Middle Generation Console Upgrade Discussion [Scorpio, 4Pro]

[itsmydamnation]

I'm not so sure about the Zen CPU part (I hope its true), but I think the system will ship with 12gb of gddr5 and not 8gb.

I think they see that memory size and bandwidth is extremely important in hitting high resolutions in textures and pixels. The last thing they would want is to be bandwidth bound.

The biggest possible boon for AMD could be to get an 8 core Zen in Scorpio ( i dont know how likely that is but at the ~360mm sq it is possible) . The reason its a boon is with a 30watt power budget for CPU thats around the perf of a 7700K. When those games get ported to PC all of a sudden the clock advantage of Intels dual and Quad core chips doesn't matter. If it is just 4 Zen cores or still jaguar based then it will be business as usual in terms of game ports.

 

[Jay]

The biggest possible boon for AMD could be to get an 8 core Zen in Scorpio ( i dont know how likely that is but at the ~360mm sq it is possible) . The reason its a boon is with a 30watt power budget for CPU thats around the perf of a 7700K. When those games get ported to PC all of a sudden the clock advantage of Intels dual and Quad core chips doesn't matter. If it is just 4 Zen cores or still jaguar based then it will be business as usual in terms of game ports.

If it does have zen, then I'd expect it to be 8core 8 thread variety clocked at around the 2ghz(or bellow). But you never know.
It would benefit amd like having gpu's in consoles. Marketing, and optimisation on pc side.
Although if most of the optimisations are around smt, then the optimisation benefits wouldn't be as great if it was the layout I proposed.
It would be a pretty big win for both sides amd and ms, but there's a lot of other considerations.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Does anyone really optimise for PC CPU type?

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Does anyone really optimise for PC CPU type?

To an extent. Compilers generally ten to favor Intel's architecture just because it's the most prevalent. That tends to put AMDs CPUs at a disadvantage in performance critical situations. Beyond that there's various optimizations for core count. Most consumer apps being optimized for 1-2 cores. 4 core's are sometimes optimized for, and anything beyond that is rare except in the professional space.

Some game developers have done work to make their games run well on more than 4 cores, but again it's fairly rare. Before the current console gen, it was rare for any PC game to take advantage of more than 1-2 cores.

Regards,
SB

 

[Shifty Geezer]

By type, I meant particular CPU model. I thought devs just used the compiler and built for x86, and it was down to the CPU to make it run quickly. I can't imagine devs will write code that maps to AMD Ryzen CPUs better than Intel, for example, so much as write vector code or whatever and it'll run. The only optimisation I imagine happening is they performance profile on their own PC and that'll show how its own CPU (i7!) performs.

 

[chris1515]

Does anyone really optimise for PC CPU type?

https://www.google.ch/amp/s/depline...6/03/18/slides-taming-the-jaguar-gdc2016/amp/

Yes sometimes

 

[Shifty Geezer]

That's for console, no? Is that code then used in the PC space providing better support for games running on AMD APUs? The posit was that Ryzen in Scorpio would be good for AMD because it'd get devs optimising for Ryzen which would result in better performance on PC. My expectation is that the PC version is compiled for PC (Intel) without any particular attention to CPU architecture because it has to run across many different architectures on PC.

 

[chris1515]

That's for console, no? Is that code then used in the PC space providing better support for games running on AMD APUs? The posit was that Ryzen in Scorpio would be good for AMD because it'd get devs optimising for Ryzen which would result in better performance on PC. My expectation is that the PC version is compiled for PC (Intel) without any particular attention to CPU architecture because it has to run across many different architectures on PC.

For console, for multiplateform title it depends. Some studios have one team for PC version and one team for console version and this time the console have the same CPU...

 

[chris1515]

In a 2015 presentation about Sunset Overdrive, Insomniac did not use AVX because they were thinking the title will maybe launch on PC. They used SSE instructions...

 

[Jay]

https://www.google.ch/amp/s/depline...6/03/18/slides-taming-the-jaguar-gdc2016/amp/

Yes sometimes

I believe amd did one this year to do with optimising for Ryzen, so it probably is a thing.

I think that @sebbbi in one of the Ryzan threads has mentioned about optimising somewhat for cpu's.

Could be to do with the way caching works, smt, lds's?
May be able to get a lot more performance out of the lower end ryzen cpus, than just throwing years of intel optimised/friendly code at it.

 

[mpg1]

Well if Scorpio/Windows store UWP game development sounds as closely tied as Microsoft is going for then yeah ...maybe there would be some spillover benefits to how well games perform on Ryzen in PC environment. Maybe getting Zen inside Scorpio would have been a strategic move by AMD...

 

[Rodéric]

AVX is not very interesting on consoles, and not widely available enough on PC...

 

[Jay]

This was the presentation I was thinking of regarding ryzen optimisation
http://schedule.gdconf.com/session/optimizing-for-amd-ryzen-cpu-presented-by-amd

 

[dobwal]

This article mentions "True 4K" not "Native 4K"...it's a matter of semantics but it could mean checkerboard 2160p...

Except that MS has used "True 4K" to distinguish native from checkerboard or upscale 4K.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

That's for console, no? Is that code then used in the PC space providing better support for games running on AMD APUs? The posit was that Ryzen in Scorpio would be good for AMD because it'd get devs optimising for Ryzen which would result in better performance on PC. My expectation is that the PC version is compiled for PC (Intel) without any particular attention to CPU architecture because it has to run across many different architectures on PC.

They will to varying degree's target a set of vector instructions. For example, Sebbbi mentioned in another thread how No Man's Sky won't run on older AMD processors (I believe he mentioned Phenom and older, could be wrong, I wasn't paying too much attention when I read it) due to not supporting a certain vector instruction set (I don't recall which it used). You'd have to go much older Intel CPUs before the cutoff.

Some developers may have different CPU branches depending on vector instructions supported by CPUs similar to how they may have different rendering paths.

Regards,
SB

 

[3dilettante]

They will to varying degree's target a set of vector instructions. For example, Sebbbi mentioned in another thread how No Man's Sky won't run on older AMD processors (I believe he mentioned Phenom and older, could be wrong, I wasn't paying too much attention when I read it) due to not supporting a certain vector instruction set (I don't recall which it used). You'd have to go much older Intel CPUs before the cutoff.

It seems as if the PC version's vector support matched the PS4's Jaguar instruction set. SSE 4.1 in particular seems to have stood out as a point of contention, and that was adopted with Bulldozer and Jaguar.

That and any number of console-like features/inflexibility makes me wonder how much of the PC release depended on code developed and tested under the auspices of getting the PS4 version to work. The latter was alleged to be getting more help from Sony for development and QA, and the devs apparently didn't resource much PC QA at all until after launch.

 

[Clukos]

On the topic of checkerboard rendering, Dice/Frostbite just had a presentation about it: http://www.frostbite.com/2017/03/4k-checkerboard-in-battlefield-1-and-mass-effect-andromeda/

 

[Rangers]

By type, I meant particular CPU model. I thought devs just used the compiler and built for x86, and it was down to the CPU to make it run quickly. I can't imagine devs will write code that maps to AMD Ryzen CPUs better than Intel, for example, so much as write vector code or whatever and it'll run. The only optimisation I imagine happening is they performance profile on their own PC and that'll show how its own CPU (i7!) performs.

Apparently from reading Ryzen reviews quite a few apps are optimized for Intel CPU's and not AMD. This makes it hard for AMD to compete. AMD can build a great architecture in a vacuum and Intel will still perform better just because software is written towards them. Although you cant blame the developers too much, Intel has overwhelming share, is the 800lb Gorilla for decades, and AMD hasn't been competitive for a while.

The above seems to apply more towards general purpose software than games though that I can tell.

 

[mpg1]

those Frostbite charts bode well for a lot games hitting 2160p CB on Scorpio at very least...

 

[Clukos]

those Frostbite charts bode well for a lot games hitting 2160p CB on Scorpio at very least...

This is what I'm thinking for third parties, X1/Ps4 situation reversed, 1800c vs 2160c in most cases. At least that makes sense for scaling a game from X1 all the way up to Scorpio across 4 different platforms. Of course, first parties (and some third parties like ID [my guess]) will push both the Pro and Scorpio more.

Edit: Some quick math
1800c = 1600x1800 = 2,880,000 | 2160c = 1920x2160 = 4,147,200
4,147,200/2,880,000 = 1.44
6 tflops / 4.2 tflops = 1.42

Xbox/Ps4
900p = 1600x900 = 1,440,000 | 1080p = 1920x1080 = 2,073,600
2,073,600/1,440,000 = 1.44 (ring a bell? )
1.84 tflops / 1.31 tflops = 1.40

My guess is that if MS want to do "True 4K" with Scorpio they'd have to sacrifice more than what the Ps4 Pro will for 1800p checkerboard or even 2160p checkerboard, which doesn't make sense whatsoever (both for consumers and marketing). Also, all this nonsense is really good for a single reason, just messing up fanboy warrior logic, they are basically reversing the marketing terms so each "side" will have to adjust and use the "opposition" arguments against them, fun times!