I think we will see a lot of jobs move to the gpu over the life of the console much like we saw things being move onto the SPU in cell.
Good read!
I hope not! The GPU is already midrange and it does not need more power sucked from it.
I think we will see a lot of jobs move to the gpu over the life of the console much like we saw things being move onto the SPU in cell.
Good read!
I hope not! The GPU is already midrange and it does not need more power sucked from it.
The GPU can't be fully utilized on graphics alone. They'll slot in some compute tasks whenever they can thanks to the 8 ACE.
There is no significant extra power that can be used this way. The extra power is minimal. I can almost guarantee you developers will be using compute in ways that use gpu resources that otherwise could have been used for graphics. They will do so because the cpu is so underpowered. My guess is maybe there is an extra five percent of free gpu time that can be used for compute before you have to start taking away power that could be used for graphics. It is a shame that this game has to run on such an underpowered cpu.
they will use cycles when the gpu would normally be stalled & running compute at that time it's not taking anything from the graphics.
From what I have read, there are normally not as many of these cycles as we would hope. GPUs are already very efficent and at most there are a small number of these free cycles. My guess is maybe five percent of GPU time. This will not be enough for developers, so they will leech graphics power.
What is very interesting is that the developer says that the GDDR5 memory really gives the system "its wings", and lauds the immense 176GB/s of bandwidth available. However, it's not a bottomless pit of unlimited throughput - efforts still need to be made to use small pixel formats in order to maximise performance. Bearing in mind that the vast, unified memory pool of high-bandwidth RAM is one of the key advantages PS4 has over PC and the next-gen Xbox, it'll be interesting to see how multi-platform projects cope.
I found that part interesting, if GG are already maxing out the 176GB/s GDDR5, multiplats are going to struggle to match it on PC (for the time being) and Durango.
So devs might have to use lower res textures on Durango as they only have 68GB/s to work with (I don't think the 32MB of ESRAM would help much with texture streaming?)
Why would they? Multiplat devs would typically target the lowest common specs...I guess this is what they have learned this gen with PS360.
I found that part interesting, if GG are already maxing out the 176GB/s GDDR5, multiplats are going to struggle to match it on PC (for the time being) and Durango.
So devs might have to use lower res textures on Durango as they only have 68GB/s to work with (I don't think the 32MB of ESRAM would help much with texture streaming?)
What a PC with a discrete GPU may not match that easily, is the (for KZ4 relatively small so far) amount of 128MB of RAM shared by the GPU and CPU. This will allow lower latency access than on traditional PC architectures (where this has to go over PCIe and is usually done with a page locked area in host memory which isn't known for best memory performance characteristics neither).Yeah, KZ4 isn't tapping the extended RAM yet, so there's nothing on show that PCs can't match and surpass.
What a PC with a discrete GPU may not match that easily, is the (for KZ4 relatively small so far) amount of 128MB of RAM shared by the GPU and CPU. This will allow lower latency access than on traditional PC architectures (where this has to go over PCIe and is usually done with a page locked area in host memory which isn't known for best memory performance characteristics neither).
No doubt PC can/will match and surpass PS4 but how many games require 3GB of video memory on PC nowadays?