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

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Regarding the RT hardware on PS5, I think we should look at what Mark Cerny is and what he isn't.

He is Sony's console system architect and hardware enthusiast. He is not a PR guy (even though this interview was a PR move obviously).

That said, historically Cerny has been generally conservative when talking about big numbers and features, and focuses a lot more on features with significant practical results. He could have boasted to no end about the PS4 Pro's 8.6TFLOPs FP16, yet he only mentioned that in a loose sentence. A PR guy would have boasted about those almost 9TFLOPs to no end. OTOH, he talked a lot about async compute, which was later confirmed as very important for consoles by other developers.
If he mentioned RT by name, then one of two things is happening:
1 - They're using a "pure compute" RT implementation that is very efficient and performant;
2 - There's dedicated hardware for RT in the PS5 (but not necessarily in all Navi chips) that makes RT very efficient and performant.


There's also the fact that AMD always gave really nice answers whenever they had interviewers asking when they'd get RT hardware like nvidia's RTX line.
The easy way out would have been "nvidia's RTX is too slow for proper" and "there are virtually no games using it". Yet all they said was "yeah RT is really cool and we're working with devs to make it right".
That left me the impression that they didn't want to trash talk RT to avoid compromising products coming in a near future (PC or console).


And I don't see Cerny cheating by using a patched game which would also defeat the purpose of his demonstration and make it invalid. He has never done anything remotely similar in the past.

I have little doubt that the Spiderman demo was patched to take advantage of the faster storage, at least in what relates to streaming content to RAM/VRAM.

About 2 years ago I upgraded my system to have 64GB of RAM (quad-channel DDR3 at 1600MHz in a X79 platform). Using a ~40GB RAM drive, in synthetic benchmarks I get up to 7.5GB/s regardless of file size.

Back then I thought if I ran my games from the RAM drive, I'd get instantaneous loading times.
In practice, I didn't. At least not with the game I tried by back, which were AFAIR Witcher 3, Dragon Age Inquisition and Dying Light, among others.

Turns out most games, when paired with very fast storage seem to be bottlenecked by the CPU instead. Even worse, in some games like Dying Light they seemed to be using a hopeless single CPU thread to decompress/decrypt the data into the RAM, so when playing multiplayer I'd often wait more than my friends who had faster CPUs and slower SATA SSDs.

So just throwing a faster storage into the mix isn't enough to make loading times that much faster.
It's probably using the faster storage, together with some other optimizations like GPGPU decompression/decryption or using many CPU threads perhaps with dedicated instructions.

Though I wouldn't call that "cheating". Cheating would be e.g. using lower quality assets that would mean less data to transfer, or keeping those assets in the RAM without telling the journalist. I don't think he did that.
 
I wouldn't consider it "cheating" if the OS natively caches data in extra ram, nor would I call it "cheating" if the game was patched to do so explicitly. It's still the overall experience that is greatly enhanced. The reason to point out those possibilities is to expand the discussion about how the experiences can be improved, not to belittle or discredit them. The overall point he was trying to get across was the improved gamer experience. It doesn't matter how it's done for the gamer. It only matters when discussion possibilities.
 
I wouldn't consider it "cheating" if the OS natively caches data in extra ram, nor would I call it "cheating" if the game was patched to do so explicitly. It's still the overall experience that is greatly enhanced. The reason to point out those possibilities is to expand the discussion about how the experiences can be improved, not to belittle or discredit them. The overall point he was trying to get across was the improved gamer experience. It doesn't matter how it's done for the gamer. It only matters when discussion possibilities.
They were talking about having SSD in PS5 for PS5 games not for PS4 games on PS5, It was all about HDD speed and finding solutions to have instant loadings from HDD (or SSD) traditionnal storage. Caching the whole level on the GDDR6 ram would be cheating and lying in the context of the discussion.

You are trying to discredit the whole Cerny demonstration by implying that it would be normal that he cheats. But that would be lying. I know they do that regularly on the Microsoft side when they talk (or demo) about their future products so maybe some are getting used to it, but Cerny isn't some kind of salesman eager to say anything to sell his hardware. He has never done it in the past and as a leader architect (not salesman) he could have big trouble if he lied.
 
Posted this over at RA and got a response in the affirmative from one of the believed insiders.

The following patent is associated with Mark S. Grossman, lead GPU architect of Xbox


http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20180364944.pdf


HBMMS.png



Lots of good stuff on Variable Rate Shading coming from Mr. Grossman

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20190005712.pdf

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/10152819.pdf


Texture filtering

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/WO2018151870A1.pdf


Depth-aware reprojection (for HMD)


http://www.freepatentsonline.com/10129523.pdf


Tile-based texture operations


http://www.freepatentsonline.com/8587602.pdf


He is a former AMD engineer, so you can find him on lots of cross-fire multi-GPU patents as well.


A tweet for some context

 
You are trying to discredit the whole Cerny demonstration by implying that it would be normal that he cheats. But that would be lying. I know they do that regularly on the Microsoft side when they talk (or demo) about their future products so maybe some are getting used to it, but Cerny isn't some kind of salesman eager to say anything to sell his hardware. He has never done it in the past and as a leader architect (not salesman) he could have big trouble if he lied.

Very technical, this.
 
Posted this over at RA and got a response in the affirmative from one of the believed insiders.

The following patent is associated with Mark S. Grossman, lead GPU architect of Xbox


http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20180364944.pdf


HBMMS.png



Lots of good stuff on Variable Rate Shading coming from Mr. Grossman

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20190005712.pdf

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/10152819.pdf


Texture filtering

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/WO2018151870A1.pdf


Depth-aware reprojection (for HMD)


http://www.freepatentsonline.com/10129523.pdf


Tile-based texture operations


http://www.freepatentsonline.com/8587602.pdf


He is a former AMD engineer, so you can find him on lots of cross-fire multi-GPU patents as well.


A tweet for some context


I like it better without the tweet. Yikes.
 
Just plugging in real fast ssd does almost nothing to load times compared to regular slow ssd. It has to be designed in starting from low level details like drivers, filesystem, (multicore) decompression and then lastly in game engine optimizations. This makes life on pc side frustrating, despite crazy hw and ramdisk things cannot be accelerate much due to supporting lowest common denominator. Maybe consoles push nvme like ssd's and using multicore decompression into main stream.

finalfantasty14-game-load-time.png

https://www.legitreviews.com/game-load-time-benchmarking-shootout-six-ssds-one-hdd_204468
 
Just plugging in real fast ssd does almost nothing to load times compared to regular slow ssd. It has to be designed in starting from low level details like drivers, filesystem, (multicore) decompression and then lastly in game engine optimizations. This makes life on pc side frustrating, despite crazy hw and ramdisk things cannot be accelerate much due to supporting lowest common denominator. Maybe consoles push nvme like ssd's and using multicore decompression into main stream.
Yeah. It's one area consoles may lead PCs for a number of years. Something like Dreams could likely be designed with 'infinite' level size allowing for complete level streaming for UGC, without needing to worry about the stuff typical streaming has to. Probably quite a small impact in the grand scheme of things, but it'll be nice if consoles manage to get some 'closed box' advantages still.
 
In an interview with Mike Ybarra, he was asked about improving install time and load time (in reference to sony). His answer was that they are working on it but they don't want to require the devs to have to do anything, otherwise it won't be used.

A fully transparent method precludes a small flash area which would require the devs to tag what needs to be in the high speed storage, and what needs to be there first. Streaming assets in real time needs to get a working game under the worst case fetch time, so it can only be guaranteed by having the entire game there. A space just big enough for one entire game would need to wait for the full install every time someone switch game. This in unworkable without at least the devs tagging data the same way ps4 games have a segmented install and play while installling. The game and engine have to be designed around this.

Maybe sony is putting this out officially trying to get third parties to ask MS to reconsider, because if one platform allows very high speed asset streaming and the other doesn't. Sony won't get any third parties to use this. It's going to be used only by first parties.
 
In an interview with Mike Ybarra, he was asked about improving install time and load time (in reference to sony). His answer was that they are working on it but they don't want to require the devs to have to do anything, otherwise it won't be used.

A fully transparent method precludes a small flash area which would require the devs to tag what needs to be in the high speed storage, and what needs to be there first. Streaming assets in real time needs to get a working game under the worst case fetch time, so it can only be guaranteed by having the entire game there. A space just big enough for one entire game would need to wait for the full install every time someone switch game. This in unworkable without at least the devs tagging data the same way ps4 games have a segmented install and play while installling. The game and engine have to be designed around this.

Maybe sony is putting this out officially trying to get third parties to ask MS to reconsider, because if one platform allows very high speed asset streaming and the other doesn't. Sony won't get any third parties to use this. It's going to be used only by first parties.


From the rumors Xbox Scarlett and PS5(Digitalfoundry video) have 1TB SSD.

Do you have a link on the interview?
 
In an interview with Mike Ybarra, he was asked about improving install time and load time (in reference to sony). His answer was that they are working on it but they don't want to require the devs to have to do anything, otherwise it won't be used.

A fully transparent method precludes a small flash area which would require the devs to tag what needs to be in the high speed storage, and what needs to be there first. Streaming assets in real time needs to get a working game under the worst case fetch time, so it can only be guaranteed by having the entire game there. A space just big enough for one entire game would need to wait for the full install every time someone switch game. This in unworkable without at least the devs tagging data the same way ps4 games have a segmented install and play while installling. The game and engine have to be designed around this.

Maybe sony is putting this out officially trying to get third parties to ask MS to reconsider, because if one platform allows very high speed asset streaming and the other doesn't. Sony won't get any third parties to use this. It's going to be used only by first parties.

Why not just have the data needed to run get auto-tagged on access during pre-release testing? If not by this method specifically, there's almost certainly some way to automate this. Developers having to do it manually seems archaic.
 
From thee rumors Xbox Scarlett and PS5(Digitalfoundry video) have 1TB SSD.

Do you have a link on the interview?
I'll post back if I find it, I watched a million stuff yesterday, it was on youtube, some sort of podcast or google hangout, not a official interview from the big publications.

None of rumors have any credibility so far about storage configuration, so I keep my prediction intact :LOL:
 
Why not just have the data needed to run get auto-tagged on access during pre-release testing? If not by this method specifically, there's almost certainly some way to automate this. Developers having to do it manually seems archaic.

MS was already using some Machine Learning to do this last year (2018) in relations to digital Downloads and Fast Start. If they had success with that, they could expand that further.

Sony already requires developers to do some tagging of assets when they build their games. It's maybe not named or described exactly like this but it does exist. It's in how they bundle the game because there are different segments and the segments are ordered. It's how Sony Devs can get their games to start so quickly from Digital Download and installation from disc.

I'm fairly certain there's already a B3D thread about all this.

And here it is...

B3D Thread: https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/...soft-intelligent-delivery.60370/#post-2035096

MS Page: https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-one/faststart
 
There was 2 things I was hoping for when we was talking about scorpio and I got neither.
  1. New texture formats, some have been around prior to current gen consoles.
  2. Layered storage solution. Intergeated Solid State of some sorts. I said at the time I'd swap some TFlops for it. Always call it tiered as in my mind would be more than just caching.

I don't expect new texture formats, given up on that, even for next gen. Would be presently surprised.

I'm glad that Cerney has confirmed some form of SS solution, as I don't think any next gen console is viable with just HDD.
During scorpio discussion, I was saying could snapshot memory upto 5 games, and 4 apps into SS, for instant loading, then 10gb cached data per game, rest of storage would be combination of allowing OS to cache or under dev control or combination. Outlined more, but that's not important.

Now with things like HBCC I could see more elegant solutions.
All I know is no form of SS would be a deal breaker, but a tiered solution could probably work for most people under most circumstances. 1TB of SS is a big cost, but in the end its about balance, and that's only one way to do it, and may be the route taken. The other isn't faking or lieing.
 
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