NGGP: NextGen Garbage Pile (aka: No one reads the topics or stays on topic) *spawn*

[Inuhanyou]

But how much use is the RAM going to be if you only have the bandwidth to access 1-2GB a frame?

I think 3.5 GB of RAM is enough for games, someone was saying Skyrim, Crysis 2/3, Far Cry, Battlefield etc don't use any more than that.

In a high end PC, they actually use much less than 3.5 GB. But that is because they are running upscaled console games to begin with. When your actually designing your game around that ram amount as the lowest common denominator, a lot changes in terms of design, but i should not have to be the one saying that.

Next gen isn't the PC version of Skyrim, Crysis 2/3, Farcry 3, or Battlefield 3.

 

[thuway]

What about rumour from edge that Sony is pushing for 8 gb ram with higher bw.

If Microsoft is actually releasing a pro sku in the future with better hardware, maybe sony caught wind and is trying to match their strategy. Even if ps4 comes out stronger, everyone will flock to microsoft if they release a more powerful sku that is twice as strong as the initial 720.

I haven't heard a single thing about 8 GB of RAM. Most information that we get is from devkits of yore, white papers, and PDF's. The current leaks on Durango were back from the Durango Summit.

I personally don't think Sony will go with 8 GB of RAM, 6 GB GDDR5 is far more likely. Even than, neither of us will know until final silicon begins to arrive.

 

[(((interference)))]

I want to ask you an honest question, publicly, but I really wonder if you will respond. What is your opinion on the differences between Orbis and Durango? Which do you prefer? Why? I understand your unwillingness to talk, but as far as I'm concerned, people deserve a drop in the pond from the best insider in the business .

I should mention that the trend here has been to pose such questions to bkilian in analogies referring to bicycles

 

[(((interference)))]

In a high end PC, they actually use much less than 3.5 GB. But that is because they are running upscaled console games to begin with. When your actually designing your game around that ram amount as the lowest common denominator, a lot changes in terms of design, but i should not have to be the one saying that.

Next gen isn't the PC version of Skyrim, Crysis 2/3, Farcry 3, or Battlefield 3.

Ah, but we have these same games that use less than 3.5 GB on PC running on 512GB on the current consoles, so I'm sure they'd manage to do proper next gen titles with nearly 8x the RAM.

 

[Albofighter]

I should mention that the trend here has been to pose such questions to bkilian in terms referring to bicycles

Until microsoft breaks his legs and he can't cycle no mo

but bkillian has stated that he knows nothing about orbis so I doubt he would have an insider opinion on the matter.

 

[(((interference)))]

I've talked a particular developer, and said, the greatest single upgrade either machine can have, is in the RAM department.

That's a bit simplistic as it ignores the type of RAM, consider whether developers would prefer 8GB of DDR3 vs 4GB of GDDR5.

 

[Acert93]

They were going for 6-8x the 360, Durango is at least that - enough said.

People probably should stop using "PR metrics" from MS's marketing slides and "performance estimates" given to insiders as a baseline of Durango's performance.

From a pure numbers angle Durango is *not* 6-8x faster. Architecture aside: Fillrate is about 3x (4 vs. 12.8Gpixels), texturing is about 5x (8 vs. 38Gtexels), flops are about 5x (240 vs. 1200GFlops), about 3x triangles (500M vs. 1600M triangles/sec), aggregate bandwidth, counting only the bandwidth to the eDRAM and not the internal bandwidth is something less than 4x (54 vs. 170GB/s). Memory footprint is over 6-8x jump, once you count count the OS it is about 10x.

Durango is mostly in the 3x-5x range of raw peak performance improvement range.

Before the numbers are poo-poo'd with "efficiency of modern GPUs" I would note that Durango also has to perform at 1080p, counter diminishing returns, GPU performance doesn't necessarily increase linearly with raw specs (i.e. workflow issues), more expensive shaders to get better results, etc balance that out--especially the higher resolutions. So any appeal to "it will look 6-8x better" (whatever THAT means) is easily then cut in half but increasing resolution, which brings it back inline with 3x-5x or less in terms of "realized" potential.

The good news is Cape Verde seems quite capable of playing games like BF3, Batman AC, Dirt 3, etc at relatively high settings (minus AA) near 1080p at 30Hz so indeed Durango can play this generations worth of content the way mid-low range PCs currently do.

 

[Inuhanyou]

^ That sounds a lot more like negative conjecture than anything else i've heard here. And how do you know they'd be aiming for 1080p to begin with?

Ah, but we have these same games that use less than 3.5 GB on PC running on 512GB on the current consoles, so I'm sure they'd manage to do proper next gen titles with nearly 8x the RAM.

True, but again, if everything is as i've heard and Durango's GPU is properly fed(read, not bandwidth starved), then it is a properly balanced machine. Personally if Sony can, i'd like to see them upgrade to 6gb to keep up with the amount.

Microsoft was going with 5gb minimum for games, if we can get that to be the lowest denominator (since presumably if Orbis got 6gb, 5.5 would be allocated to games), things would be improved even further, and Devs would not be complaining about ram amount for a long time.

 

[Albofighter]

I don't think microsoft are listening to devs anymore. It's probably true that they have a more casual mindset. Just think about it, if they listened to devs, then I doubt we would hear that epic games is dropping their voxel lighting solution. Only reason they're doing that is due to underwhelming specs. This sucks cause over 70% of high budget games use unreal engine so if that engine suffers, it means a lot of games will.

 

[Bagel seed]

Ah, but we have these same games that use less than 3.5 GB on PC running on 512GB on the current consoles, so I'm sure they'd manage to do proper next gen titles with nearly 8x the RAM.

And I'm sure they would make them even more proper with 12x the RAM

But based on the spec of both consoles at the moment, I wouldn't pay over $399 for either of them. $349 would be right. And I certainly hope they aren't as big as launch PS3's because I don't see why they would need such large cases for TDP's not even close to 200w.

 

[MrFox]

I think the worst thing that happened to Sony was the PS2 success, causing some bad decisions about PS3.
Worst thing that happened to Nintendo was the Wii success, WiiU tried to reproduce that, and seems to have somewhat failed so far.
And the worst thing that happened to Microsoft was the Kinect success, it looks like Durango was made consequently.

 

[(((interference)))]

People probably should stop using "PR metrics" from MS's marketing slides and "performance estimates" given to insiders as a baseline of Durango's performance.

From a pure numbers angle Durango is *not* 6-8x faster. Architecture aside: Fillrate is about 3x (4 vs. 12.8Gpixels), texturing is about 5x (8 vs. 38Gtexels), flops are about 5x (240 vs. 1200GFlops), about 3x triangles (500M vs. 1600M triangles/sec), aggregate bandwidth, counting only the bandwidth to the eDRAM and not the internal bandwidth is something less than 4x (54 vs. 170GB/s). Memory footprint is over 6-8x jump, once you count count the OS it is about 10x..

Well, yes I mean't 6-8x in real world performance rather than just going by on paper specs.

I'm not sure whether the games are all going to be 1080p either, I can see games like COD targeting 720p @ 60 and others might go with some intermediate resolution between 720p and 1080p.

Proelites hints about the rendering planes also perhaps indicates that the console is even better suited for upscaling from less than 1080p resolutions this time around.

Dynamic resolution switching might also feature in a big way.

 

[dobwal]

bkillian you are killing me. If there was an Xbox 4 I would hang high hopes on you returning as the director of the Xbox Division but, alas, there is no Xbox 4 (just Xbox Cloud).



Yes. A "glass half full person" would say so far what we have seen is 640 ALUs @ 1GHz (=Cape Verde = Durango's 768 @ 800MHz) and there is another 480 ALUs for the OS/QoS, much like Orbis 14+4 rumors.

The "glass half empty" person says, "There is no 2nd GPU."

The "whether the glass is half full or half empty, doesn't matter, because it is filled with piss either way" says, "Oh, there is still QoS, but it is coming out of your robust 12 CU bucket. But remember this kiddos: this is a big jump from what you have now and the architecture is far superior. What you get is way better than the Xbox 360. Don't look at the specs ("these are not the droids you are looking for") and ignore any rational talk about former budgets. The bottom line is look at the games. And they are in 4K resolution* (upscaled from 720p). The GPU is so awesome Kinect, physics, and GPGPU all run on the GPU too, as well as the dedicated SmartGlass display! All without significantly impacting GPU reserves because the ESRAM and secrete sauce make the Xbox 720sub-HD more efficient than any platform. Evar. So you see there was no need for moar."

If i find this hilarious because when everyone was drooling over Cell and its theoretical TFLOPs and how it was a supercomputer. It was the 360 with the most relevant technology as it was the first piece of mainstream hardware to be released with an unified shader gpu which dominates gpu tech now.

Nevermind that MS is continually on the forefront designing an API to keep up with ever growing performance of PC gpus. Sony is so good at designing and manufacturing harware that it dropped it all to basically go off the shelf. Its the equivalent of the 720 running a linux OS with opengl as its graphic api.

I love Sony but Sony having hardware spec advantage over MS has happened before and AMD gpus and x86 cpus are MS's forte. AMD gave MS unified shaders before it put it in its own products, so its practically impossible to see if MS and AMD are working together to realize AMD vision of tommorrow with MS basically financing the endeavor.

 

[Bagel seed]

According to AndyH one of the first bringers of infos, 1080p 30fps or 720p 60fps are the targets for Durango.

 

[(((interference)))]

True, but again, if everything is as i've heard and Durango's GPU is properly fed(read, not bandwidth starved), then it is a properly balanced machine. Personally if Sony can, i'd like to see them upgrade to 6gb to keep up with the amount.

Microsoft was going with 5gb minimum for games, if we can get that to be the lowest denominator (since presumably if Orbis got 6gb, 5.5 would be allocated to games), things would be improved even further, and Devs would not be complaining about ram amount for a long time.

I don't think 6GB is likely - as the recently departed Rangers said sometime ago, 4GB of GDDR5 is already like 2x the cost of 8GB of DDR3 http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1695766&postcount=185

And as numerous people have said, changing to 6GB at this time is not possible since it'd require a new bus and so a expensive and time consuming system redesign.

 

[(((interference)))]

And I'm sure they would make them even more proper with 12x the RAM

But based on the spec of both consoles at the moment, I wouldn't pay over $399 for either of them. $349 would be right. And I certainly hope they aren't as big as launch PS3's because I don't see why they would need such large cases for TDP's not even close to 200w.

Well they'd be even properer next next gen games with 30x the RAM

They shouldn't be as big as the launch PS3 or 360, unless maybe the PSU is now internal.

 

[Albofighter]

well you gotta respect sony for going with cell and selling the console at a huge loss. If the cell was a bit easier to develop for and they handed out good tools, we would probably get the super cell right now with amazing hardware and BC.

Microsoft on the other end went with an efficient design for 360 that was capable enough. Now they have a lot of money and success in gaming and have the most potential out of all competitors and yet they waste it away with kinect. They could have taken out sony and nintendo next gen, they have the resources...so dumb

 

[Bagel seed]

It's the third console curse. Or every 3rd console.. at this point it's happened enough times to be worth taking note of.

NES, SNES, N64
Master System, Genesis, Saturn
GC, Wii, Wii U
PS1, PS2, PS3
...

 

[mrcorbo]

But how much use is the RAM going to be if you only have the bandwidth to access 1-2GB a frame?

I think 3.5 GB of RAM is enough for games, someone was saying Skyrim, Crysis 2/3, Far Cry, Battlefield etc don't use any more than that.

32-bit legacy issues are dictating how much memory games use on PC. If this wasn't an issue, PC devs might use more.

And memory isn't just workspace (where bandwidth is a limiting factor), it's also fast storage. Being able to keep more assets in fast storage is always going to be beneficial to performance and will make for bigger levels (or worlds) with fewer (or no) load screens. Even the best streaming engine is only going to take you so far.

 

[Ketto]

lmao the thread tags are awesome!