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

8 core CPU with wide AVX is probably the best choice for that.

PhysX always was primarily a CPU thing, despite what marketing leads to believe. GPU was used mostly for eye candy like debris particles, or some cool smoke / fluid effects. (correct me if i'm wrong)
Recently there is support for rigid body physics on GPU in PhysX and other physics libs, but this often comes with compromises that affect accuracy. E.g. approximating shape with spheres for collisions, or even softer constraints.
GPUs could be used well for the solver, but collision detection is not so well suited for GPU execution model if you want to use analytic shapes (box, capsule, sphere, cylinder....) which cause execution divergence. (fine grained dispatch from GPU could help here too).

GPU physics would make more sense on console assuming faster CPU communication, but i would say we don't need it in general. Exception would be a game with huge number of bodies and low requirement on accuracy, but usually it's more interesting to have it the other way around. (robotics vs. lame stack of 100 boxes)

I have never heard of DirectPhysics :O
But in case you disagree with CPU physics being fine, what are your expectations from acceleration?

 

That's the bit that people liked though, and what the PhysX accelerator was created for, no?

 

I thought Ageias accelerator was about only accurate rigid body physics, not debris effects.
But after watching an old video i see i might be wrong. Destruction was the focus here, but i can't tell if it used 'accurate' physics for everything or additional low quality but fast 'eye candy' physics as well.
Still i don't see a need for further HW acc. nowadays. One could use CPU for accuracy and GPU for quantity at the same time.

GPU rigid bodies have been introduced to NV PhysX with version 3.4. So before that the GPU support was restricted to eye candy i guess. (PhysX is pretty much the only physics lib i have never used, so not sure about differences, details, and what really had GPU acceleration)
While checking this i found NV seemingly still offers the Ageia accelerator on the german page, haha https://www.nvidia.de/object/physx_accelerator_de.html

 

AMD is expected to leave GCN for their GPUs after NAVI. Is this going to cause some additional compatibility concerns for PS5 Pro/X2X ?

 

I was hoping that was gonna happen this gen but sadly it was not meant to be

 

Shouldn't for Xbox, they already support multiple GPUS over BC. And if Sony is committed, shouldn't for Sony.

 

It still is, if it is being used. I remember PlanetSide 2, it had PhysX support for a while, and it was really great to see. It changed about the whole game, no performance impact if you had a GPU capable/support PhysX.
Some videos on youtube for the ones who missed it. PhysX has been disabled in PS2 due to server stability i think it was, i played during the time it was enabled on a kepler (GTX680). Whatever people say about PhysX, i think it actually was a great feature that made a difference when actually used. More games have/had PhysX.

 

Well, I would like AMD to offer some sort of alternative to PhysX that's comparable in terms of performance and capabilities. I was expecting Microsoft to offer such a solution, at least for Direct X, when they purchased Havok. And then, a couple of years later they announce Direct Physics, so again, I expected it then. I know a lot of games that have PhysX support use it for eye candy over gameplay, but it's also a feature that I think drives graphics into next generation territory. I can't think of a single game that's really physics heavy that doesn't use the nVidia solution, and if both Microsoft and Sony stick with AMD, that's not a solution that is going to be available on consoles. Shifty's point about it being a GPU task now is valid, except that it's only on one vendor's GPUs and that's not the one that's in the console space. I don't care if they have to include a special physics accelerator or if they just start supporting GPU acceleration via Direct Physics, or find some other way. Honestly, I'm sort of waiting for the game that has PhysX support on PC and Switch but not on PS4 or Xbox One.

Basically what I'm saying is, go play any game with PhysX support on an nVidia GPU and you'll see stuff like cloth simulation, tons of debris and smoke that looks like smoke and compare that to what we got on Xbox One and PS4. Hell, Cryostasis came out in 2009 and had ice that melted into water that would flow across surfaces and around objects while the smaller droplets would pool up and slosh around as a larger puddle. It wasn't perfect, but it's still much better than anything I've seen this gen. That's what I want.

 

Immagine to drop both the cost of the HD and BlueRay reader... Spend that money saved instead on RAM buffering (64 giga) + small fast SD (128 giga)... Games on cartridges of maybe 32, 64 or 128 giga... The result is having extremely quick loading times... Online delivery is penalized but maybe Sony wants to build up a strong collaboration with GameStop and such going 180 degree from all online MS politics (as it seems).... You cannot more instantly play your online purchased games... You have to wait the download.... Maybe a premium priced console can have the 1 tera SSD instead of the 128 one .... Or maybe 256 can be a more reasonable basis for all....

 

Don't forget you would have to feed the ram cache each time you start the console... Na I don't see your solution being realistic...

 

I hear you, but i think you put your request to the wrong address. Hardware wise AMD has the same capabilities as NV. Anyone can implement all the features you want on any hardware. Unlike raytracing, there is nothing specialized to physics in NV GPUs and never was.
This can be done by game / middleware developers themselves, no need for a helping hand from AMD or Microsoft.

Personally i think physics simulation has more potential than photorealistic rendering or AR/VR, and the animation driven focus in games is the industries biggest failure. But it's not a hardware issue.
If you ask me what's the reason physics are so underutilized in games, it's two things:
Physics is hard and the usual practice 'fake it until it looks right' does not work as well as in graphics.
And second, engines like PhysX, Havok, Bullet etc. are somehow limited, which leads to the wrong assumption we can't do better.
Examples for the limitations / hacky solutions i see:
Dead ragdoll lying on a floor starts to jitter - need high sleep threshold to fix this.
Player holding objects, objects jitter on collisions - use a gravity gun forcefield effect to make the jitter look like intended.
Large mass ratio causes instability - give both the player and the vehicle a mass of 1.
Robotic simulation not robust (jitter, soft joints, weak motors or none at all, solver explosions) - use animation and scripting instead.

I say this with (dated) experience from those engines: My own, ODE, Havok, Bullet.
None of those allowed me to do the things i wanted, which is powered ragdolls and replacing character animation with simulation. (Natural Motion solves the problem by running their own solvers on top)
At a time i already gave up, i tried the Newton engine made by one man and surprise: It worked. Traditionally this engine prioritized accuracy over performance, but actually perf is good and comparable to the others. It was used in games like Penumbra, Amnesia, Soma.
(Penumbra has a big focus on physics and it's world is very believable / interactive - better than HL2 IMO. So i recommend it if you're curious. Feels similar to Cryostasis otherwise but no shooting.)

I have no experience with particles, but with cloth simulation. Those things surely are easier to do and current GPUs / APIs are well suited i would say.

 

PhysX goes open source.

That physics demo vid you linked to is next-gen, I agree, but it's also quite distracting regards the water IMO as it looks like gel, not water. Would be nice to have good water simulations though.

 

If not this what else ? Sony speaks of loading times 20 times less... this can be obtained only by huge RAM buffering.... Probably there gonna be a lot of cheap slow RAM... If you keep the consoloe powered probably also RAM may be keeped freezed and as you switch on it behaves exactly as a traditional mass storage... Actually this happens also in PS4 with the limited DDR ram in the system.... While the system is idle its powered.

So I see two PS5...
Base and Ultra....

- Same HW but 128 or 256 SSD (399)
- Same HW but 1 tera SSD + blue ray player 4K (549)...

The thing is only ULTRA owners can play old PS4 disk titles on new console... So you either forced to keep longer your old PS4-Console to play old Disk titles or buy the ULTRA version.... This at the end will limit the devaluation of used PS4, make a new cartridge market for PS5 that mostly don't run old PS4 disks so new remastered market for PS5 cartridges and such...

Sony don't want to fight against GameStop and such... Also people like to go in such shops and buy used games by talking with someone... Just crazy to think the all online approach can work....

Also cartridge will be writable so updates will be just stored there... The 128 or 256 giga SSD is used to keep the system informations and the Code of games you buy online ... And, of course, store the game session informations of all the games you played both on cartridge or online buyed...

Personally I play just one game at once and I think 90 per cent of people does the same...

So having even 128 giga ssd is fine for me....

The blaze loading is REALLY good....

I definitely discharge my idea of a revamped PS4-pro... The idea of Sony IMHO is to keep the base PS5 very affordable in price (and physical dimensions) so no need to have other cheap entry level HW... This gonna accomplished by used PS4

 

Personally I wouldn't be surprised if a lot time is wasted loading a game on all the decompression/conversion/initialisation dependent stages.

If you have the total IO bandwidth/latency besides multi-threading these operations which might need some effort why not decompress everything to the SSD itself and/or load the game as a preinitialised ram/gpu state snapshot itself.

IMHO the only way to really get the implied speed advantage.

 

We already have games that take almost that alone, then there's the OS and other necessary apps taking space. Also I'm pretty sure most people don't play just 1 game at a time

 

I believe the "no loading time" is a false thing. No doubt they're working on reducing them, which is good. But my guess is it can be achieved with existing hardware ie nvme ssd, (but with smarter usage since it's a closed system), and, maybe some tricks and improvements about how games are being packaged. Which can be awesome.

But Sony won't find a "magical" storage configuration/hardware. Hell, even the improve cpu horsepower could help a lot with loading time alone...

 

I think as dev kits are out, this is the time you can start calling the leaks pretty much what we are going to get.

So, ps5:
CPU: Zen 2 8/16 boost clock 3.2 (normal clock probs a conservative 2.4),
MEM: 20+ gb memory plus 4gb cheaper ram dedicated to the OS (Smart move considering the cluster f#'@$ with reserved ram on the PS4 (MS don't have this problem as they can write an OS properly),
GPU: 12.9 to 14ish TF navi based gpu with whatever sony had AMD specifically design.

X-box (the one that people care about)
CPU: Zen 2, probably indentical to the PS5 although I have read it won't have SMT enabled. As there are benchmarks out there confirming the 8 core Zen's perform better with it disabled in gaming this is probably a good thing in a console anyway.
MEM: 16 gb
GPU: ~12 TF

I think the CPU and GPU will be indentical, just with the Xbox lacking the specific hardware Sony designed with AMD (Guessing it's specific to assiting raytracing and would explain the extra floppage)

Anyway, I'm out of the game until someone release a game I need a console 4 (I'm looking at you Gran Turismo 7), they just cannot compete with my desktop.

As an aside, I think this is MS's last throw of the dice, if PS5 'wins' and I expect it will do if for no other reason than the market share of the PS4 is just so much bigger with people heavily invested in the ecosystem, I expect them to call it a day and start releasing games on Playstation. Game anywhere really has already made the first step towards them pulling out of the hardware market in my opinion. It will be a shame, but them mabye this will leave a space for Samsung to come in and deliver the last console anyone is ever going to need.

Anyway, take this as a the ramblings of a former PS fanboy (Now master race devotee) hoping to be pulled back in for some couch gaming at some point in the near future. Anyway, thanks to game anywhere, I am off to play Forza Horizon 4 with everything set to extreme\ultra, suck it console nerds

 

Their play go stuff was kind of magical in some games: Insert the Bluray and play the game in like 45 seconds in some cases. Magic is made of simple tricks.

 

PS5, code name Penn & Teller.

 

I think 12 or max 16 giga of fast RAM (HMB2 or gddr6) then 64 giga of slow RAM for mass storage buffering and maybe part of the OS.... I know double ram controller is needed... The thing is too much fast memory could create problems with limited bandwidth in the sense is not properly utilized so money wasted.. Sony's GPU don't believe is beyond 10 TF... Yes probably 128 giga SSD is too little... So 256 giga.