Mark Cerny "The Road to PS4"

I found the bit about how during PS3s development, the ICE team were treating 3rd parties as competition interesting, that very much explains the terrible launch period.

Also i was unaware of how key Shuhei has been to the PS3s success and how his contributions have completely changed SCE for the better, my respect for him has vastly increased after watching this video.
 
I found the talk about the original Sony-GPU for the PS3 interesting but far too short. Has anyone further informations about that "beast"?

Also he conveniently left out all about the Nvidia GPU, especially when and why it was implemented into the PS3. From Cernys speech I think I remember that even in 2004 the original GPU was still in play, or?
 
dagamer said:
Those at B3D will also appreciate the thinly veiled digs at the Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Wii U system design for using eDRAM.
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I took that as a reference to not retreating to the complicated architecture of the PlayStation 2, which he covered about ten minutes earlier.

His entire arc of PlayStation -> PS2 -> PS3 was the increasing time-to-triangle for developers. With PS4 they didn't want to return to the PS2 time-to-triangle (3-6 months) but the original PlayStation (1-2 months).
 
Anyone felt Mark was being a little disrespectful to Kutaragi? Using picture that looks to have negative connotations.....ok he called him a genius....but then followed up with a mocking tone about Kutaragi and his LoTR-death-to-triangles big talk..system-on-a chip Cell...and also about passing the torch (self-proclaimed) ...
 
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gongo said:
Anyone felt Mark was being a little disrespectful to Kutaragi? Using picture that looks to have negative connotations.....ok he called him a genius....but then followed up with a mocking tone about Kutaragi and his LoTR-death-to-triangles big talk..system-on-a chip Cell...and also about passing the torch (self-proclaimed) ...
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I didn't take that as disrespectful. He was using an anecdote to show how KK was looking at the big picture of graphics rendering, in contrast to his view as a game developer just wanting to get stuff on screen. Game developers are happy to work with triangles at the moment, and someone wanting to reinvent the whole graphical rendering world to something better is not sympathetic to the requirements of the industry as a business (as opposed to art).
 
gongo said:
Anyone felt Mark was being a little disrespectful to Kutaragi? Using picture that looks to have negative connotations.....ok he called him a genius....but then followed up with a mocking tone about Kutaragi and his LoTR-death-to-triangles big talk..system-on-a chip Cell...and also about passing the torch (self-proclaimed) ...
Click to expand...

I think he said he'd have done things differently, and I think the passing the torch quote was that Cerny wished that he was having the torch passed to him, because that would have meant he was considered as accomplished or as worthy as Kutaragi. Instead, he was just passing along an award Kutaragi had earned.
 
Indeed though that kind of makes me sad as it seems like this gen might be the death of consoles as a playground of exotic architectures that the PC can't try but in then end could be better for the given time or the future. As stated by Cerny most developers didn't care if you had a chip that could ray trace decent results in real time cause then they'd had to start over with their tool chain. That makes me said . I'm all for easier to develop but not at the expense of avoiding technology that could be revolutionary on the area of graphics at a whole.

Krazy Ken would of put a voxel retracing proccessor in there if he thought it would of made better graphics and that's what I loved about him. His damn what everyone is used to now but choose twhat he thought was the best available from a sheer hardware perspective at the time. Yes it might of made some programmers lives a living hell but from a tech geek point of view it was pure awesomeness.
 
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Basically, if you want to do that and live as a company, then you need to take the time to create most of the basic toolchains and hand them out with the new hardware. That just wasn't an option at this stage - there is literally nothing out there to suggest we are there yet.

Also, it shows to me that everyone thinking this is the last console generation, is very likely completely wrong. There's still way, way too much ground to cover and a dedicated, fixed platform is going to stay relevant. But innovation needs to come in a form that at least connects with the state of what people can do on PC, and that makes some sense.

There's still plenty of room for innovation. We have compute on the PC side, but PC hasn't nearly maxed out the potential of that the way the next-gen systems should be able to.

I think Cerny struck a good balance between respecting the designer ambition and brilliance of Kuturagi but also showing that any step further down that path would have been suicide.
 
Yeah sadly the only one financially able to do that this gen was Microsoft the one with the least desire to do so. We might see it again if Sony is able to start making a good amount of money again but even then the PS3 will curb their desire to do so. Only way were to likely see them go down that road again was if the PS3 had won this generation as convincingly as the PS2.

I just hope that it doesn't such a closed circle that innovation can only push forward on the lines that everyone is taking cause even if there is a better option no one is willing to throw money at it and try to convince everyone to switch their toolchain.
 
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Kb-Smoker said:
Wow that was awesome. I would love him to do a more technical talk. I could listen for hours..... :D

I think it was cryteck that called out sony on the ram. ;)
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Crytek wanted 12 gb Ram in next gen consoles :D ! Cevat mentioned that long back in a lecture about future rendering and how photorealism will be achieved with the arrival of next gen hardware. I don't see the photorealism yet Cevat, but maybe you had anticipated better than what has been served by MS and Sony.;)

That video was amazing. What was a revelation was Shu Yoshida's role in Sony all these years, along with Cerny's. I had no idea these two gentlemen had had so much impact n what I was playing.
Also, the fact that Cerny has concentrated much more on the software side of PS4 matches what devs are saying in different interviews. i think the Avalanche interview also mentioned the same that PS4 has better tools as of now.

As for exotic hardware, Yes, I am also in the boat which wanted a exotic hardware rather than an optimised PC architecture ! But even a PC has a LOT of untapped power which we never get to see as none of the games I play are actually optimised enough to run to the max of my PC's capability. I have never seen any game actually take full advantage of my 4 cores running at 2.8 GHz yet !

So, yes, a console with a fixed hardware similar to a PC is still practically more capable than a PC with the same spec. Simply because the hardware is fixed. But give me teh exotic hardware over it anyday ! :p I was actually hoping for a super charged Cell for the next PS.

Frankly speaking, except for us geeks, a kid buying a console just wants a powerful hardware with jaw dropping games. He doesn't care what's inside the box.
 
Xenus said:
Yeah sadly the only one financially able to do that this gen was Microsoft the one with the least desire to do so. We might see it again if Sony is able to start making a good amount of money again but even then the PS3 will curb their desire to do so. Only way were to likely see them go down that road again was if the PS3 had won this generation as convincingly as the PS2.
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I doubt it'll happen again unless 'exotic' just means cutting-edge. eg. Hypermemory cube. Development complexity has grown exponentially, and the issues with mastering technology are also growing exponentially. So giving someone a whole new processing architecture is just going to make their lives miserable amongst a sea of easy-to-use competitors (who also have backwards and cross-device compatibility), and I wouldn't be surprised if a new, exotic console was just ignored as more trouble than it's worth. Sony only got away with it with PS3 because of their previous runaway success IMO. Only if there was an amazing breakthrough tech, like octographic phototropic volume instantiation, that gave a significant improvement to on-screen performance at amazing value and was easy enough to use when mastered, would there be a small chance of someone building a console around a new, alien tech.
 
I found this video pretty interesting, once I started watching I was reasonably captivated.

It seems Sony is getting pretty smart, doing all the things I'm sure MS did from the start, like including software devs in the hardware process.

I still think they will make enough dumb decisions to have problems though.

Also very interesting to know Cerny is just some kind of freelance contractor. Hard to believe such a person would be lead designer for one of their consoles.
 
Rangers said:
I found this video pretty interesting, once I started watching I was reasonably captivated.

It seems Sony is getting pretty smart, doing all the things I'm sure MS did from the start, like including software devs in the hardware process.

I still think they will make enough dumb decisions to have problems though.

Also very interesting to know Cerny is just some kind of freelance contractor. Hard to believe such a person would be lead designer for one of their consoles.
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What's so hard to believe ? Did you see his qualifications? He's worked alongside SCE for a number of years so it simply makes sense.
 
Rangers said:
I found this video pretty interesting, once I started watching I was reasonably captivated.

It seems Sony is getting pretty smart, doing all the things I'm sure MS did from the start, like including software devs in the hardware process.

I still think they will make enough dumb decisions to have problems though.

Also very interesting to know Cerny is just some kind of freelance contractor. Hard to believe such a person would be lead designer for one of their consoles.
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Considering he's worked on most marquee games in Sony's lineup since 1996, it's really not that surprising: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerny_Games

Granted, I doubt he's the one directly planning out the silicon in the APU Sony used, some EE at AMD was doing that (and maybe Kuturagi would have been more involved there with the PS2 and PS3 designs), but I suspect from a software standpoint ensuring developers have good toolchains, great documentation, and the overall design philosophy of the system, that's all him.
 
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