It's a double-edged sword. They're trying to sell their last minute upgrades as very significant, but somehow didn't realize that it makes raw specs difference look like a big deal in the process.
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Digital Foundry: Microsoft to unlock more GPU power for Xbox One developers
- Thread starter DaSorcerer7
- Start date
It's a double-edged sword. They're trying to sell their last minute upgrades as very significant, but somehow didn't realize that it makes raw specs difference look like a big deal in the process.
Excellent post.
It's tough to say how much R&D went into the PS4 camera, but even after investing in it, they erred on the side of core games/gamers and made it optional.
I don't think it will matter much. Video data stream upon which GPU will be doing math is counted in Mbit/s where Ram read/write speed is in GB/s. Could be wrong though.
Also running different non game task in parallel on GPU... wouldn't that cost some overall performance ? Or GPU parallel nature would deal with that ?
FranXico
Member
As someone who is unfortunately, very dependent on MS development tools at (non-gaming) work, I can also tell you how bad their long term support is.
We primarily develop on C++, and use Perl and Python for scripts.
We recently upgraded from an old Visual Studio to 2012, and were very happy thinking "Yay! C++11 support!", only to find that support for both variadic templates and constexpr was missing (which sucks royally if you're making a library).
Even worse, we use COM extensively, and wasted a whole sprint on the upgrade because of endless regressions with MIDL. Anybody complaining about this (let me assure you, more people than you imagine had these problems) got a blank "we decided not to fix for your use case at this time".
And for those who think COM is obsolete, what do you think WinRT is?
Chobel
Member
OS need only CPU to call GPU. Windows Aero need GPU computing because it's showing in screen.
They said it in the article, GPU reservation is for Kinect and Snap. Also if your read the article they said in the future the OS won't reserve GPU even with all that functionality. If Xbox One can do it (No GPU reservation) with Kinect and snap, then PS4 probably won't reserve any GPU time.
PS4 is rumor to support HDMI 2.0. Sony is going to make a push for 4k bluray/video service.
Xbone: 2 ACE/ 16 queues [isnt some on this reserve for OS now?]
Lawds.
But not to worry! With a little:
and:
we should start to see the advantage of how Microsoft is over-delivering on value.
LOL, wow. 10/10
XB1 crushes the PS4 in volume as well.
SwiftDeath
Member
You could say that all that extra space is filled with hot air.
velociraptor
Junior Member
That's the funny thing about this entire fiasco. 10% unlocked? Gap closed!
I'm expecting a 4K video service too later on in the gen for the PS4.
Once all of the "hardcore" gamers buy the system, they are going to need to branch out into other areas; pointless to advertise to people who already own the product.
I'm expecting a multimedia feature campaign similar to the PS3's "it only does everything" tagline about 3-4 years from now.
Then how they plan to get kinect working ? CPU is weaksouse and i doubt they will try to make it even less powerful by moving task from GPU to CPU. Image calculation isn't really easy task considering they have few different images to deal with.
Insane Metal
Gold Member
Holy shit, masterful. 10/10
They have to make room for THE CLOUD!
TheGreyHulk
Member
MS was limited to a smaller GPU due to the fact that they chose to roll with ESRAM, which takes up a big chunk of the chip space. Anand estimated it takes up 1.6 billion transistors out of the 5 billion total on the chip. That's a pretty decent chunk of die real estate. It's kind of ironic that they initially went with eSRAM + DDR3 due to the costs of GDDR5 because what they ended up having to due to the chip to get around the DDR3 limited bandwidth ended up creating a big ass chip the manufacture which affects their yields and could end up being a costly decision since the eSRAM will limit their ability to move to smaller manufacturing nodes in the future.
The PS4 has 18 compute units active so it sits in between a 7850 and 7870 based on compute units alone. Not sure if they have 20 on chip w/ 2 disabled for yields or not. If it did have 20, that would basically be a 7870/mobile 7970. There's only so much space you can give to a GPU/CPU before you get a chip that's too damn large to get good yields off of. I think they chose a very balanced setup w/ 18 CU's.
Chobel
Member
Moving goal posts? You said PS4 is media machine first gaming console second, we answered no it's gaming machine first. and now you're manipulating what we said and changing it to "PS4 won't have any media functionality". Stop this bullshit.
PS4 will have media machine capabilities but it's gaming machine first.
And no, MS and Sony don't have similar living room goals.
SwiftDeath
Member
I would think 4K would be something MS is interested in as well but I'm not sure how they would go about it
Do you need a special 4K blu-ray drive or can normal blu-ray drives handle it?
ChainsawFilms
Member
Video stream won't eat up GPU either, as all the decoding / encoding is handled by a specialist chip. There's a reason they've reserved that 10%, and it will be a higher percentage than they currently believe they need, just in case they later discover they need more. Bandwidth allocation must be the same.
Running non game tasks in parallel on the GPU? That's what the 10% is allocated for, those non gaming tasks.
I get this impression MS want you to be able to run an App next to the main game window (why anyone would want to do this I don't understand, but kids these days and their micro attention spans!) and an App could conceivably be.... anything. An animated 3d gameguide doing a walkthrough as you play along, that could be your 10% right there.
I don't imagine that 10% is allocated for Kinect. I could be wrong but isn't that all handled on dedicated hardware now, rather than eating into the main CPU / GPU? I'd hope so.
4k material won't be fast in homes. Nor games nor movies will support it in recent future.
Also i doubt even 50GB DL BD can hold whole movie in 4k with decent sound.
BlimBlim Gamersyde videos are like 700mb for 2 minutes and they are still compressed.
BTW anyone have some data in above ? 10minutes@4k with 7.1 audio ? How much would that take ?
SenjutsuSage
Banned
This article was a lot less juicy compared to the first one, but I look forward to seeing the rest of what gets released over the weekend. I think it's good that they're putting out and talking about as much of the system as they are, because I certainly enjoy reading it.
Most interesting part was the part about the ROPs and how much bandwidth is required under the scenario they described, but if I'm thinking about this right, do you even necessarily need to use the ROPs in so evenly spread a fashion? Wouldn't there be a very real scenario that devs on the PS4, for example, can pick and choose to make specific render targets and depth/stencil surfaces much higher quality than others to take advantage of the benefit that 32 ROPs gives them while still providing respectable quality to the rest of the displayed pixels before ever hitting a bandwidth wall? You imagine then in a similar scenario where devs on the Xbox One can do the same basic thing, they just wouldn't have enough pixel fillrate to achieve as consistently high quality a look as what might be on display in a ps4 title, even if it still ends up looking impressive regardless.
I guess it all depends on how bandwidth requirements scale depending on the quality of bits per pixel that devs choose to take advantage of. Isn't there a realistic scenario where devs on the PS4 can just choose to apply even higher quality than 32bpp to specific environments, or even to their game's main character while still having plenty enough lower quality bpp render targets or surfaces at a high quality to spread around to the rest of the environment before hitting the bandwidth wall? Assuming it can work this way, which I assume it must be able to?
Also glad they didn't bother with another resolution mandate like with the 360. Let devs make the important decisions that are best for their own games.
Most interesting part was the part about the ROPs and how much bandwidth is required under the scenario they described, but if I'm thinking about this right, do you even necessarily need to use the ROPs in so evenly spread a fashion? Wouldn't there be a very real scenario that devs on the PS4, for example, can pick and choose to make specific render targets and depth/stencil surfaces much higher quality than others to take advantage of the benefit that 32 ROPs gives them while still providing respectable quality to the rest of the displayed pixels before ever hitting a bandwidth wall? You imagine then in a similar scenario where devs on the Xbox One can do the same basic thing, they just wouldn't have enough pixel fillrate to achieve as consistently high quality a look as what might be on display in a ps4 title, even if it still ends up looking impressive regardless.
I guess it all depends on how bandwidth requirements scale depending on the quality of bits per pixel that devs choose to take advantage of. Isn't there a realistic scenario where devs on the PS4 can just choose to apply even higher quality than 32bpp to specific environments, or even to their game's main character while still having plenty enough lower quality bpp render targets or surfaces at a high quality to spread around to the rest of the environment before hitting the bandwidth wall? Assuming it can work this way, which I assume it must be able to?
Also glad they didn't bother with another resolution mandate like with the 360. Let devs make the important decisions that are best for their own games.
ChainsawFilms
Member
I've seen this 2 ACE / 16 queues posted here recently, but is that correct? I thought it was 2 ACE / 4 queues. If I remember correctly, Cerny said not only did they increase the ACE number (2 to 8), they also increased the number each one can queue (again, 2 to 8)??
I may well be wrong....
castaction
Member
DAMN
SenjutsuSage
Banned
"For example, consider a typical game scenario where the render target is 32bpp [bits per pixel] and blending is disabled, and the depth/stencil surface is 32bpp with Z [depth] enabled. That amount to 12 bytes of bandwidth needed per pixel drawn (eight bytes write, four bytes read). At our peak fill-rate of 13.65GPixels/s that adds up to 164GB/s of real bandwidth that is needed which pretty much saturates our ESRAM bandwidth. In this case, even if we had doubled the number of ROPs, the effective fill-rate would not have changed because we would be bottlenecked on bandwidth. In other words, we balanced our ROPs to our bandwidth for our target scenarios. Keep in mind that bandwidth is also needed for vertex and texture data as well, which in our case typically comes from DDR3."
I don't fully understand this part, what they are saying is that having 32 ROPs is waste because, anyway, the eSRAM bandwidth can barely handle 16 ROPs?
So, does this means the PS4 has a bandwidth bottleneck?
Can someone explain?
I don't fully understand this part, what they are saying is that having 32 ROPs is waste because, anyway, the eSRAM bandwidth can barely handle 16 ROPs?
So, does this means the PS4 has a bandwidth bottleneck?
Can someone explain?
KimonoNoNo
Member
I wonder where MS's plans for a subsidised console went?
That was the thing as a Sony fan I was most worried about.
That was the thing as a Sony fan I was most worried about.
Goodacre0081
Member
wasn't this MS's plan all along with getting an all-in-one device into the living room?
Probably the same toilet where they were snorting the coke when they thought of the idea.
My scenario was addressing the "time sharing" scenario (game and OS not being rendered at the same time). But at any rate, this discussion is all speculative until we get more detail on how Sony's implementation handles multitasking.
But based on what we have so far, Sony doesn't have a reason to announce anything.
SenjutsuSage
Banned
I also found that part interesting, but I don't think it necessarily HAS to work that way. What stops a PS4 game, for example, from using a higher quality than 32 bits per pixel for their render targets and depth/stencil surfaces in specific parts of their game to make those pixels even higher quality, and then apply a smart balance of quality pixels across everything else before ever being limited by bandwidth? So under this scenario, the PS4 with even more pixel pushing power may still be able to benefit meaningfully from the extra ROPs by using higher quality bits per pixel before hitting the limit on bandwidth, whereas on the Xbox One you assume devs may not have as much freedom to do the same, but this all depends on how the bandwidth requirements scale from higher than 32bpp. Even with a decent increase in bandwidth requirement, however, PS4 devs still appear to likely have something extra they can push quality wise before ever hitting the bandwidth limit.
I was under the impression your blog is still getting plenty of hits.
Have you played or seen a vita? Basically when you hit the PS button, the game pauses and the last image on the screen is grabbed as a screenshot and shrinks down to a thumbnail and the OS appears behind it. When you resume, the image of the game grows to fill the screen, and then resumes.
At no point is he game running at the same time as the OS.
I did not say that the PS4 is a "media machine first gaming console second".
I said that both systems will be multimedia machines the can also run console games, with games obviously being a part of that "multimedia".
Haha, excuse me? What is your problem?
First of all, if you are going to get so uptight you could at least state what I actually said. I simply said that the PS4's power is going to also help when it comes to media functions -- not just games. Never stated that you guys said the system won't have any media features.
Both consoles will primarly be known/viewed as gaming machines first. Very few are going to buy either console solely for features outside of gaming.
A good number will however, buy both consoles for gaming on top of multiple media features.
They both want to take over the living room so yes, they both want the same goals.
Sony has their own large companies that make media, yet they aren't going to try and push what they make on to their own "box"? Heh, okay. Yep, Sony doesn't want to take over living rooms. They only care about appealing to hardcore gamers and nothing more.
Yup, that's why I'm buying both (+ exclusives). MS should be playing up media features instead of talking about specs. Sure, most of GAF would hate it but most of GAF is a lost cause for them. They should be focusing on other consumers. Or a different message. Or talking to GAF about games. Anything other than talking about specs with tech-savvy consumers! It ain't working.
SenjutsuSage
Banned
From my understanding, the PS4 has 8 of these dudes, where as the Xbox One only has 2.
This post is legendary for its lack of comprehension of this news. I'm sure 900 people jumped on you but this was hilarious so I thank you for this.
Damn @ the gap between PS4 and Xbox One actually getting wider now that we have this confirmed. Most people weren't even calculating this very often in their PS4 v. XBO match ups because nobody was sure for a fact how much would be reserved of the GPU. So this will actually result in most comparisons to date being off, and in Sony's favor. Man Albert Penello and Major Nelson's entire narrative is crumbling in shambles. It's a good thing Microsoft PR lately has been a bit more forthright about the power issue, because this just gets messier every day.
I have seen this posted before and i have yet to see if have we the correct details on that.
He had a rough day. Yesterday they went crazy over a comment by albert "We upgraded the CPU and GPU in Xbox One several weeks ago." They were saying this confirms all the nonsense he posts.
and then this happened. "Yes, I was referring to the previously announced clock speed increases." LMAO
I definitely don't expect 4K to get wide support any time soon but I wouldn't be surprised to see them put a few 4K videos on their "online store" for the PS4 in the future -- at least some smaller length videos.
The major difference is that Sony didn't compromise their hardware design and specs in pursuit of the living room goal where it appears that Microsoft did.
I like the confirmation of the 10% reservation because it puts the PS4 deltas all at 50% or higher. Much more balanced than 40-something
Generally speaking those are responsible for compute omphh in GPUs. By compute you can understand it for example: Better physic
If i would be MS at this point i would go full Nintendo. Complete blackout on hardware spec and keep those NDAs until it will be last gen.
With each new article Xbone is getting weaker.
LiquidSolid
Member
SMH. Please, stop making things up when you don't understand what you're talking about. The idea that you need to reserve part of the GPU just so you can call the system UI up at any moment is beyond ridiculous. You're not storing the fucking UI on the GPU, what would be the point of that? It's stored in RAM and being run on the CPU. That's all it needs and crossing to it should be instantaneous (CPUs aren't as slow as you seem to think). And even if it isn't, that's Sony's programming fuck up and has absolutely nothing to do with reserving part of the GPU.