PS4Pro: Secret Sauce Confirmed

[Pemalite]

Intrinsic said:

Pemalite said:

This isn't a "secret sauce".

It was never even really a secret to begin with.

The fact that the Playstation 4 Pro has superior FP16 performance over the regular Playstation 4 was almost a given as the Pro uses a more modern revision of Graphics Core Next (Or at-least an older GCN design with modern underpinnings) which the last few GCN generations... There has been a stronger emphasis on FP16 performance.
Sony just took advantage of that.

However... Just so we are clear, it's less precise. It's not going to be able to be used for everything, don't expect it to solve all of the Playstation 4's lack of 4k problems. It won't.

Okay. Next Rumor please.

polaris has full fp16 support. And shows a lot of improvement in tests compared to other cards. What exactky do you mean by not as precise? Do youbknwo whst sony has done? seen the design diagrams? Know the engineers on sonys end that customized the chip? And its not a "rumor" that there is this thing/things that the Pro's GPU has (compared to a 4/5yr old GPU architecture)that makes it pound for pound better than the stock PS4 GPU..... it's a fact. 

I mean, you make these improvements sound like they are nothing or wont yeild to an all round better perfomring machine. Weird. 

nVidia's Tegra has full FP16 support.
You do realise it is actually a type of "flop" right? Flop is an acronym for FLoating-point Operations Per Second.
The flops you typically run around sprouting is FP32 or Single Precision. FP16 is the same as your regular flops, just the numbers used are smaller, so you don't get the same degree of accuracy in your calculations.
You also have double precision and more as well.

And yes I have an idea of what Sony has done. They are using PC derived technology as a basis, which from there we can build an idea of the Playstation's capabilities, such as half precision floating point performance.


Now the game that digital foundry tested, which took advantage of fp16 has a ton of caveats.
Yes it is rendered at 4k, 60fps. But it does so by using pre-calculated/baked lighting, shadowing and other details and faster, but less precise fp16, the game is simple. It's not a big AAA release... Even before the Playstation 4 Pro released I stated this would be possible for simpler titles. (Again. I was right.)


Now you are probably wondering... How does fp16 affect things? Well, in mobile, loading up the fp16 units over fp32 will typically save you power.
On PC this has typically been less of an issue in the modern era where FP32 is preferred.
However... If you actually paid attention to GPU's over the years you would have noticed the various times that AMD, nVidia, Microsoft and Games have dabbled in fp16.

In older games when doing HDR rendering (Not to be confused with this latest craze of HDR) each render targets channel is rendered at a 16-bit floating point value or fp16.
Now a render target is a buffer where the video card draws pixels for a scene that is being rendered by an Effect Class, now you can imagine the complications of having pixels drawn in 16-bit rather than 32-bit right?
So a FP16 render target will use 16×4 = 64bit for each texel.

What happens is you are getting less precision in your colours, gradients, everything.


Here is an extreme example:




Basically you are sacrificing graphics quality for speed. Not much of a drama for a simple game being showed here by digital foundry where you don't see assets zoomed up near the camera.

Again, the fact that the Playstation 4 Pro supports FP16 is not some amazing revelation that will change the landscape, it wasn't some kind of "secret sauce" that gives it some strange amazing new capability never seen before, I'm sorry if that was ever your assumption.
This was almost expected as AMD in recent years had added support at the hardware level for it, it's only natural for a device that uses PC-derived technology to take advantage of that, don't you think?

This isn't some kind of anti-sony hate train, this is reality of what we are dealing with here.

CGI-Quality said:

Turkish said:
Sony once again at the top of cutting edge technology. If these guys were GPU vendors they'd leave everyone in the dust, we'd have Titan X performance for half the cost.

With all due respect, absolutely not!

Sadly. It is posters like that... That give people the impression that Sony is building these GPU's, when they aren't. :/

Conina said:

"On paper though, the technical accomplishment here is impressive. VooFoo has quadrupled resolution over the base PS4 version, and it has done this using a GPU that only has 2.3x the compute power of the older hardware and only 25 per cent more memory bandwidth. Either the base PS4 is being significantly underutilised (in which case we would expect an improvement on its 2x MSAA) or there's something more going on behind the scenes."

It actually has more than 25% more bandwidth though.