Could PlayStation 4 breathe new life into Software Based Rendering?

Offloading vertex shader work to spu's is common practise on the PS3. Crysis 2 was a notable exception.

 

Yap, in this case the fragment shader is also a passthrough.

The SPUs are also commonly used in post-processing. The original MLAA on PS3 did "everything" on the SPUs. The later PhyreEngine version does the final blend on RSX instead.

 

Reading through this thread was like people purposefully misunderstood the concept. But I am afraid that, like Infamous 3 will show as well, PS4 exclusives will give a new definition to software based rendering. I expect GT7 to have volumetric particle effects like nobody has ever seen before.

 

Resogun basically is the game I've been waiting to play ever since blasting tunnels through the voxel-environments in Ken Silverman's Voxlap demo almost a decade ago. There's just so much fun and fascination in real-time voxel based destruction, it's seriously addicting.

Given what that Voxlap demo achieved with just a few GFlops of computing power back in 2003, I'd really love to see what is possible on a modern 2TFlops console. If they ever made a voxel-based FPS with TRULY destructible environments (not that half-baked Red Faction stuff, as much fun as it was), I'd probably go mad with excitement.

Just imagine a multiplayer FPS game in which you can basically re-shape the map in real-time, blasting dynamically generated tunnels below enemy lines, carving new entrances into the enemy's base by destroying walls etc., creating trenches in the ground for the sake of cover etc.

Think of it as "Minecraft-Reversed" with powerful guns and way more, smaller cubes to dynamically destroy during each round. What made epic multiplayer maps such as CS_dust so great was the wealth of options and possible routes to choose from when making your way to the bomb spots. Now imagine that, apart from the usual options, you could just go ahead and blast entirely new paths through such a map, destroy existing entrances, and (in general) shape the battlefield according to your specific strategy for each individual "round".

It obviously would have to be realized in a more arcade-style of way with an arsenal of RPG-like weaponary etc. - but it would make for some great, innovative gameplay.

Just download that very old voxlap demo and "play" it for a few minutes to realize how much silly fun a game based around such an engine could be (if done properly) ...

EDIT: To cut a long story short: SONY should just make a "Forsaken" type of game with an improved "Voxlap"-like engine and completely destuctible environments - it would be a financial smash-hit and a great tech demo for the PS4's compute capabilities at the same time.

 

There no "new definition" of software rendering, software rendering is just software rendering.
If you can't even comprehend what a directional light is different from a point light, you don't know what the jargons that you are using means.

PS4 is nothing more than a mediocre consumer device that just matches the today's mainstream graphics device, to put it in perspective, it has less than half of the flops compared to the leading class GPU in terms of raw power. It's not happening.

 

The butthurt hardware geek whining about the new gaming consoles being weak is getting way, WAY long in the tooth by now! While the hardware may be mediocre, being a fixed hardware platform means software will become increasingly optimized for said hardware, as we've seen for PS360 and every other console before it. If you showed final-generation PS3 games to people at PS3 launch you'd scarcely believe they ran on the same hardware. The same will happen to PS4 as well.

Of course it will!

 

I think you are mixing up the different software gens (new algorithms, optimization) on a console platform with what "software rendering" means. The fact that the rendering are still need to go through the pipeline as triangles, fixed function or programmable, make it not pure software rendering.

Real-time rendering has always been about finding the cheapest way to fake the most realistic looking (assuming that's the goal, aside for artistically styling). Newer hardware will provide more/better ways to fake it, making it look better (this is what you are talking about).

But it doesn't change that fact that it's still faked via fixed functions in various ways, and fixed function hardware is always cheaper than a general purpose processor. One day the convergence would probably happen, but it's not the PS4.

 

In fact you can even argue that any effect done today with real-time rendering can be done with CPU, but you just won't get the frame rate to make it feasible.

 

For AAA games I'd agree it would never happen. But for Indie games there is an opportunity to go pure software, or more specifically an opportunity for the first game to do so. That's because the first game that goes that route will get lots of free press if anything for being such a curiosity. Strictly speaking you're right in that it may not be considered 100% software rendering since even if they used the alu's purely for compute and had no shader code at all, they still may as well use the texture units for something rather than waste them and unless they draw the pixels themselves they will still have to flow through the gpu hardware pipeline, or use gpu hardware scaling or whatever. But you could argue that an indie game that totally forgoes shaders and uses gpu alu's purely for compute is 90% of the way there to being a software renderer. For the purposes of a small indie game it could definitely happen this gen because as I said everyone would be talking about it due to the high nerd factor.

 

Joker, you should do it. Write Nude Poker Game 2.0 for the next gen!

 

Lol, yeah I'm sure the console owners would welcome me with open arms

 

Ahem... My arms are actually extended right now.

 

I think you're just mixed up period, as I wasn't talking about anything of the sort you describe. Quoting error, perhaps?

 

Polygon rasterization is still going to be the baseline for the foreseeable future because it's such a damn practical and convenient method to render realtime graphics... Not to mention, the entire development toolchain is built upon this concept; modelling, skinning, texturing, bones, animation, world building...everything.

 

Not seeing any actual signs of it, TBH.