Decline PS4 wins the console war against XboxONE, yet it is a hollow victory as Consolesdämmerung is upon us

Taking into account of inflation, maybe 5 dollars.

 

Xbox 720 is gonna use 8GB DDR3 RAM. The lack of bandwidth will be compensated with 32MB ultrafast onboard ESRAM. Now think for a second here, genius. What is gonna be more economically viable for Nvidia? Putting 8GB+ GDDR5 RAM (very expensive and power hungry) on a videocard PCB for consumer price, or having maybe an ultrafast cache on-die and instead use access to main memory, resulting in about similarly good performance?

 

Are you also one of those people who believe that the PS4 can offload CPU workload to the GPU?

 

See that thing at the top? Most retailers have similar policies (though most will only have you pay the price at preorder OR the price at final release, not the lowest the price ever got between then) and as a result, tend to aim overly high on placeholder prices.

 

Insert coding to the metal catchphrase here. It's like I'm on neoGAF only the stupid factor is 10 times higher.

 

There are some highly parallelized, computational intensive tasks that can be offloaded to modern GPU. I've a fusion laptop (APU + GPU) and you can tell the graphic driver to use either graphic processor or both (hybrid crossfire). In theory one of the GPU can be reserved for physisics or other GPGPU tasks. In case of the PS4, you have only one GPU but I don't think it would be too difficult to modify the design to allocate a group of shaders (AMD calls them Compute Units) to another task that isn't vertex or pixel shading

 

I'm pretty sure hybrid crossfire is mainly about saving power, the big GPU can turn completely off and let the little one handle things when you're on the desktop.

PhysX and other physics libraries already do this.

 

You mean some shitty laptop Jaguar CPU is gonna calculate anything major in the first place? That's why modern GPUs are now GPGPUs.

 

I think that would be NVidia Optimus. With Hybrid crossfire you get indeed both running as a kind of poor man's SLI (or actually Crossfire, as it's AMD).
Last time I heard of it, the equivalent AMD technology was still in beta.

 

Morgoth is on a fucking roll tonite

 

And you are a fucking moron all the time.

 

There is an interesting article about the PS4 architecture here: http://techreport.com/news/24725/ps4-architect-discusses-console-custom-amd-processor

There is some discussion in the comments that the Power-derived CPUs used by PS3/360 were actually really terrible, and that AMD's chip could be as much as 5x more efficient. That's probably optimistic, but hey would be cool if true.

 

From an architectural standpoint, the PS4 is different from modern PCs. The Jaguar cores are faster than X360 cores, so it really doesn't matter computationally - plus you have compute units (which are entirely unused in gaming thus far) to increase processing power for some general tasks (Physics, pathfinding, and AI). So while PC's are equipped with more raw horse power than a PS4, the newer architecture in use (referred to as super charged PC) gives it an edge in some ways. I personally look forward to how ease of development will translate to newer risk taking designs and faster/optimized PC ports.

I mean, these new wave of consoles are merely PCs at this point. That's a HUGE win for PC gaming. It makes everything far more "HOMO"geneous. This is what PC gamers wanted all along. Better scalability for future PC hardware, less reliance on antiquated, proprietary console designs of the past.

 

I was guessing around that range of improvement in instructions per cycle myself. But we don't know how many edges AMD will need to cut to make it cheap enough.

 

hybrid crossfire is activated only when the application requests fullscreen 3d. The GUI is drawn by the APU and the external GPU is completely switched off. When you launch a program using 3d you can select via the drivers to use the GPU inside the APU, the external GPU or both. The latter gives you the best performance but produces more heat. Since the GPU inside the APU is usually weaker and has less bandwidth, the gains are not so noticeable as in the case of traditional crossfire.

I usually enable the external GPU for modern games and the one inside the APU for the older.

Since it's a laptop, cooling is limited: using the external GPU or crossfire the chip temperature rises to 75-80 deg, using the APU alone the temperature stays around 65.

 

With all due respect Morgoth-chan, it appears to me that you don't know as much about how computers work as you think you do.

 

That's why he buys consoles.

 

Ad hominem attacks won't do anything good for your KKKs either. So perhaps you should elaborate your criticism clearer? What exactly don't you understand?

 

Why you're so interested in consoles of the decline?

 

The new wave of consoles is just a standard PC with some efficiency gains in engineering. It's win-win. This generation will see a LOT better scalability than previous generations did. I don't see why everyone continues to argue the same old points. There are some interesting differences that favor PC gamers this time around.

 

I am but slightly puzzled, as to how putting a memory controller on a GPU PCB, for memory which does not, in fact, interface with that PCB directly, would help performance in any meaningful way.

And also how a massively parallel cluster of stream processors optimized for floating point operations (a modern GPU) would be anywhere above absolutely terrible at general purpose computing tasks (which is what offloading CPU tasks to the GPU really means).

But I'm not that good with hardware, so hopefully you can clear these up for me!

 

Memory is unified/shared in that developers don't have to rewrite to RAM, they share what's already in place. This is unlike current PC architecture (Or modern consoles). Even on modern APUs, you are still rewriting to RAM when you want GPU versus CPU computation, for every task.

 

Latency from GPU to RAM and from CPU to VRAM would still be several orders of magnitude worse than on a single PCB though, wouldn't it?

 

Because it will affect PC gaming undoubtedly. I care about PC gaming, hence I must understand the "enemy" too, so to speak.

 

The 360 has unified memory.