4 alleged superior GPU can make some things look better, but not really fundamentally alter anything (if I'm correct)

 

[grumble]

These leaks are 2+ years old, enough time for significant hardware revisions to have taken place. The final product could be anything.

Even if they're on par though, the firm's direction and attitude towards small developers is still terrible.

 

[Cidd]

yeah, because that'll stop the fanboy war.

lol I was just about to post the same thing, the console wars wont end like it or not.

 

[specialguy]

No. screw parity.
Parity means another endless fanboy war.
We need a clear winner in the hardware department.

We've had that in the past...for example Xbox/PS2/GC generation...

It solves nothing in terms of fanboy wars.

 

[Imperial Hot]

Microsoft just needs to go ahead and announce this shit already. Stupid rumors.

 

[Reiko]

Microsoft just needs to go ahead and announce this shit already. Stupid rumors.

MS really doesn't give a shit at the moment:/

 

[jaypah]

We've had that in the past...for example Xbox/PS2/GC generation...

It solves nothing in terms of fanboy wars.

if anything it'll make one side super defensive and the other side super attack ready. Having parity is the closest we'll ever come to sanity and that's kind of sad lol.

 

[Razgreez]

These leaks are 2+ years old, enough time for significant hardware revisions to have taken place. The final product could be anything.
\

Tomorrow these leaks will be 3yrs old at this rate

 

[Cidd]

Except CPU speed and power, RAM quantity, disc read speed (likely), memory latency (it will trail there, DDR3 latency<GDDR5) etc...

I think, maybe someone more knowledgeable can explain better, but in a way the CPU will be the true limiting factor anyway. The GPU cannot actually create vertices/geometry or something like that. So it can improve some things yes, but not the most fundamental ones. Like a prettier coat of paint on the same building analogy.

So the PS4 alleged superior GPU can make some things look better, but not really fundamentally alter anything (if I'm correct)

Wait what?

RAM quantity?

Last time I checked they both got 8GB
Latency, I was told is not a problem due to cache memory and high bandwidth
The CPUs are basically the same
The PS4 GPU is 50% more powerful than the 720s

I don't see how you come to this conclusion.

 

[Eideka]

Except CPU speed and power, RAM quantity, disc read speed (likely), memory latency (it will trail there, DDR3 latency<GDDR5) etc...

Do you know anything we don't ? As far as I'm aware the Durango CPU is clocked at 1.6, the PS4's is rumored to have undergone a slight boost to reach 2.0ghz.
I was under the impresssion that 8gb of GDDR5 is a much more interesting solution than its DDR3 equivalent, where is the next Xbox supposed to have the edge exactly ?
I can't really comment on memory latency, is that a big deal ? If so, why would Sony engineers have opted for that ? So far the PS4 seems to be a very elegant machine in its design, that's not to say MS can't come up with something on par.

So the PS4 alleged superior GPU can make some things look better, but not really fundamentally alter anything (if I'm correct)

I'm not knowledgeable enough to discuss this, but I would be shocked if 3rd parties refused to tap into the PS4's extra power for the sake of visual parity.
That seems so dumb to me, I'm for each machine to be made the most of.

 

[Punkster_NY]

that is misleading

only 30mb of that esram will write at 170g/s

if the rumored 8g GDDR3 is true then the write speed will be 68g/s

holy shit that low?

 

[Xenon]

Microsoft just needs to go ahead and announce this shit already. Stupid rumors.

No VGLeaks needs to stop milking this old info.

 

[AgentP]

Each of the two CPU modules connects to the north bridge by a bus that can carry up to 20.8 GB/s in each direction.

The GPU can read at 170 GB/s and write at 102 GB/s through multiple combinations of its clients.

This seems to me to point to the eSRAM exiting primarily for bandwidth and not latency. The CPUs are not read/writing to eSRAM and the bandwidth is boosted by the dual access of the two pools.

 

[Crimson_Gold]

These leaks are 2+ years old, enough time for significant hardware revisions to have taken place. The final product could be anything.

Even if they're on par though, the firm's direction and attitude towards small developers is still terrible.

What? 1st they were one year old and now they are 2+? Doesn't really matter. We will find out soon enough what this thing can do

 

[gcubed]

Tomorrow these leaks will be 3yrs old at this rate

these leaks are from BEFORE the 360 launched!

 

[Galacticos]

yeah, because that'll stop the fanboy war.

We need to be able to say "This console has better hardware" without starting a never-ending argument.

 

[Takuya]

No VGLeaks needs to stop milking this old info.

2013 info is old?

 

[Maximilian Kolbe]

if anything it'll make one side super defensive and the other side super attack ready. Having parity is the closest we'll ever come to sanity and that's kind of sad lol.

Kaz:
"You know, they say all men are created equal, but you look at me and you look at Don Mattrick, and you can see that statement is not true! See, normally if you go one-on-one with another console, you got a 50-50 chance of winnin'. But I have GDDR5, and I have 1.84TFlops, so you got a 25% at best at beatin' me! And then you add Iwata to the mix? Your chances of winnin' drasticy go down. See the three-way, at next-gen, you got a 33 1/3 chance of winnin'. But I, I got a 66 2/3 chance of winning, cause Iwata KNOWS he can't beat me, and he's not even gonna try! So, Don Mattrick, you take your 33 1/3 chance, minus my 25 percent chance, and you got an 8 1/3 chance of winnin' at next-gen! But then you take my 75 perchance chance at winnin', if we was to go one-on-one, and to add 66 2/3 ch&#8230; percents, I got a 141 2/3 chance of winnin at next-gen! See, McTrick; the numbers don't like, and they spell disaster for you at next-gen! "

 

[jaypah]

We need to be able to say "This console has better hardware" without starting a never-ending argument.

yeah, it's nice to want things.

 

[IOnEI Falcon]

Haha! It's too perfect!

 

[sangreal]

2013 info is old?

old as in the same info they've given us 5 times already. The image in the OP has literally been sitting on vgleaks server waiting to be milked for over a month (and it has been making the rounds since then). There is very little new information here and the new info isn't that interesting

 

[phosphor112]

These leaks are 2+ years old, enough time for significant hardware revisions to have taken place. The final product could be anything.

Even if they're on par though, the firm's direction and attitude towards small developers is still terrible.

So it's 2+ now? :lol

 

[Zen]

The gap in power between the 720 and the PS4 is terrifying. I wonder how multiplats on 720 will fare, there are reasons to be worried on that front.

I wouldn't be surprised if 3dr parties systematically enhance the PS4 versions of their game with graphical features.

With such relatively similar architectures between all three platforms it's virtually guaranteed that they will.

 

[gcubed]

yeah, it's nice to want things.

well, this is the first time that 2 consoles are running almost the same hardware is it not? Usually there was always a layer of abstraction "but the emotion engine is amazing" or "the power of the cell" with a cloud of mystery around it

 

[specialguy]

We need to be able to say "This console has better hardware" without starting a never-ending argument.

That literally almost never happens.

Even saying Xbox>Gamcube, clearly true, is a very touchy subject,.

 

[Reiko]

Remember when we wanted to hear about the specialized audio hardware?

No instead VGleaks likes to regurgitate old info for more website hits.

 

[Eideka]

With such relatively similar architectures between all three platforms it's virtually guaranteed that they will.

That would be awesome, just to see the meltdowns.

 

[LukasTaves]

It's a big part of AMD's APU push, so something both PS4 and the next Xbox will be capable of. (Assuming the leaks are correct and MS are using Jaguar cores)

See here for more detail.

I never looked into the specifics of HSA, but i though it had coherent memory on the unified pool of the apu... Sharing a cache makes sense, but should also be a lot more complex to handle XD

In that graphic there should be somewhere a HSA mem management unit (HMMU) than makes this via hardware. In Xbox 360 memexport was software IIRC.

http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2012/10/hsa10.pdf

I think memexport was a hardware function, but that's not i was talking about.

Memexport allowed 360's gpu to rewrite buffers to memory so they could be used again as a new input (and once it was in memory the cpu could touch it too)... Cache locking allowed 360 to lock a portion of the cache, and enter in a streaming mode where the gpu could consume data directly from the cpu without going through the main ram... It made sense for procedural or highly compressed content...

 

[mrklaw]

come on guys, these rumours have been around since before the 360 launched, they've had plenty of time to make adjustments.

 

[LukasTaves]

Except CPU speed and power, RAM quantity, disc read speed (likely), memory latency (it will trail there, DDR3 latency<GDDR5) etc...

I think, maybe someone more knowledgeable can explain better, but in a way the CPU will be the true limiting factor anyway. The GPU cannot actually create vertices/geometry or something like that. So it can improve some things yes, but not the most fundamental ones. Like a prettier coat of paint on the same building analogy.

So the PS4 alleged superior GPU can make some things look better, but not really fundamentally alter anything (if I'm correct)

Geometry shaders/Tesselation are all about that.

Current gpu are not spectacular at doing this though, but it could be one of those things that are severely hampered by the api and not the hardware...

 

[BruiserBear]

So, someone who can understand these charts explain to me please.

What does this equal in terms of PS4 power?

Same, 75% etc????

I think a simple comparison could made in the car world. Durango being a 200hp car and the PS4 having 300hp. The PS4 has a few mods attached as well.

 

[AgentP]

Remember when we wanted to hear about the specialized audio hardware?

No instead VGleaks likes to regurgitate old info for more website hits.

Besides the one flow chart, all the info looks new. Why would you care about something so pedestrian like an audio processor? The memory subsystem is the life blood of the console.

 

[USC-fan]

These leaks are 2+ years old, enough time for significant hardware revisions to have taken place. The final product could be anything.

Even if they're on par though, the firm's direction and attitude towards small developers is still terrible.

Lol people shot down changes could be made in a year so now people are saying it 2 years old.

 

[mrklaw]

Geometry shaders/Tesselation are all about that.

Current gpu are not spectacular at doing this though, but it could be one of those things that are severely hampered by the api and not the hardware...

this is an interesing point though. Lets assume for a moment that Durango is based on 7770 and PS4 on 7850 architectures. Surely there is enough data out there on those chips for us to work out theoretical max performance - ignoring ram limitations etc.

So from that we could work out how likely they are to be bottlenecked on the ram bandwidth or not?

eg if the triangle setup on both is relatively low, DDR3 might be enough to keep both at max capacity.

edit: http://www.behardware.com/articles/856-2/review-amd-radeon-hd-7850-7870.html

Pitcairn can be seen as a double Cape Verde (the GPU used on the Radeon HD 7700s). It has 20 Compute Units (the blocks of processing units that make up GCN cards), is capable of processing two triangles per cycle and has 32 ROPs at its disposal supplied by a 256-bit memory bus. Remember each CU includes 4 texturing units and 64 processing units organised into four 16-way vector units, for a total of 80 texturing units and 1280 processing units.

Cape Verde: 10 CUs, 1 triangle par cycle, 16 ROPs, 128 bits
Pitcairn: 20 CUs, 2 triangles per cycle, 32 ROPs, 256 bits
Tahiti: 32 CUs, 2 triangles per cycle, 32 ROPs, 384 bits

don't know how accurate this is, but it suggests that if PS4 is based on Pitcairn, and Durango on Cape Verde, that PS4 would have potentially double the triangle setup performance.

edit 2: VGleaks.com says Durango GPU is 2 tris/clock as well, so triangle setup should be comparable.

 

[Reiko]

Besides the one flow chart, all the info looks new. Why would you care about something so pedestrian like an audio processor? The memory subsystem is the life blood of the console.

Because I want to know more about the system?

 

[AgentP]

Because I want to know more about the system?

I think you need to actually read the article and the second page example, it says more about the system than anything yet released. If correct, this is a gold mine. Of course you could glance at the graph, call it old, and ask for something else you will not read or comprehend.



http://www.vgleaks.com/durango-memory-system-example/

Finally let&#8217;s compute how much bandwidth is left for the non-coherent GPU access to consume. Let&#8217;s assume that:

The sum of bandwidth from the north bridge to DRAM is 25 GB/s.
Some portion of the GPU coherent bandwidth misses the L2 caches.
Non-coherent CPU bandwidth is 3 GB/s.
This leaves 42 GB/s of DRAM bandwidth available to the GPU clients.

If anyone missed this, take a look. If correct (big if), it puts a nail in he coffin of the "eSRAM is for low latency for the CPU" camp. The example and flow chart clearly shows the CPU cannot see the eSRAM. It shows how the DDR bandwidth is split between the CPU and other IO, leaving the rest for the GPU. Anyone who knows modern GPUs knows that this left over bandwidth is far too little for a decent GPU (in this example 42GB/s). The eSRAM is dedicated to the GPU and Move engine, leaving the full 102GB/s for rendering uses. Hence the 32MB eSRAM is clearly being used like a cache to help overcome starving the GPU for memory bandwidth.

 

[Combichristoffersen]

I think a simple comparison could made in the car world. Durango being a 200hp car and the PS4 having 300hp. The PS4 has a few mods attached as well.

So when ND and SSM unveil their PS4 games we can assume VTEC just kicked in, yo?

 

[BlockheadBrown]

Well played! Agreed.

 

[Limanima]

Where's that gif of Homer entering and instantly leaving the bar?
Nothing new to see here...

 

[specialguy]

If anyone missed this, take a look. If correct (big if), it puts a nail in he coffin of the "eSRAM is for low latency for the CPU" camp. The example and flow chart clearly shows the CPU cannot see the eSRAM. It shows how the DDR bandwidth is split between the CPU and other IO, leaving the rest for the GPU. Anyone who knows modern GPUs knows that this left over bandwidth is far too little for a decent GPU (in this example 42GB/s). The eSRAM is dedicated to the GPU and Move engine, leaving the full 102GB/s for rendering uses. Hence the 32MB eSRAM is clearly being used like a cache to help overcome starving the GPU for memory bandwidth.

and that's the best hope imo for performance increasing "special sauce"...low latency esram helping the gpu be more efficient.

 

[Xenon]

2013 info is old?

Are these not more detailed versions of the specs released a month ago which are over a year old?

This is just VGLeaks Durango Specs: Hyper-milked edition

 

[enzo_gt]

Remember when we wanted to hear about the specialized audio hardware?

No instead VGleaks likes to regurgitate old info for more website hits.

I think the specialized audio unit hype died down when the PS4 was revealed to have something similar, if I'm not mistaken.

The way each console handles audio could make worlds of difference, but people only seem to care how long their GDDR is.

 

[ChosenPredator]

We need to be able to say "This console has better hardware" without starting a never-ending argument.

that won't stop it, there will be endlessly my console of choice is stronger then yours "nyah nyah aboo boo" type talk lol

 

[Foxix Von]

Are these not more detailed versions of the specs released a month ago which are over a year old?

This is just VGLeaks Durango Specs: Hyper-milked edition

The info you are referring to is from this year.

 

[AgentP]

and that's the best hope imo for performance increasing "special sauce"...low latency esram helping the gpu be more efficient.

Since when do GPUs require low-latency? They have been using GDDR for years. The argument was the low latency helped CPUs far more than GPUs. Small data sets, AI, physics, etc. Time for new theories I guess.