Current Generation Hardware Speculation with a Technical Spin [post GDC 2020] [XBSX, PS5]

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I think we will that on the xbox side with GameStop's in the near future. Once the expandable storage cards come down in price a bit and the world is a bit less covidy I think they will roll something like that out. I could see them wanting to delay that at the moment because they don't want to be seen encouraging people to risk their health by going into stores. The expandable storage cards for the xboxs are perfect for this. I could even see it being a free service, if Microsoft provided the kiosks for free to gamestop and gamestop provided the floor space for free its just another reason for customers to go into a gamestop, giving them more opportunity for sales.

Plus you can download and install any xbox game now, even if you don't own it, which would help with this. You wouldn't have to own every game that you transfer, so if you saw something cool you could just copy it over.
Wouldn't need to be the external ssd cartridge, although that could obviously be provided as an option. Just a usb drive for person to take it home on.

I forgot about MS and gamestop working relationship now.
But yea, I had these ideas at the start of the XO gen and different ways it would be beneficial to everyone including gamestop where the long term writing was on the wall.

But it is a fact that not everyone has good net or uncapped. I don't know how much that all will change by next gen.

Back to what you lot was talking about, its definitely viable physical could go next gen, disk are getting more and more useless as delivery medium.
 
I think ROM (cartridges or whatever read only electronic system) are better than disk, and digital only is not such a good idea, it should always be an option IMO.
(Some people buy games at release finish them and resell them to play more games, there's no reason to prevent them, and disks are sooo slow...)
I think their going to allow it to naturally fall away instead of forcing everyone to go digital.
The few people that are left they can probably live without to be honest. As you say they trade in and buy second hand which isn't in the studios or platform holders intrest.
They would prefer you go onto something like gamepass, then you don't need to worry about trading in, you just delete it from drive.
 
Having fun paying $100+ for a game if they move to cartridges/usb's for physical games... (which is exactly why they won't)
 
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Having fun paying $100+ for a game if they move to cartridges/usb's for physical games... (which is exactly why they won't)
Not sure if it would cost that much by then compared to high capacity disks, but I don't see any reason to do it at that point anyway.

I think any form of physical is going away.
My idea about putting it on external drive is simply the ability to make use of someones high speed net access. Even use your own external drive.

Unless your comment was just general one.
 
Im sure this has been said many a time before and in more relevant threads ... reusable external storage with download kiosks at the retail stores.
 
Im sure this has been said many a time before and in more relevant threads ... reusable external storage with download kiosks at the retail stores.

How popular would that be? How would tying the game to your Live account actually work? Games aren't tied to the storage. You wouldn't want to be keying your Live details on a public terminal. Where in the process is the retailer identified so they get their cut?
 
How popular would that be? How would tying the game to your Live account actually work? Games aren't tied to the storage. You wouldn't want to be keying your Live details on a public terminal. Where in the process is the retailer identified so they get their cut?

The entitlements wouldn't be done on the external drive. Its just there for mass data movement. You can already download games you don't own yet.

Its only when you go to start them up that the entitlement checks happen and validate.

The console could then cache those entitlemnts for a set duration depending on what they are. Ownership can be cached forever, Gold Membership until expiration, Game Pass or Game Pass Ultimate until the 15th or 30th (when games usually roll off) or expiration of subscription.

As for how the retailer makes out on this, they have deals directly with Microsoft for dealing with this. Not sure what makes sense for them both.
 
Rasterization as a process is synonymous with scan conversion, in this case I'm treating scan converters as a later stage in the rasterization hardware's functionality. Whether they're physically distinct in a manner that hasn't been indicated before isn't clear, but for the purposes of determining peak geometry rate the rasterizer block would be accepting the geometry first.
Yes, the Raster Unit is determining the peak geometry rate, but I am discussing the change in fragment output per triangle from 1-16 for RDNA1 to 1-32 fragments per triangle for RDNA2, more specifically the Scan Converters.
Perhaps there's something about the links being used to reference posts, but I haven't seen what is supposed to indicate there are coarse and fine scan converters like you've claimed.
In the other thread, discussion went:

- Navi 21 (RDNA2) hss 8 Scan Converters, twice as many as Navi10 (RDNA1)
- Yet, both Navi21 and Navi10 have 4 Raster Units
- And both have peak geometry at 4 triangles per clock
- Later clarified that triangle fragment coverage for Navi21 increased from 1-16 to 1-32, and geometry throughput closer to peak
- Extra detail provided that 'coarse rasteriser' and 'fine rasterisers' are involved

Explanations are around how twice as many Scan Converters are involved for 1 triangle to be converted to 1-32 fragments.
The amount of coverage information being used for pixel shader wavefront launch is equal to the size of the wavefront. Whether that coverage mask is filled with active lanes is based on how many pixels/quads a triangle is found to be touching, where a scan converter probably provides the information that populates the mask.
This coverage information being equal to the size of the wavefront being launched doesn't look the same across architectures. For example:
- GCN, 1-16 fragments, Wave64 across SIMD-16 over 4 cycles
- RDNA1, 1-16 fragments, Wave32 across SIMD-32 over 1 cycle?
- RDNA2, 1-32 fragments, Wave32 across SIMD-32 over 1 cycle?
I'm not seeing gain in restricting the amount of coverage information being generated by narrowing the scan converter output, a wavefront isn't going to launch until it has that information, irrespective of the number of pixels the triangle covers--which can be more than 32.
Well, if 'coarse' rasterisation is sending 'partial' triangles to 'fine' scan converters, coverage should be less sparse, so more fragments produced per scan converter. And more occupancy for SIMD-32 units and better efficiency.
The model I'm working with for now is what was documented in AMD's patent for a binning rasterizer, which is presumably the DSBR introduced with Vega. https://www.freepatentsonline.com/20190122417.pdf
What AMD has publicly described as its rasterizer covers the primitive batching module, accumulator, and a scan converter. If AMD has split or duplicated scan conversion hardware, the path from the binning and culling portion of the rasterizer would define peak geometry rate for triangles that are rendered.
Something has changed for RDNA2, as we still have the same geometry throughput but double the number of scan converters.

BTW, that patent doesn't clarify Scan Conversion and 1-32 fragment output. It's more an efficient primitive culling algorithm with screen space tiling and depth testing before fragment shading. Looks like a TBDR-type stage incorporated into an IMR. Interestingly, the primitive batching module is sending partial triangles to the scan converter, as mentioned above.

This patent discusses the hardware to make fragment shading more efficient, and save bandwidth, by binning and using hidden surface removal with the accumulator and hierarchical-z depth testing. With deffered shading like a TBDR. To make these fixed-function units more effective, faster GPU clocks now make sense for RDNA2 and PS5.
I'm not 100% certain on the identity of the packers in the driver leak, but if it's related to POPS packers in the ISA it's not how they would be used. A wavefront can reference a packer ID, but that ID is for all pixels in the wavefront. The point of it is to provide a way to detect that exports from different triangles' pixel shaders are hitting the same pixels, and the packer ID and the value given by that packer give the order those exports should retire in based on what sequence the triangle entered the rasterization process.
In the driver leak, these Packers are associated with Scan Converters. And the number of Packers per Scan Converter have doubled from RDNA1 to RDNA2. Since both fragments per cycle and scan converter coverage have doubled in RDNA2, these Packers seem related.
GCN has a 4-clock cadence, so 16 items would be brought up per clock, per shader engine.
For the above, that's Wave64 per SIMD-16 and 4 clock cycles on native GCN. This Wave64 and 16 items is per SIMD-16 units (there are 4 in a GCN CU) and not per shader engine.

RDNA1 has a legacy mode where 2 Wave32 across 2 SIMD-32 units per cycle would achieve 64 work items/ cycle in Wave64 mode.
The PS4 Pro's rate was 64, and it has 4 shader engines. The PS4's rate is 32, and it has 2 shader engines.
PS4 Pro has 4 Shader Engines? I'm sure this is meant as 4 Shader Arrays. Likewise, PS4 has 2 Shader Arrays rather than 2 Shader Engines.
Shader engines.
Likewise, Navi22 and PS5 have 4 Shader Arrays rather than 4 Shader Engines. Navi21 has 4 Shader Engines and 8 Shader Arrays for contrast.
 
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So we're a full month after the launch of the PS5 and there's still no x-ray of its SoC?
 
So we're a full month after the launch of the PS5 and there's still no x-ray of its SoC?

I thought a die shot did hit Twitter, a storm over someone seeing a date of 2019 in it and the pic was pulled.

That's what I thought was in an update from Red Gaming Tech.

I had meant to ask here if anyone has it saved locally.

RGT: 15:15 for the story
Twitter profile in question:
Tease from the company:
http://techanalye.com/news/topics/今日の一枚/3302/
 
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Having fun paying $100+ for a game if they move to cartridges/usb's for physical games... (which is exactly why they won't)

It wouldn't be that high by 10th-gen (are we talking 10th-gen timeline here?). There's already decent-speed USB 3.0 drives with 128 GB capacities coming in around $20 or even $10, and that's with mark-up for profits. The better-quality ones are still more pricey than that, generally, but those prices should come falling way down as the years go on, and with that the actual specs (if not necessarily capacity sizes) should improve along with moving on to USB 4.0 and derivatives.

Personal hope is by 10th-gen something like the Series expansion cards will be affordable enough as a physical medium distribution model, and they can be a fraction of the size (128 GB, even 64 GB), hopefully with even better compression/decompression support. It could do a lot and also shave off costs on BOM by removing need for the UHD Blu-Ray drive.


Ouch! This might actually impact any mid-gen refreshes (especially any "upgrade" style models) negatively; 7nm is already pricey enough for consoles as-is.
 
I don't even get the point of physical distribution with the size of patches games require. If you don't have the necessary internet connection these consoles are pointless and if you do physical is irrelevant outside of compatibility they could/should do differently anyway.

P.S. IMHO they should give a full digital license for physical discs if you have them for Xbox and 360. In the case of X1 games you provide the disc once and then over the next few months the console could just randomly ask a few times for the disc and if provided just make it a full digital license. The amount of abuse this would allow is imho neglect-able and could be covered with some deal or part of gamepass in case of MS. Or allow to make a game a digital copy with 1-3Euro/USD if you provide the physical copy. That would probably be acceptable too.
 
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I don't even get the point of physical distribution with the size of patches games require. If you don't have the necessary internet connection these consoles are pointless and if you do physical is irrelevant outside of compatibility they could/should do differently anyway.

As somebody with bad internet and who notices big patches, they are still the exception rather than the rule for the type of games I play. I bought four PS5 games on disc and of those only AC Valhalla has had a patch over 10Gb, Dirt 5 and Sackboy have only had small patches. Sony first party games do not tend not to have massive patches, although Days Gone did because it was speculated they they recompressed all of the games textures with Oodles, which led to it taking up around half the install size.

The type size of patches folks have seen with Call of Duty and Cyberpunk are ridiculous. I bought Cyberpunk digitally and I reckon my total download for the version I have installed must have been 140Gb at this point and in that case, I do welcome more patches. ;) The nice thing about discs? I was able to loan my AC Valhalla disc to a work colleague so he could try Valhalla while I'm playing Cyberpunk.
 
The type size of patches folks have seen with Call of Duty and Cyberpunk are ridiculous. I bought Cyberpunk digitally and I reckon my total download for the version I have installed must have been 140Gb at this point and in that case, I do welcome more patches. ;) The nice thing about discs? I was able to loan my AC Valhalla disc to a work colleague so he could try Valhalla while I'm playing Cyberpunk.

On Xbox you can share games with your friend without the disc:)
 
On Xbox you can share games with your friend without the disc:)
You can also do that on PlayStation with digital copies.

Can you share Game Pass titles on Xbox? I mean with non-Game Pass subscribers.
 
You can also do that on PlayStation with digital copies.

Can you share Game Pass titles on Xbox? I mean with non-Game Pass subscribers.

I think it works like Gold entitlements, the Home console lets anyone play online and your GamerTag lets you play online. So if thats the situation then the Home console gets GP entitlements and your GamerTag gets GP entitlements too.

But I have not tried it.
 
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