News & Rumours: Playstation 4/ Orbis *spin*

Status
Not open for further replies.
The PS3 chatpad is wireless. It has its own port to pair with the PS3 during setup.

A PS4 chatpad could do the same.
 
CD Projekt, the creators of The Witcher and gog.com are very happy with the PS4 and they are excited about the console, which they consider a high end PC.

Not only they define it as a high-end PC, performance wise, but they say it's going to make the life of developers much easier. Way to go, I think.

You can create even more tricks in easier to develop hardware, imho, and find some interesting possibilities too.

http://gamingbolt.com/witcher-3-dev-ps4-is-a-high-end-pc-cd-projekt-happy-with-new-architecture
 
It's a very capable box. Devs should show us quality work that excites us instead of showing quick port with pared down specs. :)

It doesn't really matter if a technique was implemented before. IMHO, it's *how* you implement and integrate the technologies together with art that matters. There should be a lot of interesting approaches with AMD's and Sony's new architecture.
 
It is always nice to read your opinions, patsu. Your posts help to encourage a better atmosphere in the forum.

Now that you mention it, the power of the machine, the new AMD technology and the customizations of Sony should give them an early edge when it comes to games created for the console by 1st party developers and 3rd party developers which use the PS4 as lead platform.

I don't expect the X720 falling behind so much, if at all, so the comparisons will be even more interesting next gen, with consoles and PCs being all of them powerful but different in their approach at the same time.

Cheers patsu
 
The connector besides the analog headset jack is called an "extension port" in the docs. I wouldn't be surprised it's simply power and digital i/o. Some types of microphones require power, and there are also noise-canceling headphones that need power too.

Maybe it's to power the fabled dual shock bracelets.. 10,000V when you get hit in game. :LOL:
 
The exact line from Sony has 3 items:
Ports – USB (Micro B), Extention Port, Stereo Headset Jack

From the hi-res pictures, the USB is on the back under the light bar and has a USB logo visible, the headset jack looks like a normal 1/8-inch, that leaves the rectangular connector as the "extension port", I don't think it's USB, it looks like a custom thing.
 
Gamasutra delivers the goods :)

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/191007/inside_the_playstation_4_with_mark_.php

"One thing we could have done is drop it down to 128-bit bus, which would drop the bandwidth to 88 gigabytes per second, and then have eDRAM on chip to bring the performance back up again," said Cerny. While that solution initially looked appealing to the team due to its ease of manufacturability, it was abandoned thanks to the complexity it would add for developers. "We did not want to create some kind of puzzle that the development community would have to solve in order to create their games. And so we stayed true to the philosophy of unified memory."

...

"I think you can appreciate how large our commitment to having a developer friendly architecture is in light of the fact that we could have made hardware with as much as a terabyte [Editor's note: 1000 gigabytes] of bandwidth to a small internal RAM, and still did not adopt that strategy," said Cerny. "I think that really shows our thinking the most clearly of anything."
Click to expand...

Dem's fighting words!!! :O

The three "major modifications" Sony did to the architecture to support this vision are as follows, in Cerny's words:

"First, we added another bus to the GPU that allows it to read directly from system memory or write directly to system memory, bypassing its own L1 and L2 caches. As a result, if the data that's being passed back and forth between CPU and GPU is small, you don't have issues with synchronization between them anymore. And by small, I just mean small in next-gen terms. We can pass almost 20 gigabytes a second down that bus. That's not very small in today’s terms -- it’s larger than the PCIe on most PCs!

"Next, to support the case where you want to use the GPU L2 cache simultaneously for both graphics processing and asynchronous compute, we have added a bit in the tags of the cache lines, we call it the 'volatile' bit. You can then selectively mark all accesses by compute as 'volatile,' and when it's time for compute to read from system memory, it can invalidate, selectively, the lines it uses in the L2. When it comes time to write back the results, it can write back selectively the lines that it uses. This innovation allows compute to use the GPU L2 cache and perform the required operations without significantly impacting the graphics operations going on at the same time -- in other words, it radically reduces the overhead of running compute and graphics together on the GPU."

Thirdly, said Cerny, "The original AMD GCN architecture allowed for one source of graphics commands, and two sources of compute commands. For PS4, we’ve worked with AMD to increase the limit to 64 sources of compute commands -- the idea is if you have some asynchronous compute you want to perform, you put commands in one of these 64 queues, and then there are multiple levels of arbitration in the hardware to determine what runs, how it runs, and when it runs, alongside the graphics that's in the system."
Click to expand...
 
Last edited by a moderator:
That is a very informative interview. They have teased out a few extra details from him that have filled in a few gaps.
 
PS4 Linux would have been perrrfect. Damn the dudes who hacked PS3 Linux. D^8 If they had waited, they could hack PS4 Linux instead. :D
 
There is a rumor that GT6 is coming out end of this year. Perhaps we will know the question about Logitech wheel compatibility on PS4 soon.
 
whome0 said:
No one has asked if we still can swap an internal hard drive, do Logitec USB steering wheels work.
Click to expand...

patsu said:
There is a rumor that GT6 is coming out end of this year. Perhaps we will know the question about Logitech wheel compatibility on PS4 soon.
Click to expand...

We already know it has USB 3 for its peripheral and controller ports (so no proprietary ports). Why would support for accessories be any different than it is now? Meaning support and drivers for any given peripheral (like a wheel) is game dependent. If you're trying to figure out if Drive Club, for example, will support your current G25 wheel then you would probably get a faster response by emailing Evolution and asking directly. Unless you're looking for some strange OS level driver support for wheels?

User hard drive swapping I am quite curious about, though.

EDIT

Evolution Contact Info
 
Last edited by a moderator:
They will have to write PS4 driver for it. Whether GT6 will run on PS4 (soon ? :)) is the real question.

EDIT: I am assuming it's similar to BSD driver model ?
 
patsu said:
PS4 Linux would have been perrrfect. Damn the dudes who hacked PS3 Linux. D^8 If they had waited, they could hack PS4 Linux instead. :D
Click to expand...

Speaking of which, the hardware that's included in the PS4 will make a very tempting target for Linux hackers. Not the hacker wannabes that just want to run pirated stuff. But the real hackers that like to play around with hardware and whatnot. Similar to how the original Xbox was such a tempting and irresistible target.\\

Sony (and Microsoft) will have to be on their A game when it comes to system security.

Regards,
SB
 
patsu said:
They will have to write PS4 driver for it. Whether GT6 will run on PS4 (soon ? :)) is the real question.

EDIT: I am assuming it's similar to BSD driver model ?
Click to expand...

They as in the vendor, Sony or the developer? I'm assuming the developer will handle any peripheral drivers independently for their game (likely working with the vendor). Probably building on whatever base level driver support is built into the OS. Regardless, whether Sony/Logitech have to build the driver into the PS4's OS or the developer has to do it independently, the question will in all likelihood boil down to "does X game support Y wheel?". Which is a matter of the developers choice. Unless I'm overlooking something.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top