walsufnir said: DonFerrari said:   Same place, but still one or more layers above the totally specified code you would use as a Sony 1st party studio on PS3 and now on PS4 and Pro. But where are these layers specifically? What are they? Where do you think the Xbox DX has more abstraction than the one for Sony and why?

 

Because on the specific case of ND they weren't using any abstraction to code as far as they reported. And if you go back to look at Vulcan the expectation was that it would still be more abstraction than consoles APIs that were more abstraction than directly codding for the HW. And ND were coding for the HW on last gen and possibly this gen as well, which is the explanation we usually see as to why their games perform and look better than other companies.

DonFerrari said: walsufnir said: But where are these layers specifically? What are they? Where do you think the Xbox DX has more abstraction than the one for Sony and why?   Because on the specific case of ND they weren't using any abstraction to code as far as they reported. And if you go back to look at Vulcan the expectation was that it would still be more abstraction than consoles APIs that were more abstraction than directly codding for the HW. And ND were coding for the HW on last gen and possibly this gen as well, which is the explanation we usually see as to why their games perform and look better than other companies.

No, you can be sure that not the whole game was not "coded to the metal". Usually it is shader code and/or inline assembly to talk as directly to the hardware as possible (mind - assembly is not the lowest possible mode but the only one exposed to the programmer).

Generally, you write "code to the metal" for critical paths in your code (the code that takes the most time). Nobody writes whole games anymore in assembly, not in the dimensions current AAA games are.

Naughty Dog did The Last of Us with 256Mb of RAM on the PS3 I don't even feel the need to upgrade to the PS4 Pro, raw performance will never be on top of software development on my list. If a developer finds the way to turn 4Tf into 8Tf, good for them, just don't prioritize the amount of pixels displayed on the screen over the actual quality of your game.

Sometimes the talk of the TFlops here makes me think if people were gaming on the PC would they have a second monitor set up just to watch CPUZ and resource monitor telling them what their CPU is doing in terms of threads and handles rather than watching the damn game lol.

I love specs too I guess so I'm a bit guilty of this, but definitely not to the degree which the flop wars have bought us, Switch gonna be a beastly handheld, PS4P going to be a beast of a home console for the next 12 months at the very least and Scorpio will most likely come along as the Original Xbox to the PS2, shinier no doubt, but I can't see people jumping off the PS4 wagon by the time it will roll around to us.

But either way, for gamers.... we have effectively supercomputers for gaming now, enjoy them.

walsufnir said: DonFerrari said:   Because on the specific case of ND they weren't using any abstraction to code as far as they reported. And if you go back to look at Vulcan the expectation was that it would still be more abstraction than consoles APIs that were more abstraction than directly codding for the HW. And ND were coding for the HW on last gen and possibly this gen as well, which is the explanation we usually see as to why their games perform and look better than other companies. No, you can be sure that not the whole game was not "coded to the metal". Usually it is shader code and/or inline assembly to talk as directly to the hardware as possible (mind - assembly is not the lowest possible mode but the only one exposed to the programmer). Generally, you write "code to the metal" for critical paths in your code (the code that takes the most time). Nobody writes whole games anymore in assembly, not in the dimensions current AAA games are.

 

Still you won't do that while on DX12, you would need to go out of it on X1 to be able to get this benefit