| fatslob-:O said:
@Bold Not just the operation were impoved on the architecture. They improved caching, sheduling, and the whole programmability of the gcn gpu's compared to the VLIW gpu's. Developers will practically do almost nothing for the PS4/xbone to utilize gpgpu because they can just rely on amd's HSA bolt library to do most of the work for them and this is allowed because gcn has expanded programmability. Like I said I don't think ninjablade knows anything about hardware. |
I know all of that, but you're still making it sound like Wii U's GPGPU capabilities aren't too useful, why? What does "being awkward" have to do with anything? Awkward to perhaps the people who haven't had much experience, but if you understand how to use it the most efficient way possible, then it doesn't have to be so "awkward" (VLIW GPGPU isn't as bad as you're making it seem). And why are you comparing Wii U to GCN at all? I just recited the fact that PS4/X1 will use GPGPU, whether it's easier or not is not too relevant, if it means offloading tasks from the CPU so that it can have more leeway, then by all means, learn to not make it so unusual. Of course, that's where budgets and business kicks in, where some teams may not want to spend so much on trying to understand it, and yes, that's where Nintendo goofed up. But, it's possible that NFSMWU impliments some GPGPU usage since the performance of that game is better than PS360 (Espresso alone may not have performed that well if the code was very floating pointy SIMD-y and not integer). If a single digits amount of people were able to make it happen, then I don't see why double digits amount of people wouldn't be able to figure out.
Anyway, even though floating point is supposed to be Espresso's weak points, if used correctly it's not so bad at all. I recall that a NeoGaf member tested several CPUs in floating point / SIMD, and a PPC750CL (Broadway) didn't do too bad at all compared to other CPUs. (if you havne't seen it before, I'll link you to the post, and if I could find it.) And if Espresso is 3 Broadways with higher clocks and more cache, then it's not to hard to estimate how capable Espresso should be.
