| Scisca said: The only bad thing about it is - I was planning to buy this GPU and be happy for years to come, but if in a matter of months it's going to be the go-to console GPU, it means PC will soon need something beefier... RX 480X minimum. At least I hope AMD GPUs will be perfectly optimized for games from now on. |
Polaris isn't really a game changer in the PC landscape, that was never it's intention, not from a performance perspective anyway.
Vega is where AMD really offers a high-end chip.
Navi with it's next-gen memory and likely an explosion in die-size, should be where things really start to get interesting as far as performance goes.
As for AMD GPU optimizations in the PC landscape, won't happen.
nVidia and Intel control larger market shares in the PC landscape, nVidia works closely with game developers to implement nVidia-specific technology's and optimizations and advertises the fact.
AMD's drivers can also be hit or miss... And PC's have a different software ecosystem. (OS, API's, etc'.)
| setsunatenshi said: Yes all that is true but we have to take 2 things into account, price and the current rumors. There is no magic here, if MS wants a console that is as powerful, if not more powerful as the PS4 Neo within the same pricerange they need to remove ESRAM. If it's included in the same APU, it will reduce yeilds and space for CUs. If they have a different apu that somehow includes the same or more CUs as the Neo while remaining with ESRAM then for sure it will be a much more expensive APU. In a world where price was not a factor of course they could throw anything inside the console and have it serve coffee as well, but that's not how things work.
The same goes for the case of PS4 offering backwards compatibility in the way you are describing. It would not meet a competitive price point first of all, and more importantly PS3 users would still not be able to play PS4 games. Now as it stands original PS4 owners can play Neo games and probably will be able to play PS5 games (less demanding ones i would assume) at lower settings. All because of settling down on a non exotic PC architecture :) |
That assumes that Microsoft isn't happy enough to eat some of the cost and that assumes Sony isn't profiting from the Neo.
Both have happened historically with Consoles.
As for backwards compatability, let's assume Sony sticks with "non exotic PC Architecture". - What happens if some of the fixed function units were removed from the GPU that PS4 games rely on? You break backwards compatability. (And we have allot of fixed function units even in modern GPU's.)
This has happened multiple times historically.
For example, the Xbox 360's Tessellation unit rely's on N-Patches to perform tessellation, which is incompatible with the Xbox One and Playstation 4's Tessellation unit from a hardware perspective.
Or hows about when the TnL fixed function unit from GPU's was eventually removed? One has to assume that games on consoles aren't targeting high-level API's and are building closer to the metal where such things are more important than on PC, where things can be abstracted and thus compatability is less of a fickle thing.
What happens if some SIMD instructions are removed from the processor that games rely on? You break backwards compatability, this has happened before with 3D Now! MMX, etc'.
Console generations takes year as well. Going from the PS3 Geforce 7 GPU to todays Geforce '18' GPU's is a night and day difference architecturally, games built and targeting every single nuance would be incompatible, that is the same kind of jump between a PS3 and the Neo and one would assume would be a similar kind of jump between the PS4 and PS5.
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