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ethomaz on 30 March 2013
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Adinnieken said:
ethomaz said:

Adinnieken said:

Actualy, it doesn't.  Because it came to light at GDC that the PS4's memory architecture isn't as great as it sounds.

While the GPU gets the top speed, of 120 or 170 GBps, the CPU only gets 20GBps.  So CPU wise the two consoles are just about even steven, and GPU wise the next Xbox is only slightly slower.

The margin of difference in performance now is less than 1%.

The opposite happened in the GDC... the PS4 architecture seems even more impressive and strong.

Except that it didn't.

I'm not suggesting that the PS4 isn't an impressive machine, I'm saying the hyperbole over the GDDR5 memory was a bit premature.  The entire PS4 doesn't get the advantage of 176GBps throughput.  It's 20GBps on the CPU.  The same, in fact, as on the next Xbox.  The difference thus is that the next Xbox has 170GBps throughput as opposed to the PS4's 176GBps to the GPU.

And my apologies.  I was overzealous in my estimate.  The performance difference is a 3% gain for the PS4.  I doubt you'ld notice the difference between 7 and 10 ms. 

Eveything showed new in GDC.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-inside-playstation-4

The PS3 CPU, GPU, HSA, etc is even more impressive than PC parts alone... the 20GB/s bandwidth for CPU is crazy high (the DDR3 used in high-end PC have ~12GB/s in dual-channel)... no PC have this bandwidth... "one source tells us that the CPU is more constrained at around 20GB/s - still pretty good at around two-thirds the level of bandwidth available to Intel's Ivy Bridge"

And Next didn't have 170GB/s bandwidth... it is a sum of parallel brandwidth of the eSRAM and DDR3 but everybody forget the data can't travel for the two tunels at the same time... the bootleneck will be always the lowest bandwidth.. only perfect cases will use all the paralel 170GB/s... the PS3 is 176GB/s for all cases because it is one tunnel alone with HSA the GPU and CPU can access the same memory space without need to travel between memories (eSRAM do DDR3, DRR3 to MoveData, DRR3 to eSRAM, PC RAM to GPU RAM, etc).

The GPU itself has designed to run Graphics and Compute in parallel without lost performance... the GPU is new and custom... not close to anything in PC market "The cool thing about Compute on PlayStation 4 is that it runs completely simultaneous with graphics. So traditionally with OpenCL or other languages you have to suspend graphics to get good Compute performance. On PS4 you don't, it runs simultaneous with graphics. We've architected the system to take full advantage of Compute at the same time as graphics because we know that everyone wants maximum graphics performance".

The GPU is like a evolution of the GCN found in HD 7000 series in PC... there is features to come in the GCN 2.0 to be releases late this year (or mabye it can be a pre-GCN 2.0). AMD and Sony did really a great job.

PS4 is not like a custom PC monted with parts... there are a lot of stuffs not found in PC and the performance is way ahead similat graphics.

GDC just showed more impressive stuffs about PS4.