Predict: The Next Generation Console Tech

[Love_In_Rio]

:smile:

And ?.

 

[french toast]

Underclocked for thermals ?

 

[Love_In_Rio]

Underclocked for thermals ?

That discrepancy from GPUZ versions with HD 4770 is old known:

http://translate.googleusercontent....AIUsKD&usg=ALkJrhhh_lO1UufDgcZ6MuG8MYtdcz4QDg

 

[Kaotik]

if the hd 4770 is the gpu inside the Wiiu, why Nintendo talk about only 1,5 times the raw power of the current gen console ?

Where have they stated this?

 

[Rodéric]

Why bother with GPUZ ?

GPU do not have instructions to give you details about them like CPU do, all you have there is a database filled by humans who can make mistakes.
I don't say it's not valuable, but it's no better than using your favourite search engine.

 

[dumbo11]

I don't disagree with anything you said particularly. However I'm wondering where this 4% figure you quoted is coming from?

Should I assume you weren't referencing the rumoured flops figures of both PS4 & Durango GPUs?

Just wondering is all.

Nope - completely pulled out of thin air... it's just strange to see so much focus in here on processor/gpu performance. Wii/PS/PS2/gameboy - afaik not a list of the most technically advanced hardware on earth at the time.

My view is that consoles are competing against set-top boxes and tablets for the 'living room space'. They need to focus on that battle rather than trying to beat a PC running on a desk somewhere.

For the truly radical - ship the device with a "decent" 3d gpu, and during this generation transition the hardware over to an 'onlive' style terminal...

 

[Rangers]

I think everybody misinterpreted that post by Xpidemx, as I did at first too. Somebody said "more GPUZ", so he posted some screens of GPU-Z. Get it?

 

[Rangers]

I'll take fancy shaders and lighting over texture resolution and loading times any day of the week. Someone should contact that GAF guy who knew Wii U specs and tell him to give a closer look because meltdown is about to happen in near future

In the end it could end up like this...

Developers : Give us more power MS!

MS : Here is 8 gigs of cheapest RAM available.

Developers : Huh...Its cool I guess. Give us more graphics processing power.

MS : NO! Here is 1 TFLOP and deal with it.

Developers : Sigh...Ok. Here is screen tearing, frame dropping sub hd multiplatform game for you. Deal with it!

I dunno, I've been really fascinated with this since the rumored specs came into line. And I even made a thread on B3D long time ago asking something like "all else equal, which is better, more RAM or a better GPU?" (to which I got typical "it depends" unfulfilling answers IIRC), so I've always been interested in that topic.

I tried to put it into terms of PC GPU's, 4X ram .5 X teraflops. first in my mind to think about it (Assuming 1.8 TF 2GB PS4 and 1TF 8GB 720, and ignoring RAM speed discrepancies). Would you rather have, 2GB HD 7770, or 512 MB HD 7850? I dont know, comparison leans towards 7770 gut reaction there, seems more well rounded. But maybe it's cause I chose a RAM number too low for current game. What if it's 1GB 7850 vs 4GB 7770? Comparison might lean to 7850 now, in current games.

Then I thought in terms of current consoles. Would you rather have full PS3 with 512MB, or 360 with 24 shaders instead of 48, 4 ROPS instead of 8, with 2GB RAM? I'm not at all sure there, might lean PS3. But now think of full PS3 with 128MB, versus half GPU 360 with 512MB. Now I'm leaning 360.

I dont know but it's fascinating. The longer I look at all those comparisons the more I think I go RAM every time. But I could be wrong. One thing I do know, RAM is the one spec I always think you cant "fake". You look at console versions of PC games like Crysis 2 and the shaders are there, but the textures arent.

Then again, bothering me most about current gen visuals of late is lowly 720P, and isn't that the GPU?

Developers : Sigh...Ok. Here is screen tearing, frame dropping sub hd multiplatform game for you. Deal with it!

I think they would just have to drop the load on the 720 GPU. I dont think it would equate to tearing, bad framerate, after all the game has to be playable. But less effects.

 

[Prophecy2k]

I dunno, I've been really fascinated with this since the rumored specs came into line. And I even made a thread on B3D long time ago asking something like "all else equal, which is better, more RAM or a better GPU?" (to which I got typical "it depends" unfulfilling answers IIRC), so I've always been interested in that topic.

I tried to put it into terms of PC GPU's, 4X ram .5 X teraflops. first in my mind to think about it (Assuming 1.8 TF 2GB PS4 and 1TF 8GB 720, and ignoring RAM speed discrepancies). Would you rather have, 2GB HD 7770, or 512 MB HD 7850? I dont know, comparison leans towards 7770 gut reaction there, seems more well rounded. But maybe it's cause I chose a RAM number too low for current game. What if it's 1GB 7850 vs 4GB 7770? Comparison might lean to 7850 now, in current games.

Then I thought in terms of current consoles. Would you rather have full PS3 with 512MB, or 360 with 24 shaders instead of 48, 4 ROPS instead of 8, with 2GB RAM? I'm not at all sure there, might lean PS3. But now think of full PS3 with 128MB, versus half GPU 360 with 512MB. Now I'm leaning 360.

I dont know but it's fascinating. The longer I look at all those comparisons the more I think I go RAM every time. But I could be wrong. One thing I do know, RAM is the one spec I always think you cant "fake". You look at console versions of PC games like Crysis 2 and the shaders are there, but the textures arent.

Then again, bothering me most about current gen visuals of late is lowly 720P, and isn't that the GPU?



I think they would just have to drop the load on the 720 GPU. I dont think it would equate to tearing, bad framerate, after all the game has to be playable. But less effects.

I think you make some valid points Rangers. You really do.

However, for me. When I think about texture resolution this gen I do wonder.
If current gen games could be reproduced with hi-res textures on everything (not just the characters and enviroments you'll only generally see up close), would it really make so much of a difference?

If you were to take the very highest quality textures of any game this gen, and apply it to a whole game, how much RAM would you actually use? Would 2GB be enough? Would 4GB be?

But then if you had the option instead to go with incredibly dynamic and beautiful lighting and shadowing, post processing, bigger worlds and more simulation (Physics AI - through compute) would you not want that along with 4x the texture res of current gen (assuming 2GB i.e. 4x RAM - very dirty assuption I know)? Or would you be happy with worse shadowing, lighting, effects etc, if you could get 8x texture resolution (again forgive the crudeness of the comparison)?

I'm sure its waaaaay more complex than that. And I also think that the difference between 2GB of GDDR5 and 8GB of DDR3, i.e. memory bandwidth, would make things even more complicated.

(Note: I'm convinced that Sony will eventually go 4GB)

 

[kots]

I dunno, I've been really fascinated with this since the rumored specs came into line. And I even made a thread on B3D long time ago asking something like "all else equal, which is better, more RAM or a better GPU?" (to which I got typical "it depends" unfulfilling answers IIRC), so I've always been interested in that topic.

What is the benefit of a huge amount of ram (albeit cheap) if the gpu chokes ...
Personally if these rumours are true i must say that i'm dissapointed , because i love the franchises and want to play the next gen ones .
But i won't accept MS serving me second class hardware and expecting me to buy their box ..... no . If it happens , i'm jumping ship the next second .

 

[Rangers]

What is the benefit of a huge amount of ram (albeit cheap) if the gpu chokes ...
Personally if these rumours are true i must say that i'm dissapointed , because i love the franchises and want to play the next gen ones .
But i won't accept MS serving me second class hardware and expecting me to buy their box ..... no . If it happens , i'm jumping ship the next second .

Everybody is.

 

[archangelmorph]

There are rather major limitations though. The shared data has to be very small in order to fit into core-local memory. The AI characters can do independent decision making only as long as their decisions do not depend on what any other AI is doing. Not to mention that AI is fundamentally about decision making, i.e. branching, which generally wreaks havok with very parallel architectures with their small local memories, long pipelines and typically light weight branch prediction/handling hardware.

So AI parallelizes nicely as long as you want to do comparatively trivial stuff on small data sets. As usual.
That's not to say it's useless. I'm just pointing out some limitations for the benefit of those who do not have much personal experience with parallel codes.

Wrong.

You seem to be conflating the logical process of data-parallelizing code execution across multiple-cores (of some arbitrary hardware configuration) with writing data-parallel AI jobs specifically for the SPUs.

Also Inter-agent interactions or decision-making is not a core code-dependency & thus doesn't even come into it.

You can simply re-architect your code to abstract & decouple these interactions into event sender/listener frameworks with cached-state queued messages/events which would solve the problem elegantly.

There isn't even a requirement for most (if not all) AI interactions to resolve in a single frame & any smart engineer would be spreading the cost of AI update across multiple frames anyway.

& if none of this is true & you do have some stringent requirements for single-frame AI algo resolution for all agents in the system then you're likely either unrealistically overspeccing your game's AI requirements or you have so few agents (e.g. Street Fighter) that you have zero-requirement to parallelize in the first place...

 

[Ruskie]

My problem with rumored MS strategy of multimedia box and slow hardware is that I'm living in Europe. We don't get half of the things people find great about multimedia on 360, and I have a feeling that next gen it will be similar. So, if hardware is underwhelming, I'm definitely jumping ship. PC ship that is

 

[homerdog]

That being said, SONY won't need more than 2GB of RAM if they're really going for cloud gaming in the long run.

Well, the cloud won't be a viable option for some years still. Probably not until it's PS5 time.

Meanwhile, I will be getting a cellphone in the next couple of weeks that has 2GB of RAM.

 

[RedVi]

Well, the cloud won't be a viable option for some years still. Probably not until it's PS5 time.

Meanwhile, I will be getting a cellphone in the next couple of weeks that has 2GB of RAM.

With a 40x lower bandwidth rate than low end 256-bit GDDR5.

 

[GuestLV]

With a 40x lower bandwidth rate than low end 256-bit GDDR5.

And? Look at NOVA3,Real racing2,Dark Meadow,Galaxy on fire 2 HD etc Do You think there is 40x drop, in quality in compare with consoles?

 

[Simon F]

Having infinite computing power doesn't do us any good when we're constrained by bandwidth and data. We simply can't feed the processors data fast enough to take advantage of them. We need to develop infinite capacity ram and storage, along with infinitely wide transports.

Rubbish! Once we have implemented infinite computing power you just compute everything at the same time. That way you don't have to read any data from external memory. :smile:

 

[french toast]

And? Look at NOVA3,Real racing2,Dark Meadow,Galaxy on fire 2 HD etc Do You think there is 40x drop, in quality in compare with consoles?

Exactly, games like max payne, gta 3, shadow gun, nova 3, modern combat 3, real racing 2...on max settings on a 720p phone they look very console like to me..even over mhl to tv they look very impressive...indeed on first glance you wouldn't know it was not a ps360 unless you took a proper look and noticed the lack of textures and detail.

They are not ps360 class, but they are clearly better than original xbox....pretty impressive indeed.

 

[Grall]

Rubbish! Once we have implemented infinite computing power you just compute everything at the same time. That way you don't have to read any data from external memory. :smile:

Hmm, I'd say having infinite cores inside other cores sounds like there'd be a fair amount of latency involved, communicating between said cores. In fact, infinite latency could be a fair description I'd think (which would be unfortunate in the realm of realtime computing)...

Also, have anyone considered the gravitational field created by an infinitely large computer?

 

[SKYSONY]

When you guys talk about slow hard regarding the 720, I would like to remind you the hardware specs have changed since then. According to lherre, the current dev kits have 8 low speed cores, 8 Gb RAM and a 7000 series Radeon HD. That´s what we have now.

Regarding PS4, we know 10 months ago it had the APU+discrete GPU with 2 Gb of GDDR5, which might be 4 Gb now. And probably the new dev kits include the most powerful combination of APU+discrete GPU Sony can afford at the time the dev kit is sent to the developers.