NGGP: NextGen Garbage Pile (aka: No one reads the topics or stays on topic) *spawn*

[MrFox]

It's not the same as last gen since both machines are launching at the same time, and there's no rumours of components as exotic and high end as Cell was back then for fanboys to get overexcited about.

What about the Blitter? It's exotic when it's called a blitter instead of a DMA engine.
Fanboys can say "Oh! Games will be amazing when they'll master teh Blitter!" It's a very good angle for hype.

 

[ERP]

I don't think there's any amount of special sauce in Durango that can bridge a 6 CU and 600 GFLOP gap.

latching onto individual figures is not a useful way to understand performance differences.
OK lets say that everything else in the hardware is identical for a second, so you have a 50% performance difference, but only in ALU limited situations.
When I render shadows, I'm ROP (or rathe Z-Fill) limited, if my shaders are texture heavy, the ALU's sit idle and wait on memory, on current PC GPU's if the vertex workload is dominant, for the most part they grossly underutilize the ALU's.
So what percentage of the time do the extra ALU's actually help?
If it's 40% it's a 20% performance difference, if it's 80% it's a 40% difference I would guess it will end up being closer to the first than the second.
If 720 has more ROPs (and enough associated bandwidth) or a larger register pool and can hide more latency, then it gets more of that difference back, because it runs other portions of the frame faster.

Now I'm not suggesting it's "faster" or for that matter "slower", I'm saying it's just one aspect of a design.

 

[Albofighter]

and since durango has so many experienced engineers working for it, I would not be worried at all about performance difference. They have been with AMD longer, started the durango project first, have more money to invest, and more custom hardware designed for gaming in mind. Worry about orbis, not durango.

 

[Proelite]

and since durango has so many experienced engineers working for it, I would not be worried at all about performance difference. They have been with AMD longer, started the durango project first, have more money to invest, and more custom hardware designed for gaming in mind. Worry about orbis, not durango.

Not according to Sweetvar26. Sony started at least 6 month earlier.

 

[ultragpu]

latching onto individual figures is not a useful way to understand performance differences.
OK lets say that everything else in the hardware is identical for a second, so you have a 50% performance difference, but only in ALU limited situations.
When I render shadows, I'm ROP (or rathe Z-Fill) limited, if my shaders are texture heavy, the ALU's sit idle and wait on memory, on current PC GPU's if the vertex workload is dominant, for the most part they grossly underutilize the ALU's.
So what percentage of the time do the extra ALU's actually help?
If it's 40% it's a 20% performance difference, if it's 80% it's a 40% difference I would guess it will end up being closer to the first than the second.
If 720 has more ROPs (and enough associated bandwidth) or a larger register pool and can hide more latency, then it gets more of that difference back, because it runs other portions of the frame faster.

Now I'm not suggesting it's "faster" or for that matter "slower", I'm saying it's just one aspect of a design.

So words have reached my ear that you work for SCEA right ERP? Do you know the latest spec on PS4/Orbis even if you can't say a word about it?

 

[Albofighter]

Not according to Sweetvar26. Sony started at least 6 month earlier.

Are you sure? isnt there documents stating that Sony was going for SuperCell until 2010 when they switched to amd whereas microsoft went with AMd from the start. I've seen this mentioned a lot.

There's also something else I wonder. If these guys for example started working on HD 6xxx or 7xxx series from the start, can't they move their customizations to new series like hd 8xxx? One would think it would provide even more power and efficincies.

 

[Bagel seed]

The fact that ERP knows all the ROP advantage ways means Orbis probably already countered or matched it if it exists in Durango.

 

[Albofighter]

so ERP really works for SOny? That's awesome...ERP, I know you're under NDA but was hoping you can at least talk about other things like are you confident in Orbis or where it's headed? Do you think we will be satisfied? Is sony making sure they are not outclassed by durango? Whatever you can tell us without breaking NDA would be appreciated.

 

[Bagel seed]

Dude.. you gotta at least buy him a drink first.

 

[ultragpu]

Are you a bicycle fan by any chance ERP?

 

[ERP]

So words have reached my ear that you work for SCEA right ERP? Do you know the latest spec on PS4/Orbis even if you can't say a word about it?

Like I said in the other thread I'm very careful not to comment on any product the company I work for is producing.

 

[Sonic]

so ERP really works for SOny? That's awesome...ERP, I know you're under NDA but was hoping you can at least talk about other things like are you confident in Orbis or where it's headed? Do you think we will be satisfied? Is sony making sure they are not outclassed by durango? Whatever you can tell us without breaking NDA would be appreciated.

This is extremely rude and goes against our forum etiquette. Please refrain from asking questions like these and bothering developers that post on this forum. I understand the desire for information, but this is the wrong way to go about it. If ERP wishes to volunteer information he will, but considering whatever information he has is likely under NDA please understand that there are numerous ways of breaking that. And for crying out loud we don't need him getting any attention of the IAD at Sony.

 

[Rangers]

latching onto individual figures is not a useful way to understand performance differences.
OK lets say that everything else in the hardware is identical for a second, so you have a 50% performance difference, but only in ALU limited situations.
When I render shadows, I'm ROP (or rathe Z-Fill) limited, if my shaders are texture heavy, the ALU's sit idle and wait on memory, on current PC GPU's if the vertex workload is dominant, for the most part they grossly underutilize the ALU's.
So what percentage of the time do the extra ALU's actually help?
If it's 40% it's a 20% performance difference, if it's 80% it's a 40% difference I would guess it will end up being closer to the first than the second.
If 720 has more ROPs (and enough associated bandwidth) or a larger register pool and can hide more latency, then it gets more of that difference back, because it runs other portions of the frame faster.

Now I'm not suggesting it's "faster" or for that matter "slower", I'm saying it's just one aspect of a design.

most people will just counter this by noting that everything "around" a GPU usually scales with it's shaders. And for the most part they're right.

I guess if there is one, single number that goes the longest way toward making games look good on screen (which in turn is the single biggest factor in core gaming), it's that shader flops number.

Of course all that said, I try to keep pointing out if there's any number that may rival it, it's the RAM quantity, where apparently Durango has an edge.

If I want to know two basic things about a console and only two, I'd want to know 1) shaders and 2) RAM

 

[Albofighter]

This is extremely rude and goes against our forum etiquette. Please refrain from asking questions like these and bothering developers that post on this forum. I understand the desire for information, but this is the wrong way to go about it. If ERP wishes to volunteer information he will, but considering whatever information he has is likely under NDA please understand that there are numerous ways of breaking that. And for crying out loud we don't need him getting any attention of the IAD at Sony.

Wasn't trying to be rude as I stressed that as long as he won't break NDA. The last thing I want is for him to get in trouble for a meaningless reason. If he can't say anything at all then that's that, but how would I know without asking? I don't read minds...

 

[ultragpu]

Like I said in the other thread I'm very careful not to comment on any product the company I work for is producing.

OK Sorry I missed that, wouldn't want to get you into any unnecessary trouble mate.

 

[bgassassin]

Well for me after considering different things the main viewpoint I've settled on is that the gap won't be enough for most, if not all multi-plat devs to justify increasing the budget to take advantage of said gap. The end result would be 3rd party games looking exactly the same regardless of the console leaving 1st party titles to show any potential differences.

 

[Brad Grenz]

Gies floated the same theory on GAF. That 3rd parties will just try to stay under 3.5GB of RAM usage and not burn through the Durango's memory bandwidth. Of course, based on the specs we have now that just sounds like a recipe for everything having a better framerate on Orbis.

 

[trainplane]

Remember also that the Wii U supposedly has 2x or 3x the GFlops of the Xbox 360 and we don't see any difference. Yes, lots of caveats such as 1st gen software, different archs, slower CPU, etc, but just saying theoretical GFlops don't tell the whole story. Given what we know, the PS4 will be stronger, but you might need DF articles to tell the difference again.

 

[ultragpu]

Well for me after considering different things the main viewpoint I've settled on is that the gap won't be enough for most, if not all multi-plat devs to justify increasing the budget to take advantage of said gap. The end result would be 3rd party games looking exactly the same regardless of the console leaving 1st party titles to show any potential differences.

This is essentially what we need, it's good for the industry all around and the end users wont get any gimped products for the most part. Also It would be awesome to see Sony's exclusives to be designed with 3.5 Gb of GDDR5 ramage and 18 CU of shader processing power with gpgpu special sauce.

Speaking of special sauce, I do recall some info from one of the very first VGleaks regarding Orbis being focusing on fine grain compute & tessellation. Now, would that compute unit described by DF serve such a function in any meaningful way?
http://www.vgleaks.com/world-exclusive-ps4-in-deep-first-specs/

 

[Scott_Arm]

Please, no more "special sauce," ever again. I cringe every time I read it.