sure!

So you'd 'tessellate' polygonal models just like you would NURBS surfaces, scaling them both up and down?

Surely this is a PS5 blowout? The PS4 will be nearing completion by now, certainly it won't be in the 'researching' stage.

By now, I would imagine some of Sony's staff has moved on to start researching the PS5 and Vita2.

That's... the clearest description I've heard since the tech was first introduced!

In summary...

GPGPU - knew this for awhile... kinda why WiiU uses it as nearly all GPUs built in the last few years. Obvious. Its also why WiiU has lower-end CPU. GPU takes more work that used to be in CPU.
Tessellation and other DirectX-like technologies. - Knew this for awhile too. Also something in WiiU (WiiU can do tessellation) and part of GPUs built in the last few years.
Lighting tech - Kinda vague here and clearly opinion based. Also doesn't really help define anything.

The rumors for quite awhile have all had PS4 with an A10. The latest rumors saying its literally a heavily optimized APU (A10) that is on the market now. (i.e. not 2013's APU series) This also aligns with AMDs statement that their 2013 plans were delayed.


Nice write up, but nothing really new here and if you really want to know more about the PS4s (and likely neXtBox's) GPU/CPU... just google AMD Fusion (specifically the desktop A10 variants) and read from wikipedia, AMD, Tom's Hardware, and other 3rd party sites.

its not used to make distant objects look like crap that wasnt what i meant. Objects with low amounts of polygons become  disfigured from tesselation etc. So in the past with low polygon counts it wasn't very useful. But what you said is basically correct haha

http://www.nvidia.com/object/tessellation.html

- Tools and APIs are proprietary to Nvidia. The only GPU physics library worth anything is this. AMD's libraries aren't used in any games even though they are free which indicates they are very far behind or too hard to use.
- I don't see anyone working to change this with new tools or engines. There are some paid-for tech demos that didn't amount to much.
- Running code on the GPU is very, very hard because of poor memory access. It takes experts with PhDs in CS right now. It's incredibly expensive to hire the talent and give them the time to optimise the code. Even if it had potential savings you can do a better job with the time and money running it on the CPU.
- GPUs consume a lot of power at full load. It is more energy efficient to run CPU code right now unless the code is very good.
- Splitting the GPU between GPGPU work and rendering work is very hard and would need AMD's full support.
- AMD as a company is near bankrupt and has no time or ability to help with this.
- The code you get is very specific to that GPU. It's even less portable than Cell code was to an Xbox CPU. Devs would practically need to reimplement three times for three consoles. Unless one console has dominating share the proposition is poor.
- Budgets are constrained this gen especially. Games are increasingly limited by budget instead of hardware. Spending money to especially put calculation on the GPU has to be lower priority than merely HAVING those features in any form.
- The parts of game code that are suited to running on a GPU (physics) are low priority and frankly optional features compared to getting the game even running.
- It's been around for five years and none of the above has changed even a little bit.

The first post is wrong, it's WORSE than the Cell in terms of coding difficulty, time to optimise and being platform specific.

Did you know that the only working consumer GPGPU product right now is a video encoder, and it is incapable of producing the same quality as a CPU encode?

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@superchunk

Their 2013 plans are "delayed" because they actually cancelled the products due to their dire financial situation.

Are the GPUs in the A10 Fusion APUs not GPGPU?

Sony London making another character action game... I like. I hope it is Eight Days.

1) WiiU is a GPGPU.

2) I think youre reading into it too much as their stated reason were low yields... same thing the rumors state for why neXtBox is running into a little issues as well.

All signs for the last year of rumors have shown MSony going towards AMD APUs.