Predict: The Next Generation Console Tech

[Prophecy2k]

The first Samaritan demo ran on 3x Nvidia 580 GTX.

Crytek desires 8gigs of RAM and 4x Nvidia 590 performance.


So performance of a Nvidia Maxwell GPU is what I expect and it fits nicely with Crytek and Epics wishes. I'd be shocked by a GPU that is 2 teraflops or less.

The same Epic who is more interested in iOS games than console games at this point (beside supporting their engine middleware). And the same Crytek who announced they were getting out of making console games altogether after Crysis 3 and Ryse?

Sony and MS won't kill their console businesses under mounds and mounds of losses just to appease a pair of devs who's interest in console gaming on the whole has been shown to wane this gen.

 

[Ruskie]

Keep it in mind that back in 05' memory was painfully expensive. I think 256MB of DDR3 would cost you ~60$ if I remember correctly. MS probably payed small fortune for 512MB of GDDR3 at the time. They will probably pay much less for RAM this time around.

Plus, those higher end GPUs today are mostly expensive because of cooling and memory. I'm sure they will be able to save some money on these parts since there won't be dedicated chunk of GDDR5.

 

[Blazkowicz]

I believe GDDR5 is absolutely needed, unless there's fast and plentiful enough DDR4 available to console vendors in late 2013. It would be a good thing, this would kickstart DDR4 but may be quite expsensive initially. What it has for it is cost going down, down the years.

 

[Ruskie]

I believe GDDR5 is absolutely needed, unless there's fast and plentiful enough DDR4 available to console vendors in late 2013. It would be a good thing, this would kickstart DDR4 but may be quite expsensive initially. What it has for it is cost going down, down the years.

MS if definitely going with DDR4 and eDRAM. DDR4 bandwidth wouldn't be close to enough without embedded memory on GPU. DDR4 should be cheap, but eDRAM not so sure.

 

[liolio]

Considering Cape Verde was the most prevalent rumor, the above GPU's look good. Besides that, it's assumed this would not be the actual GPU in the final, just the most modern available at the time they were hocking together the kit (could have been in January or something).

According to Tech Power up review at 1080p, 6870 is 129% as fast as 7770. 6950 is 146% as fast. And 7770 isn't even the slowest of the two Cape Verde options.

Interestingly the transistor count between the two is closer (1.7B=6870 vs 1.5B=7770) though. And 7770 is a much more modern architecture which may draw close or ahead of 6870 in the most modern games, but it is still battling a deficit of 640 SP's vs 1120. 6950 the case of superiority is more clear.

Sorry but you miss the point the main difference between the hd 7770 and the hd 6950 is not only the flops count.Their massive difference is in the number of ROPs and the available bandwidth. What the hd 7770 does it does with half the ROPs and more or less half the bandwidth. That's what imo cripple the cap verde the most. Lesser FLOPS count never prevented Nvidia to beat AMD card.

Anyway who here is not expecting a custom solution? It's going to be neither a Cayman, neither a cap verde nor a Pitcairn.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

A "hardcore" console coming out at the end of 2013 for example, containing a GPU with the specs and/or performance of a HD 6870 or HD 6950 would be kind of "ridiculous", wouldn't it?

Just think about it:

Two years after the release of such a console for example, the GPU in it would already be around five years old ?

Is anyone really thinking that would be "next-gen" worthy?

The tech inside the next gen consoles should be quite up to date at launch. Just because there are PC GPUs even more powerful with more execution units, don't mean that something like a 8770/8850 should be considered old compared to a 8970, even if the absolute performance level compares to some older high end card.

This gen consoles pretty much pushed the power consumption levels to the max, there just are pretty tight restrictions on what you can put into a reasonable sized box, that people will buy in large quantities and a +200W GPU is imo quite far outside of those restrictions. Improvements in the next gen are going to have to come from performance per Watt.

 

[user542745831]

So, the general consensus here appears to be that GPU performance on par or better than HD 7970 or GTX 680 would unfortunately be rather unlikely for "next-gen" consoles ?



Then how would that:

http://www.unrealengine.com/files/misc/The_Technology_Behind_the_Elemental_Demo_16x9_(2).pdf

Elemental demo

• GDC 2012 demo behind closed doors
• Demonstrate and drive development of Unreal® Engine 4
• NVIDIA® Kepler GK104 (GTX 680)
• Direct3D® 11
• No preprocessing
• Real-time
  • 30 fps
  • FXAA
  • 1080p at 90%

translate to "next-gen" consoles, if they would be equipped with a GPU more similar to the specs/performance of a HD 6870 or HD 6950?

Would that mean that "next-gen" consoles would probably not be able to render UE4 based games at full 1080p with 30fps ?

 

[ZeroEx]

You have to keep in mind, a lot of these tech demos are running on PCs with OS overhead and are most likely not full optimized yet.

And as people keep mentioning, alpha and beta dev kits are just starter kits for people get used to the console environment and specs will most likely be bumped up a bit.

 

[Kb-Smoker]

Getting HYPE!

Sea Islands will bring Unified Address Space between the GPU and the CPU. Furthermore, GPU will be able to page system memory using CPU pointers, bringing full memory coherency between the two.

The number of GCN units is not known at this time, but the performance is targeting GeForce GTX 680.


Also worth mentioning is that SI is the architecture chosen to be expanded into high-performance consoles, thus we should see quite interesting announcements regarding to vast compute and graphics capabilities carrying the next generation of console games.

http://vr-zone.com/articles/amd-nex...-2015-gpus-get-names/17154.html#ixzz271DhFlIb

One of these paired with a Kaveri apu would be amazing!! HSA seems perfect for a console with shared memory. This is what i been saying since the leak about the apu came out!

Also look at the 680 used again. Weird that so many next gen demos were running on a 680 and look that is what SI is targeting.

 

[XpiderMX]

Getting HYPE!


http://vr-zone.com/articles/amd-nex...-2015-gpus-get-names/17154.html#ixzz271DhFlIb

One of these paired with a Kaveri apu would be amazing!! HSA seems perfect for a console with shared memory. This is what i been saying since the leak about the apu came out!

Also look at the 680 used again. Weird that so many next gen demos were running on a 680 and look that is what SI is targeting.

Can it be an APU+HD8xx0? whath about performance of something like that?

 

[Kb-Smoker]

Can it be an APU+HD8xx0? whath about performance of something like that?

That is what I'm saying. Apu plus a gpu. But this is unlikely because it makes more sense to go with a cpu plus a gpu first and later roll them into an apu when it move to 1X nm process.

 

[XpiderMX]

That is what I'm saying. Apu plus a gpu. But this is unlikely because it makes more sense to go with a cpu plus a gpu first and later roll them into an apu when it move to 1X nm process.

A Kaveri APU is better than a 4~8 Jaguar cores cpu?

 

[N2O]

Getting HYPE!


http://vr-zone.com/articles/amd-nex...-2015-gpus-get-names/17154.html#ixzz271DhFlIb

One of these paired with a Kaveri apu would be amazing!! HSA seems perfect for a console with shared memory. This is what i been saying since the leak about the apu came out!

Also look at the 680 used again. Weird that so many next gen demos were running on a 680 and look that is what SI is targeting.

It said consoles,so i said it's both

 

[babybumb]

So it could be close to fully clocked pitcarn powah with 8000 level design

 

[Blazkowicz]

You actually need the generation after Kaveri and radeon 8000 series to better support an APU + GPU it seems :

http://vr-zone.com/articles/amd-nex...-2015-gpus-get-names/17154.html#ixzz271DhFlIb

to me, a pessimistic xbox 720 would be a Kaveri with more GPU power, 128bit ddr4 (8GB plausible) and no edram

 

[Megadrive1988]

If this is true (Sea Islands in the next-gen PlayStation and Xbox), that's very good news!

 

[ERP]

It's more likely you'll see something between PC generations, i.e. something with many of the features of the to be released silicon, but probably missing some depending on the release schedules.
I'm more interested in the exact combinations of Flops/Rops/bandwidth for FB and texture units in each of the boxes. I think there is plenty of scope for two chips "based" on the same architecture (if they are) with similar die sizes to have very different performance characteristics, for example I could see something with less flops and more rops delivering a better 1080 experience. It'll be interesting to see where the sweet spot is.

 

[Ruskie]

Agreed. I don't think we will see for example HD8870 based GPU, it would be a waste. It will be custom GPU with less ROPS, lower clocks and say more ALUs or whatever. Both of them will choose what is best fit for their system and put it in the box.

 

[Megadrive1988]

I haven't been following this thread too closely--If Sea Islands is used, are we looking at a low-end or mid-range GPU from the R8XXX family?

 

[Ruskie]

I haven't been following this thread too closely--If Sea Islands is used, are we looking at a low-end or mid-range GPU from the R8XXX family?

Hard to say, probably upper medium (HD8850) IF (and thats big if) the rumored specs for them are true. Less TDP, more FLOPS. Would be crazy to miss the chance, although I must say, I'm a little suspicious of that leak.