alright, im going back and forth in "ok I understand it!" and "shitty it makes no sense" lol
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NX Gamer: PS5 Full Spec Analysis | A new generation is Born
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Some games have an uncapped framerate on menus therefore it can reach something like 300 frames per second.
So the fans get loud. The solution that Cerney talked about was that the cool be designed to dissipate a fixed amount of heat and they will then vary the clock speeds so that the dissipated heat is what they expect the cooler can do reasonably.
Weather this work is a different question
If the architecture was designed to run fast and at high clock speeds from the get go (which is more believable than the "they increased the clocks at the last minute to react to XSX" theory) I'd be really curious to see how that scales with a mid-gen PS5 Pro running the same clocks with a higher CU count. Could be quite beastly.
Cerny gave an example that proves it's not just about uncapped frame rates. I believe he mentioned horizons map menu having a low triangle count causing the ps4 to nconsume more power.
Regarding the whole map screen thing, please read Liabe Brave's latest post. They explain it perfectly. It doesn't have to do with uncapped framerate per say, rather with the amount of saturation of the GPU in terms of workload. Because a map screen is much simpler in terms of game code compared to live gameplay, it is much easier for an engine to saturate the GPU to 100% workload, while in gameplay it typically is more like 95% of saturation or even lower (depening on how highly optimized the engine is) because of inherent inefficiencies due to a high level of parallelism (there's more idling involved because interdependant instructions have to wait on eachother).
So the entire idea of this design is that you deterministicly downclock the GPU frequency during those scenarios with 100% saturation of simple to execute instructions (you dont need as much clockspeed for that), while you can easily and deterministicly upclock the GPU during live gameplay where the saturation is more like 95% with complex and highly parallelised instructions. You can do this because everything is based off a feedback loop around workloads, instead of thermals or power draw (since those have been set in stone beforehand). This also means that the downclocking should never impact ingame performance in unpredictable ways, since you as a developer have way more control over the right clocks for each workload, because it is deterministic.
So the entire idea of this design is that you deterministicly downclock the GPU frequency during those scenarios with 100% saturation of simple to execute instructions (you dont need as much clockspeed for that), while you can easily and deterministicly upclock the GPU during live gameplay where the saturation is more like 95% with complex and highly parallelised instructions. You can do this because everything is based off a feedback loop around workloads, instead of thermals or power draw (since those have been set in stone beforehand). This also means that the downclocking should never impact ingame performance in unpredictable ways, since you as a developer have way more control over the right clocks for each workload, because it is deterministic.
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Damn man, that's a great post. And explains the "variable frequency" thing perfectly. unfortunately, it would get ignored by those championing this notion that sony did some last-minute panic clocking. Truly a disservice to the work they have put into thier technique.
That's what AMD's Smartshift does, I don't see any relation with the chosen frequencies.
Technique? Something that PC hardware does for years? In my personal opinion is still an afterthought.
Also the post you quoted has several flaws, like, it will not take years until the games can make the PS5 work 100% on GPU load, a bad optimized game can do that from day 1, and that will definitely happen a lot during the lunch period (and after, even today both XB and PS4 has a fair share of them).
The silicon is still AMD silicon like any other silicon it cannot sustain max boost during max power usage. See any GPU currently on the marked.
I don't know why people think this won't make devs work harder. This approach will make games harder to optimize. What happens when you have a complex scene that requires high CPU usage at the same time? Now you have to make changes or a decision in which to prioritize because you can't just run both CPU and GPU at the max rated clocks and I/O throughput can't fix this.
Was it wasteful on the PS4, the Xbox One X, or the Series X? Because that's how power scaling works on every piece of modern silicon at the clock speeds these things ship at. It was true of the PPC cores on the Xbox 360 and PS3, too.
Because there are already so many factors that make can code performance unintuitive, meaning that the only way to know for sure is to test it. You already run something, measure what the limiting factors are, tweak the design and try again to see if it's an improvement across a range of use cases. That's profiling in a nutshell, and the practice doesn't change just because there's one more variable. In fact, it probably disappears in the noise because we're looking at a couple of percent difference - whereas poor reference locality or another core thrashing the cache results in orders of magnitude difference in performance.
Not really. They were aiming for rather conservative clocks. Usually at the sweetspot between performance and power consumption.
This is not what PC hardware has done for years and several people have already explained this quite clearly in this very thread. For PC hardware, you do not work with a set power and thermal limit beforehand for the entire system. The boost is not constantly engaged, while the PS5 runs in constant boost essentially.
marecki already explained quite clearly how it works for PS5 and why it is such a different approach compared to anything we're used to:
This is not an afterthought at all. It was very deliberately designed this way to achieve three things:
1. be able to reach higher clocks than you would normally be able to (in a sustained manner)
2. get tighter control over your cooling solution, so you can reduce the average noise production of the console
3. improve consistency across every console produced due to the deterministic nature
This implementation could never be replicated on PC, because the PC platform is inherently not a closed box design like a console and it has never been done on consoles before because well, someone has to be the first one to do it right?
Also, it seems you are conflating what they explained about GPU load. In the current paradigm, you would see a GPU and/or CPU reach 100% load especially in badly optimized games. This is completely seperate from the actual complexity and amount of workload that needs to be processed at that time. It could be many simple instructions (like the Horizon map screen where power draw maximizes) that could easily be processed with a lower clockspeed without any performance penalty, or it could be a lot of complex instructions that cannot be processed all at once because there's more idle time in between due to the parallel nature of the instructions. This is what you would see during actual gameplay and due to this, you never reach an actual 100% saturation, but more like 95% (in a badly optimized game, this percentage is possibly even much lower than that).
In summary, because the PS5 will determine it's clocks based on the actual workload (the APU is designed in such a way that there's a constant feedback loop from both CPU and GPU), it will constantly change it's clockspeeds based on that. Which is completely different from any other implementation before this (be it PC or console), where the throttling is based off thermal conditions and power draw. The thermal and power draw is not a factor in this for the PS5, because both limits have been determined beforehand, so only the actual workload matters.
So you are right in saying that the silicon cannot sustain max boost during max power usage, because in most cases it will not be doing that on the PS5. It will either sustain max boost during lower power usage, or go below max boost during max power usage and anything in between. Because clocks are purely based on live workloads, developers can determine and control this beforehand through their testing and optimization phases. Again, all because the max power is a known factor and the system dynamically throttles both CPU and GPU based on workloads you throw at it. It's a very different approach to what we are used to.
Lady Gaia and Liabe Brave can explain this better and with more detail than I ever could. It seems like they are devs themselves, so I would assume that they know what they are talking about. Anyway, that's what I caught about this design based on their posts and several others, as well as Cerny's presentation. It really is a completely different approach to what we're used to, so we should stop comparing this solution to any other approach as well.
The thing is performance profiling tools will lock your HW frequency (at least the ones I've used before, not sure if consoles are any different - I assume not-). We don't know at which point the system is "balanced" and CPU won't run at 3.5GHz while the GPU is at 2.23GHz. Now you have multiple scenarios to deal with when both your CPU and GPU frequency are varying based on load and power budget. I agree it would need to be tested, but based on experience I'll say the "couple percentage" it's heavily downplayed.
The 3.2GHz cores were not conservative for their time unless you're comparing those devices with pretty pricy alternatives. The fact that power scales exponentially with clock is not some big secret and there is no magic sweet spot where this isn't true. At lower clock speeds it's possible to keep a constant voltage and merely ride a power of two curve, but as Intel has noted with current leakage and other effects alongside higher frequencies it's getting a lot closer to a power of three. Yes, you can find a "sweet spot" where you're closer to scaling with the square of the clock speed, but that still means that you get less than 5% performance increase for 10% additional power. Once it reaches cube scaling it's closer to 3% increase for each 10% in additional power.
This isn't new. We've been pushing clock speeds as high as we can get away with forever, because it keeps die sizes and therefore manufacturing costs down for the performance levels.
Like I mentioned before that would be really difficult, making something that uses the maximum 8 cores 16 thread all of the time or even some of the time would be really difficult. Your always going to end up with gaps and moments of down time, and threads and cores not being utilised as much if at all. The only things that max all the cores would be benchmarks and software that is designed to max the cpu. Someone posted a picture of the profiler of Spiderman, you can see it has lots of gaps, and plenty of underutilised threads.
Ordinary triple AAA games will likely come no where near to fully utilising the CPU, probably the only things that might are sim games that are designed to chunk through data.
People keep assuming that what Sony is doing is related to conventional boost clocks which are thermally sensitive. The reason profiling tools have historically offered the option to lock CPU clocks is to be able to get deterministic results (something I'm pretty familiar with given that I led a team that built some of the profiling tools millions of developers have used.) Sony's solution already guarantees deterministic results, so that's entirely unnecessary.
You already have multiple scenarios to deal with in terms of cache and memory contention. Again, this is nothing new. It's impossible to say whether the couple percentage cited is accurate or not because we have no concrete data to base a conclusion on. We have the lead architect's word for it, and until we have any data to suggest otherwise it's all we have to go on. When we know more about the cooling system in use that should help clarify things somewhat, but as I've said often here: it's the games that matter and that should tell us all we need to know about how the system works in practice. The fact that developers are expressing a great deal of enthusiasm is a clue, and the only one I've personally heard from with direct experience seems positively overjoyed with the design decisions.
Thanks for giving your insight, there's so much misinformation going around and it's nice to see input from someone with real knowledge. :)
Clearly, you don't know what you are talking about.
Especially after saying the bolded and enlarged part.
Well, I'm out, if you think that having a chip that is controlled by power limits is something new it's OK.
t this pint you will be doing us a favor.
Thre is nothing new in the tech space, everything has been done before income way or the other. However, what sony is doing is a first for consoles, same way MS RAM thingy is a first for consoles even though it was something Nvidia did years ago.
It doesn't change the fact that a good deal of work went into it, especially to get that chip closed as high as they have. But keep on thinking that this is all some 48hr reactionary gimmick cobbled together by sony at the last minute.
You are misunderstanding the context. It is frequently the "low demand" scenes that cause the GPU to overdraw power.
It's a similar point. The problem in these cases is that the scene is too simple, making one part of the GPU run way faster than it normally would and draw more and more power to do so. This is what causes PS4s to overheat, and why Furmark back in the day would kill a GPU. It is counterintuitive, but complex scenes you would normally describe as "demanding" stress the GPU more evenly, reducing the likelihood of power being overdrawn. That's exactly what you want. Scenes that don't need to be faster can cause the clock speed to throttle avoiding thermal events without impacting the user experience, while actually intense gameplay will stay at max clocks when the user actually will need the performance.
That's not how power consumption works at all. Power use is not only a function of clock speed.
Given the PS5's unified pool of memory, all of it running at insane bandwidth, I wonder how that's going to affect PC versions of multiplats. Yes, the SSD is fast, but I can see pcie4 SSDs catching up if you've got the money.
Having a harder time picturing a DDR5 memory configuration that wouldn't bottleneck a game designed for the PS5's memory bandwidth (or even the Series X's slower CPU memory pool, still significantly more bandwidth than what I expect on PC system memory).
Having a harder time picturing a DDR5 memory configuration that wouldn't bottleneck a game designed for the PS5's memory bandwidth (or even the Series X's slower CPU memory pool, still significantly more bandwidth than what I expect on PC system memory).
It sounds kind of like if a Gatling Gun had a tendency to randomly stop rotating and keep the up its normal fire rate, but out of a single barrel.
PCs generally have more cache in their CPUs. It's not an issue.
I haven't enough knowledge about it but that's already the case this gen and it didn't impacted PC at all.
Like other member said, CPU cache is very low on console.
You've got this exactly backwards. A badly optimized game uses less of a GPU's compute power, not more. Think about what you apply the term to: games that don't look as good, or run as well, as similar games on the same machine. The machine has the same amount of TF in both cases. What changes is that the well-optimized game uses more of the potential power, by keeping all parts of the chip more occupied. A badly optimized games has unfixed bottlenecks that stop work from proceeding as fast as it "should." (Note that optimization isn't necessarily the reason two different games behave differently, I'm assuming for argument that it's the only variance between the examples.)
I am not a dev, an engineer, or have a degree in computer science. I'm an interested (and hopefully at least half-educated) layperson. My statements are based on what I believe I know from reading more authoritative sources, and from listening to public statements by the platform holders. I'd like to think I have a facility with following the logic of their arguments, but you should take what I say as what it is, not as infallible pronouncement.
Lady Gaia has actual expertise. Definitely pay close attention and put great stock in those posts.
My understanding is thats how it works on the XSX as well, if you access the faster or slower pool you lock access to the entire bus from any other device from accessing it for the period of the memory transaction. The difference being that the memory transactions will take the same amount of time on the PS5 regardless of where it is but the majority of the memory access by the CPU will likely take longer on the XSX.
I thought that TFLOPS don't matter that much.
So, I still don't get the point of all the overclocking to nightmare level with variable frequencies. Like why?
Cerny says it's only dropping for a couple of percent and only sometimes. Ok.
If it's only a couple of percent, like 2%, why not lock the frequencies?
TFLOPS don't matter anymore and according to Sony it would only to go down roughly 2%... so lock it 2% below.
spend less on cooling and make it way easier for devs.
Why sacrifice so much just for 2% more?
I have the feeling that it actually goes down way more than "just 2%", so that the TFLOPS gain - on paper - is much more than just 2%.
And Sony really wanted to close the TFLOPs GAP. 9 TFLOPS vs 12 TFLOPS just sounds horrible from a marketing perspective
Single digit vs double digit, but 10 vs 12 sounds much better.
And it might have been done very late at this stage, that would explain why we haven't seen the console yet AND why sony talked so late about the ps5 at all. With the PS4, they already showed almost everything by then.
anyway, we will see how it turns out.
So, I still don't get the point of all the overclocking to nightmare level with variable frequencies. Like why?
Cerny says it's only dropping for a couple of percent and only sometimes. Ok.
If it's only a couple of percent, like 2%, why not lock the frequencies?
TFLOPS don't matter anymore and according to Sony it would only to go down roughly 2%... so lock it 2% below.
spend less on cooling and make it way easier for devs.
Why sacrifice so much just for 2% more?
I have the feeling that it actually goes down way more than "just 2%", so that the TFLOPS gain - on paper - is much more than just 2%.
And Sony really wanted to close the TFLOPs GAP. 9 TFLOPS vs 12 TFLOPS just sounds horrible from a marketing perspective
Single digit vs double digit, but 10 vs 12 sounds much better.
And it might have been done very late at this stage, that would explain why we haven't seen the console yet AND why sony talked so late about the ps5 at all. With the PS4, they already showed almost everything by then.
anyway, we will see how it turns out.
With a 54 CU SoC at 2323mz your looking at a 16 TF GPU, at the same clock speed as base PS5 then it be 15.3 TF. I think their high clock speeds are possible because of their narrow design, I'm not sure it be possible with a bigger SoC, at least not on RDNA2, maybe RDNA3.
Not only, yes. But you do need power to push clocks higher and keep the system stable.
I'm not a dev but I don't see any problems with this as long as they can clock it higher without instability and cooling issues. Microsoft did it with the Xbox One S too.
But if it results in loud fan noise then they're obviously taking some wrong turns here.
My theory is that the system 's architecture has been engineered in reverse order to maximize i/o throughput from the perspective of the memory subsystem's weakest link (the ssd) and eliminate i/o pipeline bottlenecks all the way to the CPU and GPU. At the downstream end of the i/o pipeline you have the GPU caches now with insane bandwidth, being clocked so high, and a more easily saturated GPU with fewer CUs to allocate to (less parallelization) but still with very high performance due to the high clocks once again.
Fan noise on the PS4 Pro is ridiculous. When playing RDR2 I've often had to resort to headphones so that I could understand dialog without turning on subtitles.
That's litterally 8GB of GDDR5 all over again here.
How did PC games do the last generation with PS4's unified pool of memory ?
He just asked a question about game design taking account of consoles specificities, including the Series X, there is no need to show up your astrological table and brandish these like a crucifix.
The main difference with 2013 is that brute forcing any games built for consoles was already easy for 2013 PCs, am easiness that naturally translated into marketshare.
I hate that noise, even playing on the very silent Xbox One X gets me occasionally annoyed after jumping in on Stadia and Geforce Now where things are truly 100% silent.
Developers will not cut out a third of their target market by coding a game specifically to console standards.
I see people are still spouting this nonsense. Yes they changed the clocks last minute and Cerny made up a whole section in his presentation about faster clocks etc just because they had a single digits TF and were scared of the beast. /s
they have been designing and testing the console for years, I doubt they can just throw in a last minute change like that just for marketing.
cerny has a good record and isn't there to lie or spout pr nonsense that's not his job, unlike others who do that.
So outside of exclusive games nobody will use the extra power the x-series brings. And even exclusive games won't do that for a while thanks to their forced xbox one compability...
Can't wait to see the exclusives that use the full power. Hopefully Hellblade 2 will bring the heat.
That's a better answer provided from the commercial side, even if platforms sales balances and valuable gains made on it are all different for each publishers, studios and titles. So having consoles exclusives games from third-party isn't to exclude, it's already there but for others reasons than hardware.
I wouldn't say that. The extra power will be used, just not in a way that renders a game unplayable on different hardware.
Exactly,
MS studios are becoming incredibly adept at hardware scalability, they will push the games to the limits, while being able to scale them back for lower-spec machines.
It will be interesting to see if SSD starts becoming a requirement. It could still be worth thier investment to do extra engineering to support HDD though, even if those versions require loading screens.
It will eventually become a requirement, probably as soon as adoption rates of the new generation and SSDs on PC are at a point where it makes business sense.
I feel like I owe a tuition fee after reading this. Very informative.
I guess this s the new narrative now.
At this point, there s no need to even address comments like these.
Its not that no one would use the extra power. It's about how that extra power would present and what it translates to.
Its a simple case of either higher native rez, or a higher framerate. Not both. And the logical thing for any dev to do is to look the framerate and dynamically scale the rez. What that translates to is that the PS5 would on average rn at scaled-down rez from the XSX about 15-20% of the time. While everything else remains exactly the same.
And while I and many others have repeated this, that means that The XSX could be at 2160p@(Y)fps (where Y is whatever fps lock the devs set out for) 100% of the time and the PS5would be at 2160p@(Y)fps around 80%-85% of the time. All effects and assets would be the exact same thing with the only difference being that when that part of the game comes along that is taxing on the hardware, the XSX would likely be able to hold its rez @2160p while the PS5 would scale its rez down to around 1800p/2052p to maintain the locked framerate.
That's what this nonsense is about. 2160p vs 1800p/2052p - 2160p.
What makes all this even crazier is that with those kinda rez targets/range,1800p - 2160p ; 95% of the people out there wouldn't be able to detect or tell apart. Its actually easier to see a difference between 1080p vs 900p (around a 40%+ rez difference), than it is to see one between 1440p vs 2160p. Even though the latter is over a 100% resolution difference. And that's simply because when pixel count is already that high diminishing returns kicks in and it starts getting really hard to tell resolutions apart. And yet such a fuss is being made about 1800p/2052p vs 2160p. Even crazier when you consider that those drops in rez on the PS5wouldonly really happen about 15-20% of the time.
Crazy times.
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