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

[Rangers]

As a console only gamer I personally concentrate on the TFs as we get fixed hardware for a generation. If you start out weak at the beginning of a generation it’s only going to get worse as PCs push WAY beyond where your console is. Consoles used to catch up to PCs at the start of a new generation (or get close at least) but those days are over. PCs start out ahead and only get further ahead with time. If a console starts out with low compute then you’re stuck with it for an entire generation (unless we get mid-gen refreshes as we did this time).

If TFs mean so much why not game on PC? I really don’t want to. I like the simplicity of a console. I like that everyone’s using a controller. I like the lack of hackers using aim bots and wall hacks. TFs aren’t everything, but for a new console they are important as that’s what the console is going to be for it’s entire life.

Is this my twin?

 

[DavidGraham]

so maybe we'll be seeing an overall 4x increase in resources assuming an extremely aggressive shrinkage.

Can the CPU and GPU handle a 4X increase in assets and resources along side the usual fidelity increases (resolution, lighting, RT, shadows, physics, AI, game logic ..etc)?

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Ultimately, we will just have to wait and see which of the machine is more balanced.

More "round" Copyright (c) Mark Cerny.

Surely you would think Sony would have a good reason for pushing their storage bandwidth and RAM quantity to whatever they end up going with. If saving money on the GPU side and putting it towards the SSD and Memory config can provide experiences that they couldn't do otherwise, then it could be the right call.

I doubt Sony set out with a 7500MBps target when designing their storage andI/O system and I also doubt there was a point when there was a conscious balance/decision between I/O bandwidth and GPU.

I'm just wondering how tangible of a difference 5GB/s is over say, 3GBs? I guess in general my mind struggles to come up with game scenarios where what is done on one couldn't be done on the other. Obviously that's true for 9TF vs 12TF as well but I would think getting those "performance wins" would count for something early on in the generation.

Indeed, both are impressively high numbers. I put more stock in what has been said about the storage and I/O system than the crazy bandwidth. Whether any of this actually translates into anything meaningful remains to be seen. I'm more than happy with greatly diminished load times.

 

[KirkSi]

Is this my twin?

If we were separated at birth then I hope we’re non-identical twins. I wouldn’t wish being identical to me on anyone

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Level Up!
What's better? More ram and slower ssd, or less ram and faster ssd?
Just some random numbers: 16GB and 7GB/s vs. 24GB and 3,5GB/s.

Likely neither. They'll just provide different ways of achieving the same results. I suppose in a real-world scenario, whichever one is closest to the multiplatform standard would be best. Se perhaps the more RAM, less speed, as that'll fit PC better, and the less RAM, more speed console might be optimised less. But if the filesystem is good enough, it might not make much difference to the devs workloads.

 

[MrFox]

Level Up!
What's better? More ram and slower ssd, or less ram and faster ssd?
Just some random numbers: 16GB and 7GB/s vs. 24GB and 3,5GB/s.

Considering the cost of gddr6, it's more like 16GB vs 17GB to make an equivalent BOM choice.

 

[Globalisateur]

Globalisateur u ok bro?

Yes, very well, thank you. I was just exhausted.

 

[N2O]

Sony is pushing RAM quantity?

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Sony is pushing RAM quantity?

I guess we'll find out. I'm hoping they've thrown in 2-4Gb of cheap DDR solely for the OS so all the good stuff is available for games.

 

[N2O]

Feel like I heard this before in early 2013, just this time side swapped.

 

[Esrever]

Assume you have to fill 5GB of ram to get a game going, 7GB/s and 3.5GB/s will barely be a noticeable difference. Also faster ram probably dominate performance vs faster SSD once the game is already running. Streaming data directly off disk is slow when compare to RAM whether you are talking about 7GB/s or 3.5GB/s The RAM will run at 500GB/s. If the assets aren't in RAM they will still need to be fetched. 7GB/s vs 3.5GB/s hitting storage likely isn't going to change much considering both are 2 order of magnitude slower..

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Assume you have to fill 5GB of ram to get a game going, 7GB/s and 3.5GB/s will barely be a noticeable difference.

If you focus on the raw storage bandwidth and not the whole I/O system, sure. Even the fastest SSDs in RAID array can't remove loading times from PC games. Mark Cerny has spoken of an optimised end-to-end storage and I/O solution.

The raw bandwidth of the storage is just one of the bottlenecks.

 

[Esrever]

If you focus on the raw storage bandwidth and not the whole I/O system, sure. Even the fastest SSDs in RAID array can't remove loading times from PC games. Mark Cerny has spoken of an optimised end-to-end storage and I/O solution.

The raw bandwidth of the storage is just one of the bottlenecks.

Unless he has some magic way to teleport bits off the SSD into the APU, the bandwidth is still going to be the number of bits that moves the data around. Sounds like bullshit PR talk.

 

[mpg1]

Methinks MS may remember this in releasing a possible higher end console first. They know the first 2 million are going to sell even at $500-$600. There's a way to take advantage of tha early adopter tax.

You'll almost certainly not get any games bundled with your console at launch.

 

[AbsoluteBeginner]

Seems like Ariel was first of Navi's and would explain "Navi was built for Sony rumors". Perhaps it was Sony that first started to work with AMD on Navi for next gen.

/* TARGET VEGA10
/* TARGET VEGA10_HBCC
/* TARGET RAVEN
/* TARGET VEGA12
/* TARGET VEGA20
/* TARGET ARIEL
/* TARGET NAVI10
/* TARGET MI100
/* TARGET NAVI12
/* TARGET NAVI14

Only unreleased chips here are Ariel and MI100.

 

[N2O]

You'll almost certainly not get any games bundled with your console at launch.

Well, MS have game pass this time, just put 3 months in the bundle and they will get bunch of games.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Assume you have to fill 5GB of ram to get a game going, 7GB/s and 3.5GB/s will barely be a noticeable difference. Also faster ram probably dominate performance vs faster SSD once the game is already running. Streaming data directly off disk is slow when compare to RAM whether you are talking about 7GB/s or 3.5GB/s

It doesn't matter if SSD is slower as long as it's fast enough, which is mostly about the access time. As discussed for 'megatexturing', the amount of data needed in RAM is actually very little. Let's say 4GB. You then have a couple GBs for cache and you can fill the whole world with varied detail on like 8 GBs. What everyone's used to is great gobs of RAM because HDDs are slow and can't stream effectively, but once storage is fast enough (which doesn't need to be as fast as RAM), the rendering paradigm can shift from 'everything in RAM' to 'ideal streaming'. Quite possibly we'll never need more than 16 GBs ever in a console because storage will be getting faster and faster.

As for whether Sony's solution can be faster in practice, possibly if the latency is that much slower on MS's solution, but given baseless rumours of MS having fabulous paging tech, I doubt there could be much in it.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Well, MS have game pass this time, just put 3 months in the bundle and they will get bunch of games.

They won't be next-gen games though, or MS would be throwing money away if they let all their new XBSX owners play all those new XBSX games on a free three-month Game Pass.

 

[mpg1]

Well, MS have game pass this time, just put 3 months in the bundle and they will get bunch of games.

Yeah and in some ways it's not as bad was in terms of launch day cost. You were always forced to buy a new game(s) for your console because the launch lineup was the entire library. Now though with BC out the gate there's thousands of games that will already work.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Unless he has some magic way to teleport bits off the SSD into the APU, the bandwidth is still going to be the number of bits that moves the data around. Sounds like bullshit PR talk.

Arthur C Clarke was famously quoted for saying "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

But it's not magic if your storage system, filesystem, controller and I/O chain are optimised to read massive amounts of smaller assets individually and decompress them ready for use by CPU and GPU compared to the convention of games being bundled as lots of massive packs of compressed assets, where there is an overhead of reading the pack, then picking the assets you want from it, then decompressing the asset before it can be used. What Mark Cerny has said supports this, as does some of Sony's own patents.

But we'll see.