Did sony navi *spin*
- Thread starter mpg1
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oh not that bullsh*t again...
D
Deleted member 13524
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AFAICS, that article doesn't state that Navi is exclusive to the PS5.
It states that Sony's demands for features on Navi made AMD allocate 2/3rds of RTG's engineering man-hours towards Navi's development, and that resulted in less manpower to optimize the Vega architecture, hence Vega's disappointing performance (like the 1.4Ghz power efficiency wall, no real software stack for NGG, etc.).
I don't know if all PS5-specific features are coming to Radeon Navi (most of PS4 features like TruAudio, increased ACE count for Async Compute, etc. did end up on GCN2 and up), but there will definitely be Navi for PC.
Some have contested that article here, though.
I believe Jason Evangelho did talk to industry insiders, but I don't know if his understanding on AMD's R&D procedures is deep enough to interpret correctly whatever he heard.
Amd would never commit suicide, instead they are improving and improving.
In fact those PS4 features where allready present on the R9 290 before the official PS4 launch.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/7457/the-radeon-r9-290x-review
Navi will probally be out for pc before the PS5 is here. Should give us some nice preview of what to expect. It perhaps will be like last, a mid-end Navi in the consoles, with reasonable power/performance figures.
D
Deleted member 13524
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Yes, and in the Bonaire HD7790 several months before that.
I'm assuming PS4's GPU was finalized much earlier and the SoC in production long before Hawaii or even Bonaire. Sony needed around 5 million PS4 units to be on the shelves in November.
I doubt AMD ever reached close to 5 million Hawaii GPUs sold, within the lifetimes of the 290 and 390 series combined. The PS4 family OTOH just surpassed 91 million units sold.
The volume for gaming consoles is on a whole other level compared to discrete GPUs, which would be a good indicator for Lisa Su to order RTG to focus on making Sony happy, despite hurting Vega's performance.
Which is good for the PC GPU market aswell, as Navi probally will see the light there too, perhaps in a higher-end part.
Begs the question, does a GPU/CPU manufacturer as AMD make more money out of consoles then pc gpu/cpu market? I can think AMD gets more profit out of their pc gpu's which are much more expensive.
This is exactly why anyone shouldn't buy into leaks when evidence contradicts them.
Info about an upcoming GPU usually leaks months before in open sources. Namely: Linux patches (Mesa, kernel drivers, etc.), Windows driver bundles, LLVM backend repo, ROCm repo, PCIe validation report, various PCI IDs appearing everywhere, sample cargo shipping logs, benchmark databases containing sample benches, etc.
Prior the CES there was only a single remark in Windows drivers and a strangely leaked PCI ID.
My guess-work understanding of their semi-custom unit is that 3rd parties probably just access a catalogue of IP blocks that RTG already has in the pipe, whether they're fully implemented or not in a complete product (desktop/mobile GPU) is immaterial. For things that have yet to see a PC product, they probably have to do more work, and that's where I see the prioritization occurring in terms of R&D. IIRC, even Cerny describes that a bit when Neo was launching.
Things like more ACEs really isn't that unfathomable from a flexible design point of view (just as more CUs wouldn't be difficult to imagine), so it's a little nutty to associate a 3rd party being responsible for it (such a novel expansion of an idea wouldn't be patentable in itself!). Let's be realistic - a bigger desktop GPU was going to happen anyway, and having more queues would have been an obvious expansion of GCN to help feed the CUs the compute cous-cous-queues-queues.
Even take the double rate FP16, which serves the deep learning market, something that would have been in the planning stages for years; did Sony speed things up for implementation? maybe. Since then we have yet to see that feature beyond their Vega lines targeting HPC/workstations, so understandably, it may have been a little lower on the stripper pole for shoving it into the rest of their consumer market R&D. Maybe.
Cernly, Sony went a little above and beyond with the checkerboard material, and they notably do have patents for these, probably because it wasn't even in the RTG planning.
Ike Turner
Veteran
What?? This sentence sounds like a PR quote haha
The thought that the likes of Sony has much to offer AMD in terms of profound GPU design insights seems rather far-fetched.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Which outside of their first party titles gets very little use, I'm curious to see whether they include or expand upon it in the PS5, or if it'll be left to the wayside as a footnote associated with the PS4-P.
Considering the amount of effort it takes to utilize it, it isn't surprising that multiplatform developers prefer to either roll their own platform agnostic version of checkerboarding (or similar tech) or continue to just brute force render at 1 to 1 resolution for the framebuffer.
If it was instead a standard feature/IP block available to all AMD GPU and semi-custom licensees then I'd imagine it might actually see more widespread adoption.
Thinking about this another way, it implies that much of what Sony wanted in a semi-custom GPU was already available as standard IP blocks available to anyone wanting a semi-custom GPU from AMD, as otherwise Sony likely would have patented it to prevent others from using it, similar to what they did with Checkerboarding.
Regards,
SB
The idea that a company with 25 years of insight into making market leading game hardware and software have nothing to contribute to GPU design is cartoonishly naive.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
You mean like AMD, NV, and Intel? Sony hasn't designed hardware components better than those 3 for gaming in almost 2 decades. Hence why Sony stopped trying to design their own hardware components. Their last mostly in house design (PS3) almost ended up in contributing to the company almost going bankrupt. It wasn't the only reason, but it was a big factor.
Yes, they do have things to contribute, but not on the same level as the designers at AMD or NV especially. Which doesn't mean they can't come up with something novel (their version of Checkerboarding, for example which almost no one else wants to use).
Regards,
SB
DmitryKo
Veteran
Last time I checked, Sony had no such overwhelming competence in designing dedicated graphics hardware.
PlayStation and PlayStation 2 used 3rd-party CPUs with custom vector coprocessors to handle graphics tasks, PlayStation 3 used Cell SPE vector coprocessors with a modified GeForce 7800GTX (G70), and PlayStation 4/Pro uses either a custom Radeon HD7800 (Bonaire XT) or a RX 480 (Ellesmere XT).
PlayStation and PlayStation 2 used 3rd-party CPUs with custom vector coprocessors to handle graphics tasks, PlayStation 3 used Cell SPE vector coprocessors with a modified GeForce 7800GTX (G70), and PlayStation 4/Pro uses either a custom Radeon HD7800 (Bonaire XT) or a RX 480 (Ellesmere XT).
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Would you care to cite any recent patents by Sony pertaining to 3D graphics that would indicate R&D effort of such intensity as to bring major, architecture-defining insights to AMD's drawing board?
ID buffer is successfully used in a few multiplat big games like the 2 last tomb raider games, The Witcher 3 and some COD games.
Pro has a couple more custom hardware features than ID buffer (not talking about the VEGA stuff). Pro has gradient adjust and PS invoke. When you add the volatile bit also found on PS4, it's clear that Sony like adding more and more custom hardware stuff in their GPUs.
I wouldn't be surprised to see plenty of others customized stuff on Navi GPU only found on PS5. They may not design whole GPU architectures, but they do design (or co-design) small stuff that can help graphics rendering in their games.
I don't know, can you cite any games AMD have created as sophisticated as God of War, Detroit, The Last of Us Part II, Dreams, Ghosts of Tsushima, etc? The purpose of the hardware is to run the software and the intersection between the two is an area where Sony's expertise is world class.
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