Next Gen GPU architecture GCN, RDNA, Navi 10/20 (PS5 Navi Hybrid, Xbox Navi Pure) *spawn*

[borntosoul]

People are too caught up in thinking Sony and MS give a damn what each other do. They have may effect each other in some ways, but that doesn't mean you base all the decision making around beating your opponent.

If we're being real, winning for Sony , MS and Nintendo, is making massive return on investment. They'll work together or individually to secure that income. Competition is only about securing more of it. If you aren't able to secure solid return on investment you'll leave the stage.

If MS didn't exist, Sony still needs to drive the next generation. The driving force for new generations and new hardware is to get the spending cycle to recur again. If Sony is eyeing profits we are near the tail end of the generation and so releasing a new device will cause more spending to happen.

Calculations for ROI is fairly straight forward. You look at the total TCV (total contract value) of a customer for Sony. Which can be calculated by the average revenue from the attach rate of games and services for say 6 years time in the Sony ecosystem. Once you're hitting the 6th year, your TCV is completed, and your projections for profits and revenue drop. So what better than to start another generation and re-calculate your project profits for another 6 years of TCV and start subtracting off any subsidies or costs required to gain a customer.

You take this concept and you look at how Sony positioned itself, a launch window filled with some of the most desired PS4 exclusives and being backwards compatible with their older library; they can effectively reduce their cost of acquisition to gain new customers by riding off the hype for the tail end of their generation. This will result to a roaring start on securing their next generation of profits during a time in which they can be 12 months ahead of their competition; meaning they have more ample time to gain new customers than they otherwise have to compete against MS for - since they are 12 months behind in hardware and their games still won't be ready yet.

Perhaps that strategy changed, I'm not sure. But to say this is an invalid or poor strategy seems far too focused on power being the main delivery agent for being the biggest driver of securing a base and therefore profits.

Agreed as it’s all dollars.. but on that note l was always against B/C, and my reason was if you bring out a new gen console then you have a few new gen games for on launch day and push selling them. but if it was B/C then you wouldn’t sell as many new games because people buying the new console may still be playing from their last gen library. So the transition to new games will be slower l thought.
A lot of early adopters kept the last console like myself. I still own the ps3 which my daughter uses for a blu ray and Netflix.

But my current thinking is a little different, I’m still not totally convinced but there are some interesting points.

Now what we effectively because of B/C, is that people who have the money would upgrade to the new machine and still play with their friends who haven’t upgraded yet. AND people who don’t quite have the money can trade up to the new machine and keep their old games library.
How this is going to effect new sales of ps4 slim l don’t know.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I don't know why some are still making theories with a PS5 2019 launch. They have officialy stated that they won't release it before April 2020. But what about MS now ? They still said nothing officially so they could still launch their next box in 2019. Not that I think they would.

Yeah, MS in 2019 seems unlikely, IMO. Their most recent data point (XBO-X launch) would give 2020 as a possibility with a tease this year.

Considering that Sony have talked a little about PS5 but without any concrete details, I expect something similar from MS at E3 if for no other reason than to give people something to talk about other than the PS5 for the next year.

Either company releasing something this year would be premature, IMO, even if they may have originally wanted to release this year.

Looking at early AMD roadmaps for Navi, it was likely that both companies expected an earlier launch for Navi (2018) than what is actually happening. That would have allowed for a mature GPU core based on Navi tech in a 2019 console. Both companies are probably thus delayed from original internal targets.

If some form of RT support was planned for Navi, it's also possible that when MS started work on DXR for Windows, they expected AMD to release Navi in a similar timeframe to NVidia's Turing.

All speculation, of course, but I believe both companies have been delayed because AMD is late with Navi.

Regards,
SB

 

[borntosoul]

4Pro was not a reset button.


Momentum & PS4 overall sales trending towards the 100M mark (at the time when planning & decisions were to be made).

edit: i.e. consider the atypical high rate of sales for 6 years meaning shorter time to market saturation and the need for such decisions to be made years in advance.

Nope, planing is years in advance, and the ps4 pro was done purely for 4K and no other reason. Because they had to support it and so did ms.
Releasing close the the ps4 pro doesn’t work because you need a few years for tech to evolve and ideas to play out before you release something that has no significant reason to upgrade and that would make it a flop. A billion dollar flop. Consoles are all about hype. Momentum Sony has already.

 

[snarfbot]

Whats the deal with igp's? The new Intel graphics are supposed to be at least on par with the current 3700u and such, has anything leaked out about the next gen?

 

[itsmydamnation]

Whats the deal with igp's? The new Intel graphics are supposed to be at least on par with the current 3700u and such, has anything leaked out about the next gen?

You mean the ones with twice the memory bandwidth thax to LPDDR4?

 

[snarfbot]

You mean the ones with twice the memory bandwidth thax to LPDDR4?

I dunno what they're doing under the hood, all I saw was some slides on anandtech showing them performing within a few % of the 3700u, although they erroneously labeled it a 25watt cpu.

 

[AlNom]

Releasing close the the ps4 pro doesn’t work because you need a few years for tech to evolve and ideas to play out before you release something that has no significant reason to upgrade and that would make it a flop. A billion dollar flop. Consoles are all about hype.

The vast majority of owners are on the base consoles.

Momentum Sony has already.

The idea is to keep it going strong as the market becomes saturated with your current gen.

edit:

i.e. Sony would have their own data about the annual sales and total number of users, and so what PS3 did across 8-10 years, PS4 is accomplishing at a much faster rate. Given the mass exodus between the PS3 and PS4 generations, it would not seem unreasonable to want to tailor another console to drop not long after their current product reaches a similar plateau. Then the problem is that a console launch does indeed take a long time to put together, so they have to make very informed decisions on where to go.

 

[borntosoul]

The vast majority of owners are on the base consoles.


The idea is to keep it going strong as the market becomes saturated with your current gen.

Yes, but they don’t need saturation, they need strength, otherwise if they could have released in 2019 they would but they can’t. So all points are valid and are not worth arguing over. End of story.

Edit. Sorry that came out grumpy, but what I’m saying is my points are valid because 2019 is not happening which is what I’ve been saying for 3 years and because of the reasons I’ve mentioned.
Yes the ps4 is growing fast but so are the games and also the money generated from them.
There is no reason whatsoever to release in 2019. Timing is everything and I’m sure when the stars align ( meaning tech / software and manufacturing ) for Sony they bring out the ps5 .

 

[AlNom]

Yes, but they don’t need saturation, they need strength, otherwise if they could have released in 2019 they would but they can’t.

Sure. A lot of things would make a 2020 launch more amenable between the delays/cost/complexity in fab node, architectural design (R&D), inflated memory prices circa 2016-2018, and the timing of software.

So all points are valid and are not worth arguing over. End of story.

No need to be hostile.

 

[borntosoul]

Sure. A lot of things would make a 2020 launch more amenable between the delays/cost/complexity in fab node, architectural design (R&D), inflated memory prices circa 2016-2018, and the timing of software.


No need to be hostile.

Soz, l realise that came out grumpy, not my intention. Just me being a little blunt.

 

[itsmydamnation]

I dunno what they're doing under the hood, all I saw was some slides on anandtech showing them performing within a few % of the 3700u, although they erroneously labeled it a 25watt cpu.

Then yes they compared a CPU with JEDEC spec DDR4-2400 to one with LPDDR4X-3733 so you know having like 55% memory bandwidth and Vega 10 is memory bandwidth limited.

 

[MBTP]

Do you guys know why PS3 is not emulated on PS4/PRO?
I think it's related to the major difference in archtecture CPU and GPU, but primarily on GPU.
I believe that even with PS4 GPU been " overall more powerfull" than PS3 GPU, in certain aspects it might be slower, or it might be faster but not enough to run the game at 1080p on the PS4 with decent frametimes.
Some games run very well on AMD GPUs and some games run very well on Nvidia GPUs, generally those games explore the archtectural advantages of each. One famous point is the efficency of nvidia's with tesselation, for example.
So if a full RDNA means an NVIDIA like arch, it could mean that if there is not enough power overhead, some PS4 games could lose performance on that rebalancing of the GPU arch so an intermediary move would be the ideal.

 

[iroboto]

Do you guys know why PS3 is not emulated on PS4/PRO?
I think it's related to the major difference in archtecture CPU and GPU, but primarily on GPU.
I believe that even with PS4 GPU been " overall more powerfull" than PS3 GPU, in certain aspects it might be slower, or it might be faster but not enough to run the game at 1080p on the PS4 with decent frametimes.
Some games run very well on AMD GPUs and some games run very well on Nvidia GPUs, generally those games explore the archtectural advantages of each. One famous point is the efficency of nvidia's with tesselation, for example.
So if a full RDNA means an NVIDIA like arch, it could mean that if there is not enough power overhead, some PS4 games could lose performance on that rebalancing of the GPU arch so an intermediary move would be the ideal.

Primarily CPU is the reason for their BC woes. Cell architecture was born on another continent from X86 ones.

 

[snarfbot]

Then yes they compared a CPU with JEDEC spec DDR4-2400 to one with LPDDR4X-3733 so you know having like 55% memory bandwidth and Vega 10 is memory bandwidth limited.

Lol ahh gotcha pretty deceptive not surprising though.

Still hopefully AMD has something other than a die shrunk vega 10, even if they dont strictly need it.

 

[itsmydamnation]

Lol ahh gotcha pretty deceptive not surprising though.

Still hopefully AMD has something other than a die shrunk vega 10, even if they dont strictly need it.

It's 2020 for the 7nm Navi/zen2 (maybe it Will be zen2+ or zen3) based apu.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Maybe he's referring to the following: Microsoft had a $500 Bill of Materials for a lower performance system compared to Sony's offering because of decisions with Kinect.

Again, that's cost not performance. boipucci said "Sony wouldn't make the Wiiu mistake of compromising next gen performance for pure hw emulation". This is clearly referring to hardware performance given the context of hardware emulation, i.e. backwards compatibility.

Arguably decisions on cost affect decisions on performance.

You can argue anything on the internet but I think most people can differentiate between performance and cost, nor is their correlation between them. Relative to PS4, Switch has low performance and a high price and equivalent high sales. Relative to PS4, Xbox One had high price, low performance and low sales. I'm using a binary high/low just to illustrate the lack of meaningful correlation.

I can’t see how Sony was aiming for 2019 It’s common sense, why would Sony release the ps5 so soon after the ps4 pro ?

Why would Sony release PS4 Pro (2016) just three years after PS4 (2013). If PS4 Pro was a "mid-generation" system, wouldn't that have made 2019 the logical launch year (six years after PS4), for the next console?

4Pro was not a reset button.

Nor is PS5 it seems as it doesn't require you to reset your game library.

 

[Globalisateur]

I don't think there is any need to go over in detail about what the guy said/did but here are the Tweets:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1121687268123529216

https://twitter.com/x/status/1121724713162526721

My original point to Globalisateur was that Sony have not officially talked about PS5 date. The IR Day graph is proof of that.

Who has first explained the PS4 and its specs in 2013 at the global Playstation event in front of Playstation boss ? Was it official ?

Who has announced PS5 with some specs on April 16th 2019 with a 2020+ released date ? Was it official ?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Why would Sony release PS4 Pro (2016) just three years after PS4 (2013). If PS4 Pro was a "mid-generation" system, wouldn't that have made 2019 the logical launch year (six years after PS4), for the next console?

That's a bit of a stretch. Mid doesn't need be exact. We have 'mid-life' not at the mid-point of our lives, not knowing how long we're actually going to live. Mid gen refresh could comfortably be 3 years in and 4 or 5 years out and still be a mid-gen device rather than a 3/8ths generation update.

Nor is PS5 it seems as it doesn't require you to reset your game library.

Hardware wise. PS5 is and has always been a new generation in the traditional sense for Sony. It's only recently that they confirmed BC; perhaps they were waiting on emulators and whatnot to be solid enough before finally committing to it, and were always ready to launch without if beneficial? A mid-gen device using the same basic architecture could release anywhere within a generation without affecting the next-gen being a true next-gen. So, let's say 4Pro doesn't come out until 30 months before PS5, and is that much more powerful now as a result. Does that change PS5? No, because this hypothetical 4Pro is still without SSD, without raytracing, without next-gen hardware features. It's games will be PS4 games from the PS4 generation just in higher resolutions and better framerates than the 2016 4Pro we got. In an alternate timeline, 2013 PS4 > 2018 4Pro > 2020 PS5, 4Pro fits just as it does in the current predicted timeline of 2013 PS4 > 2016 4Pro > 2020 PS5. that PS5 also being possible in 2019, or 2021. A later 4Pro would have had different sales of course, with more people being likely to wait until PS5 then upgrade. May be a dumb move to wait that long for a refresh. But due to the difference between generational architectures, there's nothing about mid-gen refreshes that dictates, or even implies, anything about next-gen release timelines.

 

[bitsandbytes]

Who has first explained the PS4 and its specs in 2013 at the global Playstation event in front of Playstation boss ? Was it official ?

Mark Cerny and yes.

Who has announced PS5 with some specs on April 16th 2019 with a 2020+ released date ? Was it official ?

Mark Cerny for the specs part, Peter Rubin for the date part (Mark not quoted about date). Specs given are official.

The graph from the IR Day is official and explicit. Sony haven't talked about date yet, irrespective of when that will be.

You might think this is being pedantic but they are important (and deliberate I guess) subtleties. Sony want to give an impression without being bound by it?

 

[iroboto]

You might think this is being pedantic but they are important (and deliberate I guess) subtleties. Sony want to give an impression without being bound by it?

Sounds a bit like a fork. Sony indirectly hinted to a 2020 launch through unofficial means (perhaps as a way to shut down leaks/prying from journalists and control their own agents from saying anything with a canned response) while threatening a possible 2019 release if you look at the board and take all of these rumours as related truth.

I mean, I was adamant that Sony missed and 2020 was definitely their release date but I am no longer as confident. The Wired article back in April could viewed as being as effective as a conference teaser reveal by MS this E3; followed by a full reveal and pre-order now all within 12 months of the Wired article. So while I debated against other members here on this point, I think there has been enough information (unverified info) to concede some room here. I know some people like to work in absolutes, but I got a feed on OG XBO process leading into be final year and it’s largely not written about. So unverified info will likely stay unverified.

When I think about how they managed ray tracing, lots of questions there but the only major paths with the little time they had is to either back port from Navi 20 which is an assumption that Navi 20 has RT support; or get it directly from a vendor that is guaranteed to have their IP complete, and thus powerVR. Considering that powerVR is complete whereas perhaps Navi 20 could continue to slide in their dates, if Sony wanted to force a 2019 release it would be more straightforward to go with powerVR and guarantee deadlines are met.

As for skipping E3, perhaps the landscape has changed enough to release a new console in the same fashion as 4Pro and so they don’t need or want E3 to buy their developers more time to work without needing to demo. Or to demo later in the year having more time with the SDKs.

Still haven’t heard more leaks about PS5 though but MS is still also very locked up 7 days from their conference.