Link: http://gamingbolt.com/ps4-ice-team-programmer-surface-tilingdetiling-on-the-cpu-is-10-100x-faster-now

PS4 ICE Team Programmer: 'Surface Tiling/Detiling On The CPU Is ~10-100x Faster Now'

Sony’s ICE team programmers are basically a bunch of talented developers that work on the core graphics technologies for the PS4. One such developer is Cort Stratton who is a senior programmer on Sony’s ICE Team.

On his Twitter feed he revealed a few interesting tid-bits about PlayStation 4 games development and how his recent contributions will make things run faster.

“Finally wrote that ASM I was looking forward to. Early results: PS4 surface tiling/detiling on the CPU is ~10-100x faster now. SIMDlicious!.” he Tweeted.

Let us go in detail into what each term actually means.

An ASM is a programming language that has a strong level coupling between the language and architecture machine code. This language is specific to one architecture [in this case the PS4's architecture] compared to high level programming languages which can be used across several architecture/devices. Basically this language gives more control over performance since the developer will essentially write code for one specific device.

Tiling is essentially dividing an image by a grid so that limited rendering is used in creating a scene. This process is performed by the CPU [all modern architectures use hardware to accelerate this process]. Once the geometry is decided for the tiles, the GPU then renders each of them to memory buffer.

SIMD [single instruction, multiple data]. As the name indicates, SIMD is essentially performing single instruction across several data points. Almost all modern CPU comes packed in with SIMD instructions for an increase in multimedia performance .

So essentially, Stratton wrote a code that will push tile performance on the PlayStation 4′s CPU by 10-100 times faster.  Note that improvement in performance will result into tiles being switched faster which also means less processing time. But the developer also needs to use the appropriate tile size since larger tiles will obviously use more processing time. It’s a balance, you see.

He also revealed that the previous code was bad and was a just copy reference from the hardware documents. “It was pretty bad. Pretty much a copy of the reference code from HW docs, evaluated in full per fragment with a memcpy at the end,” he tweeted.

“(plus an awful memory access pattern; I needed to restructure things to write full cache lines),” he continued, referencing his approach towards tiled rendering.

[memcpy is a C++ function that is used to copy the values of bytes from source to the memory block pointed by the destination.]

Given that Stratton has contributed in developing PS3′s SPU rendering code to several games such as the Uncharted and Grand Theft Auto series, it’s most likely going to be used for future PS4 titles.  But remember, as he mentions this is still an early version and things might improve even further in the future.

I think this is great news that PS4 is being optimized and improved this early in the gen. :)

This will be the beginning of the diminishing returns for both the XB1 and PS4. Within a few short months, most of the optimizations for both of them will be completed. Sure, there will be newer ones in the future, but significant changes will be accomplished in the first 12 months I would suspect.

Just my opinion of course...

nICE

Great. Cant wait to see the results. These people are super talented. They also warned sony in 2004 that two cell processor without any GPU will be fatal. But sony listened to them at late.

Thanks for turning a positive/neutral comment on twitter into a negative outlook.

i have no clue what i read but i'm souper excited.

The performance gap will start to increase... right now devs are working more to make the Xbone version of the games run than optimizing the PS4 version.

Wrong... new optimizations will come near the end of life of the console... PS3 is almazing us with the 2014 titles because these improvements.

what does this mean in DBZ terms?

Super saiyan 3.