PS5 Will Release Early 2019 (Opinion)

[JEMC]

gcwy said:

JEMC said:

Well, let's look at PS4 and PS4Pro GPUs

PS4 features a 1152:72:32 part, so it has 1152 shaders and 72 texture units, and it's based on Pitcairn, maybe Tahiti architecture.

PS4Pro has a 2304:144:32 part, with 2304 shaders and 144 texture units based on the improved Polaris architecture with some Vega enhancements.

What we see is that PS4Pro's GPU has more than twice the power of a PS4, yet what is the best it can do? Increase the framerate (which is also CPU dependant), increase the resolution from sub 1080p to Full HD and add slightly better lightning and textures (enhancements that require Digital Foundry's close up analysis to notice, because we can barely see them during gameplay) or run the game at higher res and then make a 4K checkerboard interpolation. That's not much for more than twice the power, don't you think?

Now let's look at Vega 64, AMD's counterpart to the Nvidia GTX 1080, and we see that it's a 4096:256:64 part featuring 4096 shaders and 256 texture units. So, even accounting for its architecfural enhancements, Vega 64 is not twice as powerful as a PS4Pro or RX 480/580 GPU.

Sure, it will be able to run Vanilla PS4 games at native 4K which, given how much do both Sony and MSoft talk about it, seems to be the goal for next gen consoles as far as resolution goes, but can it do that while also displaying better, more detailed graphics to a degree where we can see them without resorting to DF or other kind of exhaustive comparison sites?

I find it doubtful.

 

Side note: I've taken the GPU info from both this wikipedia page with all ATI/AMD GPUs and also TechPowerUp's database, in case you want to check them out.

You're comparing directly by theoretical numbers, and even then don't factor in important ones like the clock speed, you should see that I used FLOPS to compare different GPUs (of course there are architectural differences, TMUs and ROPs that affect the overall performance too) and it's better than simply using shader cores and the like. I mentioned a 12TFLOPS GPU for PS5 in 2020 in my original post, which is exactly twice the power of Xbox One X, even without accounting for its architectural enhancements.

Xbox One X, from what I'm seeing, is running half of its games using a CBR method (or some reconstruction technique, or even dynamic resolution) to achieve 4K and half at native 4K, most first party MS games are native 4K, however. It might change when the console gets released and more games support it, though. Barring the resolution upgrades, the One X also has other visual improvements to the image quality, like higher resolution textures and in specific cases it utilises a higher quality of visual settings e.g. better AO solution, higher quality of depth of field, better LODs and better draw distances, just to name a few. If we consider the latter, half of PS5 games should have no trouble running at 4K while leaving a signifcant headroom for improving visual fidelity. As for demanding games, I absolutely expect some games to not make native 4K. I don't remember there being a single gen (after Genesis/SNES) where every single game was running native resolution. Developers will surely be sacrificing image quality if need be, it's been done before.

I think comparing PS4 Pro enchancements and using that as a basis for next-gen console visual upgrades is a bit deceptive because games will be developed from the ground up for next gen consoles and it's obvious that these mid-gen refreshes aren't being fully utilised, probably never will be because of this. We should see significant changes in lighting models or probably entirely different rendering techniques, though I may be reaching here. One thing I did not consider while contemplating this, is that consoles already use a portion of their resources to for GPGPU tasks to make up for the weak CPUs. As the CPU upgrade will be a noticeable jump from this gen, we should definitely see less of that and more free resources for developers to use for graphics.

Well, we both agree that there's no way Sony can launch PS5 early 2019 because it wouldn't offer a big enough jump in performance.

Beyond that, you believe that a 12 TFlops GPU, so something like AMD's current Vega 64, would be enough of a jump while I think that it wouldn't be enough. Who will be right? Only time will tell.

There's still a problem, tho. Will AMD be able to produce a GPU that powerful but with a low enough TDP to make it viable for a console? I mean, it's impossible to do that on 12nm, so they'll have to wait for 7nm. Will it arrive in time?