That RDNA 1.8 Consoles Rumor *spawn*

You can do it before shipping the game and better yet it's guaranteed to work everywhere at nearly no performance hit. If storage space is a concern then you can use texture compression as well ...

And texture streaming is an orthogonal issue altogether. Inferencing shaders can't really beat texture sampling hardware when it comes to these tasks and they have optimized compression paths too ...

I/O traffic stopped being a bottleneck ironically since the new consoles introduced SSDs so using ML to minimize this traffic isn't going to matter in the slightest. A better case for ML texture upscaling would've been on systems using an HDDs since high I/O traffic would prove to be a bottleneck ...

 

Microsoft is using ML to take a lower res texture and up res it on the fly
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-wants-use-machine-learning-improve-poor-game-textures

So by the sound of the quote it looks like ms is willing to do the work for game developers to reap the benefits of it. You say SSDs remove the bottleneck but I'd like to ask how. Even the ps5's ssd pales in comparison to the GDDR ram in the console.

As this person said you can ship much lower res textures which means more games will fit on a users ssd and at the same time downloads will be faster and for those on metered connections cost less. Then you can move the low res textures into ram for the gpu to upscale in real time thus needing less bandwidth both on the graphics card when its being read and ssd has to transfer it. If they can use this with sfs they may be able to use even less bandwidth.

I don't see the down size here

 

What’s the point of this? The Pro was more Vega than the One X. FP16 and HBCC didn’t come close to being game changers for Vega PC gpus. The PS4 didn’t need all the features added to later versions of GCN to become best selling console of its gen with plenty of good looking games to boot.

It’s not like every RDNA2 feature must be present or these two consoles will be failures. The XSX biggest advantage will come from its 20% more Tflops and 25% more local memory bandwidth. The PS5 has the raw bandwidth advantage with its SSD.

The unique arch features of both consoles may cancel each other out or not be readily employed or exploited by third parties devs (how much resources are going to be spent on features that are not standard across platforms).

It’s like we are making a mountain out of molehill to beat a dead horse. We don’t have enough info about the hardware and the bits of info we are getting of late aren’t doing much to change that reality.

 

So why having an ultra fast SSD ?

I see ML for textures something more useful in Stadia-like consoles.

 

Simple, SSDs have a higher I/O bandwidth than HDDs do but of course it isn't going to match the speed of VRAM. More importantly why are you concerned about SSDs not being able to match the speeds offered by VRAM in the case of streaming ? In the near future, SSDs will be capable of streaming 3 raw uncompressed 24-bit 4096x4096 per 16.6ms/frame which is multiple times more texel density than 4K resolution itself is capable of displaying so I'm failing to see how from your perspective that I/O traffic will be an issue at all ...

Also, ML isn't this magical change in the paradigm of data compression you think it is that will somehow revolutionize our current texture streaming systems. It's just another data compression method with it's own faults ...

Well I can already see a downside because using ML isn't anywhere near close to a lossless conversion process that they seem to hint. Sometimes using ML to do texture upscaling will noticeably diverge from the original texture result.

By comparison doing texture compression using offline preprocessing and then using the texture sampler's hardware block to do the decompression will get you near ground truth result which is close to the quality of the uncompressed texture. This way developers can minimize the signal to noise ratio thus controlling the quality/data loss tradeoff depending on the compression formats they use. Best of all, developers don't have to train any black box models to get texture compression technology right. Texture compression is so much simpler to deal with and you don't burn shader ALU operations either which could be used for more useful things ...

Sure you could do inferencing on a 128x128 texture size and output a 4096x4096 texture size result but it isn't going to be pretty. While you could fix these quality issues by increasing the input resolution of the textures but then you'd have to give up on being able to use a small amount of data anyways thus negating your initial premise of the advantage behind in using ML. We also can't guarantee that the trained model will consistently work the way we expect it to either compared to a hardware decompression block which will give us more consistent results ...

In conclusion, it's pretty hard to beat 2+ decades worth of optimizations behind texture samplers ... (even Larrabee prototypes had texture sampling hardware and future GPUs will still have them despite having less graphics state than their predecessors did)

 

buon giorno!

RDNA 1 and RDNA2, something in between, doesn't matter as much, and it's normal, imho. What matters is that he mentioned there isn't ML stuff on the console. Something like DLSS would be the consoles salvation.

 

I think there were some hints that the Series X may have some ML, right?

 

PS5 being between RDNA1 and 2 was already known publically a long time (github, rumors and other leaks). Then MS advertised their VRS heavily, and the ML speculations then. The sony engineer gets attacked because he's just that, a sony engineer (or was?).

 

Well found.
So some real problems are there against XSX... That combined with the extreme clock of this console GPU and weird solution found to control temperature spikes lead me to a prudent wait & see in regards of buying it... can't say is a bad console but also not totally convinced.

 

I think you're overcomplicating what Sampler Feedback's are. The feature as I like to think about it is really nothing more than a feedback texture containing a requested MIP level for the sampled location.

Having actually looked at the spec for myself, in the case of streaming there is also a MinMip/'residency' texture describing the current MIP level. Herein lies the problem behind "MinMip texture", since it reflects the current tiled resource mappings so updating your MinMip texture involves doing calls to UpdateTileMappings API to change the tiled resource mappings so it pretty much kills any hope of this texture streaming system being performant ...

Seeing as how AMD specifically discouraged against using that API before and they don't recommend using tiled resources for RDNA, I'm going to assume that their recommendation remains true for RDNA2 until they show a robust reduction in their binding costs otherwise ...

Sampler feedbacks are about as valuable as tiled resources are when it comes to texture streaming which amounts to nearly nothing ...

 

Before saying this wait at least Digitalfoundry face off, maybe the devs like Billy Khan lead engine programmer of ID software praised the console for a reason.

And he has devkits, not like people speculating here.

 

nah he is just paid by Sony !

 

I think my ps4pro can last a bit more