Who would have designed such a block?
Sony PlayStation 5 Pro
- Thread starter chris1515
- Start date
davis.anthony
Veteran
... AMD?
It says "fully custom design", not that all (or even any) of the low level design was by Sony.
AMD are already well on with developing their second generation of XDNA NPUs, and Strix Point with an RDNA 3+ GPU and XDNA2 NPU is on course for this year. Come to think of it, AMD did say they were going to be bringing AI to graphics this year, maybe that's Strix Point and PS5 Pro ....
XDNA 2 is supposed to have more than 3X the performance of the 10 TOPs XDNA 1 in the 7040, so presumably that's in the region of 30+ TOPs.
... Hmmm. 30+ TOPs + 268 TOPs = ~300 TOPs! 
(not really, can't see what's in Strix Point being fast enough for scaling to 8K!)
(not really, can't see what's in Strix Point being fast enough for scaling to 8K!)
Last edited:
Love_In_Rio
Veteran
Who designed Tempest engine?. Is a CU without cache and with an DMA controller added based on the SPU design, made with AMD blocks with a configuration asked from Sony. But Cernys team is also capable of design low level things on their own and ask AMD to make them, the Kraken decompressor was designed from them and AMD made it. And is not like Sony doesnt have integer units already architected in the drawer (SPUs had one for example). If you wanted a ML processor you could take the Tempest engine and make it taking away the floating point units and adding more INT8 ones.
Last edited:
EXCLUSIVE - PS5 Pro Enhanced Requirements Detailed
Insider Gaming has learned of the developer requirements that need to be met to have the 'PS5 Pro Enhanced' label.
insider-gaming.com
The below is much more relevant.EXCLUSIVE - PS5 Pro Enhanced Requirements Detailed
Insider Gaming has learned of the developer requirements that need to be met to have the 'PS5 Pro Enhanced' label.
The bold in particular.
This sounds more like dedicated or custom RT logic, than simply "increase this" standard PS5 RT baseline metric.
Though Rich clarified this statement from this past DF Direct Weekly; that his belief that 60fps isn't happening on the Pro, was based on prior GTA console titles, and the current PS5 CPU clocks. However, he did emphasize that if PS5 has a performance mode (60fps), then it stands to reason that Pro will have it as well. But of course, his original statement will still comeback as warrior fodder regardless.
Last edited:
Frenetic Pony
Veteran
Ye, PS5 has been $399 discless with Spiderman 2 recently, $499 without a game seems likely.
Simply porting across some or all of the PC side RT effects should suffice in many cases. Hopefully this means though that in those cases where little or no extra effort is made on PC RT, the PS5 Pro will drive that development effort for both platforms.
Not understanding that. How does it point to custom logic, as opposed to just putting in more RT than in PS5?
This one is interesting. Some games could target 60fps on Pro while only 30fps on PS5. They couldn't do that on PS4 Pro.
Also this. They finally give us a performance improvement from PS5. Their 45% performance improvement never made any sense whatsoever.
Last edited:
The bullet-point statements prior to the RT bulltet-point mention, simply states, increased such-and-such metric or feature from the prior baseline console (PS5). However, the RT bulltet-point is phrased differently, as if the Pro model offers more RT functionality than simply an increase in RT performance over the baseline PS5.
Not saying that I'm right, just how I took the wording of it. Plus, if Sony wasn't all that confident with AMD's FSR scaling/reconstruction solution, and developed PSSR for that particular reason, then there maybe other aspects of the Pro GPU that could potentially have more bespoke logic than the baseline model.
Last edited:
The 45% increase was an average and specifically for rasterisation. And as it's in the developer docs rather than in a guide to meeting "PS5 Pro Enhanced" requirements, it's not something to dismiss
The doubling figure in that marketing guidance is an "up to", and could include as part of rendering a much faster RT component and further performance increases from things like VRS. I've not doubt that the PS5 can be up to twice as fast as the PS5 in some circumstances. Raw power + VRS + RT alone would give you a lot of room for some games to get there in at least some circumstances.
I don't see it this way. Lets look at this logically:
- Every game with a fixed resolution has to have a target resolution. All Pro can do is make them higher.
- Every game with variable resolution has to have a target resolution. All Pro can do is make them higher.
- Every game with a fixed frame rate has to have a target frame rate. All Pro can do is make them higher.
- Not every game has RT. Some games have no RT at all.
"Inclusion of PS5 Pro Raytracing effects" would also cover for example, adding RT reflections where you only had shadows, or vice versa, or adding a second or third bounce, or turning on RT AO.
This is all marketing bollocks, they're wanting something specific that they can point to and say "this is only there because PS5 Pro allows it be enhanced". They want something with parameters that can translate to a checkbox on an advert.
I wouldn't be looking for tech insight into the console from guidance on meeting marketing rules, and I especially wouldn't trust it over developer docs.
Because in the side-by-side comparisons we'll be going back and forth trying to tell the difference and requiring DF to tell us that PS5Pro is better.
So I've been thinking about this 2 ~ 3x (4x in some cases) RT performance increase for PS5 Pro, and I realise that I've been making a fundamental oversight in my comparisons.
I've been comparing PC RDNA 2 to PC RDNA 3. But PS5 isn't PC RDNA2. It's older (front end, back end, CUs at least), and so the RT implementation might not be quite as refined either. And crucially it doesn't have PC RDNA2's large infinity cache, nor does it have a (costly!) wide bus like Series X to compensate (with RT being specifically mentioned at Hotchips as a reason for the wider bus).
The PS5 is AMD's oldest RT GPU, and PS5 Pro is likely to use designs as new or newer than even the latest PC RDNA3 GPUs. It's probably a bigger jump than "RDNA2 -> RDNA3" would indicate.
If PS5 Pro has RDNA 3+ RT technology and a relatively modest 64MB of Infinity Cache it will already be 2~3x faster than PS5 at RT, without the need for some radical new revolutionary RDNA6 tech.
At this point, PS5 Pro might just be a nice but modest improvement over RDNA3, and what's in the PS5 Pro developer docs might not actually indicate that AMD has caught up with Nvidia at RT.
Edit: Here's an article on RDNA3's caches, where I understood some of the words. By cripes that L3 is fast ...
Cheesy chips
I've been comparing PC RDNA 2 to PC RDNA 3. But PS5 isn't PC RDNA2. It's older (front end, back end, CUs at least), and so the RT implementation might not be quite as refined either. And crucially it doesn't have PC RDNA2's large infinity cache, nor does it have a (costly!) wide bus like Series X to compensate (with RT being specifically mentioned at Hotchips as a reason for the wider bus).
The PS5 is AMD's oldest RT GPU, and PS5 Pro is likely to use designs as new or newer than even the latest PC RDNA3 GPUs. It's probably a bigger jump than "RDNA2 -> RDNA3" would indicate.
If PS5 Pro has RDNA 3+ RT technology and a relatively modest 64MB of Infinity Cache it will already be 2~3x faster than PS5 at RT, without the need for some radical new revolutionary RDNA6 tech.
At this point, PS5 Pro might just be a nice but modest improvement over RDNA3, and what's in the PS5 Pro developer docs might not actually indicate that AMD has caught up with Nvidia at RT.
Edit: Here's an article on RDNA3's caches, where I understood some of the words. By cripes that L3 is fast ...
Cheesy chips
davis.anthony
Veteran
We haven't seen anything in the PS5 vs XSX ray tracing comparisons from Digital Foundry to suggest there is anything wrong with PS5s ray tracing implementation at the architectural level.
Thus I wouldn't accept PS5s RT is somehow flawed which is why PS5 Pro is 2-3x faster.
It also won't have 64MB of Infinity cache as the 7700XT only has 48MB.
Thus I wouldn't accept PS5s RT is somehow flawed which is why PS5 Pro is 2-3x faster.
It also won't have 64MB of Infinity cache as the 7700XT only has 48MB.
Looking back at some of Pro's earlier rumors...
Jeff sources as we can see, have gotten many things right, way before MLID even reported such leaks this month.
Jeff even mentioned after MLID leak that other things weren't being discussed to protect sources. Even MLID mentioned that he had to edit the Pro spec's not to out his source.
If, and this is a big IF, Sony has some custom RT in place assisting AMD's compute unit solution, this would be interesting discussion to be had.
Jeff sources as we can see, have gotten many things right, way before MLID even reported such leaks this month.
Jeff even mentioned after MLID leak that other things weren't being discussed to protect sources. Even MLID mentioned that he had to edit the Pro spec's not to out his source.
If, and this is a big IF, Sony has some custom RT in place assisting AMD's compute unit solution, this would be interesting discussion to be had.
I don't think PS5 RT is flawed, and I don't necessarily think Xbox's is any better beside the increased bandwidth and L2, both of which will definitely help but not make up for the lack of Infinity Cache.
I do think that AMD may have refined their implementation by the time of PC RDNA 2 though - they did for many other parts - and I am certain that Infinity Cache offers a big boost to RT performance. Having the top few levels of your BVH in high bandwidth cache during RT would be a massive speedup and greatly reduce external BW demands.
If PS5Pro has Infinity Cache, even if it is just normal RDNA 3 (it's probably better), there is no realistic way it can not be > 2x as fast as PS5 at RT.
The ~35 TF 54CU 7700XT is already ~50% faster than the ~13.2 TF 40CU 6700XT in Cyberpunk with regular RT. That's with the 7700XT having only 48 MB of L3 vs the 6700XT's enormous 96 MB L3!
Now imagine the 6700XT was 20% slower and you'd stripped it entirely of its massive, high bandwidth cache, designed in large part to support it during RT. It'd choke, and the 7700XT would be well over 2x as fast.
Once you start to appreciate just how badly things are stacked against the PS5 at RT, it's easy to see how an RDNA 3+ PS5Pro could reasonably be 2 ~ 3x as fast as the PS5 just by having RDNA 3's Infinity Cache. No magic sauce required.
------------------
On the subject of Infinity Cache quantity, having 16GB of memory and a 256-bit memory bus, PS5 couldn't have 48MB of Infinity Cache. It has to be a multiple of 4 (32, 64, 128), and if it were to match RDNA 3 on a cache / controller level it would be 64. To a large extent the bus determines the L3 cache.
davis.anthony
Veteran
I don't think PS5 RT is flawed, and I don't necessarily think Xbox's is any better beside the increased bandwidth and L2, both of which will definitely help but not make up for the lack of Infinity Cache.
I do think that AMD may have refined their implementation by the time of PC RDNA 2 though - they did for many other parts - and I am certain that Infinity Cache offers a big boost to RT performance. Having the top few levels of your BVH in high bandwidth cache during RT would be a massive speedup and greatly reduce external BW demands.
If PS5Pro has Infinity Cache, even if it is just normal RDNA 3 (it's probably better), there is no realistic way it can not be > 2x as fast as PS5 at RT.
The ~35 TF 54CU 7700XT is already ~50% faster than the ~13.2 TF 40CU 6700XT in Cyberpunk with regular RT. That's with the 7700XT having only 48 MB of L3 vs the 6700XT's enormous 96 MB L3!
Now imagine the 6700XT was 20% slower and you'd stripped it entirely of its massive, high bandwidth cache, designed in large part to support it during RT. It'd choke, and the 7700XT would be well over 2x as fast.
Once you start to appreciate just how badly things are stacked against the PS5 at RT, it's easy to see how an RDNA 3+ PS5Pro could reasonably be 2 ~ 3x as fast as the PS5 just by having RDNA 3's Infinity Cache. No magic sauce required.
------------------
On the subject of Infinity Cache quantity, having 16GB of memory and a 256-bit memory bus, PS5 couldn't have 48MB of Infinity Cache. It has to be a multiple of 4 (32, 64, 128), and if it were to match RDNA 3 on a cache / controller level it would be 64. To a large extent the bus determines the L3 cache.
The PS5 Pro GPU will and is likely a carbon copy of the 7700XT.
Which has a 256bit bus and 48MB of infinity cache.
If you look at this path tracing test data, the 7700XT is 2.2x faster than the 6700XT and 2.4x faster than the 6650XT.
People forget how terrible the raw ray racing performance is on PS5, so it really isn't difficult to get to 2x (or more) performance.
Attachments
Similar threads
- Locked
