That RDNA 1.8 Consoles Rumor *spawn*

@iroboto - appreciated!

 

I think the DMs are between Odium and SIE engineer though

 

Not seen any either, but then i have some on ignore.

 

Dr David Kanter said RDNA1 architecture retains elements of GCN, so I wonder if Sony chose to forgo certain RDNA2 features in order to retain the necessary GCN arch to help facilitate a more hardware approach to backwards compatibility?

Sony's software stack is not as good as MS, coupled with PS4's lower level GNM API and the fact they'd need to recompile shader binaries packaged into PS4 games/downloads were a hill they chose not to climb with a more software based BC approach and so went with a hardware based approach to BC with a GPU which retains some GCN elements (present in RDNA1 arch)?

 

Gavin Stevens is Odium. As I understand it. At least from the people witch hunting are saying.

I don’t really want to post this stuff here. Let’s just wait for final results. We will know after launch.

 

My take is it's all complete bullshit and was attention seeking by certain people and places.

In the end, the version labeling is a matter of pedantry that won't make any difference. The consoles have whatever hardware features they have. The devs will make exceptional use of both platforms, regardless of what they're marketed as having. The games will be amazing on both. Gamers will truly enjoy the NextGen consoles.

 

Although I agree, still would like to know what was actually said.
Does anyone have a screen cap or anything?
Am I the only one who didn't get to see it?

 

It's on that other forum if you want to see it.

Tommy McClain

 

I don’t mind technical speculation. But I am doing my best to not contribute to haves and have nots type speculation And I also don’t want to be involved in verifying anything team misterxmedia comes up with.

There will be eventual die shots and others ways to figure this out post launch. So I rather not harass our diehard Sony members here over it. A journalist will do this and the conclusions provided.

You should be able to follow Neogaf and reset era as the topic is picking up. There’s not much to discuss that they aren’t.

 

Wait, is that the level being discussed here?
I take every rumor/leak with a huge bucket of salt.
And only find the concepts worth discussing. But if that's who / level this is from, I'd rather not even discuss it as it gives people like that more oxygen than they deserve. Even as a what if type discussion.

 

He’s been researching it for a while. A long while. The tweets and information didn’t come from him. He’s been diving in code and random shit. The tweets came from a Neogaf. He just linked his stuff together with it.

obviously the problem with that is that he started with the assertion that PS5 is not RDNA2 so he will cling to anything that strengthens that argument. No one explored other possibilities.

 

Because these DX12U features were all initiated and patented by Microsoft in the first place.

On the upside, Next-Gen games should just work fine with RX 5000 series. It's just that RDNA2/Turing/Ampere will do everything faster.

 

Geometry Engine is an AMD term.

 

I do not understand why people take this stuff so personally, on either side (why do there even need to be sides for a consumer product?)

If it’s true that PS5 is just RDNA1 plus ray tracing or something else, isn’t that just entertaining to speculate about? I’m sure PS5 will be a great product, but I kind of like the idea of one console knocking it out of the park. It just makes the narrative more interesting. I felt the same way about the PS4 in 2013.

Also, if one of the big players excels beyond the other, it only drives the competitor to be more competitive. MS has been playing the part of good-guy under dog since 2014 for this reason (BC, cross play, etc).

 

The big issue that bothers most people raising these questions of RDNA 2.0 vs 1.9 (or maybe even RDNA 1.9.2.85.3 for that matter) is: Does it support Mesh/Geometry Shaders. Does it support Sampler Feedback. Does it support VRS.

Best case scenario: Yes, 100% to all of the above.
Worst case scenario: Pretty much yes, 90% to all of the above.

Let me explain.

There is no way PS5 does not have something akin to mesh shaders. AMD has been advertising this "unlocking" of the geometry pipeline for half a decade already. It was one of their main game changing features for their (then) future architectures. Then it was advertised as Next Gen Geometry Pipeline.

Now, does the implementation in PS5 work and perform exactly the same way as it does in RDNA 2.0 for pc under DX12 or vulkan? Best case scenario: Yes, and then some. Worst case scenario: yes for 90% of use cases, with slight workarounds for the others. That is it, that is the worst it gets, and I state this completely pulled out of my ass, but trust me on that one.

Sampler Feedback & VRS: those are not as much cornerstones of AMD vision for GPU arch as Geometry was, so I think those have a more solid chance of actually not making it to PS5. Yet, it really matters very little. The things they achieve can be done (and with good performance) with other aproaches.

PS4 PRO has been using checkerboarding and reconstruction extensively which adresses the same things as VRS. I really think VRS is way more usefull for DX12 scenarios, where you cant cant build algos that are optimised for the exact particularities of one GPU. It is very likely that hand crafted compute shaders and rasterization tricks targetting PS5 can perform better and achieve better results than VRS ever will on PC.

Sampler feedback also does things that can, and in fact have been, adressed in software before. Aka. RAGE. God, I keep mentioning this title, but honestly, anybody who wants to discuss and speculate about Virtual Texturing HAS TO re-read their papers and re-watch their presentations. How did the Rage Engine know which texture pages to load into their cache and at which mips? That is an interesting problem which saw a lot of experimentation from Carmak, which he describes by the way. His ultimate solution was quite simple. Rage renders a "proxy camera" encoding UV's only and discovers the needed pages from that. There are thousands of ways to optmize that by the way. Render at lowe res, render only section of the frustrum each frame and get the coverage temporally spread across multiple frames. One can also improve results by having a wider FOV on that proxy, or randomily render things behind the camera every so often to cache the full 360... Here, Sampler Feedback really is a WAY more ellegant way to solve the problem, and a great loss if not present for that reason. But there is still a viable workaround, if not more. The workaround performance is also clearly less performant, but probably it is a drop in the ocean for modern engines.