Meaningless gossip... They will probably have some custom BUS between CPU and system memory, like any other recent console..
The tldr; as I see it,a Neogaf user who is apparently a long time dev tweeted a DM to architecture engineer for PS5 and got back a return statement.
But because this guy was blasted by everyone for being wrong, he posted the DM and pulled it down immediately but everyone screenshot it and it’s been circulating.
I had given it some thought and there might be some truth. He was not even the first person to bring it up, back in 2018 this was also discussed.
In the end it doesn’t matter if there is feature parity. It’s just a label, unless the PC RDNA2 is completely outperforming both consoles by a sizeable amount, which some news outlets and Odium also have committed to.
We will just have to wait and see if the statements are true. As Jay wrote, if RDNA 2 fails to see light this year and the longer it takes to release may indicate it was never ready in time for production for both consoles.
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)?
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.
Geometry engines (or simply primitive shaders) are a standard feature of RDNA 1. I really find it astonishing that Sony will miss the boat on so many RDNA 2 features. Very strange.
Featuresets are not pedantry. Will indicate whether performance of the two platorms are comparable.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.
This is a really interesting point. If they chose 36 CUs for BC reasons it figures that there may be other aspects of the PS5 hardware determined by it.
Featuresets are not pedantry.
I don't really buy the 2019 release theory. Can a one year delay cause such paucity of features? VRS and mesh shaders were not developed in one year time.Not at all strange if there was a year delay.
Sorry. I misunderstood your post.I never said they were. I spoke to the version labeling of the featuresets, as in 1.5 vs 1.9 vs 2.0.
Nothing is released yet we don’t know if they haven’t announced thing because they don’t want to. Or they SDK is not ready. Or they do not have it. EtcFeaturesets are not pedantry. Will indicate whether performance of the two platorms are comparable.
Yeah, I think @Pixel has come up with a really sensible possibility there.Of course... BC
I don't really buy the 2019 release theory. Can a one year delay cause such paucity of features? VRS and mesh shaders were not developed in one year time.
only benchmarking can compare the performance of the two systems. This is speculation of have and have nots and relaying that to game performance before either has been released.
Since when was a radio ever silent, except when switched off/down?Between the Github leak naming, and the radio silence on VRS and Sampler feedback, I've been considering it a distinct possibility for a while now. So much so that this doesn't actually surprise me.
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Since the FM radio.Since when was a radio ever silent, except when switched off/down?
In some countries FM radio is still a thing, especially since Covid-19Since the FM radio.
If PS5 is based on GFX IP 10.0 as the Github leaks have shown, it won't have VRS and Sampler Feedback. Simple as that.
But Github wasn't true?