PlayStation 4 (codename Orbis) technical hardware investigation (news and rumours)

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This really isn't news. It's common knowledge that consoles have always had much lower access to the hardware than PC's. If anything the current news is that thanks to Mantle, this decades old situation looks like it finaly be ending (or at least improving significantly in the PCs favour). Perhaps she's jumped ship at the wrong time!

Wasn't she working at 343i? I don't think she is talking about PC. Maybe MS doesn't allowed the same access to the hardware compared with Sony.
 
Wasn't she working at 343i? I don't think she is talking about PC. Maybe MS doesn't allowed the same access to the hardware compared with Sony.

There were two tweets floating around; one was about the relief of never having to work with Win8 ever again, and the second was about freedom to program to the metal with the PS4 and not be held back WinOS and GPU driver layers.
 
If Mantle is a replacement for Direct X then perhaps it doesn't since as far as I'm aware, devs don't go through DX for compute work. That said, GPGPU is going to be far less important for PC's due to the greater CPU resources and the added latency of PCI-E. Even without improving the interface for compute, Mantle cleary brings massive advantages for PC's in terms of low level GPU access though.

It may need a combination of Mantle and integrated chips combining CPU/GPU to see if hybrid algorithms are plausible. We haven't seen those so far - nearly everything launching now was developed on PC for the most part, even the exclusives. Even Guerilla had a full PC implementation of their engine.

Was told GPGPU usage is not really exploited in PC games because of latency concerns. Is there any low level framework defined in the HSA consortium ?

Tackling compute in the CPU would work, but it would be nice if the powerful GPU can be used more efficiently.

What PC config did GG use to make KZSF ? AMD GCN GPU ?
 
This really isn't news. It's common knowledge that consoles have always had much lower access to the hardware than PC's. If anything the current news is that thanks to Mantle, this decades old situation looks like it finaly be ending (or at least improving significantly in the PCs favour). Perhaps she's jumped ship at the wrong time!

If Corrine stayed at Microsoft game studios and was working on PC (and not Xbox), then she'd be working with Direct3d and DirectX anyway wouldn't she?

She'd have no exposure to mantle there as far as I can imagine.
 
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If Corrine stayed at Microsoft game studios and was working on PC (and not Xbox), then she'd be working with Direct3d and DirectX anyway wouldn't she?

She'd have no exposure to mantle there as far as I can imagine.

It depends on whether Microsoft will be incorporating parts of Mantle into future DirectX versions. Which is no different than any past version of DirectX where features of one IHV or another were incorporated and made part of the standard.

If there is as much developer demand for this as it seems thus far, MS may be feeling some pressure to incorporate elements of Mantle into DX if possible.

Regards,
SB
 
If Corrine stayed at Microsoft game studios and was working on PC (and not Xbox), then she'd be working with Direct3d and DirectX anyway wouldn't she?

She'd have no exposure to mantle there as far as I can imagine.

I think I read from somewhere that OpenGL also has similar extensions to achieve Mantle-like benefits.

However all these efforts seem to be graphics centric. Not the same as tight HSA low level integration + access.

We should give the devs a few years to explore HSA before concluding that all these are the same.
 
Another confirmation that PS4 has much slimmer abstraction layers between gaming engine and hardware:

twittercorrinnemerabe7wdjf.jpg

https://twitter.com/Corrinne/status/404655972976586752

This was response to this [now deleted] tweet.
I wonder how you can take so much advantage of coding to the metal in such powerful machines by factory design nowadays.

I mean, even if there are OS layers and GPU drivers around coding to the metal should provide some advantages, but the thing is that they should be significant to really make a difference.

Afaik, coding to the metal on the X1 is forbidden. Either she enjoys the extra performance or she just likes to code to the metal.
 
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