Baseless Next Generation Rumors with no Technical Merits [post E3 2019, pre GDC 2020] [XBSX, PS5]

[Tkumpathenurpahl]

So a gen 3 mode. That wasn’t tested. And the native gen 2 mode is actually just a boosted 4Pro mode?
Therefore the results never showed up.
I mean I guess if there are 54 CUs then yea you could shut off 18 of them and drop back down to 36.

I’m okay with people sort of hanging onto that because that is about missing information. But I’m pretty sure since June they cannot just add more CUs without extensive testing or delays.

More that the Gen 2 mode is the bare minimum of performance that devs can expect from the PS5, meaning dev kits can be put in the hands of developers a good 12-18 months before release. Meanwhile, Sony has a chip which they can use to test BC.

I don't expect something as dramatic as 54CU's in the PS5, especially if these leaks are true. But 40-44 CU's seems reasonable. Some quantity more than the Pro seems sensible.

How much time would be needed to test a different configuration? For the sake of argument, let's say:

1. Sony has a 36CU RDNA2 chip which they can use to test their own BC needs.
2. AMD has an 80CU RDNA2 chip as the upper limit of their architecture's scalability.
3. Customisations have been made to Sony's chip for the purpose of BC.

How much testing, and over how long a period, would then be required to scale up the customised chip, given that the architecture upon which it's based can clearly scale higher than the customised chip?

 

[AbsoluteBeginner]

One thing I dont get is people saying "36CUs is not enough, its same amount as Pro".

No. RDNA CUs are very big, considerably bigger then GCN. 40CU in Navi is likely more akin to ~60CU GCN in space on same node.

Radeon 7 is 13B transistor 330mm² chip with HBM memory interface. Navi 10 on 256bit bus is 251mm² and 10.3B transistors.

So no, 40CU GPU Navi chip in console is not small, especially since its going to have additional hardware reserved for RT. It cannot be compared to Pro in any way.

In addition to that, at time of PS4 and Pro release, 7850 and RX470 were both smaller and considerably less expensive chips then equivalent 40CU Navi currently is (212mm²/231mm²/251mm²..160$/180$/350$)

If size and price comparison is not enough, ask yourself, is AMD asking more for Navi/Zen2 combo then back in 2013 with GCN/Jaguar? Because, AMDs current APUs are mix of incredible CPU and very, very good GPU, and their financial situation is miles better then back then. Why would they not charge more for it?

Its all relative, but with all this being said, Navi10 with RT in console is in no way, shape or form "little".

 

[HBRU]

I don't dispute the 36CU chip's existence, just the notion that it's the final configuration. 36CU's/18WGP's is the bare minimum required for BC, BC is massively important to the PS5, and spending more on a larger chip would be wasteful when this chip is potentially going to fail some aspects of testing and require a redesign.

My proposal is more that they've spent money on a testing chip that allows them to robustly test BC, test the limits of their cooling solution (hence the high clockspeed and the design of the dev kits,) whilst still being able to provide physical hardware to developers, replete with the features of RDNA 1 or 2.

They know from the PS4 that suddenly giving developers an extra 4GB of memory caused no problems. I think an extra 4 or so CU's would be much the same.

Of course, they may also have decided that a 256 bit bus is their limit, and downclocked 18gbps GDDR6 on such a bus is only good for ~9.2TF.

Yes...
The final one maybe a 60 CU chip... (with 6 cu disabled) that can also add something 1,7 ghz x 54 CU mode to the BC modes....

This one is gonna be much more expensive... that's why I belive to it less....

 

[BRiT]

If MS managed the impossible with 360 compatibility on One and with Series X BC with all previous consoles, what makes it impossible that Sony may find a different and smarter solution without compromising next gen performance?

Sony.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Sony have not said explicitly, but from Mark Cerny's interview with Gamasutra:

I don't think PS4Pro is at all a good consideration for PS5's limits as it was a stop-gap with the priority being just get something out that'll run and nought to be gained from extensive investment in a new architecture. I'm looking more at all the other GPUs in the world running the same code, swapping from device to device. For a lot, there's clearly abstraction through the OS layer, but there's also plenty of abstraction at the hardware level too. The ACEs schedule work across CUs so the same architecture can be produced with different CU counts and just work. You can even disable CUs in a chip and it'll just work.

In consoles of old, devs were poking around at the hardware level, so any changes could definitely screw with things. Does that really happen nowadays? Take your suggestion of caches - do the devs have control over what goes where in the cache? I'd have thought not, that it was all handled by the GPU. Devs just write shaders. And if it's the shaders that are incompatible, which I can imagine being a concern as that's been mentioned in the past as 'GCN code' being incompatible across GCN iterations, then the problem wouldn't be the number of CUs but the fact they aren't GCN. If being a completely different architecture with a completely different way of processing shader code and completely different scheduling isn't a problem for BC, why would the number of CUs be? That to me seems the least concern with BC!

 

[Nesh]

Sony.

 

[Globalisateur]

If MS managed the impossible with 360 compatibility on One and with Series X BC with all previous consoles, what makes it impossible that Sony may find a different and smarter solution without compromising next gen performance?

Will any X360 disc just work on XB1 not connected to the Internet ? No.

What MS have done is not strict BC. It just gives the illusion of BC on some games. You need to re-download the sources which have being somehow modified by MS so they need to be re-licensed by the publisher.

Sony perfectly know how to do real BC as they already did it on PS2 (PS1 BC), launch PS3 (PS1, PS2 BC).

 

[Nesh]

Will any X360 disc just work on XB1 not connected to the Internet ? No.

What MS have done is not strict BC. It just gives the illusion of BC on some games. You need to re-download the sources which have being somehow modified by MS so they need to be re-licensed by the publisher.

Sony perfectly know how to do real BC as they already did it on PS2 (PS1 BC), launch PS3 (PS1, PS2 BC).

Hopefully that wont be a problem for what they can aim for next gen performance.

 

[iroboto]

Will any X360 disc just work on XB1 not connected to the Internet ? No.

What MS have done is not strict BC. It just gives the illusion of BC on some games. You need to re-download the sources which have being somehow modified by MS so they need to be re-licensed by the publisher.

Sony perfectly know how to do real BC as they already did it on PS2 (PS1 BC), launch PS3 (PS1, PS2 BC).

The hardware doesn’t exist to run the program. So it is not strict Backwards Compatibility. But the downloads don’t modify game code; they run a separate 360 OS with modified drivers to run the game. The game code itself is left unchanged. So by in large I would not call this an illusion. Original code is unchanged. There needs to be an addition of a modified 360 wrapper to support the title to run.

 

[iroboto]

More that the Gen 2 mode is the bare minimum of performance that devs can expect from the PS5, meaning dev kits can be put in the hands of developers a good 12-18 months before release. Meanwhile, Sony has a chip which they can use to test BC.

I don't expect something as dramatic as 54CU's in the PS5, especially if these leaks are true. But 40-44 CU's seems reasonable. Some quantity more than the Pro seems sensible.

How much time would be needed to test a different configuration? For the sake of argument, let's say:

1. Sony has a 36CU RDNA2 chip which they can use to test their own BC needs.
2. AMD has an 80CU RDNA2 chip as the upper limit of their architecture's scalability.
3. Customisations have been made to Sony's chip for the purpose of BC.

How much testing, and over how long a period, would then be required to scale up the customised chip, given that the architecture upon which it's based can clearly scale higher than the customised chip?

I do not believe you would build an entirely separate chip for the sake of testing BC. The chip that needs to work with BC is the PS5 one. It’s don’t believe you can test one chip and port over the design to another chip that is inflight with its own customizations. That’s sounds incredibly inefficient and difficult to do.
As for how long it takes to customize a chip. You have design and the you have validation and then you have a test run and then it’s tape out and go.
From Software perspective most of it should be under validation for multiple months before its ready for release. I wouldn’t be surprised if hardware validation is longer. So 4-6 months in validation.

So I don’t believe think there is a significant probability that Sony has another chip at this point in the game. At best the full chip wasn’t tested in the regression tests. I find this to be the most probable if Sony comes out with something stronger than 36 CUs at 2.0 GHz.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

There was way more than one reason behind XB1's lack of success. Had it been the same power as PS4, but still more expensive and with a mandatory Kinect no-one wanted and with the screwed up TVTVTV messaging, it'd have still struggled.

Awwww, that hurts. You're calling me a "no-one."

I actually liked that Kinect was included, and like the TV support that it had. I was hoping for both to get more investment and to improve what was offered at launch. I still use the X360 with Kinect from time to time. I got rid of my XBO once I gave up on Microsoft ever supporting TV features ever again.

Spoiler

I'm not actually hurt. But do want to point out that while the messaging obviously didn't strike many console gamers the right way, there were quite a few of us that liked some of the things MS wanted to try with the XBO. But regardless they horribly bungled the launch messaging. Instead of focusing on TV so much, they should have focused more on games and then mentioned it also does TV. Instead they came across as TV being almost more important.

Then again, this was also when MS was investing heavily into getting into TV show production. Something that was quickly dropped once Phil Spencer took over.

Regards,
SB

 

[Nisaaru]

Sony perfectly know how to do real BC as they already did it on PS2 (PS1 BC), launch PS3 (PS1, PS2 BC).

"Perfectly know"? As far as I know these solutions were (mostly) HW of pretty simple and slow systems, CPU and GPU wise. How somebody can compare that to the complexity of emulating a 360 system in SW escapes me.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Sony perfectly know how to do real BC as they already did it on PS2 (PS1 BC), launch PS3 (PS1, PS2 BC).

It's pretty easy to do BC when you include the old console in the new one. If not using the same hardware, you need either emulation or hardware compatibility. PS4 and PS4Pro shows Sony aren't well versed in those - they can't emulate PS2 flawlessly (same as MS unable to emulate 360 flawlessly) and they couldn't even get hardware compatiblity between Pro and base modes, having to include the old hardware in the design and, in doing so, restricting the level of improvements they could bring with PS4 games not being enhanced on the Pro without software updates.

That's not to say Sony can't implement PS4 BC on some non-PS4 hardware, but they don't have a great track record. What MS has done with XBSX is, assuming it all works, a benefit of their approach towards hardware abstraction and XB1X's OS design.

 

[Nesh]

It's pretty easy to do BC when you include the old console in the new one. If not using the same hardware, you need either emulation or hardware compatibility. PS4 and PS4Pro shows Sony aren't well versed in those - they can't emulate PS2 flawlessly (same as MS unable to emulate 360 flawlessly) and they couldn't even get hardware compatiblity between Pro and base modes, having to include the old hardware in the design and, in doing so, restricting the level of improvements they could bring with PS4 games not being enhanced on the Pro without software updates.

That's not to say Sony can't implement PS4 BC on some non-PS4 hardware, but they don't have a great track record. What MS has done with XBSX is, assuming it all works, a benefit of their approach towards hardware abstraction and XB1X's OS design.

Yes I was impressed that MS managed, not just BC, but also noticeable improvements in IQ and framerate of old games on One including 360 games. Impressive work. BC on PS2 and PS3 barely added anything. PS2 emulation on 4 at least improves the resolution.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

PS2 emulation on x86 has been pioneered via PCSX2 and that upscales. Sony's effort is less capable going by this list. eg. Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance works on PCSX2 with some minor visuals glitches, but fails on Sony's own PS2 emulator. The games Sony sanctions have possibly had bespoke work done on the emulator before Sony gave up on it, or just happened to work and Sony left it at that. It's far from a great endorsement.

That said, Vita supposedly has great emulation of PSX and PSP. That's impressive seeing as PSP is completely different to Vita.

 

[MrFox]

"Perfectly know"? As far as I know these solutions were (mostly) HW of pretty simple and slow systems, CPU and GPU wise. How somebody can compare that to the complexity of emulating a 360 system in SW escapes me.

Ps2 was neither simple nor slow in some of it's hardwired sections. It was the days of crazy hardware hack and timings.

Cell is an order of magnitude more difficult to emulate than the 360 cpu.

Amiga emulation needs 100x higher clock for reasonably perfect emulation and took 20 years of ongoing development. We literaly have the fully documented hardware manual of each Amiga chips since 1985. With multi core processing on ps3 the chances of having a game with hidden race conditions is very high, Cerny talked about this and his patents are not about compatibility but actual race conditions which no software solution can solve without cycle-exact emulation which would be moronically inefficient. I remember one of the more candid interviews, he said something along the lines of 80% compatibility is very easy, and 100% is extremely difficult and maybe impossible.

 

[goonergaz]

Well X360 had it's best years in 10-11 and 12 was still good, better than most of the early years. 13 was already the launch of current gen, so disagree that they lost momentum in their later years. 360 was a late bloomer. Kinect and the Slim model boosted the sales by a lot. Prior to them, it looked like PS3 was going to cruise past the 360, but it ended up a close fight till the end.

I maybe could have worded it better, but essentially they were selling to the Kinect crowd and had lost momentum regarding releasing decent exclusives whereas PS3 had not.

Conversely Sony had turn the car crash PS3 completely around and were the ones with true momentum going into this gen.

Either way PS3 sold more than MS all the time it was out, so it’s hard to really take your initial comment the way it was intended.

 

[Nesh]

PS2 emulation on x86 has been pioneered via PCSX2 and that upscales. Sony's effort is less capable going by this list. eg. Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance works on PCSX2 with some minor visuals glitches, but fails on Sony's own PS2 emulator. The games Sony sanctions have possibly had bespoke work done on the emulator before Sony gave up on it, or just happened to work and Sony left it at that. It's far from a great endorsement.

That said, Vita supposedly has great emulation of PSX and PSP. That's impressive seeing as PSP is completely different to Vita.

PSP yes maybe. PSX? I wouldnt call it any special achievement.
Yes Sony's emulation efforts have been very disappointing.

EDIT: Btw what is that list? It says PS2 Classics Emulator Compatibility List (on PS4). Why does it include "?", "unplayable" and games not listed on PS Store? PS2 emulation I thought is only available for games that are in PS Store. So how were these games tested?
Its not like you can pop a PS2 game in a PS4 and it will run an emulator.
Is this an emulation compatibility list in general regardless of platform?
Baldur's Gate is noted us unplayable, no mention of a PCSX2 emulation.

 

[dogen]

PSP yes maybe. PSX? I wouldnt call it any special achievement.
Yes Sony's emulation efforts have been very disappointing.

EDIT: Btw what is that list? It says PS2 Classics Emulator Compatibility List (on PS4). Why does it include "?", "unplayable" and games not listed on PS Store? PS2 emulation I thought is only available for games that are in PS Store. So how were these games tested?
Its not like you can pop a PS2 game in a PS4 and it will run an emulator.
Is this an emulation compatibility list in general regardless of platform?
Baldur's Gate is noted us unplayable, no mention of a PCSX2 emulation.

right at the top it says "PS2 Classics Emulator Compatibility List (on PS4)" and you can also look at the ps3 list. they're tested by injecting ps2 disc images into the emulator.

 

[PSman1700]

Baldur's Gate is noted us unplayable, no mention of a PCSX2 emulation.

Baldurs gate works fine on PCSX2? I even played champions of norrath (a more demanding title??) on PCSX2, no problems at all. Most games work fine on PCSX2, yes you need to find the right settings and it is a hassle sometimes if you want perfect, but for 90% of the time it is 'perfect', even better then real ps2, higher res, better fps in some cases, filters and fixes etc.