PS5 and next Xbox launch speculation - timing and specification

[Intersect]

I don't think you know what Infinity Fabric is.

Or that you know what youre talking about at all.

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Edit: None of the statements below are inaccurate. The 2013 PS4 APU does not have any of the features mentioned below due to the design predating AMD's SME and SEV. AMD APUs from 2010 have included a ARM trustzone security processor and ARM Multi-media. AMD SME and SEV developer Whitepapers were published in 2015 two years after the 2013 PS4 release. The first time SME and SEV were incorporated in a CPU were with Zen and Infinity fabric.


Infinity fabric is a number of things: News has been targeting external features which is primarily an improved Hyper transport. Infinity fabric also includes transparent to the OS encryption and decryption of memory for VM security which creates a 1.5% performance hit. That is worthless without a governor (OS/Hypervisor) that allows only authorized threads to have access to the unencrypted memory. Given you have all of that, NoC seen in Vega which also supports Infinity fabric is a logical extension of Infinity fabric. The analogy is ARM Trustzone security whose bus and some accelerator internal bus support NoC, the Memory controller/govener which supports Infinity Fabric DRM has to work with upgraded registers which are also required for NoC. Infinity fabric internally is a NoC and more.

AMD's security processor is an ARM Trustzone CPU and encryption accelerator to support HDCP 2.2 the accepted standard for encryption for everything!!!!

The AMD Secure Processor is an on-chip unit that is completely separated from the x86 CPU tasks. It runs off a 32-bit ARM Cortex-A5 microcontroller, uses a secure OS/kernel, and has off-chip firmware and data storage. The purpose of said processor is to provide cryptographic functionality for the secure generation of keys and management of these keys for different applications. A hardware-validated boot option enables root of trust for the security of the entire platform.

On-board secure memory encryption (SME) enables a single key to encrypt system memory, including that on virtual machines or containers, thus protecting against physical memory attacks. SME is fully transparent and requires no OS or driver support. It also supports hardware devices, including network and storage devices and GPUs, to access encrypted pages without issue, via direct memory access (DMA).

AMD's second memory encryption technology is called secure encrypted virtualization (SEV), which protects virtual machines (VMs) and containers from each other as well as against tampering in general. It generates one key per hypervisor, per VM, per group of VMs, or per VM with multiple containers. This enables isolation of the hypervisor from the VMs/containers.

Note also that AMD mentioned a latency increase of 7-8 ns when memory encryption is enabled, which results in a 1.5% performance hit in SPECInt. This is very reasonable in my opinion and well worth the benefits of encryption.

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The PS3 CELL has a hypervisor and encrypted memory unfortunately the master Key was hacked. When that was discovered, Sony eliminated Linux support on the PS3.

**Infinity Fabric DRM for Virtual Machines is a Trusted Execution Environment using a ARM trustzone CPU and AES -128 encryption accelerator. I am only assuming that it qualifies as a Playready SL3000 level DRM.**

Current PS4s use the ARM Trustzone CPU and accelerator in Southbridge for a trusted boot. Beyond that the APU's GPU has no DRM and Netflix relies on Obfuscation (hiding a 30 meg app inside 1 GB of padding and upgrading moving the app code inside the padding regularly).

Since Infinity fabric includes Root of Trust boot, a Southbridge with ARM Trustzone is not necessary. Southbridge and Northbridge as well as Infinity fabric may be included in the APU reducing costs and allowing instant on and/or always connected=AMD's Start Now.

 

[Kronik]

Infinity fabric is a number of things: News has been targeting external features which is primarily an improved Hyper transport. Infinity fabric also includes transparent to the OS encryption and decryption of memory for VM security which creates a 1.5% performance hit. That is worthless without a governor (OS/Hypervisor) that allows only authorized threads to have access to the unencrypted memory. Given you have all of that, NoC seen in Vega which also supports Infinity fabric is a logical extension of Infinity fabric. The analogy is ARM Trustzone security whose bus and some accelerator internal bus support NoC, the Memory controller/govener which supports Infinity Fabric DRM has to work with upgraded registers which are also required for NoC. Infinity fabric internally is a NoC and more.

AMD's security processor is an ARM Trustzone CPU and encryption accelerator to support HDCP 2.2 the accepted standard for encryption for everything!!!!

Edit: The PS3 CELL has a hypervisor and encrypted memory unfortunately the master Key was hacked. When that was discovered, Sony eliminated Linux support on the PS3.

**Infinity Fabric DRM for Virtual Machines is a Trusted Execution Environment using a ARM trustzone CPU and AES -128 encryption accelerator. I am only assuming that it qualifies as a Playready SL3000 level DRM.**

Current PS4s use the ARM Trustzone CPU and accelerator in Southbridge for a trusted boot. Beyond that the APU's GPU has no DRM and Netflix relies on Obfuscation (hiding a 30 meg app inside 1 GB of padding and upgrading moving the app code inside the padding regularly).

Second edit: Since Infinity fabric includes Root of Trust boot, a Southbridge with ARM Trustzone is not necessary. Southbridge and Northbridge as well as Infinity fabric may be included in the APU reducing costs and allowing instant on and/or always connected=AMD's Start Now.

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I mean... no. This has nothing to do with Infinity Fabric. Did you even read what you linked?

Infinity Fabric is an interconnect between the CPU and the GPU or on-die between cores and other elements.

The thing you are talking about is AMD Secure Processor which is a part of about every AMD CPU and APU since 2013.

And seriously... who the fuck cares about this anyway? It's literally the least interesting thing about a new console design.

 

[LordOcidax]

Late 2019 - early 2020.

 

[Apex88]

Don't see any scenario where this comes before 2020. There hasn't even been a hint of things to come, with many big PS4 exclusives expected in 2019.

If, and it's a big if, it does come in 2019. I can only see it being an iterative affair, which goes against Sony's stated desire to have a clean, new gen, start.

 

[Expy]

Don't see any scenario where this comes before 2020. There hasn't even been a hint of things to come, with many big PS4 exclusives expected in 2019.

If, and it's a big if, it does come in 2019. I can only see it being an iterative affair, which goes against Sony's stated desire to have a clean, new gen, start.

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It took a year for rumors, announcement, and launch of PS4.

 

[TheThreadsThatBindUs]

You guys really have to stop comparing PC-s to consoles.

First, consoles use unified heterogenous memory, so you don't need to copy data from the main RAM to the VRAM and store in two places.

Second, there is the problem of memory size. The root of the problem is that on DirectX 11 the memory management is done by driver and it's very inefficient. On DirectX 12/Vulkan the memory management is done by the game engine but that would require the devs to do their job properly. But so far the whole thing didn't really improve.

Currently if a devs wants to go with 2-3GB of real VRAM usage then you need 8GB VRAM on the graphics card. If a dev would want to with 8GB of real VRAM usage you would need at least 16GB but more like 32GB.

The point is, the whole VRAM usage is very and I mean VERY VERY VERY inefficient. Of course Nvidia goes on the easy route and just packs more and more VRAM on their cards for two reasons: on PC it is the easier solution and also bigger number sells. 16GB looks better on a graphics card box and they can charge more for the card.

In reality games need WAY less VRAM than the high end PC cards would lead you to believe.

That's why AMD made the HBCC which basicly sais: you devs just need to write in a few lines of codes into your DX12/Vulkan/other explicit API engine and the hardware will take care of the memory management. Remember when AMD showed the Deus Ex demo which normally required 4GB VRAM to run properly but with HBCC it run easily on 2GB and had 50%+ average FPS and 100%+ min FPS?

Obviously HBCC on PC is going to be a long story. But on consoles where there is only one hardware, one OS, one driver and one API to work against it's going to be used in every game.

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Thanks for this post Kronik.

This a really good explanation of the AMD HBCC that i'd not appreciated until now. I appreciate the insight there. Sounds like HBCC is a real game-changer.

 

[Kronik]

Thanks for this post Kronik.

This a really good explanation of the AMD HBCC that i'd not appreciated until now. I appreciate the insight there. Sounds like HBCC is a real game-changer.

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Hey cheers!

The thing is, that it would be a real game-changer on PC where this issue is the most severe. Consoles are a bit better off but will help a lot as well simply because you won't have to deal with badly written code (at least on the memory management side of things).

This is an issue the industry was well aware of years ago but no one could come up with an answer. But it really got serious in the last few years because of high resolution textures and effects, bigger worlds and stuff.

On PC this means that currently about 50% of the VRAMs content is useful data but it can go as low as 25%. The rest is trash but deleting them gives a huge performance penalty on DX11. On the explicit APIs there is less overhead but then it requires nicely written code to begin with and even then there is still going to be problems with trash accumulating in the VRAM.

There is still the brute force way of putting more VRAM on the graphics cards, but there has to be a line... memory is getting more expensive and obviously draws more power the more you put on.

Obviusly more memory is always nice but we are at the point where we have to seriously deal with the efficiency problems and HBC is a very nice and elegant hardware solution to that.

 

[Deleted member 30077]

Thanks for this post Kronik.

This a really good explanation of the AMD HBCC that i'd not appreciated until now. I appreciate the insight there. Sounds like HBCC is a real game-changer.

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I wouldn't believe anything he says. A 3gb Nvidia card can use console textures without a problem. If what he says was true then no PC card could match X1X textures because I'm pretty sure the X1X can use 7-8gb for VRAM. That's why it can have 4K textures and the other consoles can't.

I'm not knowledgeable enough to know if the rest of his post is true or not but I'm of the opinion that if a part of what you say is abolute bullshit the rest is probably bullshit aswell.

 

[2Blackcats]

The cynic in me thinks the RDR2 delay could be to do a "GTAV", which makes me think a 2019 PS5 release is slightly more likely then what I thought before.

 

[TheThreadsThatBindUs]

I wouldn't believe anything he says. A 3gb Nvidia card can use console textures without a problem. If what he says was true then no PC card could match X1X textures because I'm pretty sure the X1X can use 7-8gb for VRAM. That's why it can have 4K textures and the other consoles can't.

I'm not knowledgeable enough to know if the rest of his post is true or not but I'm of the opinion that if a part of what you say is abolute bullshit the rest is probably bullshit aswell.

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I'm sorry, but... huh?!

napata, your post here sounds more like bullshit than anything Kronik wrote. What are "4k textures" (beyond some buzzword fairly technically ignorant gamers invented)?

Also, the XB1X can use higher fidelity textures and assets because it has a much bigger GPU (thus more CUs and TMUs), more RAM, but more importantly, significantly more memory bandwidth to pull in the greater texture and geometry data. The memory bandwidth there is the main differentiator between the XB1X and other consoles - with regards to being able to use higher fidelity in-game assets.

PC's in general have an advantage over consoles in this area, since they have separate memory pools for the GPU and CPU; so GPU to VRAM memory bandwidth is not shared and is wholly dedicated to the GPU.

It doesn't really sound like you're qualified to be calling anyone else's posts BS, when yours make you sound like you don't know enough about what you're discussing.

Kronik def. sounds like a developer who has first hand experience. While your post makes you sound like someone who just read something they didn't understand all that well on the internet.

 

[Deleted member 30077]

I'm sorry, but... huh?!

napata, your post here sounds more like bullshit than anything Kronik wrote. What are "4k textures" (beyond some buzzword fairly technically ignorant gamers invented)?

Also, the XB1X can use higher fidelity textures and assets because it has a much bigger GPU (thus more CUs and TMUs), more RAM, but more importantly, significantly more memory bandwidth to pull in the greater texture and geometry data. The memory bandwidth there is the main differentiator between the XB1X and other consoles - with regards to being able to use higher fidelity in-game assets.

PC's in general have an advantage over consoles in this area, since they have separate memory pools for the GPU and CPU; so GPU to VRAM memory bandwidth is not shared and is wholly dedicated to the GPU.

It doesn't really sound like you're qualified to be calling anyone else's posts BS, when yours make you sound like you don't know enough about what you're discussing.

Kronik def. sounds like a developer who has first hand experience. While your post makes you sound like someone who just read something they didn't understand all that well on the internet.

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The only thing I said he was 100% wrong about was the fact that he said you need 2-3 times as much VRAM to get the same level of textures as a console. This is factually wrong because a 1060 3gb for example can use console level textures. And a 6-8gb card can match X1X textures which can in fact use about 7-8gb of memory for textures. He said you need a 16gb or even a 32gb card for this. Completely untrue.

You seem to misunderstand what you need for higher fidelity textures though. You only need more memory for textures. If a PS4 had more memory it could probably use the same fidelity textures as the X1X. Bandwidth might matter, not completely sure about that.I might test that in the weekend out of curiosity.

BTW. 4k textures are 4096*4096 textures.

 

[TheThreadsThatBindUs]

The only thing I said he was 100% wrong about was the fact that he said you need 2-3 times as much VRAM to get the same level of textures as a console. This is factually wrong because a 1060 3gb for example can use console level textures. And a 6-8gb card can match X1X textures which can in fact use about 7-8gb of memory for textures. He said you need a 16gb or even a 32gb card for this. Completely untrue.

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The bolded is not even what Kronik said. You seem to be be completely missing his point. Which was that development on PC using DirectX features to automate memory management is inefficient in its use of VRAM. On consoles, the situation is different, meaning memory is managed more efficiently.

If you're going to claim someone is wrong, at least try to take the time to understand what they are actually saying first.

You seem to misunderstand what you need for higher fidelity textures though. You only need more memory for textures. If a PS4 had more memory it could probably use the same fidelity textures as the X1X. Bandwidth might matter, not completely sure about that.I might test that in the weekend out of curiosity.

I'd say a 4096*4096 textures is a 4k texture. What else would you call that?

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Nope, you seem to be speaking again about something you have no clue about. A PS4 with more memory but the same memory bandwidth wouldn't be able to use any higher fidelity assets than it can now, because it still has the same number of texture units in the GPU and it doesn't have to bandwidth to feed the additional texture data to the GPU to be rendered on screen. Memory amount is also important, but without the bandwidth you can't feed the data to the GPU fast enough.

 

[Deleted member 1003]

Think a successor will be teased by Sony this year or next year?

 

[Deleted member 30077]

The bolded is not even what Kronik said. You seem to be be completely missing his point. Which was that development on PC using DirectX features to automate memory management is inefficient in its use of VRAM. On consoles, the situation is different, meaning memory is managed more efficiently.

If you're going to claim someone is wrong, at least try to take the time to understand what they are actually saying first.

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Currently if a devs wants to go with 2-3GB of real VRAM usage then you need 8GB VRAM on the graphics card. If a dev would want to with 8GB of real VRAM usage you would need at least 16GB but more like 32GB.

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How would I interpret this statement any other way? Unless he's also saying that the memory consoles use also isn't the real memory usage? And that there's also tons of useless stuff in it.

Nope, you seem to be speaking again about something you have no clue about. A PS4 with more memory but the same memory bandwidth wouldn't be able to use any higher fidelity assets than it can now, because it still has the same number of texture units in the GPU and it doesn't have to bandwidth to feed the additional texture data to the GPU to be rendered on screen. Memory amount is also important, but without the bandwidth you can't feed the data to the GPU fast enough.

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Why are you talking about assets? We're talking about texture resolution only. For texture resolution memory is pretty much the only thing that really matters. It has negligble influence on other parts of the GPU. Don't believe me? Google it and find a 1000 benchmarks that show this. Here's one:

https://www.geforce.com/whats-new/g...guide#rise-of-the-tomb-raider-texture-quality

And we're talking about the difference between high (ps4) and very high (X1X) before you mention the 2 fps difference between low and very high. If the ps4 did have 12gb of memory available it could indeed use higher resolution textures.

 

[Animal Liberation Ⓥ]

Think a successor will be teased by Sony this year or next year?

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Next year the earliest.

And the tease would not be through 'official' channels.

 

[Diarrhea Day-Lewis]

Think a successor will be teased by Sony this year or next year?

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Won't be teased at all. They'll do like PS4 and PS4 Pro and announce an event a month into 2020 (or the year it releases) and launch it that year

 

[Jeff6851]

I just don't see how Sony can put out a console that will be more attractive than Xbox One X at a price that competes with it by the end of next year. I'm thinking Holiday 2021 but Holiday 2020 is realistic.

Edit: To expand on competing with Xbox, I know that there are a lot of people in the world who don't care about Xbox at all and PS5 would look to compete with the next Xbox more than X but if it's same specs or higher specs and higher price then MS can sit back for a bit and come out and beat them in specs and price a year or two later.

 

[Thadeus]

Booted up my Vita since god knows when and didn't realize how good it was for remote play. especially when the TV is taken over by some body. Currently playing Digimon MH and I think I spent more time on the Vita then the couch. Considering I doubt there would be a next portable device from Sony, would be nice too see a add on device (doubt it would be integrated) that enables the option to play away from the main console. Plus I suppose this would help compete with the NS.

Think a successor will be teased by Sony this year or next year?

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I am personally still going for a tease this year then a 2019 release due to the 6 year cycle. However again with the success of the PS4 they may decide to delay it til 2020/21.

 

[Giant Panda]

If we haven't heard any substantial rumors by the time a couple of weeks have passed after E3, then PS5 is very unlikely to release next year. In that case, a 2020 launch is pretty much guaranteed, as 2021+ would be terrible for the PS business. Sony doesn't want to wait for PS4 sales to be crashing before launching PS5; that's how you lose a lot of money and mindshare.

 

[ApeEscaper]

Fascinating read

 

[Diarrhea Day-Lewis]

If we haven't heard any substantial rumors by the time a couple of weeks have passed after E3, then PS5 is very unlikely to release next year. In that case, a 2020 launch is pretty much guaranteed, as 2021+ would be terrible for the PS business. Sony doesn't want to wait for PS4 sales to be crashing before launching PS5; that's how you lose a lot of money and mindshare.

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I agree. If a holiday launch for 2019 is happening I'd expect developers to be briefed by mid year and get kits near fall.

Nothing indicates that will happen tho. I'm betting on 2020

 

[JustAnotherOne]

And even for 2020- development on decent launch titles would have to begin right about....now. look at how long AAA took to develop this gen - new hardware and new tools probably requires more dev time. We should at least hear something about next gen pretty soon.

 

[MisterR]

Fall 2020 is my guess.

 

[RoboPlato]

Won't be teased at all. They'll do like PS4 and PS4 Pro and announce an event a month into 2020 (or the year it releases) and launch it that year

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I think it might even be closer to release than with the PS4 and more like the Xbox One reveal. A general showcase in April or May and a big game showcase at E3.

I agree. If a holiday launch for 2019 is happening I'd expect developers to be briefed by mid year and get kits near fall.

Nothing indicates that will happen tho. I'm betting on 2020

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If it's actually 2019, we could start hearing things as early as GDC in a couple weeks.

 

[DammitLloyd]

Sony's earnings call is tomorrow. Maybe we'll get some subtle hints.

 

[Catspit]

I am really up in the air about Getting a PRO.. OG ps4 is doing fine, and I don't have a 4ktv just yet. The monster hunter world difference in frame rate between the OG and the PRO has me worried if this is a thing to come with next years games.

 

[Bunkles]

I don't see a 2019 PS5 launch. What would be the selling point for a new console next year? Get slightly better graphics than PS4 Pro / Xbox One X? 2020 at the absolute earliest IMO.

 

[RoboPlato]

I don't see a 2019 PS5 launch. What would be the selling point for a new console next year? Get slightly better graphics than PS4 Pro / Xbox One X? 2020 at the absolute earliest IMO.

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I think they could make a pretty solid PS5 in 2019 if 7nm, Zen 2, Navi, and GDDR6 are all ready to go. Navi is the only one that may be a stretch. Still, I'm not sure they could make it in 2019 for $399 which is the bigger issue from Sony's perspective. I'm leaning 2020 myself but I wouldn't be shocked if 2019 happened.

 

[Inuhanyou]

It should be 2020, fall. They need to make sure they have all the technological advancements they can muster available for their next box.

7nm+, Zen3+, GDDR6, Navi+

 

[2Blackcats]

It should be 2020, fall. They need to make sure they have all the technological advancements they can muster available for their next box.

7nm+, Zen3+, GDDR6, Navi+

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Well, that's all theoretically possible next year, right?

Just too expensive.

I'm happy with either.

If we don't hear any serious noise in the next month or two through the rumour mill I think we can say with reasonable certainty that 2020 is a lock. Well unless they have reason to wait til 2021 which I doubt.

 

[Sarobi]

I am really up in the air about Getting a PRO.. OG ps4 is doing fine, and I don't have a 4ktv just yet. The monster hunter world difference in frame rate between the OG and the PRO has me worried if this is a thing to come with next years games.

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If you're not entirely sold on getting a PRO now, just hold on to the OG until PS5.

 

[DavidDesu]

I don't see a 2019 PS5 launch. What would be the selling point for a new console next year? Get slightly better graphics than PS4 Pro / Xbox One X? 2020 at the absolute earliest IMO.

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If it isn't going to be a huge leap I tend to think the same but then the iterative nature of consoles now perhaps increases the chances that we will see a decent spec bump for PS5 but nothing incredible because they know their PS5 Pro can be that step when they need to take it. It's interesting times. I'm happy with my launch PS4 for now and every passing month makes me even more likely to just wait for the big PS5 upgrade. Then again of we get great deals like Black Friday then I might finally bite.

 

[Miniature Kaiju]

Unless Sony and MS change things dramatically with the next round of consoles (and they most probably won't), dev times will probably be similar or even slightly shorter for similar experiences, since engines have already been ported and tooling is in place for the architecture.

 

[Smelck]

My gut feel (without all the tech talk above my head) is it will follow a similar timeline to PS4 release schedule

Unofficial whispers and devkits out there in mid to late 2020

Announce Feb 2021 - launch (worldwide) Nov 2021

8 years console cycle - long I know , but the sweet spot as the 4 has the legs, sales and the support to last until then (100 million+ up by then too...)

If anything console cycles are getting longer - largely due to scale of diminishing return and hitting the right pricepoint - 5,6,7 and now an 8 years cycle (I believe)

 

[jdstorm]

I honestly think that if they release a new console within the next two years it will be very underwhelming. Slightly better than the Xbox One X but I'd be very surprised if it was a significant leap in terms of processing power/graphical capabilities.

If I were developing a new console, I would wait a couple of years and aim to release a year after that. We've barely reached the point where the industry isn't struggling to make use of current hardware to make more engaging and demanding games and pushing the graphics envelope at this stage would, in my opinion, be needless and put an unnecessary strain on smaller developers.

The Switch should be proof enough that even outdated hardware can perform admirably and connect with consumers today. We need more smaller developers to be able to fully use the platform and develop games within a relatively short development cycle. Pushing out a new hardware too soon would be too soon in my opinion.

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The biggest reason to launch early is to set the new baseline beyond the Jaguar CPU in the PS4. Having an Octocore Zen as the baseline for next gen even with a PS4 Pro GPU would be a huge jump. Having a GPU with 2-3x the peformance of a PS4 Pro.

Thats going to be very noticeable for players coming from the base PS4 and an easily justified upgrade.

 

[BreakAtmo]

I think they could make a pretty solid PS5 in 2019 if 7nm, Zen 2, Navi, and GDDR6 are all ready to go. Navi is the only one that may be a stretch. Still, I'm not sure they could make it in 2019 for $399 which is the bigger issue from Sony's perspective. I'm leaning 2020 myself but I wouldn't be shocked if 2019 happened.

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If they were releasing 2019 I would imagine they'd release at $499 at a loss. With there almost certainly being no new Xbox to compete with they'd be able to go higher on the price and offer power to match it. The end result would probably have a 3-4x better CPU than the 1X (the Ryzen factor), and roughly 2x better everything else, with exclusive games and enhanced PS4 BC. That's only assuming 2019, though.

 

[RoninStrife]

So.. anew CEO at Sony after Kaz, any impact on PS5?

 

[Kronik]

How would I interpret this statement any other way? Unless he's also saying that the memory consoles use also isn't the real memory usage? And that there's also tons of useless stuff in it.



Why are you talking about assets? We're talking about texture resolution only. For texture resolution memory is pretty much the only thing that really matters. It has negligble influence on other parts of the GPU. Don't believe me? Google it and find a 1000 benchmarks that show this. Here's one:

https://www.geforce.com/whats-new/g...guide#rise-of-the-tomb-raider-texture-quality

And we're talking about the difference between high (ps4) and very high (X1X) before you mention the 2 fps difference between low and very high. If the ps4 did have 12gb of memory available it could indeed use higher resolution textures.

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Just the post above you I said: "The thing is, that it would be a real game-changer on PC where this issue is the most severe. Consoles are a bit better off but..."

Yes consoles are a bit more efficient due it being a fixed hardware and softwre, but ultimately have the same problem.

And I never made the comparison you brought up that you need 2x-3x as much VRAM on PC as on console. In fact my whole point was that HBCC would do wonders on PC and also on consoles and you might not need as much VRAM on the next-gen consoles as one would think right now.

So what you say is true but it doesn't contradict what I was on about. You can use PS4-like textures on a 3GB card, because the PS4 itself can only use 5GB for game code + graphics and also has efficiency problems even if not to the same extent as a PC.

 

[TheThreadsThatBindUs]

How would I interpret this statement any other way? Unless he's also saying that the memory consoles use also isn't the real memory usage? And that there's also tons of useless stuff in it.

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Well sure, if you take one part of his post completely out of context and ignore everything else Kronik said. He was talking about when PC devs use the DX features for auto-memory management. The case quoted wouldn't apply if the PC dev managed memory manually when coding the game, something very few PC devs would do. There's no reason for me to take anything he says there as false.

Why are you talking about assets? We're talking about texture resolution only.

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Because a game doesn't just store textures in VRAM alone...duh!! You have a whole host of data from meshes, normals, shadow and lighting data, animation data, etc.... RAM amount matter in so far as you have sufficient RAM to store ALL of the asset data associated with a game. If you don't even understand that VRAM has to store more than texture data then I don't really know how to continue with this debate.

For texture resolution memory is pretty much the only thing that really matters. It has negligble influence on other parts of the GPU. Don't believe me? Google it and find a 1000 benchmarks that show this. Here's one:

https://www.geforce.com/whats-new/g...guide#rise-of-the-tomb-raider-texture-quality

And we're talking about the difference between high (ps4) and very high (X1X) before you mention the 2 fps difference between low and very high. If the ps4 did have 12gb of memory available it could indeed use higher resolution textures.

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PC benchmarks aren't going to really tell you how much memory bandwidth factors into the equation, because the two separate memory pools means that on PC, the systems are generally not bandwidth limited. I'm not claiming that memory amount isn't important, just that it's also as important that the GPU has sufficient bandwidth to feed the greater texture data to the GPU, which is especially true on consoles where bandwidth is a precious commodity.

 

[Deleted member 721]

Btw GDC Will be 19-23 next month, probably around there Will be rumors of ps5 if its next year

 

[dgrdsv]

Btw GDC Will be 19-23 next month, probably around there Will be rumors of ps5 if its next year

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Too early. 2019 launch would mean that we won't be getting any rumors about final h/w until around GDC'19.

 

[dankhael]

I guess the perfect timing is :
Announcement at 2020 E3
Especification And console presentation at PSX
Launch at march 2021

The main features Will be:
backward compatibility with PS4
Some service like Xbox Game Pass
Maybe a hybrid console like Nintendo switch?

 

[Bitch Pudding]

Think a successor will be teased by Sony this year or next year?

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Why would Sony "tease" a successor in the first place. It would be poisonous for PS4 sales. They'll just announce it whenever it fits them, and yes, there will be rumours all around due to human kind's most important feature: not being able to STFU. But do not expect anything from Sony in this regard, except what they already did: Talk about the inevitable, the launch of a PS5 at some point.

8 years console cycle - long I know , but the sweet spot as the 4 has the legs, sales and the support to last until then

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We know Jack shit about PS4 sales in 3-4 years, and even more important for Sony, how the total number and share of subscribers develops. PlayStation has become so important for Sony that the very last thing they'll do is waiting until both take a dive.

 

[Deleted member 721]

Too early. 2019 launch would mean that we won't be getting any rumors about final h/w until around GDC'19.

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If Its the same Pattern as the PS4 then in february next year IS the reveal. PS4 Spec rumors started one year before the reveal in march/april 2012 after gdc. Developers need the Dev kits this year to the Release next year (If Its next year) so Thats why it would start the rumors maybe after gdc next month.

Unless Sony changes the pattern.

 

[Gemüsepizza]

Unless Sony changes the pattern.

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Not sure studios need dev kits so early this time around. The transition from last gen to current gen brought many big changes: Going from PPC to x86, from few cores to many cores, from a split memory config to a unified memory config and there where also big changes with graphics APIs... it was important that developers had access to dev kits as soon as possible, to get used to those new consoles. But I don't think we will see that many changes this time, PS5 will probably be very similar to PS4 architecture-wise, so Sony might get away with releasing the dev kit at a later time. The PS4 Pro dev kit was also sent out much later than the PS4 dev kit.

 

[Deleted member 721]

Not sure studios need dev kits so early this time around. The transition from last gen to current gen brought many big changes: Going from PPC to x86, from few cores to many cores, from a split memory config to a unified memory config and there where also big changes with graphics APIs... it was important that developers had access to dev kits as soon as possible, to get used to those new consoles. But I don't think we will see that many changes this time, PS5 will probably be very similar to PS4 architecture-wise, so Sony might get away with releasing the dev kit at a later time. The PS4 Pro dev kit was also sent out much later than the PS4 dev kit.

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Pspro is different since the base for development is the ps4.
I think that even If there's no Dev kit as early as last time, Sony would probably talk to developers what they will have.
But even then i would expect a Dev kit this year for a 2019 Release.

But i believe in 2020.

 

[Akabeko]

Was looking through some of the AMD documentation for family 16h (Jaguar) vs family 17h (Ryzen) here: https://developer.amd.com/resources/developer-guides-manuals/
Not seeing anything that looks like it would make backwards compatibility different on the CPU side. Looks like only new features and instructions were added, nothing taken away that I can see.

 

[Deleted member 721]

Was looking through some of the AMD documentation for family 16h (Jaguar) vs family 17h (Ryzen) here: https://developer.amd.com/resources/developer-guides-manuals/
Not seeing anything that looks like it would make backwards compatibility different on the CPU side. Looks like only new features and instructions were added, nothing taken away that I can see.

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So If there's no BC is Sony fault, Thats good to know

 

[Akabeko]

So If there's no BC is Sony fault, Thats good to know

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That's quite a jump from what I said. This is just on the x86 half of things, so there could easily be GPU incompatibilities. And, I was just looking at it from an instruction set perspective, so there could be other issues that require more than the 15 minutes I spent looking at it to identify.

 

[TheThreadsThatBindUs]

That's quite a jump from what I said. This is just on the x86 half of things, so there could easily be GPU incompatibilities. And, I was just looking at it from an instruction set perspective, so there could be other issues that require more than the 15 minutes I spent looking at it to identify.

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Practically all x86-64 CPUs are designed from the ground up to run the same code out of the box, without any changes required to the software. In terms of BC, the GPU was always the problem child to consider for next-gen.

The question really comes down to how much of a departure from the existing GCN version the Navi architecture is. Since we still know nothing about Navi, it's all up in the air at this point. Still, I highly doubt AMD is ready to move away from GCN yet, so I imagine Navi will still be GCN-based.