That's exactly what I wanted to know. Will Mantle cover low level compute capability. I knew PS4 doesn't need Mantle per se. It has something "similar".
Fair enough.That's not compute replacing CPU. That's a programmable GPU doing graphics work.
I'm not sure what choice was made, given the limited information disclosed.
It's not like AMD doesn't have a large compute initiative in parallel with its graphics pipeline, one which Sony has work going into.
I think it could be helpful for writing an engine that uses Direct Compute if Mantle rolls a path for lower-level compute in the same graphics framework for developers.
The other option might be run it with HSA providing basis for the compute portion.
Mantle does seem be borrowing some of the queuing methods for kernel dispatch used for AMD's lower-level compute methods, so they might be complementary.
The unknown here is that the latency numbers are given in the context of an HSA engine, which is the low-level access a Mantle-type compute path would try to get to.
“Physics simulation, collision detection, ray casting for audio, decompression and the like. And these operations are fine grained meaning that there will be many small world simulation tasks running on the GPU simultaneously alongside rendering of the game scenes. So the concept is that as game developers learn to use these techniques later on in the console life cycle, we will see richer and even more interactive worlds,” Mark Cerny said at the time. It seems that Sucker Punch’s inFamous Second will be using the above mentioned feature of the PlayStation 4. Brian Fleming, one of the founders of Sucker Punch studios revealed that the inFamous Second Son’s particle effects is being directly compiled on the graphics chip and uses no CPU processing at all.
Wonder if we'll be able to see anything like this on consoles:
That's 2.1 minutes/frame and only the simulation.I imagine the computational power needed is mahoosive. I doubt a moderate sized GPU was driving that snow simulation, or anything close. More likely an insanely expensive compute farm was beavering away at the calculations, and quite possibly not in realtime (as CG work likes to pick visual targets that can't be rendered in realtime).
Yes, official pdf technical paper. The snowplough was the fastest anim to render at 2.1 seconds per frame. Although they aren't using GPGPU so they might find opportunity to accelerate that massively, we're not going to hit realtime, or anything like, for a good while yet.
Yeah, stoopid typo by me. Would need a 2.1x60x30(fps) = 3780x speedup. I don't think PS4's (or any) GPU can get a ~4000x speed increase over Disney Animation's render farm...That's 2.1 minutes/frame and only the simulation.