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[NBtoaster]

Really? there is such a thing as post history... you may have understood wrong but I clearly said that because Forza 5 uses a static light source, there's no reason to dynamically move environment shadows, and I specifically used an example of holding an object to a lamp, rotating the object, etc. all of the shadows cast by the object and lighting hitting the object is exactly what Forza 5 is doing, now the rest of the objects like your furniture or whatever will cast shadows as well but they won't move, so why do those need to be dynamic again? please explain why it matters unless you have day/night transitions? those shadows are baked by nature of the design.

Using the same example, what DC is doing differently is also moving the lamp, not just the object around the lamp, NOW the shadows cast by your furniture also has to shift by the nature of you moving the lamp, this adds a whole new level of calculations and sure it is technically a lot more taxing on the hardware, but from the drivers perspective and not changing the time of day, the visual effects are the same to the viewer.

There are usually large quality differences between real time and baked solutions. Baked shadows need to be relatively low resolution to keep the size of the level down. Though baked GI is usually higher quality than realtime solutions (but less accurate).

 

[Cidd]

I was referring to the secret sauce pics and the power of the cloud comments

Ah ok, no biggy then.

 

[PSGames]

If he's getting it from there, he's obviously not reading what people are posting. The ex-MS dude who actually worked on the Xbone states very clearly the SHAPE is approx 18 GFLOPS.



He also states that devs have little of this power available to them, as most of it is reserved to power Kinect,



http://beyond3d.com/showthread.php?p=1787843#post1787843

This. The only thing Shape trumps the PS4 on is basically "free" voice recognition. Will the upcoming PSEye have a chip of it's own to compensate? Who knows.

 

[Mastperf]

Right. PS4 doesn't have any hardware to match SHAPE. The audio processor in the PS4 is just a compression/decompression piece and does nowhere near what shape does, anything advanced to match and beyond has to be handled in software using CU, which has been estimated would drain 100-200 Gflops to match shape, or even more if your doing audio raycasting.

I don't think anyone here is suggesting that SHAPE is rated at 200GFLOPS, it's actually rated at 15GFLOPS. What was said is that if one were to emulate what shape does using CU, it would be equivalent to 100-200 Glfops required to do so.

See post #3410. Again I said "what's being said"
http://beyond3d.com/showthread.php?p=1736869

Lol, you guys are too funny

While the SHAPE info is cool and appreciated, I'm not really sure how it's relevant when the majority is going to Kinect. Are you expecting the remaining power to be enough to even make a dent in the advantage the PS4 has? You also seem certain about the PS4's audio hardware which is apparently a mystery to everyone but Sony and those under NDA. Have you seen any new info that we haven't heard about?
Not trying to attack you or anything but just curious what you expect since you brought it up.

 

[qa_engineer]

This. The only thing Shape trumps the PS4 on is basically "free" voice recognition. Will the upcoming PSEye have a chip of it's own to compensate? Who knows.

Probably not. But voice recognition is more so a os feature and not a system selling or top gaming feature. I'm not saying games won't incorporate voice recognition, I'm saying people arent going to line up for voice recognition 2: talk dirty to me.

 

[USC-fan]

It now seem the really only hardware advantage for the xbone is the CPU overclock.

Since we do not know the final cpu speed of ps4[but likely 1.6ghz] and how much of the cpu is reserve between the systems. Hard to say how big advantage this is for the xbone.

 

[nib95]

If he's getting it from there, he's obviously not reading what people are posting. The ex-MS dude who actually worked on the Xbone states very clearly the SHAPE is approx 18 GFLOPS.

He also states that devs have little of this power available to them, as most of it is reserved to power Kinect,

http://beyond3d.com/showthread.php?p=1787843#post1787843

Common sense really. Can't believe there's people who actually believe Shape would be up to 200 Gflops, some even (on B3D) believing 400 Gflops! (4x more than the CPU itself lol.) No wonder that forum has lost it's credibility. At least on GAF mods are super strict about checking on claimed sources and insider links (thank God). Most other forums people can just get away with posting whatever shit they want and claiming they know someone on the inside lol.

 

[CLEEK]

It now seem the really only hardware advantage for the xbone is the CPU overclock.

Since we do not know the final cpu speed of ps4[but likely 1.6ghz] and how much of the cpu is reserve between the systems. Hard to say how big advantage this is for the xbone.

I thought that both the Xbone and PS4 reserve 2 of their 8 CPU cores for OS. If this is true, then the Xbone has 6.75 GFLOPS more CPU power available to devs than the PS4. Utterly trivial seeing as the PS4 has ~500GFLOPS of GPGPU more than the Xbox.

 

[JaggedSac]

This. The only thing Shape trumps the PS4 on is basically "free" voice recognition.

It apparently also does some nice noise reduction stuff as well. I think the accuracy of the voice recognition on the Bone is going to be quite good.

 

[Brad Grenz]

It doesn't even really matter what the FLOP count of SHAPE is. The fact is PS4 games are under no obligation to exactly replicate it's capabilities or fidelity in software on either the CPU or GPU. Most devs will either go lowest common denominator, and just underutilize SHAPE's capabilities as they produce sound engines created with the PS4's limitations in mind, or they will simply cut down the sound quality on PS4 until the computational impact is minimal. Best case scenario is that audiophiles may notice better audio quality in Xbox One games, but the performance difference will not be meaningful.

 

[Ricerocket]

If he's getting it from there, he's obviously not reading what people are posting. The ex-MS dude who actually worked on the Xbone states very clearly the SHAPE is approx 18 GFLOPS.



He also states that devs have little of this power available to them, as most of it is reserved to power Kinect,



http://beyond3d.com/showthread.php?p=1787843#post1787843

Unfortunately, Devs only have access to a small part of it. Most of it is reserved for Kinect processing. As a bonus though, it means devs don't have to ask the question "do I have the resources to spare for adding Kinect?" like they did in the last console. Kinect is free(*). _Not_ using it is leaving processing power on the table. I hope this encourages them to be more liberal in their kinect integration this time around.

(*) For certain values of "Kinect". I believe there are some features that devs can hook in to that require memory/processing on their part. Speech is not one of them.

Welp lol. That kinda puts a fork into this whole SHAPE being there for some advanced I can't name any audio effects for games.

 

[nib95]

I thought that both the Xbone and PS4 reserve 2 of their 8 CPU cores for OS. If this is true, then the Xbone has 6.75 GFLOPS more CPU power available to devs than the PS4. Utterly trivial seeing as the PS4 has ~500GFLOPS of GPGPU more than the Xbox.

Amount of reserved resources of the PS4 has not yet been confirmed. I think on the Xbox One it's 2 cores on the CPU and 10% of the GPU?

 

[qa_engineer]

It apparently also does some nice noise reduction stuff as well. I think the accuracy of the voice recognition on the Bone is going to be quite good.

Yes it is. The OS has voice control baked in so it has to have the dedicated hardware, similar to google/Motorola x and its low power third co processor which is always listening for voice commands.

The Moto X is powered by a dual-core Snapdragon processor, which is assisted by additional processor cores dedicated to the phone’s always-on voice commands and contextual awareness
Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/16/m...dares-to-innovate-review/#ZVEDRFiBbQzYYUv1.99

 

[CLEEK]

Amount of reserved resources of the PS4 has not yet been confirmed. I think on the Xbox One it's 2 cores on the CPU and 10% of the GPU?

Digital Foundary inferred that 2 cores were reserved based on a Killzone tech demo by Guerrilla games that showed it only ran on 6 cores. That's the closest we've had to confirmation.

Edit: Now with source.

Interestingly, Guerrilla's presentation explicitly refers to "every" core being used, but the screenshots of the profiling tools - developed by the team itself owing to the work-in-progress nature of Sony's own analysis software - only seems to be explicitly identifying five worker threads. As of right now, we have no real idea of how much CPU time the PS4's new operating system sucks up and how much is left to game developers, and we understand that the system reservation is up in the air. However, the profiling tool shows that in the here and now there are indeed five workers threads, plus the "orchestrator" and each of them is locked to a single core. The inference we can draw right now is that while OS reservation hasn't been locked down, developers have access to at least six of the eight cores of the PS4's CPU.

 

[nib95]

Digital Foundary inferred that 2 cores were reserved based on a Killzone tech demo by Guerrilla games that showed it only ran on 6 cores. That's the closest we've had to confirmation.

Interesting. I suppose it does make sense. Anything regarding the GPU side?

 

[Mastperf]

Originally Posted by Bkilian

Unfortunately, Devs only have access to a small part of it. Most of it is reserved for Kinect processing. As a bonus though, it means devs don't have to ask the question "do I have the resources to spare for adding Kinect?" like they did in the last console. Kinect is free(*). _Not_ using it is leaving processing power on the table. I hope this encourages them to be more liberal in their kinect integration this time around.

(*) For certain values of "Kinect". I believe there are some features that devs can hook in to that require memory/processing on their part. Speech is not one of them.


So the people who have been repeating the SHAPE info have just conveniently left that extremely important info out? Smh...

 

[viveks86]

5 million transistors
cloudy 4 x
dgpu
balance
ESRAM 214gb/s
audio chip SHARPE SECRET SAUCE

did i miss anything?

Well you missed 4.995 billion transistors

 

[Can Crusher]

I thought that both the Xbone and PS4 reserve 2 of their 8 CPU cores for OS. If this is true, then the Xbone has 6.75 GFLOPS more CPU power available to devs than the PS4. Utterly trivial seeing as the PS4 has ~500GFLOPS of GPGPU more than the Xbox.

Nobody knows how many cores are reserved I think.

 

[nib95]

EDIT: Save for the other thread.

 

[viveks86]

Digital Foundary inferred that 2 cores were reserved based on a Killzone tech demo by Guerrilla games that showed it only ran on 6 cores. That's the closest we've had to confirmation.

I think it's still fluid for the PS4 since that presentation was a long time ago when all resources may not have been locked down for the OS. Would be cool to see someone from GG present again sometime before launch.

 

[statham]

EDIT: Save for the other thread.

nice.

 

[nib95]

nice.

Well, the other thread is specifically about the performance differences between the two consoles, and that 50% figure, so it seemed more fitting. This one is more about the balance of the Xbox One which is sort of a different subject altogether.

 

[onQ123]

No SHAPE isn't going to make the Xbox games look better & so on but I love the fact that it's a hardware solution to game audio & Kinect voice control \ recognition.


I can see it making a lot of games more enjoyable on the Xbox One & might even help create some new gameplay ideas along the way since it's already there & it's not going to take away any resources from the games.


Think of something like a nightly game show like Wheel Of Fortune that's using the Xbox One to play real players against each other live & broadcasting over Xbox Live & other streaming websites.

 

[artist]

Good digging. Love these charts!

Thanks.

I find it really disappointing that the so-called journalists simply regurgitate PR ("we found that going to 14 CUs wasn't as effective as the 6.6 per cent clock upgrade that we did") without doing some basic homework like this.

Right. PS4 doesn't have any hardware to match SHAPE. The audio processor in the PS4 is just a compression/decompression piece and does nowhere near what shape does, anything advanced to match and beyond has to be handled in software using CU, which has been estimated would drain 100-200 Gflops to match shape, or even more if your doing audio raycasting.

This kind of posts evoke the same kind of feeling when I used to read Reiko's posts, really sorry.

 

[onQ123]

Originally Posted by Bkilian

Unfortunately, Devs only have access to a small part of it. Most of it is reserved for Kinect processing. As a bonus though, it means devs don't have to ask the question "do I have the resources to spare for adding Kinect?" like they did in the last console. Kinect is free(*). _Not_ using it is leaving processing power on the table. I hope this encourages them to be more liberal in their kinect integration this time around.

(*) For certain values of "Kinect". I believe there are some features that devs can hook in to that require memory/processing on their part. Speech is not one of them.


So the people who have been repeating the SHAPE info have just conveniently left that extremely important info out? Smh...

Funny thing is he was talking to me when he posted that. I went to sleep I didn't expect that it would be all over neogaf when I woke up lol.

 

[onanie]

It is a bit naughty of you to say this,

Not saying Shape can do ray casting but a processor architecture designed specifically for audio can be 15GFLOPS while at the same time it could take another non audio processor 100-200 GFLOPS to emulate it's functions

and then just moments later this,

PS4 doesn't have any hardware to match SHAPE. The audio processor in the PS4 is just a compression/decompression piece and does nowhere near what shape does, anything advanced to match and beyond has to be handled in software using CU, which has been estimated would drain 100-200 Gflops to match shape, or even more if your doing audio raycasting.

Anyways, audio raycasting is a good example of the limitation of fixed purpose hardware like SHAPE. If you try anything outside of its spec, you're out of luck.

Also, what is the sauce for your claim that "the audio processor in the PS4 is just a compression/decompression piece and does nowhere near what shape does"?

 

[shinra-bansho]

Also, what is the sauce for your claim that "the audio processor in the PS4 is just a compression/decompression piece and does nowhere near what shape does"?

I believe people claiming that cite a quote from Cerny.

There's dedicated audio hardware. The principal thing that it does is that it compresses and decompresses audio streams, various formats. So some of that is for the games - you'll have many, many audio streams in MP3 or another format and the hardware will take care of that for you. Or, on the system side for example, audio chat - the compression and decompression of that.

There's also this from the Gamasutra interview:

"For example, by having the hardware dedicated unit for audio, that means we can support audio chat without the games needing to dedicate any significant resources to them. The same thing for compression and decompression of video." The audio unit also handles decompression of "a very large number" of MP3 streams for in-game audio, Cerny added.

But I don't know whether it's entirely accurate to take from that that all it does is compression and decompression. I don't think we really know anything about the PS4's dedicated audio hardware beyond this.

EDIT: There's also this line from the early VGLeaks documents - but I think that's pretty much it in terms of info about it?

audio processing unit, ~200 concurrent MP3 streams

I wouldn't be surprised if the XB1's audio chip does do more than the PS4's considering the former has to contend with Kinect voice recognition.

 

[Ishan]

Not saying Shape can do ray casting but a processor architecture designed specifically for audio can be 15GFLOPS while at the same time it could take another non audio processor 100-200 GFLOPS to emulate it's functions... just sayin, you can't take those Gflops at face value.

and the ps4 doesnt have to have the extra audio handling the kinect has . Speech recognition isnt an easy problem and the xbox has hardware to handle kindof that .... its commendable . You want to argue the ps4 doesnt have enough hardware to inherently handle that . That is a point of contention. If thats your point you make a good one. And then it comes down to is voice recognition important going forward? but trying to say okay so we can do this recognition handling and this is so much gflops vs what the ps4 hardware does is disingenuous different aims and different advantages.

that processing power can go to a graphical advantage and diverting it to make the same voice recognition processing in ineffecient. but you cant quite equate the two .... its just pretty uncomparable.

either say kinect matters more and trying to implement that on software is hard . or say graphics arent as important as kinect ... its one or the other. not both. neither console does both

 

[RoboPlato]

Originally Posted by Bkilian

Unfortunately, Devs only have access to a small part of it. Most of it is reserved for Kinect processing. As a bonus though, it means devs don't have to ask the question "do I have the resources to spare for adding Kinect?" like they did in the last console. Kinect is free(*). _Not_ using it is leaving processing power on the table. I hope this encourages them to be more liberal in their kinect integration this time around.

(*) For certain values of "Kinect". I believe there are some features that devs can hook in to that require memory/processing on their part. Speech is not one of them.


So the people who have been repeating the SHAPE info have just conveniently left that extremely important info out? Smh...

I've been thinking this was the case for a while but it sounds like even more is reserved for Kinect than I expected. Shape is more complex than PS4's audio hardware but that's because it has to deal with the Kinect overhead.

 

[Sword Of Doom]

Right. PS4 doesn't have any hardware to match SHAPE. The audio processor in the PS4 is just a compression/decompression piece and does nowhere near what shape does, anything advanced to match and beyond has to be handled in software using CU, which has been estimated would drain 100-200 Gflops to match shape, or even more if your doing audio raycasting.

What's your point? The PS4 doesn't have Kinect so why is this even relevant? The reason it's not in the PS4 is because it's not necessary. And SHAPE also doesn't do raycasting so I don't understand what you're trying to say.

 

[Bundy]

What's your point? The PS4 doesn't have Kinect so why is this even relevant? The reason it's not in the PS4 is because it's not necessary. And SHAPE also doesn't do raycasting so I don't understand what you're trying to say.

We have a winner here!

 

[Zen]

Well we already know that PS4 has all voice and facial recognition, so what's the big deal? It's probably built into OS reserves, and might take up some extra stuff if you use it in a game.

That said it's doubtful that PS4 multiplats will suddenly start being worse than Xbox One Multiplats if they're both using making mandatory use of voice features (if such a scenario even exists). Can you honestly see voice stuff (unaided by what the PS4 does have even) taking up enough resources to offset the PS4 performance advantage?

So what's the issue? I seriously doubt we'll see games that make mandatory use of the voice stuff outside of ONE exclusives here and there.

If rumors were to be believed, Sony was originally going to bundle the Camera with the PS4 (cutting it is part of how they got the 100 dollar price advantage), so knowing that they already built Voice/ Facial/body recognition stuff for the system, it's silly to think that they did not sensibly budget the impact they would have.

What is being argued about the PS4 audio chip being weaker and that it could take resources away isn't unlikely, it just probably doesn't matter in a practical sense.

If he's getting it from there, he's obviously not reading what people are posting. The ex-MS dude who actually worked on the Xbone states very clearly the SHAPE is approx 18 GFLOPS.



He also states that devs have little of this power available to them, as most of it is reserved to power Kinect,



http://beyond3d.com/showthread.php?p=1787843#post1787843

Oh wow, yeah, why is this even a thing. A measly (not even when you factor in whatever the PS4 chip does) 18flops?

 

[demolitio]

I swear, every night I come in and see who enters the ring and always leave astonished as to where people take this thread with a bunch of assumptions and picking and choosing information just to defend something that they shouldn't have a stake in. It's always fun to see what is used as the great equalizer next and what assumptions come out of it when all that can be judged is what we know so far and what we hear from real sources.

Besides the obvious advantages that comes with this, I kind of wish Sony would announce their CPU speed as higher than 1.6 just to see where this thread goes next...lol. I'm actually surprised we haven't heard that yet but I don't think it will be clocked any higher since they probably would have stopped MS using that as a point by now. Then again, they've been pretty quiet all year and it's worked for them in many ways too.

The lead-up to the next consoles is almost like a game in itself.

 

[gruenel]

So we're back at SHAPE = secret sauce now? Even though we know almost nothing about PS4's audio chip? 200 GFlops to do sound? Oh my.

 

[Hotcooler]

https://twitter.com/digitalfoundry/status/382741043206438912

 

[DBT85]

https://twitter.com/digitalfoundry/status/382741043206438912

PNGd that for people

 

[mrklaw]

how would ROPs performance be better than expected unless the ROPs are directly connected to the esram? But I didn't think they were, and you had to render your final image from main memory? Even if they were directly connected they'd only get the ESRAM bandwidth which is still less than PS4.


edit: or the answer is just - ekim

 

[nib95]

PNGd that for people

More Microsoft PR incoming.


Also lol at Ekim. I guess he's still clinging to the word of his source even if Bish has decided otherwise.

 

[Amir0x]

It's not happening Xbox One fans. You're never going to discover some secret that lets it come close to par with PS4. I can't believe people haven't given up the ghost already lol

 

[mrklaw]

It's not happening Xbox One fans. You're never going to discover some secret that lets it come close to par with PS4. I can't believe people haven't given up the ghost already lol

why do xbox fans need it to be more powerful (or even on par)? Why can't it be enough that Xbox will have great exclusives, and multiplatform games will still look great. If you're a one console gamer next gen an Xbox one will be fine - assuming it has the games you are interested in.

MS potentially being on the back foot is good for Xbox fans. It hopefully means they'll be pressured to support Xbox one with first party content for the full lifecycle of the machine - rather than giving it a quick boost early on and then coasting on 3rd party software.

 

[cyberheater]

It's not happening Xbox One fans. You're never going to discover some secret that lets it come close to par with PS4. I can't believe people haven't given up the ghost already lol

Give it time. We're still at the denial and isolation stage.

 

[Doc Evils]

SHAPE? more like STAHP guys, it's getting kinda sad now :/

 

[KidBeta]

how would ROPs performance be better than expected unless the ROPs are directly connected to the esram? But I didn't think they were, and you had to render your final image from main memory? Even if they were directly connected they'd only get the ESRAM bandwidth which is still less than PS4.


edit: or the answer is just - ekim

They wouldn't be directly connected to RAM either way, GCN works off a crossbar for memory operations afaik so they ROPs should be able to write anywhere.

 

[Mihael Mello Keehl]

Anybody else know if this indeed from the new edge?

http://m.neogaf.com/showpost.php?p=83613773

 

[Prince Vultan]

Anybody else know if this indeed from the new edge?

http://m.neogaf.com/showpost.php?p=83613773

Wow... I have a hard time believing Edge would write something which is basically on the level of the "objectively better" Xbone posters we've been seeing around GAF lately.

"Killzone is no Halo"? Hmmm... wasn't aware there was a Halo game at Xbone's launch.

 

[IN&OUT]

Transistors
Cloud
Diminishing returns
Lowest common denominator
900p = 1080p
Balance
secret sauce
SHAPE
Elegance > Brute force. LMAO
and now

16ROPs > 32ROPs


I admire such persistence. very entertaining stuff

 

[DBT85]

Transistors
Cloud
Diminishing returns
Lowest common denominator
900p = 1080p
Balance
secret sauce
SHAPE
Elegance > Brute force. LMAO
and now

16ROPs > 32ROPs


I admire such persistence. very entertaining stuff

You forgot "Microsoft wont let Sony...."

 

[IN&OUT]

You forgot "Microsoft wont let Sony...."

I'm sure I forgot even more than that, I've seen some of the most bizarre excuses in my life in the last 6 months.

 

[Mihael Mello Keehl]

Wow... I have a hard time believing Edge would write something which is basically on the level of the "objectively better" Xbone posters we've been seeing around GAF lately.

"Killzone is no Halo"? Hmmm... wasn't aware there was a Halo game at Xbone's launch.

Yea even I am skeptical on that and how quick their tune change is even more crazy if true.

 

[shinra-bansho]

It's not happening Xbox One fans. You're never going to discover some secret that lets it come close to par with PS4. I can't believe people haven't given up the ghost already lol

The dream will never die.
PhoeniXbox.

why do xbox fans need it to be more powerful (or even on par)? Why can't it be enough that Xbox will have great exclusives, and multiplatform games will still look great. If you're a one console gamer next gen an Xbox one will be fine - assuming it has the games you are interested in.

Pre-purchase rationalisation.