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Inside the PS4 with Mark Cerny

Sony wanted the graphics of the PS3 to "improve over time" as developers got more familiar with optimizing the games for the system. I think that's a great thing to want, but in practice, designing a system that is unfriendly to program on so that it takes time to get to know how it all works, is not a great way to go about getting improved graphics over time.

As for the article, it's a great read. I like that they have dedicated chip to offload audio, compression, background task, etc. I also think the eDRAM mention in there was a shot at Microsoft.
 
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bigdogchris said:
Sony wanted the graphics of the PS3 to "improve over time" as developers got more familiar with optimizing the games for the system. I think that's a great thing to want, but in practice, designing a system that is unfriendly to program on so that it takes time to get to know how it all works, is not a great way to go about getting improved graphics over time.
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I agree, I think with their 1st party studio talent we'll still see and improvement on the visual quality of the games for PS4 over time too.
 
Although the edram may be a jab at MS and their console is easier to develop for than PS3, I think software tools to allow ease of development matters just as much and MS reigns supreme in that department, so far. I am sure Sony has improved that area too, it would be improbable that they didn't when listening to their about face on the hardware front.
 
armandh01 said:
Although the edram may be a jab at MS and their console is easier to develop for than PS3, I think software tools to allow ease of development matters just as much and MS reigns supreme in that department, so far. I am sure Sony has improved that area too, it would be improbable that they didn't when listening to their about face on the hardware front.
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Yeah from my understanding their dev studios pretty much designed the PS4 so to leave the right tools to do the job would be ignorant and doubtful.
 
that e-dram isn't really a MS thing as the original game cube had it and it just evolved for the 360 and Wii U and now the PS4. This is a logical progression cosidering that AMD (ATi/ArtX) designed the things in the first place.I would be surprised if there is no edram at all on the PS4...
 
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Creepingdeath1977 said:
Yeah from my understanding their dev studios pretty much designed the PS4 so to leave the right tools to do the job would be ignorant and doubtful.
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That seems to be the one thing Sony did right this time: Talk to the developers from both the first party devs to the third party devs. Get them involved from the start.

Just about almost everything that was suggested by developers was put into the console. As mentioned in another article about the PS4: "It's a console made for developers, by developers."

Hopefully, this attitude works in Sony's favor.
 
It will be more interesting to see if Durango is limited by running a Win 8 kernel and having to program to DirectX api's, vs direct access to gpu via libGCM on PS4. Also Sony has said they will have tooling to allow using VS 2012 as a dev environment including all its profilers etc, which should make developers lives easier.
 
I also expect the graphics will improve over the course of its life-time. Optimizations are always to be found, in both programming and art/design, and it looks like it'll be more fun to go about it this time around. If not, then it's all good, it just allows developers to focus more on the gameplay and other aspects.
 
YeuEmMaiMai said:
that e-dram isn't really a MS thing as the original game cube had it and it just evolved for the 360 and Wii U and now the PS4. This is a logical progression cosidering that AMD (ATi/ArtX) designed the things in the first place.I would be surprised if there is no edram at all on the PS4...
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It doesn't need edram since the UMA bus is so fat. Durango needs it. PS4 doesn't.
 
^bwhahahahhahahaha OK..........keep smoking the crack that Sony is feeding you. Edram is very useful because it is blazingly fast compared to going off die where wait state penalties are imposed. They obviously had cost restraints and this was an area cut to make budget.....

BTW dispite the gamecube having inferior hardware, it could more often than not hang with the xbox due to it having very fast main memory and embedded DRAM on the GPU. One has to look no further than Resident Evil 4 and Rouge Squadron to get an idea of what one can do with supposidly inferior hardware that had blazingly fast memory attached to it. The memory in the Gamecube was so fast that you could actaully swap the entire frame buffer during the vertical refresh....
 
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Edram is not needed when you have 8gb gddr5 at 176mb/s. Cerny said they could have halved the bwvand put a terabyte per second edram but decided that was convoluted and it was better to just have no edram and high bandwidth available all the time to all the memory. Thew edram on Durango is a bandaid to compensate for it using slow DDR3.
 
Let me know when you get 1 wait state on that GDDR5, oh wait....not going to happen. Embedded DRAM has that ability thus given the same bus width, giving you MORE data throughput. It also allows you to be using the GPU while it is waiting for X main memory resource to free up.....
 
You're talking hypotheticals. The actual hardware design of the PS4 is obviously a superior memory implementation than Durango's. The 360's Edram was 256 GB per second. PS4's entire 8 GB UMA is almost as fast at 176 GB per second. Durango's Combined bus widths barely add up to that. Cwrny was talking about a 1 TF pet second edram. Durango has a cheap version. It's slower than 360's edram. ROFL. Microsoft didn't decide to just throw money at the problem like people assumed. They were on a budget like anyone. They skimped on performance to favor motion control and voice recognition features. As an idea, edram is a viable alternative, but Durango's implemention of it is Mickey Mouse. 32MB isn't a lot. Ans its SLOW. They wanted 8GB at all costs but used cheap DDR 3 so they put a band aid on it. They will constantly struggle with managing what info to keep stored there in the edram. Move engines are another band aid but the bottleneck will still be there.


If MS wanted a competitive edram based system they would have equaled the 18 cu pipelines and put 64mb of actually fast edram on it. They cheapest out and Durango's Combined bandwidth is barely in the realm if PS4's total UMA.

Any developer would tell you Durango will have to be pushed just to meet PS4's bw. And only under Under ideal circumstances. Cerny was talking about 1 TF per second edram in PS4 as the alternative. But it would just complicate development. So they went more conventional with just a single array at the fastest possible speed.

Durango doesn't have edram because of its theoretical advantages. It has it as a band aid. Even without edram, x360's UMA was as good as PS3's the edram was the cherry on top. Now Durango needs to include edram bw just to about equal PS4. It's not as good of a solution as 360's for its time.. That was 256 GB per second compared to like 25 MB per second for the rest. Try to add Durango's bus speeds together and act like its as good or laughably as you seem to have suggested, better, than a solid continuous UMA of comparable speed, is a noob's move. Your argument is a loser.
 
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The specs are out there. There is no question about which system has better hardware. Surprisingly it's not close like the 7th generation.
 
YeuEmMaiMai said:
Let me know when you get 1 wait state on that GDDR5, oh wait....not going to happen. Embedded DRAM has that ability thus given the same bus width, giving you MORE data throughput. It also allows you to be using the GPU while it is waiting for X main memory resource to free up.....
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Sony and AMD came up with a custom memory controller and extra bus so that the GPU and CPU don't have to wait for each other to clear ram/caches before communicating. and GPU data has a special tag on its data headers so that there aren't any issues with drawing from the same memory pool. The CPU and GPU can both use the ram at the same time, without limitations. I'm sure the ram doesn't operate at 1T/1 wait state, but eliminating the need for memory/cache wipes and allowing more direct access is arguably as good or better.

*[H] posted this on the front page the other day:
http://www.shacknews.com/article/78889/how-does-the-ps4-differ-from-a-high-end-gaming
 
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^yes as long as you are not trying to access the same resource within the ram. GDDR5 has a fairly high wait state penalty before it starts streaming data compared to 1TSRAM. You cannot have both the GPU and CPU writing to the same location at once.
 
Stereophile said:
The specs are out there. There is no question about which system has better hardware. Surprisingly it's not close like the 7th generation.
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Isn't that going to make it difficult to port games across platforms?
I mean, if one console has vastly different performance characteristics than the other, isn't it going to require a large amount of work?
 
That's_Corporate said:
Isn't that going to make it difficult to port games across platforms?
I mean, if one console has vastly different performance characteristics than the other, isn't it going to require a large amount of work?
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As long as both the PS4 and new XBOX use the same x86-64 based architecture, porting between consoles / PC won't be NEARLY as difficult as it was with Power PC / Cell architectures. Just a matter of scaling back a feature or 2 or lowering resolution a tad.
 
Cerny said PC games can be ported to ps4 in a matter of weeks not months. Durango's modest bus transfer speed is a reflection of the scaled down 12 cu APU.

Fully exploiting the edram will be critical but the amount 32 MB is a compromised amount and any games making use of deferred render engines will be resolution limited. And indeed many forward render engines that aspire to being 1080p with AA will have to be tiled. And let me stress again it's slow embedded ram. Kind of weird just how slow it is. Usually an EDram pool is much faster than the main memory. But not in Durango's case.

It shouldn't be that hard to port multiplatform games to both. With many third party games it could simply be a difference of frame rate and or native resolution, but the "render pipelines" will be the same. Since they are by all accounts using extremely similar GCN graphics.

First parties may be more apt to experiment with the GPGPU compute features. So the extra 600GF could all be poured into compute. Imagine what that could do for Gran Turismo's physics. Or just extra bling like cloth and hair on the characters of an RPG.
 
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That's_Corporate said:
Isn't that going to make it difficult to port games across platforms?
I mean, if one console has vastly different performance characteristics than the other, isn't it going to require a large amount of work?
Click to expand...

Mojo3k70 said:
As long as both the PS4 and new XBOX use the same x86-64 based architecture, porting between consoles / PC won't be NEARLY as difficult as it was with Power PC / Cell architectures. Just a matter of scaling back a feature or 2 or lowering resolution a tad.
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The way I see it: Porting a game between PS4 and 720 would be the equivalent of porting a game to Linux and vice-versa.

The problem though: How many developers are willing to develop using OpenGL coming from the more commonplace DirectX API?

I'm afraid we're going to get more half-assed ports from the new Xbox console to the PS4 like what happened to the 360 ports to PC and the PS3 because developers weren't willing to specifically develop for either platform and took the easy way out. I'd like to see developers put more effort into their ports between consoles and PC. It's just really disappointing that developers aren't willing to embrace OpenGL (or its modified one in PS3/PS4-- libgcm) than DirectX. At least it'll open games to other markets like OSX and Linux.
 
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Stereophile said:
The specs are out there. There is no question about which system has better hardware. Surprisingly it's not close like the 7th generation.
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No, rumored specs are out there. We have no idea if there are any changes or surprises like the 8GB ram for PS4.
 
I honestly don't expect MSAA to be used on Durango, and even on Orbis i don't expect it to be widely used.

You see, we know the difference between MSAA and SMAA or similar shader methods, but that is mostly because we sit close enough to our pc screens to make it matter. Sit farther back so that the screen is at the relative distance that it will be for a console user, and you will be hard pressed to note the difference between a good shader, msaa or ssaa, specially with heavy action on the screen.

Still, we shall see which path do the devs take... maybe MSAA if the game is outputting a 720p image and SMAA for 1080p? that could be interesting, as a way to maximize the user experience.
 
MrCrispy said:
No, rumored specs are out there. We have no idea if there are any changes or surprises like the 8GB ram for PS4.
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That was an unexpected benefit of density increases. They didn't have to change anything aside from making the call to order the denser and more expensive gddr5 packages so 8GB fits where they planned to have 4. There is nothing like that in the cards for Durango. I explained in another thread how long these consoles take to design, there won't be any noteworthy last minute special sauce upgrades for Durango.

The rumored specs are pretty low end compared to PS4. 50% less GPU flops, approximately half the memory bandwidth, and a guaranteed more bloated OS if it's really using Windows 8.

The Digital Foundry face offs are gonna be a landslide. I wouldn't doubt if they discontinue the column since it's a foregone conclusion, PS4 will always have the best console version of multiplatform games.
 
octoberasian said:
It's just really disappointing that developers aren't willing to embrace OpenGL (or its modified one in PS3/PS4-- libgcm) than DirectX. At least it'll open games to other markets like OSX and Linux.
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Thanks to Windows 8's not so positive reception and if Gabe Newell succeeds in his mission on bringing Linux to mainstream (Steambox), this could very well change.
 
octoberasian said:
The problem though: How many developers are willing to develop using OpenGL coming from the more commonplace DirectX API?

I'm afraid we're going to get more half-assed ports from the new Xbox console to the PS4 like what happened to the 360 ports to PC and the PS3 because developers weren't willing to specifically develop for either platform and took the easy way out. I'd like to see developers put more effort into their ports between consoles and PC. It's just really disappointing that developers aren't willing to embrace OpenGL (or its modified one in PS3/PS4-- libgcm) than DirectX. At least it'll open games to other markets like OSX and Linux.
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Are game engines like Unreal 4/Frostbite optimized so they target DX/OpenGL both or are they written primarily for one technology and use a wrapper to run on everything else?

And I think the adoption rate of DX vs libgcm might have had something to do with the developer tools. Sony has said this time devs will be able to use Visual Studio etc and have much richer tools which no doubt is going to be much more productive.
 
I think one of the reasons Sony decided to wait on announcing PS4 hard drive size is so they can match the new XBOX. Now they know they need at least 500GB drive.
 
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