PS4 Blowout: GPGPU, DirectX 11; Sony London to “Set the Bar for the Industry”, Global Illumination, Instant Radiosity, More

[zarx]

ethomaz said:

dahuman said:
Oh boy, I can't wait for Etho and others all of a sudden start praising how wonderful a GPGPU is and how it will change gaming after reading that thing while it didn't matter on the Wii U :P

Hummmmm... really? Same anwser... GPGPU will not be used (at least not in this new generation) and particularly there is no change of water for wine because of GPGPU... there is no miracle... no game running or looking better because the GPGPU.

The others points in the article was expected.

It will be used, UE4 uses DirectCompute aka compute shaders (Direct X's GPGPU API) to calculate it's voxel based lighting volumes for example. But mostly it will be used for a few gimmicky effects like fluid/cloth simulation or particle physics. I am sure Nvidia will port PhysX to the GPU on next gen consoles in some copacity, mostly to encourage devs to implement it in cross platform games.

But definitely not the offloading CPU work to make up for weak CPU nonsense that some people seem to think. And really it doesn't apply in the same way in the console space as it does in the PC space, devs already have low lovel access to the GPU hardware on consoles so GPGPU doesn't make much difference in that space exept for slightly more capable hardware.