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AMD's Timothy Lottes - Native 4K at 30 fps with PS4 image quality requires 7.4 teraflops

VirtuaRacer

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
542
It's reasonable to assume that Timothy Lottes is speaking in terms of a stable 3840 x 2160 image with zero fluctuation. It had not dawned on me before today that the target for native 4K on a mid generation PS4 might be higher than the benchmark for a mid generation Xbox console when taking into consideration the power of their respective base GPUs.

While speaking with gaming magazine Edge (July 2018, Issue 320), AMD's Timothy Lottes mentioned that to achieve 4K resolutions for a game that looks like a regular PS4 title, at a frame rate of 30 FPS, a game needs about 7.4 teraflops per second.
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There are plenty of other factors and variables to take into account as well, of course, since, for instance, how demanding and taxing the game's other components are on the system's GPU can also have an impact on whether or not enough juice is left to be able to squeeze out native 4K resolutions.
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gamingbolt.com + gamesradar.com

Mark Cerny himself when asked if 6 teraflops would be enough for native 4K without compromise said it would require a GPU closer to 8 teraflops. Presumably he was thinking of PS4 to PS4 Pro when he offered that answer.

A clear illustration why Sony did not endeavour to chase after native 4K in 2016, preferring instead to make customizations to facilitate checkerboard rendering? CBR when implemented in the proper way looks amazing. Even Digital Foundry are continually impressed with Sony's internal efforts in that regard.

Edit: Since some posters insist on playing 'Gotcha' with the thread title, a simple clarification. For the same reason the 1X needed to be four times more powerful than the base XB1, a theoretical native 4K PS4 Pro would also need to be four times more powerful. There are many games on PS4 that do not push the system to their limits and developers are free to make compromises if they so wish. But for a Triple-A studio who come close to maximizing the power of the console, in order for these games to run at native 4K with the same lavish detail and IQ, a hypothetical PS4 Pro would require a 7.4 TFLOP GPU. Pointing to Gears of War or Forza 7 and claiming the 1X can reach native 4K with less is missing the point entirely, particularly since the 1X received more than just a GPU bump.
 
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Alethiometer

Alethiometer

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May 29, 2018
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They'll need something between 1070 and 1080, then. I don't see it being very affordable.
 
DieH@rd

DieH@rd

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Oct 26, 2017
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Devs should stick to [good] checkerboarded 4K even when nextgen hardware arrives. They should not waste all their resources on native 4K.
 
~Fake

~Fake

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Oct 27, 2017
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And that its why folks need to understand. Price x Perfomance. And we're just talking about exclusives like HZD, UC, GoW... we still have 3rd pty with in my opinion never gonna obey those standards.
I'm very satisfied with the temporal injection presented in Spider-Man. If they find a solution even better for that, they can save hardware resources.
 
bstiernberg

bstiernberg

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Oct 30, 2017
117
Alethiometer said:
They'll need something between 1070 and 1080, then. I don't see it being very affordable.
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Just FYI, AMD and Nvidia teraflops are not directly comparable when talking about real world game performance.

The consoles (PS4, Xbox) use AMD.

An Nvidia GTX 1070 has "only" 6.5 Teraflops. An AMD RX 580 has 6.17. But the 1070 absolutely demolishes the 580 in every single way, substantially so.

edit: I may have misunderstood you, my mistake if so. I'll just leave this up anyhow just for the thread.
 
starfox

starfox

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Oct 28, 2017
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VirtuaRacer said:
A clear illustration why Sony did not endeavour to chase after native 4K in 2016, preferring instead to make customizations to facilitate checkerboard rendering? CBR when implemented in the proper way looks amazing. Even Digital Foundry are continually impressed with Sony's internal efforts in that regard.
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of course it looks amazing if there is no proper native 4k to show how worse it is in comparison.

Sayin' 4K is not needed is a moot point, when in realty it's just because your own hardware (as is in xbox 1 x) is weakass to deliver it, A necessary evil atm.
 

Lucifersam597

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Jun 28, 2018
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Crap guess they should tell Forza 7 on the X1X to stop existing. 4k 60fps better textures and lighting then a PS4 could do. WTF is with this stuff? Native 4k 30 fps exists now on X1X and even has some 4k 60 fps games
 
OP
OP

VirtuaRacer

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Oct 27, 2017
542
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tyfon

tyfon

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Nov 2, 2017
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DieH@rd said:
Devs should stick to [good] checkerboarded 4K even when nextgen hardware arrives. They should not waste all their resources on native 4K.
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I agree, I'd much rather have increased object/shadow/particle detail and scene density (number of objects on the scene) etc than spending it all on just resolution.
Also better post-processing.
 
Alethiometer

Alethiometer

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May 29, 2018
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Kaironaut said:
4K is not 4 times 1080p.
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1080p - 2073600 pixels
4k - 8294400 pixels.
bng5aLZ.jpg
 
Ascenion

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Explains why Sony cut corners with the Pro. Eventually we're going to come to a point where there is no middle ground of Price x Performance and one is going to need to take precedence. A 6TF console in 2018 is still $499.
 
xabbott

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Oct 28, 2017
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VirtuaRacer said:
It's reasonable to assume that Timothy Lottes is speaking in terms of a stable 3840 x 2160 image with zero fluctuation. It had not dawned on me before today that the target for native 4K on a mid generation PS4 might be higher than the benchmark for a mid generation Xbox console when taking into consideration the power of their respective base GPUs.





gamingbolt.com + gamesradar.com

Mark Cerny himself when asked if 6 teraflops would be enough for native 4K without compromise said it would require a GPU closer to 8 teraflops. Presumably he was thinking of PS4 to PS4 Pro when he offered that answer.

A clear illustration why Sony did not endeavour to chase after native 4K in 2016, preferring instead to make customizations to facilitate checkerboard rendering? CBR when implemented in the proper way looks amazing. Even Digital Foundry are continually impressed with Sony's internal efforts in that regard.
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The problem with a lot of these quick takes seems to disregard the fact that what Sony first party does doesn't seem to apply to third parties. If you look at the One X it has native 4k/60 fps titles or titles that look much better than the Pro. So its fine that Sony decided not to chase 4k as it kept the price down I guess but it seemed like such a minor upgrade. I have both so I'm not trying to start a console war or anything. One of the bigger problems is now that I use the Pro for Sony exclusives only the first party stuff running at 1440p looks good but to be honest it already looked amazing at 1080p as well. On a TV it's very hard to notice the improvements in God of War for example (I have a two Sony TVs that I game on, one is 4k one is 1080).
 
Laiza

Laiza

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Oct 25, 2017
2,170
neoak said:
It is for the current "4K", 2160p.

True 4320p is being called "8K"
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JimmyRowe1994 said:
True, but 4K and UHD are actually different. Consoles are actually going for UHD, not 4K, despite their claims. This is because UHD TVs are 3840 x 2160, whereas actual 4K is, well, actually, four thousand at 4096 x 2160.
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Guys, there's no point in trying to swim against the tide. Popular jargon has defined "4k" resolution specifically as 3840x2160 and there is no going back from that. No amount of semantic correction will change that.
 
OP
OP

VirtuaRacer

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Oct 27, 2017
542
Lucifersam597 said:
Crap guess they should tell Forza 7 on the X1X to stop existing. 4k 60fps better textures and lighting then a PS4 could do. WTF is with this stuff? Native 4k 30 fps exists now on X1X and even has some 4k 60 fps games
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You are comparing apples with oranges. They are both fruit, yes, but there the comparison ends.

It depends on what and where a games spends the hardware processing budget. Let's take Driveclub and Forza 7 as paired examples. Does Forza have the same amount of detailed scenery as Driveclub? No. Does Forza 7 feature detailed volumetric clouds? No. Does Forza 7 have a dynamic rain system equally as impressive as Driveclubs? No. The Evolution devs also said that Driveclub, though 30 fps, could run higher unlocked.

So when people cite the Xbox One X as evidence against this calculation they are arguing against science. You have an AMD GPU engineer doing the math and explaining what it would take to get the same PS4 game at native 4K running on the Pro and people are arguing that he is wrong based upon their own subjective appraisal of what they see on screen. You might as well declare a belief in magic.

We've had discussions in the past where people talked past one another. I thought this quote would clarify things from Sony's perspective but we are back to "then why does Forza 7 exist?" Any game can reach 4K depending on how you divide your processing budget.
 
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jett

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Pretty simple deduction.

I really hope next-gen devs don't prioritize native 4K over a higher framerate. Would be such a waste of resources.
 
coolasj19

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As long I get the option to exchange resolution for a solid framerate (30 or 60, it doesn't matter), I'll take frames every time. Honestly, graphic fidelity is so good right now I wouldn't mind if we stayed at this level for a good long time and reinvested those resources into AI and frames and animation and quality of life.
 
Midas

Midas

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Oct 27, 2017
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I'm out of the loop at the moment, are you guys saying that next-gen won't have a GPU that could deliver 7.5 TFLOPs?

And guys, you know that both Microsoft and Sony will talk and push for 4K. Just be happy that 8K is pretty far away, so far.
 

Lucifersam597

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VirtuaRacer said:
Any game can reach 4K if you are willing to make compromises. You are comparing apples with oranges. They are both fruit, yes, but there the comparison ends. We've had discussions in the past where people talked past one another. I thought this quote would clarify things but we are back to "then why does Forza 7 exist?"
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Forza 7 is 4k 60fps with BETTER than PS4 picture quality, in regards to a PS4 compared game compromises were not made.

The main quote in the OP is just plain wrong we have REAL games running 4k 30 and even 4k 60 on X1X that do not cut back graphical features from what a regular PS4 can do and the X1X is not 7.4 TF.

This qoute is 100% wrong, we have real world examples running on a 6TF console right now that factually disprove this.

"While speaking with gaming magazine Edge (July 2018, Issue 320), AMD's Timothy Lottes mentioned that to achieve 4K resolutions for a game that looks like a regular PS4 title, at a frame rate of 30 FPS, a game needs about 7.4 teraflops per second."
 
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Lagspike_exe

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Dec 15, 2017
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Which is why Sony's strategy smoked MS in this regard.
They knew they couldn't hit realistically hit it on 16nm node, so they went for architectural optimization and introduced CBR to the masses. MS wanted a more robust approach which cost them one year late to market and a $100 price hike.
 

Deleted member 426

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If Nintendo sticks hard to 1080p next gen (Super Switch) we could see plenty of ports of PS5 games due to the ridiculous requirements of 4K, simply by limiting resolution.

4K is not what we should be chasing. It's a waste of resources.
 
Suzushiiro

Suzushiiro

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Lucifersam597 said:
Crap guess they should tell Forza 7 on the X1X to stop existing. 4k 60fps better textures and lighting then a PS4 could do. WTF is with this stuff? Native 4k 30 fps exists now on X1X and even has some 4k 60 fps games
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The same game also runs at 1080p60 on the 1.3TF original XBone. The Xbone X is 6TF, more than four times that of the OG XBone, so the principle still applies. Similarly, the Kingdom Hearts HD collections all run at native 4k60 on the PS4 Pro because they're ports of games that ran at 480p30 on a 6.2GF machine.
 

Lucifersam597

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bear force one said:
And you somehow think what Forza and GoW is rendering is remotely the same. XD
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Where in this qoute was a specific game referenced? They are speaking in generalities and these generalities have already been proven false.

"While speaking with gaming magazine Edge (July 2018, Issue 320), AMD's Timothy Lottes mentioned that to achieve 4K resolutions for a game that looks like a regular PS4 title, at a frame rate of 30 FPS, a game needs about 7.4 teraflops per second"
 
Fastidioso

Fastidioso

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Lucifersam597 said:
Crap guess they should tell Forza 7 on the X1X to stop existing. 4k 60fps better textures and lighting then a PS4 could do. WTF is with this stuff? Native 4k 30 fps exists now on X1X and even has some 4k 60 fps games
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Yeah a game with limited scenario can reach 4k on the X. By the way 4K exists on ps4 pro but doesn't most of games can be 4k on it. Same thing it's for the X. It's simple math.
 
bear force one

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Lucifersam597 said:
Where in this qoute was a specific game referenced? They are speaking in generalities and these generalities have already been proven false.

"While speaking with gaming magazine Edge (July 2018, Issue 320), AMD's Timothy Lottes mentioned that to achieve 4K resolutions for a game that looks like a regular PS4 title, at a frame rate of 30 FPS, a game needs about 7.4 teraflops per second"
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"better textures and lighting then a PS4 could do."

Anything is possible in 4k 60fps if little is actually being rendered. You get that right?

You could render Pac-Man. Forza isn't doing what GoW is doing and could not be done at 4k on X1 given the articles math. But I guess you dont respect math?
 
loneliestwizard

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Aren't people speculating that next-gen consoles will hover in the 10-12 tflops range?

If so, we should easily have native 4k30 and also (hopefully) a checkerboarded 4k60 performance mode for most games, especially earlier in the cycle.
 
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