Next Generation Hardware Speculation with a Technical Spin [post E3 2019, pre GDC 2020] [XBSX, PS5]

[chris1515]

Reading this it seems to me than Sony and MS decided to take the GPU workload on a specialized chip because it works better for certain tasks and no need to partition the GPU or to have graphics take priority over audio. I suppose all the codec part and OS service probably use the DSP and MS told they worked with Audio middleware provider to support the chip, I suppose the same for Sony and they bought AudioKinetics which solve the support problem.

EDIT: I heard the same months ago about the decision of Sony to have a 3d audio chip.

Xbox studio Ninja Theory’s audio team told VGC they were ‘extremely excited’ to finally have hardware power dedicated to their discipline.

Series X’s dedicated audio chip will mean they no longer have to sacrifice sound in order to facilitate other parts of their projects, they said.

I am not surprised at all and Carmack is a rendering guy.

 

[manux]

Btw. Carmack has pretty much forever argued against fixed function if there is generic option in market. In audio case one could claim ray tracing accelerator+shaders/cpu is the generic option. I still remember all the ps2 and ps3 bashing carmack did. It's not like his view has changed from the time he was active game developer.

 

[iroboto]

I think at first I figured high latency audio wasn’t an issue. But people who do aim and reaction tests for FPS found that players that had audio cues responded much faster.

Having low latency audio is an absolute must in the competitive apace.

 

[chris1515]

Btw. Carmack has pretty much forever argued against fixed function if there is generic option in market. In audio case one could claim ray tracing accelerator+shaders/cpu is the generic option. I still remember all the ps2 and ps3 bashing carmack did. It's not like his view has changed from the time he was active game developer.

The reality at the end is the audio will be the sacrifice for other priorities with the generic option. Here it will be something standard, no one can say to we need more power and someone will decide to sacrifice audio.

 

[manux]

What I'm really hoping for audio is that there would be some vr games that take audio as seriously as graphics. VR experiences is the place where I can believe much better 3d positional and environment based audio would make real difference. That said vr is still such a niche that I'm not holding my breath. Maybe something like next gen gran turismo tries to do something special for audio and that would benefit vr but I'll believe it when I hear it.

I don't have the energy to dig it up but oculus with the lead of carmack did a lot of research into audio in vr context. Especially in HRTF to make the audio perfect on per use basis. This is future tech but based on the oculus talks there is some magic that could eventually be done to make the audio in vr completely believable and localized in space. They had internal demo where the users couldn't distinguish between the real(moving in space) audio versus the audio generated in vr but that required per user configuration in HRTF.

 

[anexanhume]

So what exactly did you mean when you wrote:



Is carmack somehow in spotlight and tweeting/argumenting/... actively about gaming? If he tweets once a year about some gaming related topic and that gets some people upset isn't that pretty much wanting to silence him so tweets go from 1 to zero.

You are conflating the amount of weight his opinion holds versus his right to free speech. I am expressing my opinion on the former and explicitly stating that there is no implied statement on the latter.

 

[DavidGraham]

particle, clothes simulation maybe fluid) it was never used in AAA and because of the weak Jaguar physics in-game were better on PS3/360.

GPU particles was very common among AAA games like Doom and Call Of Duty. Though they were of the screen space variety.

 

[PSman1700]

Carmack hasn't developed a game since Rage, which wasn't even in this console generation. I don't think he deserves to be held in the same technical esteem when it comes to games as he once was. There are other reasons I wish he would drop out of the spotlight, but that's beyond the scope of this thread.

He has said things before that are abit 'strange'.

 

[chris1515]

GPU particles was very common among AAA games like Doom and Call Of Duty. Though they were of the screen space variety.

I speak about rigid body physics, Resoguns had GPU particles, Infamous second son too but no rigid body physics like the Havok demo.

 

[Globalisateur]

I speak about rigid body physics, Resoguns had GPU particles, Infamous second son too but no rigid body physics like the Havok demo.

Resogun has tons of physics applied to the objects. The environment is destructible (during the level) and at the end the whole level falls into pieces like in the Havok demo.

 

[chris1515]

Resogun has tons of physics applied to the objects. The environment is destructible (during the level) and at the end the whole level falls into pieces like in the Havok demo.

I speak about AAA games, Claybook has tons of GPGPU Physics too

EDIT: At least Housemarque told they will keep the GPGPU particles engine and include it inside UE4 for their first AAA game.

 

[PSman1700]

Physics have been largely ignored it seems this generation, with more capable hardware we might see it in use. PlanetSide 2's physics was the most impressive so far, a Sony game none the less, before they removed it for some reason (netcode?). All those physics going on in large battles was something else, and that online. GTX670 or up where required i think.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Audio hardware is more of a no-brainer to me than RT hardware. 90% of games are garanteed to have at least half a dozen audio channels going off sinultaneously 90% of the time. And very few, if not none at all, devs are about to come up with some new way of doing audio. Game audio has been a pretty standardised "solved" problem for decades. I mean, there are different levels of fancyness in how a game decides which samples to play and their properties (volume, pitch modulation, reverb, speed, etc) but the actual playback of the samples is what I think can easily be HW accelerated with very little wasted sillicon. I just don't think we need hundreds of voices. If a game wants to go thar far, then it can of course do some of the audio in software and feed that software mix to one of the HW channels.

Isn't it funny how our visual senses can tolerate and even enjoy non-realistic visuals, but our audio has to be realistic?

 

[Proelite]

If Ninja Theory is excited about Xsx's audio chip, it probably means it's much better than SHAPE.

 

[milk]

Isn't it funny how our visual senses can tolerate and even enjoy non-realistic visuals, but our audio has to be realistic?

I don't know, there are plenty games with synth-like sfx, or the thousands of indies indies with chip-tune music. Also, I'd classify many AAA games sound design as very stylized. Gears is the first to come to mind.

 

[mrcorbo]

Edit: Removed - Misunderstood the point.

 

[RDGoodla]

In previous generations Sony have tried unique memory configurations for consoles:

PS1 EDO DRAM
PS2 Rambus DRAM and EDRAM
PSV wide-band VRAM
PS4 unified GDDR5 pool
PS4 Pro GDDR5 + DDR3

What else can Sony use?

IMO unified 16GB GDDR6 is not the most efficient and Sony tends to try special configurations.
For example

16GB GDDR6 for GPU
8GB DDR4 for CPU / OS & Apps

How about wide-band stacked RAM like PSVITA?

 

[mrcorbo]

In previous generations Sony have tried unique memory configurations for consoles:

PS1 EDO DRAM
PS2 Rambus DRAM and EDRAM
PSV wide-band VRAM
PS4 unified GDDR5 pool
PS4 Pro GDDR5 + DDR3

What else can Sony use?

IMO unified 16GB GDDR6 is not the most efficient and Sony tends to try special configurations.
For example

16GB GDDR6 for GPU
8GB DDR4 for CPU / OS & Apps

How about wide-band stacked RAM like PSVITA?

Why do you think 16GB of unified GDDR6 would be inefficient?

 

[RDGoodla]

Why do you think 16GB of unified GDDR6 would be inefficient?

With Unified GDDR6 pool only, several GBs of GDDR6 are saved for OS even YouTube/Netflix.
IMO it’s inefficient.

 

[Gubbi]

With Unified GDDR6 pool only, several GBs of GDDR6 are saved for OS even YouTube/Netflix.
IMO it’s inefficient.

Your DDR4 will need a seperate bus which takes pins and power which could have been used for a wider GDDR6 bus and thus a faster system.

Cheers