The PS4 | Xbox One Benchmarks Thread

[Nate4Drake]

walsufnir said:

HoloDust said:

walsufnir said:

You don't need to post old news to reply to my post. If you read and understand what's in the text you took as a reply to me you would see that my post is still correct. There is no "unused" hardware in PS4 lying around, waiting to be used by GPGPU. It is the same hardware that is now doing rendering tasks.

Obviously I have to - if you actualy understood what is in the text, you would know what async compute is and how it runs in paralel with graphics tasks. Maybe you should re-read whole interview again bit more carefully.

Async compute is nothing new - CPUs do it all the time when context switching. But still you are going to use the same resources in rendering, as there is not much time to "context switch". All the time frames want to be rendered, where do you want to get the time for doing GPGPU with the same resources?

What they are mostly saying is that you can use the resources for rendering and GPGPU at the same time but if you do GPGPU then these resources do GPGPU and not rendering work. There is no duplicated hardware present.

As Nate4Drake already quoted:

"Cerny explained that there are many situations during game applications where functions pertaining to graphics take a backseat, and that the PS4 hardware has been designed to make the most of the under-utilized portions of the GPU during such frames.''

When will this be? In a graphical demanding game this will not likely happen. And when it does what do you want to compute then? A game has to be developed that "if close to nothing happens" to compute but what for?

PS4’s GPU is not only limited to handling the graphics but also complex processes which is traditionally handled by the CPU.

 

“We have worked hard to ensure that the console has a rich feature set, which will allow it to grow over the years and support the overall evolution of gaming. And our work there on that rich feature was to focus on making sure that for those teams that were interested in investing time, the GPU could be used for far more conventional graphics.

 

  Principally, we enhanced the GPU to make the use of asynchronous fine grained compute ----> practical on the platform. So the asynchronous refers to the GPU doing many tasks which is not directly related to graphics.”

 

He believes that the developers will be able to develop richer worlds if they are able to unlock the true potential of this feature set.

 

---> “Physics simulation, collision detection, ray casting for audio, decompression and the like. And these operations are fine grained meaning that there will be many small world simulation tasks running on the GPU simultaneously alongside rendering of the game scenes.

 

So the concept is that as game developers learn to use these techniques later on in the console life cycle, we will see richer and even more interactive worlds.”

http://gamingbolt.com/mark-cerny-explains-the-ps4s-gpu-can-perform-asynchronous-complex-processes

Now, we know this.

Experts have been working on this for a so long time, and there is a reason! 

For details, we should ask directly to people like Naughty Dog, and unfortunately I can't.

It will take time to take advantage of it, but it's coming, as Devs get more experience on the Hardware.