Pemalite said:
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'.)
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I don't know about that. Microsoft was generous enough to expose async compute and resource binding in DX12 which were strongly modelled after consoles despite AMD having a much smaller share in both integrated and discrete GPUs ...
And let's not forget that AMD has driver extensions too so they'll finally be able to compete with NVAPI (Nvidia's driver extensions) ...
Pemalite said:
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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Really simple, we emulate those fixed function units using shaders or what have you! TnL units are just precursors to vertex shaders so what's stopping them from been mimicked ? AMD believes (and at one point Intel did with Larrabee) the future to be software rendering where programmers can implement or choose ANY algorithms to use in a fully programmable graphics pipeline ...
GPU ISA is arguably more troublesome when their known to change much more frequently than some fixed function units. Rasterizers, edge setup, blending, texture filtering, or tessellation units pale in comparison to the changes that happen with GPU ISA ...
