PS4 Neo GPU Is Point-For-Point A Match For RX 480

[setsunatenshi]

Pemalite said:

setsunatenshi said:

it would be speculation behind speculation to now assume MS would eat the costs for lower yeilds of the apu to once again include esram. they need to pull the bandaid at some point. the same way Sony did when ditching the Cell and their own exotic architectures in favour of a PC type approach.

It's speculation to assume they won't.

setsunatenshi said:

i think their custom api apparently very much Vulkan like (or Vulkan based even, not 100% sure on that) should minimize the differences when coding for the PS4 and the Neo, very much like like you can run the same game on PC on any gfx card of the last 10 or so years (not all games of course but the majority) at different graphical settings.

That assumes the games are being built to target those "high level" abstraction layers. (Hint: For best performance, they don't.)
A game may use Vulkan on the PS4... Or they may use OpenGL or they might not use neither, but a low-level API.

setsunatenshi said:

lets keep in mind that there will be a lot less variety to code for on the console side. if updates will come every 3/4 years i'm confident that, sure, there will be a break off point at which certain games stop working on older hardware, but it should remain a more smooth transition. kind of like you can go now on steam and play half life 1 on hardware that is in no way close to the one existing in 99 or 2000 or whenever it was that such game came out.

 

PC is still very different to consoles, software is typically not being made near the metal, so they can't really be compared.
There are games which are broken on newer Operating Systems as well, which requiring tweaking, patching or modifying... Sometimes you need to virtualize an old software environment and "emulate" older pieces of hardware to get them to function.

1- on the speculation itself, we have to assume a more likely situation, there is only so much cost the console manufacturers are willing to take. My point still stands, keeping the esram is a mistake and the sooner they ditch it, the better for them. Judging by the rumors that they are going to have a 5.5 TFLOPS console, they can't have their cake and eat it too.

2- it's irrelevant for my point if the best hardware is the one being targeted first, I agree that it won't actually since the news are that the games will run both on the vanilla and Neo PS4s. it stands to reason that the game must be playable well on the vanilla system first and foremost. my hypothesis is that they have an opening to mantain the same architecture for a future PS5 (keeping R&D costs low, getting cheaper parts, no exotic hardware in it) and then be able to give a reason for people to upgrade, knowing they will have 100% backwards compatibility with their older titles.

3- i'm well aware of the differences between the console and PC ecosystems. what i'm saying is that starting with this generation there is very little seperating the 2, other than the OS the machines are running. the reason why games need to be patched and tweaked around sometimes to work is mostly because of the OS itself. If I try to play half life 1, probably what I would need to do would be to use compatibility mode for win xp and the game will work just fine. Notice that when the game came there was no such thing as a PCI-e port, SSDs or GDDR5 graphics cards, and still the game will work through brute force.

The same think should be valid of a future PS5 in which keeping the same architecture as the PS4 but with much better performing hardware, all previous games should work with little effort.

 

In the end I guess we can agree there's several variables at play here and we don't have the full information yet. Perhaps in a few months it will become more clear what paths both companies will take. I doubt that specs will be given next week at E3, but who knows, maybe a mid-long term vision could be discussed by both Sony and MS, and we'll have some more data to speculate on.