Nvidia: Not Enough Money in a PS4 GPU for us to bother

[Imouto]

Consoles are the "crack" of the gaming crowd. Good enough to get them high, but not as good as pure cocaine would be. Console = crack PC = Cocaine

You're taking it from an elitist perspective. I don't need superb graphics to enjoy a game. I have to find yet a PC game giving me goosebumps like old PS1 and PS2 games did back then. The first MGS, Soul Reaver, good old Final Fantasy VII, Vagrant Story, Silent Hill, Driver... the list is endless.

I'd gladly go back to PS1/2 graphics to have another golden era again.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Exactly. Graphics are less important to me than good game design, storytelling and art direction.

I'd rather replay Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines than play most new releases. Persona 3-4 and XenoSaga from the PS2 are still great games. So is Crackdown 1 from the 360.

 

[badb0y]

Consoles are the "crack" of the gaming crowd. Good enough to get them high, but not as good as pure cocaine would be. Console = crack PC = Cocaine

This statement is wrong, I am primarily a PC gamer but there are some games on consoles you simply can't ignore such as the Uncharted Series, GoW series, Halo series etc.

 

[railven]

You're taking it from an elitist perspective. I don't need superb graphics to enjoy a game. I have to find yet a PC game giving me goosebumps like old PS1 and PS2 games did back then. The first MGS, Soul Reaver, good old Final Fantasy VII, Vagrant Story, Silent Hill, Driver... the list is endless.

I'd gladly go back to PS1/2 graphics to have another golden era again.

I just watched the gameplay footage for the new Killzone and this is exactly how I felt.

It looks prettier, very much, then it got into gameplay and all I can think of is every goddamn FPS on the market.

Maybe I've been doing this for too long, but it's hard to get that sense of excitement from games, they all just seem to be copy n paste with new shiny.

 

[exar333]

Yes, this is very true.. and both those systems were very successful and didn't help ATI a damn bit.

This. Plus AMD helped design the GPU in the X360 as well. Look how well those partnerships went...AMD has limited capacity for production and this will only drive-down their ASP, when it needs to be going UP.

 

[Cookie Monster]

You're taking it from an elitist perspective. I don't need superb graphics to enjoy a game. I have to find yet a PC game giving me goosebumps like old PS1 and PS2 games did back then. The first MGS, Soul Reaver, good old Final Fantasy VII, Vagrant Story, Silent Hill, Driver... the list is endless.

I'd gladly go back to PS1/2 graphics to have another golden era again.

Well you seem to take its from a consoles perspective..

I can't believe you have yet to find those games because I can name a ton of them.. Serious Sam series, Half-life including HL2, Doom, warcraft 3, starcraft, diablo II, BF1942 etc the list is endless and I haven't even covered all the genres.

Tbh, whether or not its on a console or PC, games these days lack real game content. I can't for the life of me remember the last time a game got me hyped up. Everything seems to be a rehash of a rehash like hollywood movies. Everything gets prettier but thats about it.

 

[Imouto]

For each great PC game consoles had at least ten. It's not about a console perspective, consoles just had the vast majority of game releases and all relevant dev studios.

 

[Olikan]

Tbh, whether or not its on a console or PC, games these days lack real game content. I can't for the life of me remember the last time a game got me hyped up. Everything seems to be a rehash of a rehash like hollywood movies. Everything gets prettier but thats about it.

agree.... since blizzard screw ups, the only company that keeps me interested lately is valve

try DOTA 2, it have the same feel of those old games, were the game actually hates you

 

[notty22]

GREEN GUYS ARE DESPERATE / LOL :biggrin:

 

[PingviN]

Nvidia declined that contract.

Easy enough to decline when you know you can't compete.

 

[BladeVenom]

AMD should charge Sony and MS enough to be hugely profitable, or not bother. I imagine they would sell a lot more desktop GPUs if consoles got stuck with Intel graphics.

 

[svenge]

AMD should charge Sony and MS enough to be hugely profitable, or not bother. I imagine they would sell a lot more desktop GPUs if consoles got stuck with Intel graphics.

The problem is that AMD is desperate for money right now, and Sony/MS know it.

 

[Ferzerp]

AMD should charge Sony and MS enough to be hugely profitable, or not bother. I imagine they would sell a lot more desktop GPUs if consoles got stuck with Intel graphics.

They're desperate for any volume. Even breaking even for them might be attractive. It isn't a healthy company. How much exactly did they have to pay GloFo under contract to *not* produce a certain amount of product that they were contractually obligated to purchase? I think it was something like 60% of what actually getting the product made would have costed them (and ended up with nothing to show for it)

When you're at the point where you will throw away that much money, to avoid having to have product manufactured, you're in pretty dire straights.

GloFo made more off that payment than they would have made had they delivered the product, unless they have amazing margins.

If they fall short again this year (though the requirement had been reduced), you can see where that puts them. In light of that, it's not hard to believe that they'd be willing to sell for near cost in order to not owe GloFo another $325M (I think it was) for absolutely 0 product.

 

[tviceman]

This statement is wrong, I am primarily a PC gamer but there are some games on consoles you simply can't ignore such as the Uncharted Series, GoW series, Halo series etc.

Being locked to a controller kills it for me. I'm not a Halo fan, but I know the Uncharted games as well as GoW are good fun, but I just can't derive fun out of controller frustration. Maybe I'll force myself to actually spend a few days with a controller while playing 3rd and 1st person games, but until then I actually just don't feel like I'm missing out on anything besides anxiety and frustration. haha.

 

[raghu78]

Easy enough to decline when you know you can't compete.

well said. Nvidia did not have a APU which could compete with AMD's design. ARM cores are no match for a Jaguar core. Jaguar seems to have hit a very nice sweetspot in terms of perf, power, die size and cost. GCN has proved its credentials as a gaming and compute architecture. the APU architecture also is very powerful with a unified address space and fully coherent memory between CPU and GPU.

One of the differences from previous generations is AMD is selling finished chips and not licensing tech. x86 tech cannot be licensed and can only be sold as finished product. definitely AMD's margins on PS4 and Xbox Next would be good as they are providing a single chip instead of two separate ones. Intel does not have GPU tech on par with AMD and Nvidia does not CPU tech on par with AMD. AMD provides the best of both worlds. also AMD is done with the R&D cost. So for the next 6 - 7 years they have to just sit back and enjoy the steady revenue stream. AMD will need to do process shrinks when required but those too are not a major investment.

The discrete GPU market is bound to shrink as the low end gets eaten away by future chips like haswell / broadwell and kaveri. Nvidia has moved a lot of its resources to Tegra. But missing out on all 3 consoles is definitely not good when your primary revenue stream (discrete GPUs) is going to shrink going forward. Nvidia's response is predictable. but they would definitely feel the pinch going forward.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

Why does everyone keep calling the chips amd is providing an APU?

I thought it was two jaguar 4 core cpu's, and a GPU that's between the 7870 and 7850, leaning more towards the 7850 side?

That's what all the information on the PS4 states. Maybe that was just the dev kit, but I would think fusing all of that onto one die would create an insane amount of extra work from products that were already basically on the shelf?

 

[Hitman928]

Why does everyone keep calling the chips amd is providing an APU?

I thought it was two jaguar 4 core cpu's, and a GPU that's between the 7870 and 7850, leaning more towards the 7850 side?

That's what all the information on the PS4 states. Maybe that was just the dev kit, but I would think fusing all of that onto one die would create an insane amount of extra work from products that were already basically on the shelf?

AMD confirmed it is an APU by saying it was the most powerful APU they've ever made.

edit: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer...a-cut-down-version-of-sonys-playstation-4-apu

I know it's theinquirer, but since they quote and cite by name and title their source, I think it's pretty reliable.

 

[blackened23]

It's also quite a bit different spec wise than existing desktop APUs. The GPU portion itself is roughly equivalent to the 7870 or 7970M, while not having to deal with API programming overhead. Because of this reason you can't really do an apples to apples spec comparison between the PS4 and PCs, because consoles don't have to deal with the crippling API overhead that PCs do - some draw functions take hundreds of cycles through DX11 while there is practically no cycle delay time when programming without API overhead.... The PS4 will be very powerful for a console, should be interesting to see how it plays out. Of course, this won't stop PC snob elitists from crying about how their 4000$ computer can play surround 5760 resolution blah blah blah (no joke, 4000$ PC compared to a 400$ PS4?) but the PS4 is very very promising. In fact, Tim Lottes of nvidia had very positive things to say about it before he was forced to delete it from his blog by his employer.

PS4 is the first console in many years that has really excited me, personally.

 

[Silverforce11]

It would excite me if it was dirt cheap.. but if its approaching a cheap end PC rig with a mid-range GPU like an OC 7850 for cost, nah. Stick with PC gaming.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

It's also quite a bit different spec wise than existing desktop APUs. The GPU portion itself is roughly equivalent to the 7870 or 7970M, while not having to deal with API programming overhead. Because of this reason you can't really do an apples to apples spec comparison between the PS4 and PCs, because consoles don't have to deal with the crippling API overhead that PCs do - some draw functions take hundreds of cycles through DX11 while there is practically no cycle delay time when programming without API overhead.... The PS4 will be very powerful for a console, should be interesting to see how it plays out. Of course, this won't stop PC snobs from crying about how their 4000$ computer can play surround (no joke, 4000$ PC?) but the PS4 is very very promising. In fact, Tim Lottes of nvidia had very positive things to say about it IIRC.

PS4 is the first console in many years that has really excited me, personally.

A lot of people are saying but it's only a 7850! I was expecting something far slower than that. Without the API overhead and only shooting for 1080p this hardware is complete overkill for this console generation and I'm also really excited for what this means for PC gaming.

Graphics be damned the lack of memory on the ps3 and xbox360 is what was really holding game development back and these new consoles address that in a big way also. We should be seeing some massive game worlds on this next generation.

 

[blackened23]

You can't do apples to apples comparisons because consoles don't deal with API overhead, like you said. Again, nvidia forced Tim lottes to delete his words about PS4 from his blog, but you can still find bits and pieces (it was VERY positive obviously nvidia can't have an employee saying good things about the PS4, so his employer forced him to delete it.) In other words, sounds like nvidia doing internet damage control? HMM? "Oh, but we didn't want to be in PS4 ANYWAY!"

http://n4g.com/news/1160728/creator...-pc-new-xbox-may-have-memory-bandwidth-issues

"Creator of FXAA says PS4 could be years ahead of PC"

“If PS4 has a real-time OS, with a libGCM style low level access to the GPU, then the PS4 1st party games will be years ahead of the PC simply because it opens up what is possible on the GPU. Note this won’t happen right away on launch, but once developers tool up for the platform, this will be the case.

As a PC guy who knows hardware to the metal, I spend most of my days in frustration knowing damn well what I could do with the hardware, but what I cannot do because Microsoft and IHVs wont provide low-level GPU access in PC APIs. One simple example, drawcalls on PC have easily 10x to 100x the overhead of a console with a libGCM style API.”

 

[notty22]

You can't do apples to apples comparisons because consoles don't deal with API overhead, like you said. Again, nvidia forced Tim lottes to delete his words about PS4 from his blog, but you can still find bits and pieces (it was VERY positive obviously nvidia can't have an employee saying good things about the PS4, so his employer forced him to delete it.) In other words, sounds like nvidia doing internet damage control? HMM? "Oh, but we didn't want to be in PS4 ANYWAY!"

http://n4g.com/news/1160728/creator...-pc-new-xbox-may-have-memory-bandwidth-issues

"Creator of FXAA says PS4 could be years ahead of PC"

You take poetic license with a story, again? You make it sound as if the article you are linking has your conspiracy theory?

 

[raghu78]

Without the API overhead and only shooting for 1080p this hardware is complete overkill for this console generation and I'm also really excited for what this means for PC gaming.

Graphics be damned the lack of memory on the ps3 and xbox360 is what was really holding game development back and these new consoles address that in a big way also. We should be seeing some massive game worlds on this next generation.

exactly. John carmack clearly states the PC has layers of inefficiency. a game console is a purpose designed gaming device with close to metal programming acess, a lightweight and highly optimized OS.

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Editor...-Graphics-Ray-Tracing-Voxels-and-more/Intervi

" I don't worry about the GPU hardware at all. I worry about the drivers a lot because there is a huge difference between what the hardware can do and what we can actually get out of it if we have to control it at a fine grain level. That's really been driven home by this past project by working at a very low level of the hardware on consoles and comparing that to these PCs that are true orders of magnitude more powerful than the PS3 or something, but struggle in many cases to keep up the same minimum latency. They have tons of bandwidth, they can render at many more multi-samples, multiple megapixels per screen, but to be able to go through the cycle and get feedback... “fence here, update this here, and draw them there...” it struggles to get that done in 16ms, and that is frustrating."

The PS4 GPU cannot be compared to a HD 7850. its much more powerful and capable in a console. a PS4 GPU running a console OS could be as powerful as a desktop HD 7970 GPU running windows 7 with DX11 drivers. here is an interesting quote from john carmack

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/50277106856370176

 

[wand3r3r]

http://www.dailytech.com/NVIDIA+We+Let+AMD+Power+the+PS4/article30133.htm

Nothing new really, basically just a blog rehashing the issue.

 

[Fx1]

When you play Ultra on PC and then play on PS3 you see a huge difference. But when you play on PC between Medium and Ultra there isnt that much difference.

There are lots of particle effects and lighting which is just thrown into the game which sucks down at least 40% of your GPU power.

Consoles can focus their resources better to deliver a good graphic experience. They only really need to aim for Medium PC quality because the ultra effects dont really offer the increased visual quality that the performance requires.

I think the PS4 will be there first console to actually provide good performance in the GFX area. PS3 didnt deliver on its 1080p promises and today the consoles are seriously broken experiences compared to PC. But back then 512mb total memory was 13% of a gaming PC used. My PC had 4GB ram and 512mb Vram. The Cell was a major PITA to program for and the OS was limited by Sony's imagination.

Next gen consoles will have 8 cores and a bucket load of DDR5. A very good GPU which is more than capable of 1080p performance on High quality and maybe Ultra level quality with consoles optimising.

Ok in 5 years time this might not be where PC's are at but in truth these consoles wont be as far behind PC as they are today.