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[MLiD] Project Helix is 25 Percent Faster Than PS6

Well, it gets a bit complicated when you get into the weeds.

Theres business politics and all sorts. If MS has a long term plan then it may look to them on paper that it's more important to lose money now than a market completely, in the future.

Then there is the harsh reality that we have to accept when discussing this is that MS does have an unbelievable level of money so 1 billion dollars to Sony means a completely different thing to 1 billion dollars for MS.

So, losing a few million sales for MS to secure a future for the division could be the same as Sony losing a few hundred thousand sales on steam. Yes the money is more but it's all relative to what you have as potential liquid cash to spend.

That's where none of us have a clue to what Satya is discussing with Asha and what she can extract from the business to carry out her plans.

He has to give the new hire some rope to see what she does with it. Does she climb out of the hole that is the Xbox business she was handed. Or does she hang herself with it.
IMO they are continuing the same plan (msft).Unless Sony/nintendo are no longer constrained by hardware (aka 600 usd max for 2-3 x performance next gen after s2/ps6) and thermals via console environmental protection laws (EU).
 
I think it was a great idea, if it breaks it's easily replaced without having to send the console off for repair. And it keeps the system smaller and probably cooler.
They moved to external after the problems they had with the OG xbox ac input connector detaching from motherboard and causing fires.....


Their "fix" was replacement ac input cables with arc fault protection to interrupt the power if it sensed arcing in the power connector.
 
lol so the PS6S will cheaper than handheld ? The handheld it self is 0.5x the PS5. So PS6S will not even be on par with the PS5 and definitely worse than the Pro :messenger_tears_of_joy:

Remember when people were bitching about the Xbone S affecting Series X and being right about it? Well, why are people not seeing the failure happening again, but with Sony this time?

I don't need to be an engineer to realize it's going to drag down the main console and the whole gen with it

What's worse it that list of materials has 3 skus (edit: 4 wtf?), everyone saw from the start how the Xboxe S + Series X plan with two skus from the get-go was going to backfire, then Sony saw that and said, hold my matcha latte with almond milk and came with this "idea"

The worst of the worst? As shown by the Xbox experiment, the lower priced system is going to be the driver, making it unavoidable for development and prepare yourselves for another Baldu's Gate 3 kind of situation but for the PS6-lame edition affecting the main console as well

Absolute stupidity, copying shit for the sake of it will lead to nowhere, "portables" are the new waggle-waggle motion control crap from two gens ago, only Nintendo "doing it right" (I hated it, but they absolutely made bank), while everyone else were copying it and failing miserably
 
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I get what you are saying, but that doesn't make sense to me.

Xbox didn't just end up where it is now, and I strongly believe that MS didn't just switch up its entire Xbox management to keep doing the same thing it has been doing for the past 15 years. Or at least I would hope so.

To me, Xbox has only two options: they either completely embrace the console model and go back to what they were at the time of the 360. So that means, no more day one on gamepass, loss-leading hardware business model, Xbox games only being on Xbox....etc, or fully embrace the multiplat thing.

Any kinda flip flopping or mixed messaging, especially now, will mean they really are not learning their lesson.
I think they switched up the entire management team to ensure no hiccups in their plan. We have the leaked actbliz docs that point to convergence between Xbox & pc. That's half the plan and the valid crash out of Jim Ryan aka gaas push.

The other half is Phil's statement of we finally have a catalog for ai. I call bs on this as any trillion dollar company would seek to devalue their competitors via using ai to make similar titles but without getting any plagiarism blowback. This is going to happen.

Lastly comment from rich of digital foundry, next box should be delayed if windows for helix/portable pcs is not ready aka one unified ecosystem including continuing from one device to another (same game).

They have everything to ensure one unified ecosystem but it needs to be seamless with a good storefront.

Also more pubs esp in aa/mobile aka one stop shop for all types of games. Also it's starting via doom slayer mtx in diablo4.
 
Remember when people were bitching about the Xbone S affecting Series X and being right about it? Well, why are people not seeing the failure happening again, but with Sony this time?
Why dont you quote a single PS fan on this thread that thinks this is a good idea, if it actually comes to pass? We all think its retarded. But do keep pounding away at your strawman....
 
Yes, that's what you do on an open platform. The Consoles are open for competition, closed for security. MS focus is to lead in game Subscription and Streaming, forming the most complete universal ecosystem. Two things Epic and Steam can't match.

Hence, why the initial upfront cost of Helix needs to be artificially higher than it normally would have been had it been a console.
 
I'm sure Sony is shaking in their boots over Helix. A prebuilt PC from MS of all companies? Terrifying. Clearly a sales juggernaut in the making.
Remember when people were bitching about the Xbone S affecting Series X and being right about it? Well, why are people not seeing the failure happening again, but with Sony this time?

I don't need to be an engineer to realize it's going to drag down the main console and the whole gen with it

What's worse it that list of materials has 3 skus (edit: 4 wtf?), everyone saw from the start how the Xboxe S + Series X plan with two skus from the get-go was going to backfire, then Sony saw that and said, hold my matcha latte with almond milk and came with this "idea"

The worst of the worst? As shown by the Xbox experiment, the lower priced system is going to be the driver, making it unavoidable for development and prepare yourselves for another Baldu's Gate 3 kind of situation but for the PS6-lame edition affecting the main console as well

Absolute stupidity, copying shit for the sake of it will lead to nowhere, "portables" are the new waggle-waggle motion control crap from two gens ago, only Nintendo "doing it right" (I hated it, but they absolutely made bank), while everyone else were copying it and failing miserably
Games will be able to run on switch 2 and on PCs even less capable regardless of how powerful a PS6 is, or whether a cut down version exists. Developers are not being held back by hardware anymore. They are limited by reality of time and budgets, and quite frankly their own competence. Show me the developer right now who is crying over not being able to get their game out because the PS5 is not strong enough to support their grand vision.

People need to rid themselves of the fantasy that there is some magical next "generation" of games that look or play any different from what is out there today. Those days are over.
 
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Hence, why the initial upfront cost of Helix needs to be artificially higher than it normally would have been had it been a console.
Not really. As long as they're not losing money. MS isn't looking for hardware profits, or they wouldn't be allowing OEMs to build and profit off the devices. What MS wants is a thriving hardware ecosystem with various form factors but built mostly by OEMs.

MS first party devices are not necessarily going to take a profit, OEMs usually take 20-25%.
He said PS fan. :messenger_grinning_smiling:
I am a PS fan, everyone I know has Playstations, I used to have a PS2 with OG GOW when little.
Yes clearly a PS fan lol get real Senjutsu.
You keep repeating senjutsu thing, let's put an end to your paranoia. I don't have a Xitter account, never will. Only "social media" I have is reddit, you are welcome to come stalk me on it, like the GHG guy.

Also, just because Xbox ecosystem is my preferred choice of gaming doesn't mean I have anything against Sony, lol. PSN would be my secondary ecosystem if Sony expanded Cloud Gaming.

Order of preference: Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo, Epic, Valve.
 
Thx.

Last time around it made absolutely no difference despite the carnage in here when PS5/XSX released.
Don't read too much into all that. Sony has always kinda gone with more of a hybrid approach to their AMD tech implementation, while MS tends to go for more of an off-the-shelf approach.

for instance, Xbox requires direct X support, which no PlayStation hardware would require. Or like MS going with a separate neural block vs Sony's neural arrays. Now whats funny about this is that AMD does the NPUs for their CPUs and the neural arrays for their GPUs. MS has chosen not to go with neural arrays on the GPU, but instead go with an NPU that is usually associated with the CPU for its AI stuff. Different ways to do the same things.

That whole full rdna and whatnot is just chatter... they are both customized silicon.
 
Or like MS going with a separate neural block vs Sony's neural arrays. Now whats funny about this is that AMD does the NPUs for their CPUs and the neural arrays for their GPUs. MS has chosen not to go with neural arrays on the GPU, but instead go with an NPU that is usually associated with the CPU for its AI stuff. Different ways to do the same things.
Both have "Neural Arrays", that's just a feature of RDNA5.
That whole full rdna and whatnot is just chatter... they are both customized silicon.
MS has 0 customization on the GPU side this time.
 
Both have "Neural Arrays", that's just a feature of RDNA5.
So that means that in addition to neural arrays on the CUs helix also has a separate NPU? I was of the impression that they removed the neural arrays in favor of the NPU.
MS has 0 customization on the GPU side this time.
Based on what you have pointed out, then it really does mean MS made absolutely no modifications this time around. In fact, they probably just carried over the NPU from the CPU side of AMD chips, too, not bothering to take that out.
 
So that means that in addition to neural arrays on the CUs helix also has a separate NPU? I was of the impression that they removed the neural arrays in favor of the NPU.

Based on what you have pointed out, then it really does mean MS made absolutely no modifications this time around. In fact, they probably just carried over the NPU from the CPU side of AMD chips, too, not bothering to take that out.

GPU is the same die as the 9070 XT successor.

NPU + CPU is custom.
 
So that means that in addition to neural arrays on the CUs helix also has a separate NPU? I was of the impression that they removed the neural arrays in favor of the NPU.

Based on what you have pointed out, then it really does mean MS made absolutely no modifications this time around. In fact, they probably just carried over the NPU from the CPU side of AMD chips, too, not bothering to take that out.
NPU is just ~100 TOPs for Copilot stuff

While the GPU is like ~3000 TOPs for FSR5/Neural Rendering stuff
 
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Is it really? I mean, there are quite a few Ryzen AI CPUs out there. Like the Zen 5 Ryzen AI 395 (or something)... for all we know magnus CPU is just a next-gen Zen 6 variant of an as-yet-unannounced CPU chip.

Those have ddr5/6 phys.
Console CPU don't need them.
 
I'm sure Sony is shaking in their boots over Helix. A prebuilt PC from MS of all companies? Terrifying. Clearly a sales juggernaut in the making.

Games will be able to run on switch 2 and on PCs even less capable regardless of how powerful a PS6 is, or whether a cut down version exists. Developers are not being held back by hardware anymore. They are limited by reality of time and budgets, and quite frankly their own competence. Show me the developer right now who is crying over not being able to get their game out because the PS5 is not strong enough to support their grand vision.

PS5 is the leading system for developing games on consoles, of course you'll not find devs bitching about it, unless you think next gen the Super-Xbox-PC becomes the leading system for development, so it doesn't really matter what Sony spews HW wise, because it won't be the primary target and can be xboned and tossed aside til enough man power show up to fix whatever game that's not working on lower level PS6 fad/adjacent HW, but I don't see how that's going to happen if said Xbox hybrid is going to be expensive and the brand is tarnished thanks to years of Uncle Phil bad management

People need to rid themselves of the fantasy that there is some magical next "generation" of games that look or play any different from what is out there today. Those days are over.

This point can't argue, PS5 will keep getting more and more games as cross-gen keeps expanding in time, those who bought a PS5Pro are set for years, don't know how that will help Sony selling PS6s, or portable-fads and lower tier Xbone S like HW, but that's the mess they want to get in, so...

good-luck-morgan-freeman.gif
 
Yh yh swapping out ddr phy for GDDR phy isn't what I would call... customizing though.

That's custom as any piece of custom chip before. It doesn't really matter how you're changing the die. You're changing silicon. Also I think they have one less Zen6 fat core than desktop.
 
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Remember when people were bitching about the Xbone S affecting Series X and being right about it? Well, why are people not seeing the failure happening again, but with Sony this time?

I don't need to be an engineer to realize it's going to drag down the main console and the whole gen with it

What's worse it that list of materials has 3 skus (edit: 4 wtf?), everyone saw from the start how the Xboxe S + Series X plan with two skus from the get-go was going to backfire, then Sony saw that and said, hold my matcha latte with almond milk and came with this "idea"

The worst of the worst? As shown by the Xbox experiment, the lower priced system is going to be the driver, making it unavoidable for development and prepare yourselves for another Baldu's Gate 3 kind of situation but for the PS6-lame edition affecting the main console as well

Absolute stupidity, copying shit for the sake of it will lead to nowhere, "portables" are the new waggle-waggle motion control crap from two gens ago, only Nintendo "doing it right" (I hated it, but they absolutely made bank), while everyone else were copying it and failing miserably

I think people are just guessing and it is not real. But the PS6 handheld I am sure can be used as a hybrid with dock so a separate SKU as a PS6S which is almost the same thing. It is super dumb idea IMO.

Far more modern architecture. Better raytracing, upscaling techniques. Its nonsensical to simply compares the flops /cores.

As per the leaks the handheld is suppose to be 0.5x the PS5. It will have FSR5 or PSSR3 but it won't be faster than PS5
 
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NPU is just ~100 TOPs for Copilot stuff

While the GPU is like ~3000 TOPs for FSR5/Neural Rendering stuff
3000?! I remember you mentioning 1200 for the PS6. Is the ML gap that wide or have your estimates changed? Or was the PS6 number without sparsity ie 4x PS5 pro? That would exactly translate to 25% delta for Helix on the ML side as well.

Should be ~1200 TOPs (not that INT8 matters when FP4/6/8 exists)
 
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The NPU will not only be able to do things like co-piloting, but also real-time translation into any language and real-time lifelike voice generation from written texts. In addition, the NPU is faster, i.e. has lower latency than the GPU, so the ~120 TOPs will be enough for many interesting things.

The Helix GPU will likely have 1500-2000 TOPs INT8 and 3000-4000 TOPs INT4.
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Excuse Me Wow GIF by Mashable

10 times the PS5 Pro?
I think that number may be with sparsity. So ~1500 without it or 5x ps5 pro.

Regardless, 10x effective performance would be easy next gen as you will be using it not just during the final upscaling stage, but for other tasks like texture compression, RR, radiance caching etc… may be even lightweight LLMs down the line.

The PS5Pro is actually using around 30 TOPs. The remaining 270 (of its rated 300 TOPs) is idling every second. If we get to 80% utilization or more next gen with neural arrays, that's 30x the actual ML throughput of ps5 pro!

Now, if some genius out there figures out to exploit sparsity for gaming workloads, that would be 1.2x (likely) to 1.6x (holy grail) on top of that! But that's uncharted territory at the moment. I think the only non-gaming field in graphics that is learning to exploit it is NEural Radiance Fields.
 
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Now, if some genius out there figures out to exploit sparsity for gaming workloads, that would be 1.2x (likely) to 1.6x (holy grail) on top of that! But that's uncharted territory at the moment. I think the only non-gaming field in graphics that is learning to exploit it is NEural Radiance Fields.
We need Carmack back.
 
Nevertheless no one knows exactly how big the difference will be between the PS6 and the Helix. The only real data is 408 mm² and 280 mm² for the APUs, everything else is just speculation. If we start from the measurable transistors on the chips with same nm, it shows 45% more in favor of the Helix. Traditionally this is always a relatively good performance metric on a similar architecture.
 
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Owned all xboxes. Had all their subscriptions for decades before I finally realized that I never actually played the pc releases on ultimate and the xbox was just gathering dust.

I think I am burned out on the brand. They just never seem to get it. The xbox is a sports tv. The xbox is not a console but everything is a console. The xbox should rung windows.

FFS. I' out.
 
Nevertheless no one knows exactly how big the difference will be between the PS6 and the Helix. The only real data is 408 mm² and 280 mm² for the APUs, everything else is just speculation. If we start from the measurable transistors on the chips with same nm, it shows 45% more in favor of the Helix. Traditionally this is always a relatively good performance metric on a similar architecture.
But it's not the same kind of chip. One (Xbox) is a chiplet and the other is a SoC. That's why Xbox is so much bigger. Apparently aside from being more modular chiplets have better yields than SoC, a thing which Xbox has been struggling with in this generation.
 
But it's not the same kind of chip. One (Xbox) is a chiplet and the other is a SoC. That's why Xbox is so much bigger. Apparently aside from being more modular chiplets have better yields than SoC, a thing which Xbox has been struggling with in this generation.
Indeed, this must be taken into account. It follows from this that there is no reliable data yet regarding the actual performance of the two consoles.
 
Xbox GPUs are actually super close to being stock.

X1 was GCN1 - PS4 almost the same but with better GPGPU functionality

Xbox One X is stock Polaris, PS4 pro is Polaris with one or two things from Vega architecture.

PS5 is very close to RDNA1 with RDNA2 RT, it has cache scrubbers but other than that it has nothing beyond AMD architectures. Series X is almost stock RDNA2 without infinity cache and with surprisingly low clock.

PS5 pro has the most custom AMD GPU so far. With elements from RDNA2, RDNA4 and even ML not found in any other AMD architecture.
PS4 Pro and PS5 (don't know about PS5 Pro) have ID buffer hardware. Something not found in any other known GPUs AFAIK. It can be useful in CBR upscaling, temporal AA but not only.
 
3000?! I remember you mentioning 1200 for the PS6. Is the ML gap that wide or have your estimates changed? Or was the PS6 number without sparsity ie 4x PS5 pro? That would exactly translate to 25% delta for Helix on the ML side as well.
Different formats.

Magnus/PS6 should be ~3000/2400 4-bit sparse TOPs respectively, ~1500/1200 4-bit dense or 8-bit sparse TOPs and ~750/600 8-bit dense TOPs.
 
The NPU will not only be able to do things like co-piloting, but also real-time translation into any language and real-time lifelike voice generation from written texts. In addition, the NPU is faster, i.e. has lower latency than the GPU, so the ~120 TOPs will be enough for many interesting things.
The NPU can't possibly have lower latency if being used in any way for doing anything that has to do with graphic rendering. Like that's physically impossible, especially when comparing it to neural arrays that are inline or integrated within a GPU compute unit.

Nevertheless no one knows exactly how big the difference will be between the PS6 and the Helix. The only real data is 408 mm² and 280 mm² for the APUs, everything else is just speculation. If we start from the measurable transistors on the chips with same nm, it shows 45% more in favor of the Helix. Traditionally this is always a relatively good performance metric on a similar architecture.
Nope... you can't just look at two chips, both on the same process node and assume that the physical percentage size difference between them is equivalent to the measurable transistor count or even worse a performance delta. Eg... Helix has a whole NPU that the PS6 doesn't even have at all. And that NPU can take up as much as 50mm2 on the die.
 
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Different formats.

Magnus/PS6 should be ~3000/2400 4-bit sparse TOPs respectively, ~1500/1200 4-bit dense or 8-bit sparse TOPs and ~750/600 8-bit dense TOPs.
Do you think they might leverage 4-bit to make those numbers relevant? So far it seems to be used only for generative AI due to the low precision
 
It's not nearly as discrete (and I realise NVidia marketing particularly distorted reality on this).
Compute execution units are shared (there's no separate pools for compute/shading and AI, or RT for that matter), and while you have specific accelerator ASICs for parts of RT pipeline - all that does is remove bottlenecks 'outside' of compute - and compute still happens in all workloads.
And as mentioned by the other poster - raster fixed function elements also play into this - your RT still has to sample textures etc. (so 'raster' operations) to synthesize the picture, and perform de-noising which is either a shader or an AI/compute workload, further making it all depend on each other.
I shared these photos before but I always thought this is how the PS6 reaches 5090 performance, not with brute force but with AI through a new Neural Rendering Pipeline.
81UxZ0oyaQ8UVgVR.png

ITen6RWNUXwGaslh.jpg


Neural Rendering Pipeline
Render Essentials (geometry + partial lighting)
- Internal Resolution: 720p–1440p
- Base FPS (raw render): 30–60 FPS

Radiance Cores generate key data
- Sparse ray tracing / path tracing samples
- Partial global illumination

Neural Arrays reconstruct:
- Lighting (full global illumination from partial rays)
- Denoising (remove noise and stabilize lighting)
- Resolution (AI upscaling → 4K–8K output)
- Detail (texture + edge + surface enhancement)
- Motion (AI frame generation)

Frame Generation Stage
- Inserts 1–3 AI-generated frames per real frame
- Effective FPS: 60 → 120 → 240 FPS

Final Image (AI-completed)
- Output Resolution: 4K–8K (reconstructed)
- Perceived Performance: High FPS + high visual fidelity


Mark Cerny gave us some hints on this as well in his PS5 Pro technical seminar.

"Another source of future growth will come from more sophisticated neural networks. When fewer, higher quality pixels are combined with the right neural network, the result is richer graphics.

One way to look at this is supportable upscaling ratio. If we're able to create quality imagery with a 2:1 upscale and can then improve the neural network and reach the same image quality with a 3:1 upscale, then the effective power of the GPU has roughly doubled. And that stacks on top of whatever is being done to speed up rasterized rendering or ray tracing.

There's enormous potential here. We also hope to be heading towards multiple uses of these CNNs within a frame, not just super resolution, but also some of the other targets I was talking about, such as the denoising that's needed when doing optimized ray tracing."
 
I think it was a great idea, if it breaks it's easily replaced without having to send the console off for repair. And it keeps the system smaller and probably cooler.
The only real knock is when the power supply is a wall wart like the old 8/16 bit systems. (Which makes it hard to plug multiple things in.) But a external power supply with a mid-brick design. I'd prefer more systems to be designed that way.
 
Do you think they might leverage 4-bit to make those numbers relevant? So far it seems to be used only for generative AI due to the low precision
Gen AI has a lot of potential uses in gaming runtimes.

I shared these photos before but I always thought this is how the PS6 reaches 5090 performance, not with brute force but with AI through a new Neural Rendering Pipeline.
I mean - this is all well and good but Jensen already played the 5060 is faster than 4090 card. And not what people discuss here really.
Personally - of all the uses of 'neural rendering' - the thing I'm least enthused is broadly forced frame-gen. I really hope that doesn't happen unless the approach is changed to extrapolating frames.
 
Gen AI has a lot of potential uses in gaming runtimes.
Agreed. I was thinking more along the lines of boosting existing non-generative neural rendering. There has been speculation about future ray reconstruction using FP4 and one of the reasons Nvidia is holding back on RR for DLSS 4.5. Would be a nice 2x boost if they can pull it off with 60 series and AMD follows up with their version.
 
Gen AI has a lot of potential uses in gaming runtimes.


I mean - this is all well and good but Jensen already played the 5060 is faster than 4090 card. And not what people discuss here really.
Personally - of all the uses of 'neural rendering' - the thing I'm least enthused is broadly forced frame-gen. I really hope that doesn't happen unless the approach is changed to extrapolating frames.
Are you really comparing Jensen marketing to Mark Cerny tech talk?
 
All I can say is I can't wait for the official specs to be revealed so we can really know the truth on who was right all along.
 
All I can say is I can't wait for the official specs to be revealed so we can really know the truth on who was right all along.


We already had 3-4x times more powerful in RT for PS5 Pro vs. PS5 and this turned out to be bullshit in the real world.

For sure it doesn't translate to 3-4x higher FPS, so similar situation will be true for next gen consoles when we know what their general power will be. K KeplerL2 is right obviously.
 
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