Nvidia Gets SALTY

[Pemalite]

EricHiggin said:

HoloDust said:

2020 is most likely date, though, X360 had ATI's custom GPU that had unified shaders way before their desktop cards with same feature hit the shelves. So, something like this may happen again, AMD focusing on delivering next-gen GPUs for consoles, and only later releasing desktop cards with those next-gen featues.

Pemalite said:

That just plays into my statements that GPU's and CPU's take years to design... And because of that, when you take a semi-custom approach, you have the opportunity to implement newer features that are set for future GPU designs.
The Xbox 360 is after-all is the perfect example of that.

With Polyphony showing off GT Sport using ray tracing, it's quite unlikely they were doing that just for fun, and even more unlikely it's distant future tech for PS6. AMD has mentioned recently they are working on ray tracing tech for their future products. If PS5 is going to use Navi, then at the very least, even if AMD isn't planning to use ray tracing tech until their "Next Gen" gpu products, they could very well be baking it into a semi custom Navi, just like how PS4 Pro used Polaris but had some Vega tech baked in.

Well. AMD's GPU's are capable of Ray Tracing today... Ray Tracing is typically a very compute and memory bound scenario... And what is Graphics Core Next great at? Compute... Hence why miners typically preferred them.

But, current hardware just doesn't have the horsepower to brute force it, hence nVidia's fixed-function approach, plus methods to reduce the processing load by reducing the work required.

It will be interesting to see what official path AMD takes to Ray Tracing though going forward, nVidia has applied the pressure that it's a must-have technology now.

As for the Playstation 4 Pro... It's not actually using Polaris as a base, it's using the same identical GPU found in the base Playstation 4, just doubled/mirrored. - It implemented features from both Polaris and Vega... But we need to keep in mind that the Playstation 4 also had changes away from the original Graphics Core Next design anyway. (Like an increase in ACE units.)

AMD designs it's GPU's in terms of "blocks". - And they can update, mix and match those blocks to suit their needs.

My own hopes is that next-gen will not be using Graphics Core Next, but AMD's next-gen architecture... But the realist in me says that both consoles will be Graphics Core Next based with features taken from Vega and Navi... And that to me isn't next-gen console hardware.

Last edited by Pemalite - on 15 January 2019