News & Rumours: Playstation 4/ Orbis *spin*

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TomRL said:
When do you think the SSD option will catch on? They have been around for quite a while now and they are still too expensive.
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It depends what you mean by 'catch on'. My first SSD was in a MacBook Air in 2009 and they've become more and more common but in terms of Storage:Cost, they will continue to look expensive compared to platter-based drives for some time.

You can get 1Tb SSDs now but their more expensive than I'm willing to pay. I also have concerns about longevity. I'd like some assurances that Sony's filesystem has flash-friendly block-usage algorithms.
 
DSoup said:
It depends what you mean by 'catch on'. My first SSD was in a MacBook Air in 2009 and they've become more and more common but in terms of Storage:Cost, they will continue to look expensive compared to platter-based drives for some time.
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Until SSD tech gets a complete 'reboot'. Silicon circuits are gonna cost more than iron filings. ;) I think we need a completely new storage tech to get HDD prices with SSD performance.

Regards the results, the other HDDs don't seem to offer enough performance advantage to be worth it from that POV. The SSD is the real choice for a 'HW upgrade' as long as one's willing to pay the price.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
Until SSD tech gets a complete 'reboot'. Silicon circuits are gonna cost more than iron filings. ;) I think we need a completely new storage tech to get HDD prices with SSD performance.
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I know our hardware infrastructure guys are anticipating biological media to be that breakthrough. For capacity at least, performance is a different challenge but there is always scope to go wide, i.e. a wide area storage approach is already used by many for redundancy and quickly rebuilding arrays after a drive failure but as long as it's not too wide, you can use the approach for performance as well.
 
It's not necessary for SSDs to catch up per se with HDDs; HDD tech is already capable of storing far, far more data than the average person ever needs. All that is required is for SSDs to sink to "sufficient" capacity at affordable prices, and we're very nearly there already. HDDs in consumer computers have just a few more years left of useful life.

After that, they'll be mostly relegated to NAS-type applications in the consumer space - and possibly, ultra-low-budget computers, although lower capacity, lower performance SSDs may well eat that space as well, considering the savings in space, power, materials.

Data hoarders will continue to buy HDDs in the after-market of course, but they won't be commonly installed as standard for very long. Pretty amazing a mechanical media has lasted as long as it has; the HDD first appeared in the 1950s, almost nothing used in computers back then is still in use now (short of say, keyboards, power switches and the like...oh, and Fortran. Ugh! :D)
 
Grall said:
It's not necessary for SSDs to catch up per se with HDDs; HDD tech is already capable of storing far, far more data than the average person ever needs. All that is required is for SSDs to sink to "sufficient" capacity at affordable prices, and we're very nearly there already. HDDs in consumer computers have just a few more years left of useful life.

After that, they'll be mostly relegated to NAS-type applications in the consumer space - and possibly, ultra-low-budget computers, although lower capacity, lower performance SSDs may well eat that space as well, considering the savings in space, power, materials.

Data hoarders will continue to buy HDDs in the after-market of course, but they won't be commonly installed as standard for very long. Pretty amazing a mechanical media has lasted as long as it has; the HDD first appeared in the 1950s, almost nothing used in computers back then is still in use now (short of say, keyboards, power switches and the like...oh, and Fortran. Ugh! :D)
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In the Console market there is wider gap than in the basic pc space. The current consoles shipped with 500GB and let's pretend we see a similar development this generation that we did with the older, then several TB's will be the norm soon. I am buying PC/Mac's with 120 to 180 GB SSD's and it's more than enough for typical use.
 
DSoup said:
Eurogamer have a nice DF article on the gains of replacing the stock 5400rpm HDD in the PS4.

Personally I am happy with my choice of a 1Tb 7200rpm drive but it's nice to know that when big SSDs become more affordable, that they'll bring some noticeable improvements in some areas of the PS4's operation.
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I don't have anything to compare it to since I upgraded on day 1, but I agree, I've been fairly happy with my 1TB HGST 7200RPM (7K1000). I haven't had any issues with streaming for the most part, only in Trials Fusion. Loading and install times have been great. Nice to see an article finally compare a 7200RPM mechanical drive with a hybrid and SSD.
 
No complaints with my stock drive either. Load times on the PS4 have been pretty good if you ask me.
 
Any thoughts on the rumoured performance boost the PS4 is soon to see? Allegedly the ICE team have made some startling advances in tuning the consoles performance.

thuway said:
"I don't mean game over in terms of sales. I am talking about power. PS4 performance boost rumor is insane. I find it hard to swallow"
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What kind of tuning could they do other than fix the filtering bug and tighten up bandwidth usage. Perhaps they've finally cracked the optimal solution for the GPGPU usage.

Whatever it is, E3 is going to be the public viewing as Naughty Dog show off their wizardry.

Source
 
BoardBonobo said:
Any thoughts on the rumoured performance boost the PS4 is soon to see? Allegedly the ICE team have made some startling advances in tuning the consoles performance.



What kind of tuning could they do other than fix the filtering bug and tighten up bandwidth usage. Perhaps they've finally cracked the optimal solution for the GPGPU usage.

Whatever it is, E3 is going to be the public viewing as Naughty Dog show off their wizardry.

Source
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It's weird because I thought it was supposed to be easy to get the maximum from the hardware this time around, compared to the PS3 that took a long time to offload GFX work to the Cell... so why would there be big advancements in software that are specific to PS4, but not possible XB1?

Maybe it's just the normal advancement that happens with second generation games. Or they developed something really cool that we'll learn later on?
 
MrFox said:
It's weird because I thought it was supposed to be easy to get the maximum from the hardware this time around, compared to the PS3 that took a long time to offload GFX work to the Cell... so why would there be big advancements in software that are specific to PS4, but not possible XB1?

Maybe it's just the normal advancement that happens with second generation games. Or they developed something really cool that we'll learn later on?
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I'm thinking they've perhaps figured out a really neat way to offload tasks to the compute queue similar to the kind of thing we saw with the CELL. Only this time its happened sooner due to the relatively straightforward architecture.
 
Kinda nebulous language... "performance boost" ... surely just the usual coding optimisations (or secret sauce? lol
yes I'm only joking
)?

Or maybe some sony fanboy is just feeling insecure with all the recent xbone news and wants to stir things up?

MrFox said:
...I thought it was supposed to be easy to get the maximum from the hardware this time around, compared to the PS3 that took a long time to offload GFX work to the Cell...
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Easier, not flat out easy is how I remember it being described, don't ask me where tho! :D
 
Probably related to this...

http://www.redgamingtech.com/ps4-ic...-tiling-detiling-10-100x-faster-gpu-cpu-info/

Cort Stratton is a senior programmer for Sony’s ICE Team and took to Twitter to proclaim his teams recent success “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 pointed out that the previous code the team were using wasn’t great, and was basically little more than reference hardware code and not even slightly optimized for the PS4 hardware. “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,” came Cort’s second tweet. He concluded with “(plus an awful memory access pattern; I needed to restructure things to write full cache lines).”

Remember that Cort Stratton was instrumental in the creation of much of the rendering code for the Playstation 3′s SPU (Synergistic Processing Units) which were notoriously difficult to utilize on the consoles release. It’s also worth noting that he pointed out that this latest iteration is still early code, and there will be further improvements to come. Of course, this doesn’t mean that frame rates (or graphics) will become 10-100x better on the PS4, but it does mean that the cost for certain tricks (particularly involving tiling) will be far lower.
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Furthering to the discussion, “No idea; I do very little CPU-side SIMD work on the PS4 CPU. This tiling code has to run on the host as well, so it’s just SSE2.” he said replying to a user questioning AVX/AVX2 in the AMD Jaguar. “I think they serve different needs / job sizes. Smaller jobs with tighter latency requirements are a better fit for CPU SIMD.”

Cort also pointed out that the PS4′s GPU doesn’t have a problem with AF: “No hardware/SDK issues that I’m aware of. Sounds like a question for the developer.” This is in regards to a question a user posed Stratton, likely due to recent news certain titles (such as Thief) were missing AFx16 and instead using the rather less impressive Trilinear filtering. Anisotropic Filtering is a texture filtering technique that’s extremely important for improving the visual quality of textures. The quality of textures without AF can degrade significantly, particularly when viewed at sharp angles.
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BoardBonobo said:
Any thoughts on the rumoured performance boost the PS4 is soon to see? Allegedly the ICE team have made some startling advances in tuning the consoles performance.
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This looks like hyperbolic rubbish. Perhaps Naughty Dog will show off something jaw dropping but that doesn't mean other developers will put the same effort into PS4 games.

How many PS3 games looked as good as The Uncharted series?

E3 isn't a venue for one developer to share optimisation strategies with others, that's what GDC is for.

I'm taking this with a huge pinch of salt. :)
 
DSoup said:
This looks like hyperbolic rubbish. Perhaps Naughty Dog will show off something jaw dropping but that doesn't mean other developers will put the same effort into PS4 games.

How many PS3 games looked as good as The Uncharted series?

E3 isn't a venue for one developer to share optimisation strategies with others, that's what GDC is for.

I'm taking this with a huge pinch of salt. :)
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You probably should, but ICE Team develops tools and libs for all PS developers, not just ND.
 
Hyperbolic rubbish aside (it's clearly down around 0% probability, and any massive improvement will no doubt be localised to one aspect, not the whole system) but if we want to speculate on what improvements can be made on PS4 that can't be applied to XB1, which of course any software design can, we have?:

1) API improvements. PS4 is similarly bogged down as XB1 with a heavy API and it'll gain a DX12 like boost, furthering the difference gap on XB1 getting the same equivalent boost

2) Hardware unlock. The DSP that's been sitting idle finally gets used

3) Overclock. Tests show the current throttle is conservative and Sony push another 10% onto the SoC. Although even that wouldn't count as 'insane' and 'much larger difference'. Okay, a 50% clock boost then! MS can't do this because in XB1 the clock is hard-wired (only as part of this speculation. Don't know what the clock controls are for either box).
 
My take is that they have mostly been worrying about getting the SDK to work, and now the optimisation part has started.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
Hyperbolic rubbish aside (it's clearly down around 0% probability, and any massive improvement will no doubt be localised to one aspect, not the whole system) but if we want to speculate on what improvements can be made on PS4 that can't be applied to XB1, which of course any software design can, we have?:

1) API improvements. PS4 is similarly bogged down as XB1 with a heavy API and it'll gain a DX12 like boost, furthering the difference gap on XB1 getting the same equivalent boost

2) Hardware unlock. The DSP that's been sitting idle finally gets used

3) Overclock. Tests show the current throttle is conservative and Sony push another 10% onto the SoC. Although even that wouldn't count as 'insane' and 'much larger difference'. Okay, a 50% clock boost then! MS can't do this because in XB1 the clock is hard-wired (only as part of this speculation. Don't know what the clock controls are for either box).
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4) Sony have reduced the amount of RAM/CPU/GPU the system holds in reserve due to MS dropping Kinect as a basic requirement.
(It has been rumoured that Sony were allocating extra resources to the OS to prevent MS gaining an advantage in apps/features).
 
Shifty Geezer said:
1) API improvements. PS4 is similarly bogged down as XB1 with a heavy API and it'll gain a DX12 like boost, furthering the difference gap on XB1 getting the same equivalent boost
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Sony have this already, it's called GNM and according The Crew developer, "At the lowest level there's an API called GNM. That gives you nearly full control of the GPU". I'm betting this is the March's surface tiling/detiling optimisation news after several rounds of repeated retells and embellishments.

What's crazy is SCEE's own website is reporting this. :rolleyes:
 
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