What will PS4 graphics be like?

[tipoo]

Hopefully twice as better as PS3

And now we have the opposite of the 20x overshoot, lol. Two times better would be incredibly weak for a 2013 console, it's been 7 years and compute power doubles about every 18 months. I think 6x is the closest guess. See my previous post about the Gflops.

Even the Radeon 7770 performs 1280 GFLOPS, and the chips are far cheaper for Sony and Microsoft to buy, the RSX only cost 45 dollars or so a console while it was fairly high end for the time (even if the 8800 came out the next month) and would have cost a lot more as a standalone card.

So yeah. My bet, 6x the GPU power, 4GB RAM (which is 16x the system memory of the PS3, or 8x the total memory).

 

[zephyrprime]

The CPU situation is interesting, both seem to be based on a similar generation architecture from AMD, assuming cache sizes and the works are the same the IPC should be similar so clock speed can be used to compare within the same family. I suspect devs will have a happier time with 4 high clocked cores rather than 8 at half that speed, let me tell you first hand that good multithreading is a bitch. Although now there are tools that can abstract that away from programmers, I wonder if Sony or Microsoft will implement something like that? If the 720 is based off of Windows 8, there are features like that baked in, parallel libraries and such which will be quite a boon. Plus Sony still doesn't have an official alternative to Microsofts PIX, do they? Game devs got so damn tired of not having a good debug tool that they made their own for the PS3. Sony should smarten up for the PS4. PIX is a godsend.

It doesn't make any sense that the cpu would only run at 1.6ghz so I don't put any stock in this rumor. A modern cpu that runs at 1.6ghz only does so to attain power savings. It's transistors can switch fast enough and it has enough pipeline stages to attain 3+GHz easily. Do you think processors like the A6 or the Arm15 run at ~1-1.5 ghz range because they can't attain higher speeds due to their design? No - it is only because they are so power constrained that they are forced to run at low clock speeds. If there were giving a 100Watt TDP, they could easily attain 3GHz.

 

[Fallen Kell]

It doesn't make any sense that the cpu would only run at 1.6ghz so I don't put any stock in this rumor. A modern cpu that runs at 1.6ghz only does so to attain power savings.

I think you hit the nail on the head. It is for power and cooling savings that they only have a 1.6ghz CPU. Remember, these systems are being designed so that there is maybe only 1 fan in there (and a quiet one if possible). No one likes a loud "console". The only way to do that is to use parts which are built specifically to run cool.

 

[Staples]

I think 20x is overly optimistic. Gflops aren't the best measure of performance, but just to compare magnitudes they give an ok rough measure. The 360 GPU was around 200-250Gflops. Todays high end GPUs are 2000-3000, only dual chip uber high end ones hit over 5000. 20x would be 4000Gflops.

6x the performance is around 1.3Tflops which is where the rumors also pointed to. So the two separate rumors kind of go hand in hand, lending each other credibility.

Interesting to know.

While PC CPU single threaded performance only doubles every 5+ years, I see the benchmarks for GPUs over the years and their performance gain year over year has seemed to be linear and at least 2x generation over generation. But you are right in that we can't expect to have a $500 GPU in either console. So I'd guess we should expect the performance of what a $200 video card can give us today (they will be cheaper in a year and that is why they can afford to put that in a console. And of course, as you said, console games are a lot more optimized than PC games will ever be so even with that kind of hardware, you can see performance of what a top of the line PC will give you.

 

[tipoo]

It doesn't make any sense that the cpu would only run at 1.6ghz so I don't put any stock in this rumor. A modern cpu that runs at 1.6ghz only does so to attain power savings. It's transistors can switch fast enough and it has enough pipeline stages to attain 3+GHz easily. Do you think processors like the A6 or the Arm15 run at ~1-1.5 ghz range because they can't attain higher speeds due to their design? No - it is only because they are so power constrained that they are forced to run at low clock speeds. If there were giving a 100Watt TDP, they could easily attain 3GHz.

Think about how much heat 8 full cores at 3 + GHz would put out. These consoles have to fit in a certain size, power draw and heat envelope. Plus there are yields to consider, not every core off the production line will be able to hit that high. That could be why the PS4, rumored at 3.2GHz for the same core type, uses half as many cores. It's a tradeoff either way.

And these are Jaguar cores we are talking about, the successor to Bobcat, it is optimized for low power and I don't think it has been clocked that high anyways. AMD is claiming 10% frequency gains with Jaguar.

I think the PS4 and Nextbox will both make the tradeoff of giving the GPU the higher TDP headroom, and that seems to be the way to go.

 

[zephyrprime]

I think you hit the nail on the head. It is for power and cooling savings that they only have a 1.6ghz CPU. Remember, these systems are being designed so that there is maybe only 1 fan in there (and a quiet one if possible). No one likes a loud "console". The only way to do that is to use parts which are built specifically to run cool.

The 360 has 2 fans and they are 40mm, loud, low cfm fans which can be easily replaced by better after market fans which are quieter and higher cfm. Also, the full size xbox 360 is renowned for having a loud dvd drive when much quieter alternatives were available. MS hasn't shown much concern for having a quiet system before so I don't have much expectation they will going forward.

 

[zephyrprime]

Think about how much heat 8 full cores at 3 + GHz would put out. These consoles have to fit in a certain size, power draw and heat envelope. Plus there are yields to consider, not every core off the production line will be able to hit that high. That could be why the PS4, rumored at 3.2GHz for the same core type, uses half as many cores. It's a tradeoff either way.

And these are Jaguar cores we are talking about, the successor to Bobcat, it is optimized for low power and I don't think it has been clocked that high anyways. AMD is claiming 10% frequency gains with Jaguar.

I think the PS4 and Nextbox will both make the tradeoff of giving the GPU the higher TDP headroom, and that seems to be the way to go.

Bobcat cores are only 4.9mm2 and Jaguar cores are rumored to be 3.1mm2. With such tiny cores, even with an integrated gpu and caches, the die size is just not going to be big enough to present any problems as far as yields go.

It's true that bobcat isn't intended for high clock speed applications but I just don't see MS leaving so much performance on the table when higher clock speeds are so easily attainable within the power envelope available to a plug-in console.

 

[tipoo]

You don't know how much TDP they are going to allow the GPU. You don't know how big the box will be, how large the heatsinks and fans will be, how many fans, how large the power supply will be, etc. If they are targeting 1.6Ghz, they have a reason for it. It's not finalized yet and this could all be wrong, but I find 8 3.2GHz full cores even less likely than 8 1.6GHz ones.

Again, the PS4 rumor is for a similar core type, but at twice the speed with half the cores. If they could go twice the speed with the same core count, wouldn't they? If these are both true they're obviously both running into the same limitation and went for different tradeoffs. The Xbox was probably designed with more cores for better multitasking, ie Kinect 2 use. The PS4 doesn't have that so it went for less, higher clocked cores, which are easier to take advantage of than 8 low frequency cores.

 

[jpiniero]

Again, the PS4 rumor is for a similar core type

I'd say no, it's probably closer to Piledriver. I don't think AMD can clock Jaguar that high. Still though, that PS4 CPU will draw like 50W. An 8 core Jaguar at 1.6... like 20 maybe? Either way it seems likely that the 720's GPU will have more GPU cores as well.

 

[A5]

Digital Foundry (via Eurogamer) are running an article about what they've been told is the PS4 hardware: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/df-hardware-orbis-unmasked-what-to-expect-from-next-gen-console

Summary:
8-core Jaguar at 1.6 GHz
GPU based on 7970M with 2 CUs stripped out (total performance probably around the desktop 7850)
Some kind of extra "compute module" for extra GPGPU
4GB GDDR5 system RAM (512MB reserved for OS)

 

[exdeath]

All this hype for graphics and specs when you know damn well all you're going to get is ports of Call of Duty and Madden.

Hmm I can play Spongebob and Wheel of Fortune in 4k woot.

 

[tipoo]

Digital Foundry (via Eurogamer) are running an article about what they've been told is the PS4 hardware: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/df-hardware-orbis-unmasked-what-to-expect-from-next-gen-console

Summary:
8-core Jaguar at 1.6 GHz
GPU based on 7970M with 2 CUs stripped out (total performance probably around the desktop 7850)
Some kind of extra "compute module" for extra GPGPU
4GB GDDR5 system RAM (512MB reserved for OS)

I came to post that, that is interesting. So the PS4 and Xbox Whatever would both use nearly identical CPU architectures, octacore Jaguar at 1.6. That would be very very interesting. Easy porting, no funky optimization needed (cough Cell cough).

And a dedicated GPGPU portion, so the discreet chip doesn't have to get bogged down with that, even more interesting.

 

[purbeast0]

All this hype for graphics and specs when you know damn well all you're going to get is ports of Call of Duty and Madden.

Hmm I can play Spongebob and Wheel of Fortune in 4k woot.

haha i wonder why you even visit console forums, you obviously don't like them. i do appreciate the amusing posts though.

 

[exdeath]

haha i wonder why you even visit console forums, you obviously don't like them. i do appreciate the amusing posts though.

Oh? I have Ni no Kuni and The Last of Us pre-ordered. Thanks though.

 

[tipoo]

Oh? I have Ni no Kuni and The Last of Us pre-ordered. Thanks though.

And there's your answer, yes there will be a bajillion CoDs and other cut and paste games, but there are also gems like The Last of Us (or at least it looks pretty good, lets see the final version) that are unique. Next gen hardware will allow even more to be done.

 

[Mopetar]

I came to post that, that is interesting. So the PS4 and Xbox Whatever would both use nearly identical CPU architectures, octacore Jaguar at 1.6. That would be very very interesting. Easy porting, no funky optimization needed (cough Cell cough).

It would be incredibly funny that when either the PS4/Xbox720 get hacked that someone is able to get games from the other platform to run because the architectures are so similar. It probably won't be quite as easy as popping in the disk, but it wouldn't be inconceivably to say, load the OS from one onto the other.

Also, if both are running a large number of cores at lower clock rates, it might be a good thing for PC gaming as well as more developers are forced to find ways to utilize more cores rather than just relying on one or two and needing clock speed to improve performance.

 

[exdeath]

Multi core isn't hard at all.

Just needs lost of RAM to double buffer object state into current n and new working n+1 states to eliminate locks and scheduling/order of operations issues and don't use loops to process them serially but instead to spawn 1000s of jobs that any number of cores can pull from. Main game loop threads can be linear and it's just another job that's suspended when there are autonomous parallel object jobs to be completed (eg: WaitForMultipleObjects)

Proceed with linear thread; all other cores are idle. Say we are doing physics collision pairs. Main linear thread loops and does nothing but dump all possible collision pairs into the job queue. The independent jobs themselves are the actual physics computations and there can be hundreds of them. When the main thread is done spamming the job queue it suspends itself until the job queue is empty while all available cores handle all collision pairs n cores at a time.

Experimented with this when Cell and multi core was first starting to show up and saw linear gains with core count, all else held equal. Just thousands of basic 2D shapes with dummy math code thrown in to generate CPU load, but saw 200% improvement on dual core and 400% improvement on quad core. The more objects the better to amortize the job creation/dispatching process. The main problem people struggle with is thread synchronization, eg: mutexes, critical sections, etc. and doing it this way the conventional way results in massive thread management overhead and threads locking and stepping on each other that negates any gains.

When you add DMA to the picture, you have a very powerful multithreaded system that scales linearly with cores. The double buffer of current and next states (objects use other object's fixed read only current state as input to their new states) eliminates thread locking issues (no objects are changing state as far as other objects are concerned so no worry of out-of-thread writes changing data as its being read) and can map extremely well especially to systems like Cell with DMA pumped scratch pad memory per core.

Jobs can be anything. You can have UI elements updating while physics are being computed for the next frame. When you have linear dependency like AI waiting for physics results to make decisions, you simply run all your physics jobs first (all cores busy until completed), then do the same batch process for all AI operations concurrently., etc

Double Buffer pattern is severely underused with as cheap as RAM is and it pretty much eliminates any conventional thread dependency /race condition issues.

 

[Austin8868]

Not anything special but it will be an upgrade

 

[purbeast0]

Oh? I have Ni no Kuni and The Last of Us pre-ordered. Thanks though.

so then why do you cry about people like games outside of the genres you enjoy? no one is complaining about you liking what you like.

 

[mmntech]

Summary:
8-core Jaguar at 1.6 GHz
GPU based on 7970M with 2 CUs stripped out (total performance probably around the desktop 7850)
Some kind of extra "compute module" for extra GPGPU
4GB GDDR5 system RAM (512MB reserved for OS)

It's good to see Sony finally kicking Rambus to the curb.

It's better news than what we originally anticipated. Beefier GPU and mobile based hardware. The latter of which should help keep thermals down, which were a huge problem in the fat 360 and PS3s. Though once again I can't help but feel Sony is being short sighted about the RAM.

The downside is, I don't think this will be a cheap system. I'm guessing it will be at least $499 when it comes out.

 

[exdeath]

so then why do you cry about people like games outside of the genres you enjoy? no one is complaining about you liking what you like.

Because genres I enjoy are being smothered out by games the mainstream buys.

 

[BenSkywalker]

The downside is, I don't think this will be a cheap system. I'm guessing it will be at least $499 when it comes out.

Funny, I was thinking closer to $149. A $50 GPU, a $50 CPU and ~$40 worth of RAM today, another year of price drops, mass volume OEM pricing, no margin on consoles, if this cost $200 it would be a rip off. Not convinced those are final specs at all, too early and far too low end for it to be a serious effort.

 

[crisium]

Those are much better specs than the paltry 6670 rumoured last year.

I agree that Sony is underestimating RAM. For many consoles throughout history, RAM has been a big factor in holding a system back. The Sega Saturn (4.5MB combined RAM) had available 1MB and 4MB expansion carts. The N64 could swap out its 4MB RAM for an 8MB Expansion Pak.

The Dreamcast, with just under half the RAM of the arcade version, sometimes suffered inferior "ports" from the arcade (less of a port then just carrying it over, albeit with half the RAM). Even the Xbox 1, with its generation leading 64MB, sometimes was the target of developer complaints about RAM since MS' DirectX is relatively memory hungry. There was place on the board and it is easy to add another 64MB with simple soldering as some homebrew folks did, so maybe MS played around with 128MB versions in development.

The Xbox 360 was originally going to have 256MB of RAM, but luckily they realized the error in that. Still, I think both consoles with 512MB of RAM today are being held back. Although just one factor, having extra memory could have helped the consoles with running at higher than 1024x600 with 2xAA (Call of Duty) or more than 24 players on small maps (BF3).

 

[A5]

Because genres I enjoy are being smothered out by games the mainstream buys.

What do you enjoy? The only console-friendly genre I can think of that is under-represented lately is the JRPG.

You just have to play on PC if you're looking for stuff outside the mainstream shooter/action stuff.

 

[purbeast0]

Because genres I enjoy are being smothered out by games the mainstream buys.

yea, because no one in the mainstream is going to buy the last of us.