In a pro, no way. It'll require specific, considerable efforts to use the machine. A pro should just run the base game with more room for improvements without needing an engine reworking to manage a small memory pool.
Given faster SSDs, I could definitely see something like [fast SSD > relatively small fastish DDR > very fast HBM] in future hardware. The DDR would sit more as a cache between storage and working RAM. Everything will be streamed and tiled and virtualised!
I picked the Pro because I can imagine Sony following a similar route again, of butterflying the GPU, upping the clocks across the board, and giving developers more memory.
With the PS4Pro, they granted developers an additional 512MB of memory, hence the extra DDR3. To my mind, the approach I stated was an evolution due to the added memory being directly usable by developers.
Another component of my line of thought was the way that the PS4Pro only doubled (well, 2.2x) the GPU performance, but required a satisfactory 4K image. Sony were well aware that image reconstruction was going to have to become prevalent due to the death of Moore's law.
Maybe we could see a similar nudge in that direction with a PS5Pro? If a relatively small pool of blisteringly fast memory seems increasingly likely to find its way into the PS6, maybe it makes sense to give developers 3-5 years to monkey around with it and find successes and failures before it's committed to the baseline architecture for 6-8 years?
Things change, but as long as devs are not embracing weird tech I don't see Cerny-led Sony hardware returning to the mad hardware of PS2 and PS3. Cerny's time-to-triangle metric is vague and a bit trite, but in terms of expressing the ease/effort with which you can start putting something onscreen, it does it's job and doing things easily and quickly will tend to find favour with most people - particularly those paying the bills.
Absolutely. That point was further reinforced in Cerny's Road to PS5 talk, when he emphasized the speed with which developers are able to move their PS4 engine to the PS5. I think it was something like a week.
But in that moment, he also stated that developers don't have to make use of the ray tracing hardware (I think that was it, it was certainly some aspect of the PS5's hardware.) Such a principle could apply to a smallish pool of HBM in a future console: you can ignore it and just make use of the GDDR like your PS5 engine.
I wouldn't have gone with the PS5 Pro as an example, I'd have gone with PS6.
But his example would still mean it runs the base game better with no code changes.
That was my main principle. I also think they're going to have to get creative with the Pro consoles, as the power draw reduction moving from 7nm to 5nm is only something like 45% IIRC. So if they want to bump up the GPU by a considerable amount, power savings are going to have to come from elsewhere. Such as adding large amounts of bandwidth with low power memory.
One area that I can really imagine trouble though, is BC. The PS6 would need:
- 20GB's of HBM3. Map 4GB's of HBM3 and 16GB's of GDDR6.
- 4GB's of HBM3. Map the PS5Pro's HBM3 1:1. Map the 16GB of the PS5Pro's GDDR6 to equivalent or better GDDR.
- 16GB's of HBM3. Map the PS5Pro's GDDR6 to it. Map the PS5Pro's HBM3 to something with at least 4GB of capacity and 512GB/s bandwidth....
So, pretty much, it would limit them to 20GB's of HBM3. Which then warrants the question: is 20GB's of HBM3 and 8-16GB's of DDR5 (or HBM4 and DDR6 etc) a sensible memory configuration?
