Anyone else see 9TF and 12TF and think this is pathetic tech progress compared to the previous generation upgrades? Not saying it needs or can be more powerful, just disappointed that progress slowed so much since 10-15 years ago where console generations were a lot more of an upgrade over the last one.In the past, you'd get ~10x progress in basically every area. Now, it seems to be a 2-4x depending on the area.
People are talking about the faster CPU but even the CPU upgrade, from moving from 8 core jaguar to 8 core zen 2, isn't as big as previous generations. The old in order PowerPC cores to the jaguar cores were probably a bigger move than from 8 slow cores to 8 fast cores.The general improvement is nice but I feel it isn't a night or day difference as people are hyping it up as.
RDNA vs GCN is a very small upgrade compared to pre-VLIW5 to GCN, not even counting how much raw performance difference there was. I don't even think RDNA adds anything drastically new and is mostly just ups the number of GCN. VLIW to GCN was a real complete arch change and brought so many compute focused things as well as all the same general performance improvements. GCN IPC in games is probably 30% higher than VLIW5 and you were moving from ~250mflops to 1.4tflops. PS3 to PS4 was a even bigger jump where the PS3 was still on vertex and pixel shaders, no forms of tessellation moving to a unified shaders architecture with all the bells and whistles.
Ram is not nearly as high as I would have expected if you asked me 5 years ago to predict next gen consoles. I would have expected minimum 32 GB as ram has been one of the easier things to always be able to increase in the past gens. 16 GB is a pitiful upgrade over the 8 GB of last gen. Back in the old days, you'd get 8x upgrade in ram capacity and next gen would push ram to 64GB. The SSD will help a lot with this so maybe this is easy to forgive but the raw specs is pretty disappointing.
The only big move is from the SSD which is a nice to have feature and will do cool new things. A huge jump in speed will allow asset streaming without pop ins and remove loading which will be very good. Everything else about the whole next gen is a very mediocre jump, especially with the mid gen consoles already pushing things up from the baseline.
People are talking about the faster CPU but even the CPU upgrade, from moving from 8 core jaguar to 8 core zen 2, isn't as big as previous generations. The old in order PowerPC cores to the jaguar cores were probably a bigger move than from 8 slow cores to 8 fast cores.The general improvement is nice but I feel it isn't a night or day difference as people are hyping it up as.
RDNA vs GCN is a very small upgrade compared to pre-VLIW5 to GCN, not even counting how much raw performance difference there was. I don't even think RDNA adds anything drastically new and is mostly just ups the number of GCN. VLIW to GCN was a real complete arch change and brought so many compute focused things as well as all the same general performance improvements. GCN IPC in games is probably 30% higher than VLIW5 and you were moving from ~250mflops to 1.4tflops. PS3 to PS4 was a even bigger jump where the PS3 was still on vertex and pixel shaders, no forms of tessellation moving to a unified shaders architecture with all the bells and whistles.
Ram is not nearly as high as I would have expected if you asked me 5 years ago to predict next gen consoles. I would have expected minimum 32 GB as ram has been one of the easier things to always be able to increase in the past gens. 16 GB is a pitiful upgrade over the 8 GB of last gen. Back in the old days, you'd get 8x upgrade in ram capacity and next gen would push ram to 64GB. The SSD will help a lot with this so maybe this is easy to forgive but the raw specs is pretty disappointing.
The only big move is from the SSD which is a nice to have feature and will do cool new things. A huge jump in speed will allow asset streaming without pop ins and remove loading which will be very good. Everything else about the whole next gen is a very mediocre jump, especially with the mid gen consoles already pushing things up from the baseline.