Next Generation Hardware Speculation with a Technical Spin [pre E3 2019]

[HBRU]

The use of cards makes sense also in the view of a portable all solid state PS5... Probably games can be sold on premium expensive, fast cards and cheap slow budget others... I see many games are already sold in two/three versions.... Anyway what makes the loading fast can only be some sort of RAM buffering.... What else ?!?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I guess we have a different view of what constitutes next gen.

Next gen in the console forum means next (full) iteration of console hardware. PC hardware and APIs are constantly evolving and don't come in generations per se; you've something new every year or two in that space.

 

[Xbat]

No chance of a cart type delivery system in my opinion. Just to expensive. For me the question is mechanical and flash or just flash for storage.

 

[anexanhume]

No chance of a cart type delivery system in my opinion. Just to expensive. For me the question is mechanical and flash or just flash for storage.

Carts are the antithesis of the digital movement publishers are pushing, and SSDs are here to obviate the need for them in the first place.

 

[Jay]

Next gen in the console forum means next (full) iteration of console hardware. PC hardware and APIs are constantly evolving and don't come in generations per se; you've something new every year or two in that space.

I see Stadia much like Scarlett/xcloud implementation, won't be changing every year or so, maybe mid gen upgrade. Which could be 3 years.
Basically console in the cloud, not PC.

So comparing how it may do RTRT with local based consoles, dev leaks, performance, implementation, felt applicable.
If it takes off, it could be the base console spec for multiplats in regards to gpu, cpu spec.

Is it a remote console or remote pc type of model will be interesting as I never thought of possibility as PC model prior to you saying it.
So I'll shut up :smile2:

 

[BRiT]

Technical Thread for Stadia and other Streaming Platforms: https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/...rms-and-technology-psnow-stadia-xcloud.61142/

General Industry Thread for Stadia: https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/stadia-google-game-streaming-platform-2019.60817/

Thread for Stadia Pricing Model: https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/pricing-models-for-google-game-streaming-service-stadia.61141/

 

[Scott_Arm]

No chance of a cart type delivery system in my opinion. Just to expensive. For me the question is mechanical and flash or just flash for storage.

I really can't see it being two stage. It goes against the statements they've made and how they're starting to market the ps5. The hardware can only be as fast as the weakest link. If you're caching from a slow drive to a fast one, there will always be times when you are waiting. I don't see any way around that. If you want to play a game that isn't cached yet, you wait. The time it takes to copy a 60+GB game from a slow disc to a fast one is non trivial.

If they have a custom interface, io controller for their ssd, I wouldn't be surprised to see external storage or internal storage come as an official Playstation accessory. You'll still be able to upgrade, just limited to an official expansion drive, not the drive of your choosing. If the drive is as fast as advertised, I think people would accept that concession.

 

[BRiT]

Sony's fast start technology has a game able to boot up and play with just a few Gigs or less. That wont take long at all to cache.

Why the insistence on needing all 60+ Gigs?

 

[MrFox]

Sony's fast start technology has a game able to boot up and play with just a few Gigs or less. That wont take long at all to cache.

Why the insistence on needing all 60+ Gigs?

It works only for starting a new game, like the first 30min of gameplay. If you want to continue a saved game it needs to install the rest. Specially open world games which have the whole map unlocked.

If it has enough space for the last 3 or 4 games it's a manageable rotation.

 

[OCASM]

I know you’re probably joking but no thanks! PS2 assets can stay in the 90’s.

PS2 was released after the 90's!

 

[Xbat]

I really can't see it being two stage. It goes against the statements they've made and how they're starting to market the ps5. The hardware can only be as fast as the weakest link. If you're caching from a slow drive to a fast one, there will always be times when you are waiting.

Yup that's the way I see it too. I think it will have a TB of storage.

 

[London Geezer]

PS2 was released after the 90's!

That whole decade is a big blur

 

[Shortbread]

The use of cards makes sense also in the view of a portable all solid state PS5... Probably games can be sold on premium expensive, fast cards and cheap slow budget others... I see many games are already sold in two/three versions.... Anyway what makes the loading fast can only be some sort of RAM buffering.... What else ?!?

I think Sony may have come-up with a way of virtualizing installed games into a VM or container. If the software stack is some sort of virtual game image management, this would allow for faster game startups and transitioning. In a sense, the game VM/container doesn't need to cold-boot like a traditional game (similar to a standalone OS / PC booting up), but more so a click to run a instantaneous game-VM that's already provisioned with all the necessary hardware configurations (similar to a PC VM). By having an ultra-fast SSD just improves this method.

This is just a possibility from a PC-guy who runs a lot of virtual apps (that's instantaneous) within our business environment.

 

[Deleted member 91098]

A return of cartridges would be cool. If they were not so crazy expensive (compared to SSDs and especially compared to BluRays) then a cartridge based on Optane DIMMs would allow interesting designs. Consoles could then only have a small very high performance memory for stuff that requires those specs plus a small SSD dedicated to the OS.

Games would be on cartridges with similiar characteristics as Optane DIMMs (only 3 times slower latency and competitive bandwidth to DRAM) and would not only serve as storage for the game data but as the main memory for the game as well. If a game developer has the need for excessive amounts of main memory they can just use a bigger cartridge to get it. Basically a console update on a game by game basis.

Sorry for the totaly unrealistic power fantasy but I like cartridges.

I have a supposedly blazing fast m2 ssd, but in practice it does not work that way for games. If Sony has a custom solution that delivers real results in eliminating load times and streaming issues, I'd say that'll be the killer feature of next gen. I'd choose that over a better gpu any day.

Yes, I can't agree more, and for me the same is true (to a lesser extent) when it comes to the CPU.

Currently games are designed with a 5400-7200 rpm HDD as the baseline in mind so we can't really see the full potential our SSDs could have. The jump from HDD to SATA SSD is nice but from SATA to NVMe it's barely noticeable even though the latency should be around 3 times better and peak read/write performance 6-7 times depending on the drive.

Considering that NVMe SSDs have 30 to 100 times sequential peak read and write speeds, much better random write/read performance and 70-150 times better latency compared to HDDs I'm really curios to see what devs come up with once NVMe SSDs are the new baseline.

If we take the increase we usualy had with new console generations (16 times+ more FLOPs, RAM amount etc.) then the SSD is the only part this time around that can be considered next gen.

 

[function]

Apologies if this has already been linked to (double so if I got it from here), but thought this GDDR6 pricing thing from early this year was interesting.

https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/gddr6-significantly-more-expensive-than-gddr5.html

Depending on how fast GDDR6 prices come down, a GDDR5 base machine (e.g. 'Lockhart') might benefit from a saving of several tens of dollars on BOM. If you're going with a two tier system, you really want that base system to be as cheap as possible.

X1X has 6TF of GPU and 320 GB/s, PS4 Pro has 4.2TF and 224 GB/s. A 4TF Lockhart with 256 GB/s, improved BW efficiency from being a generation on, and the kind of memory controller optimisations MS specified for X1X (more channels, more banks, lower latency) might make 256 GB/s a very workable bandwidth even with a faster CPU.

 

[temesgen]

Carts are the antithesis of the digital movement publishers are pushing, and SSDs are here to obviate the need for them in the first place.

Exactly, we're getting rid of slow Blu Ray disk but you can buy a fast card or a slower version... Nevermind games today have frequent updates and patches.

Edit: nevermind the need to swap out carts, this isn't happening

 

[Vega86]

Apologies if this has already been linked to (double so if I got it from here), but thought this GDDR6 pricing thing from early this year was interesting.

https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/gddr6-significantly-more-expensive-than-gddr5.html

Depending on how fast GDDR6 prices come down, a GDDR5 base machine (e.g. 'Lockhart') might benefit from a saving of several tens of dollars on BOM. If you're going with a two tier system, you really want that base system to be as cheap as possible.

X1X has 6TF of GPU and 320 GB/s, PS4 Pro has 4.2TF and 224 GB/s. A 4TF Lockhart with 256 GB/s, improved BW efficiency from being a generation on, and the kind of memory controller optimisations MS specified for X1X (more channels, more banks, lower latency) might make 256 GB/s a very workable bandwidth even with a faster CPU.

What do you think the general target resolution of a next gen 4 TF base console?

native 1080p
1440p
CB 2K
CB 4K
?

I think if they push 4K for the 4TF base unit, the games would only look slighly better than current gen except the load times and lod are much, much better and able to hit 60 FPS unless maybe they target 1080p. I guess the extra ram could help with better AI and more stuff on screen but limited to the quality of a 4TF machine.

It feels like games right now are designed more with the PS4 as the base with Xbox One having worse performance and resolution.

If the 4TF machine has the grunt of a little more than 3 PS4s with far better RAM, CPU and SSD and target 1080p/1440p, I guess a generational leap can still feel substantial but I do wonder how much we'd be missing out if the base consoles are much closer to about the performance of current gen 12 TF and target CB 4K.

 

[BRiT]

Zen3 with 3way SMT discussion is in the Rumor thread since AMD hasn't even talked about that yet and the rumor monger is questionable.

 

[see colon]

I really hope one of these consoles includes some form of physics acceleration. I've been playing some older PC games lately with PhysX support, and while they look a bit dated asset wise, the physics still look beyond anything I've seen on console. If both systems are using AMD, PhysX would obviously be out of the question, but it's been 2 years since Microsoft announced DirectPhysics, and as far as I know there has been no software that uses it, at least not in any form that's close to the showcases from 10 year old PhysX titles.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

PhysX was a great fit for GPUs, making the PhysX accelerator redundant and why it was dropped. I think the main problem was it was accelerator/nVidia exclusive making it not worth devs time to optimise for.