I dunno about the rumors but Team ICE is good. Like, really, really good.

"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.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below"

Read more at http://gamingbolt.com/ps4-ice-team-programmer-surface-tilingdetiling-on-the-cpu-is-10-100x-faster-now#wlTsSQ7319HA6OGc.99

I agree with you and if you want to konw for me Thuway, Tidux and other "Insider" troll us. ;)

Ah keep in mind that many developper like Guerilla, Sucker Punch and many other inside Sony Worldwide Studio work with PS3 asset but upgraded for PS4. Even Naughty will do this with Uncharted 4.

That's suposing that the current drivers and APIs are in a good state. Some months ago they improved surface tiling/detiling performance by 10 to 100X. Probably the current APIs for both consoles are pretty rushed and with room to mature. Things like CPU cache can get massive improvements if you know exactly how they work and avoid problems like excessive cache misses (as an example).

I'm not saying the rumour is true, but if the API isn't mature (as it isn't now for a recently launched console), massive boosts can be seen after replacing bad code / generic code by something more optimized in several parts of the API.

Optimization? At least they could give back around half a GB of RAM if they wanted to now but that may complicate feature implementation in the future! Wonder what he's talking about.

For sure and we will undoubtedly see some improvements but Im not sure Id qualify them as massive.

Also its Thuway, the most biased supposed "insider" Ive ever seen in my life.

impossible. Selnor has confrmed that the xb1 is the onl system that can get a performance boost

Moderated - Kresnik.

We would only see big ones if they were holding several improvements for a big update to get some media at E3 or if they have a pretty bad bottleneck right now. But as any rumour, people should take it with a grain of salt.

That could partionally explain the big gap in quality/performance between first party titles like KZ SF, Infamous SS and shoddy ports like Thief, Amazing Spider Man, etc.. Goes for both consoles, really. Early in the system's life third party devs are a bit in the dark when it comes to these things. This CPU optimization will probably benefit first party games like U4 long before third party devs get a grip on it.

PS4's DX12!