Since Zen and Polaris are on GF, presumably Raven Ridge as well... I believe they incur massive porting costs and time to move to TSMC this time round.
Pachter: PS5 to be a half step, release in 2019 with PS4 BC
- Thread starter bitbydeath
- Start date
Shin
Banned
That's a good point you make actually, though last time GloFo/TSMC were on different nodes.
There's this agreement in place between AMD/GloFo as well, not sure if that applies to semi-custom business.
We know Zen 3 with be 7nm EUV, as is their GPU after Navi (scheduled for 2020), so basically we're looking at Navi with maybe features from the 2020 GPU.
Seems too state of the art IMO, probable but not impossible.
This is correct, but I think the original poster meant the PS4 is still strong market-wise.
Still, you can tell from how people with high-end GPUs are mostly just using that extra power to run games in 4K, VR, or 144Hz. We don't really have games anymore that need a high-end card to run at 1080p/60 with all the extra settings turned up.
Souldestroyer Reborn
Banned
Bitch Pudding
Member
You'll be waiting a while as I don't think there will be a TW3 pro patch
http://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2017/06/12/the-witcher-3-ps4-pro-patch-in-the-works/
Souldestroyer Reborn
Banned
geordiemp
Member
No. It would require too much stupidity for Ps5 not to play ps4 games.
If Sony release a new console that does not play ps4 games, then they are starting from scratch, and ps4 players can decide which supplier they choose.
Ps5 plays ps4 games, sony keep most of their ps4 base.
What do you think they will do. Dont be silly.
Shin
Banned
Lmao gotta love those single reply posts that consists of 4 or so words 
Even if Matt said don't worry about BC, I think it speaks for itself because they'll be able to keep growing PS+ subscription.
As it stands it's Sony's bread and butter or at least the division that's making them the most money.
They'll do everything to protect it's growth, at the same time I'm also worried that they'll gimp the console to hit that "sweet" spot.
Even if Matt said don't worry about BC, I think it speaks for itself because they'll be able to keep growing PS+ subscription.
As it stands it's Sony's bread and butter or at least the division that's making them the most money.
They'll do everything to protect it's growth, at the same time I'm also worried that they'll gimp the console to hit that "sweet" spot.
StrongBlackVine
Banned
Not allowing backwards compatibility would be huge mistake on their part. They are fortunate to be in control of the first generation where digital game sales have become a major part of the console business. Keeping people locked into that ecosystem should be a priority.
Sony_Prophet
Banned
No, and I don't want PS4 holding back anything.
Bitch Pudding
Member
Unless PS5 is forward compatible (all PS5 games must run on all PS4s), PS5 won't be hold back by anything.
Don't worry that's not how it works.
TheThreadsThatBindUs
Member
Jason mentions that they do "some" of their AI work on the GPU. Without any more specifics it's impossible to know how significant or not their GPU AI processing is.
The point I was arguing against was that significantly more GPU flops next-gen would mean anything to the level of complexity and sophistication of next-gen AI systems. From a conceptual point of view, AI has always been a set of workloads that are fundamentally better suited to a CPU than a GPU. I recognize the advances in GPGPU have shifted this balance somewhat, but I'm skeptical that an game can port all of it's AI code onto the GPU entirely. I'm not sure GPGPU is there yet.
(Also: the SPUs aren't a GPU -- they're more analogous to SIMD units on a CPU, e.g. AVX)
TheThreadsThatBindUs
Member
Not to single you out, but I think language like this is reductionist and unhelpful to people's expectations for BC in PS5.
It's not about Sony "allowing" or "not allowing" BC, it's about whether or not it is technically feasible. Whatever the PS5 is in terms of hardware, the feasibility of BC will be dictated by their ability to write an emulator that can adequately abstract and run all PS4 games at full speed. It's not a trivial task, even with an x86 and GCN* based CPU and GPU in PS5.
Emulation through "per instruction" interpretation is a pipe-dream, so Sony's emulation programmers will have to get creative in order to get an adequate emulation solution working at a good enough performance level, and even then it will be unlikely to work perfectly on all PS4 games.
I'm sure BC is important to Sony for the PS5's launch. However, I think it would be helpful for gamers to temper their expectations. It may not even be ready by launch at all.
I don't have a 4K TV so I'm still a bit behind in that respect. I think, having bought into the Playstation ecosystem quite heavily with a PS4 and Vita early this year - I'd still like to wait and see what Sony have planned instead of jumping on an Xbox One X when I do finally upgrade to a 4K telly.
Goalus
Member
BC could be achieved via PS Now - maybe that's why they started releasing PS4 games there recently.
StrongBlackVine
Banned
Matt said BC is not a concern so I'm not worried about it, but if didn't happen for some reason that would be the end of me buying digital games on PSN except for maybe some exclusives.
TheThreadsThatBindUs
Member
And Matt may be right and it may be trivial. But from speaking to some folks on Beyond3D (plenty knowledgeable folks on there, plus some very clever known devs), there does seem to be some sense at least that it may not be as trivial as everyone seems to expect, merely from the fact that the PS5 will have an x86 AMD CPU and AMD GPU.
We'll have to see.
As far as I know, no single platform holder has EVER supported emulation-based BC at launch. So even if BC is technically feasible with PS5, I'm not personally expecting it to be available right out of the gate.
Negotiator
Banned
AI pathfinding is pretty much a given, since it's an AI task that can run on a GPU. Self-driving cars also do the same (they don't use weak ARM CPUs to run the pathfinding algorithm).
No one said that all AI tasks can be offloaded to a GPU.
SPUs are analogous to SIMD units in a GPU. Where's the disagreement here?
Miniature Kaiju
Member
The current way of doing these workloads has been better suited for CPUs. We've spent untold amounts of code hours trying to find ways to optimize tree searches, for instance, to be run efficiently in a serialized fashion because "this is the way it is done", even though it's been shown that you can achieve faster results by parallelizing and avoiding data dependencies by going with simple almost-naïve traversal.
GPU AI will require a paradigm shift, but will pay-off because serialized computing is dead-end tech.
TheThreadsThatBindUs
Member
Yes, AI path-finding is a good example. Due to the relatively low level of data dependency.
Again, the initial point I was responding to was about the future impact of deca-TFLOPs GPUs on game AI. My thinking is more that for deeper and more complex AI behaviors (read: more human like), I still don't believe that the CPU will stop being more important in this regard, given the need for higher data dependencies the more complex and life-like the AI behaviors we require become.
(And I wasn't even disagreeing on the SPU issue -- merely stating that SPU's still aren't GPUs regardless of how similar they may be to GPU SIMD units)
Thanks for the insight. I guess I still wonder at your last statement, as I struggle to see how more complex logic trees and AI-decision making (read: better AI from the perspective of the player) can really be freed from the need for relatively high data dependency, in order to take advantage of the GPUs increased parallelism.
Sure, if the end goal is merely sticking with game AI as it exists today, I'm sure more clever folks than I will find ways to convert these algorithms to more efficient GPU code. But then I thought the goal was for much more complex AI behaviors than we have today.
Negotiator
Banned
It depends on what most gamers want.
If you want human-like, challenging AI, you can already find that in Competitive MP games.
Would gamers want human-like AI in Single-player games as well or would it result in aggravation/ragequits/broken controllers?
CPUs have progressed a lot since the 2000s and yet AI seems to be stuck in the past. I'd argue it's not a technology barrier that keeps us away from that goal, but more of a deliberate effort on devs' part to make video games more easy/accessible to the masses.
TheThreadsThatBindUs
Member
Human-like AI behaviors aren't just about difficulty and making enemies in game more challenging.
It can be about making non-enemy AI more life-like. A great example of this is TLG, where Trico just seems to create the impression of a real tangible animal, through a clever combination of his AI, animation and sound design. I'm sure Tricos AI is probably rather rudimentary in practice, but it achieves a level of convincing lifelike animal behavior that I've personally never seen in a game before.
It can also, be about having NPCs behaviors that are more persistent, where their reactions and behaviors in relation to the player and their circumstances evolves over time as they learn, adapt and grow within the gameworld. Again, this doesn't need to mean more challenge for the player, it can simply mean more convincing behaviors, e.g. enemies with their own individuality. fears, preferences etc.
Would emulation even be required if we're talking the same architecture going from PS4 to PS5? This is assuming Sony keeps the same OS backend for PS5. Or would the CPU differences be just significant enough for something to have to be emulated?
Melchiah
Member
The PS3's backwards compatibility was both hardware and software based at European launch, since the EU model lacked one of the PS2 chips. I don't remember which exactly, possibly the GPU?
Theonik
Member
CPU. GPU emulation of the ps2 was harder but Sony had an emulator for both by that point but compatibility was low so they abandoned it until much later.
TheThreadsThatBindUs
Member
Àbsolutely. SInce it isn't the same architecture. x86 is the CPU instruction set architecture. We're talking about the micro architecture. For illustrative purposes, consider that the Jaguar, an intel Pentium 4 and a Core i7 4770k are all x86, but have completely different microarchitectures, so wouldn't just run the same CPU code out of the box without any changes to the abstraction layers that afford this on PC.
The GPU will be possibly be an even more significant change, going from GCN(3?) based cores to the Navi architecture. How much, we don't know yet, as we don't know anything about Navi.
Negotiator
Banned
Trico's AI is quite "annoying" for some people, because just like a real animal, he's very "unpredictable" and this makes the game more challenging than what they expect it to be. People rarely ask for realism in video games.
That's what I wanted to clear up. And I think this is the reason Cerny originally gave in that DF piece for why they didn't do boost mode for the PS4 Pro out of the gate -- they let PS4 developers code a lot of games in a way extremely specific to the original PS4's setup. So specific that relatively slight changes to hardware like this can still mess up some games. Still, I think what everyone in the thread is suggesting is that getting PS4 games working on PS5 isn't going to be as massive an undertaking as say, getting PS3 games to run on other machines.
Any way you look at it, this is a stark contrast to what Microsoft is doing by having everything developed on a unified OS and development environment. Even if the next Xbox model after the Xbox One X uses a new CPU and drastically different GPU, you can be sure Microsoft is going to try to get the Xbox library so far working on it.
The funny part is in the software to build games. PC games use abstract APIs to make sure they work on different types of GPUs from different vendors on many different CPUs.
And consoles don't have that level of abstraction - you can optimize for the given hardware in terms of cache misses, latency, GPU raw commands, intrinsincs, everything that you can rely on on a console because of fixed hardware but you can't on PC (well, technically you can, but who will optimize code for so many variables).
unapersson
Member
PC sticks to one architecture (X86 and derivatives), consoles have used many different ones (last generation was PowerPC based for most of them). PC software also generally runs at a higher level, so while drivers may break frequently, there's enough abstraction for software to keep working.
Microsoft have managed BC this gen because they bought a company that emulated PowerPC on X86.
PS Now is not a backwards compatibility solution, it is a separate service.
Using PS Now for BC is a seriously flawed idea. The network requirements are problematic and running the server farm (actually multiple server farms, because the physical distance to any console running the game has to be kept reasonable) and actually running the game requires the equivalent of a console per user.
There is no business case for PS Now based BC.
Shin
Banned
That's why I mentioned current gen since the previous were all over the place, I believe Xbox software is also ran in a VM setup?
Not that I worry about BC per say, just curious since the major components line up with that of a PC.
But as you guys mentioned it's the software side of things that drive these games changes every time.
When you think about it these 2 consoles are looking more and more alike and therefor also less exciting, innovation will have to come from else where, be it services or peripherals (VR?).
Mr_Antimatter
Member
I'm actually reminded here of a problem I face with some GoG installs. Take Sin for example. Even though i'm still using windows, and simular PC tech to what I used back when it first released, the game required a ton of tweaks to get running.
The problem? Modern PC's are so much faster then what the engine was built for that it causes mass shuttering issues, as my pc processes stuff faster then the game can spit it out. I actually had to frame limit it to keep that from happening.
On the console BC side, i'm reminded of MvC 1. If you used the fast loading option on the ps2 to play it, all the music was super sped up. The game was written for a certain disc speed for it's music, which it streams off the disk.
Something something hardware built around API something something software built around API something something console devs dig deeper than API to get as close to the hardware as possible to get the most out of the hardware something something software break on next console.
Shin
Banned
Regarding OS, Sony doesn't have their own operating system and BSD worked out well for them I think, so I don't see them switching anytime soon.
IIRC PS4 was shipped with a version of FreeBSD 7.0, current version is 11.xx while the numbering doesn't say much it is an OS that keeps evolving.
Well, failoverflow were glad Sony used an old BSD so they could break out of the BSD jail
Shin
Banned
Business is booming for ASML with the rush towards 7nm EUV and lower, they just got another order for 8 additional EUV-machines.
One company ordered 6 out of the 8 machines (NXE: 3400B) of which it will use to manufacture processors as well as memory chips.
That machine also passes the light requirement for 5nm production, I believe Samsung ordered the 6, in total 27 machines were ordered.
The take away here is that everything seems to be on schedule, so 7nm EUV should be available for mass production by 2020 if PS5 launches then.
I wonder if they'll go with the same designer as the PS4 or a different one, his new role is at Sony itself not Sony Computer Interactive Inc., thoughts?
His website and works for those interested: https://www.tetsusumiiworks.com/
One company ordered 6 out of the 8 machines (NXE: 3400B) of which it will use to manufacture processors as well as memory chips.
That machine also passes the light requirement for 5nm production, I believe Samsung ordered the 6, in total 27 machines were ordered.
The take away here is that everything seems to be on schedule, so 7nm EUV should be available for mass production by 2020 if PS5 launches then.
I wonder if they'll go with the same designer as the PS4 or a different one, his new role is at Sony itself not Sony Computer Interactive Inc., thoughts?
His website and works for those interested: https://www.tetsusumiiworks.com/
Must've been at least V8.2 as that's when FreeBSD got USB 3.0 support, unless Sony forked V7.0 and added it as a custom job.
They've been using FreeBSD since PS3 so they're pretty familiar with it.
TheThreadsThatBindUs
Member
The virtualized environment that XB1 utilises with it's three OS layers are a good start towards getting BC working earlier on next-gen, but their low level programmers will face all the same problems as Sony in terms of getting an emulation solution ready that afford all or most legacy games running at full speed.
SMG
Member
Look at history, PS2 played 1 games, 3 played 1 and 2 till a cheaper refit.
The convoluted PS3 messed things up but its more than likely 5 will play 4 games.
Regardless of the myriad of technical issue that can affect PS Now games (latency, resolution, network stability, etc.), it cannot and should not be a replacement for backwards compatibility. Also, forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't there no way to use a PS3 game you own to play it on PS Now? Like if I have a PS3 disc or digital copy of say, RDR, and the only way to play it is to 're-buy' it by signing up for PS Now, that's not Backwards Compatibility.
TheThreadsThatBindUs
Member
Clearly, this isn't true because PS Now is currently the BC solution for PS4 to play PS3 games.
Since PS Now recently started supporting playing PS4 games, it stands to reason that the service will continue onto the PS5 (Sony didn't spend all that money on Gaikai just to can it).
Practically speaking, what you're saying makes no sense, because PS Now is already an effective BC solution for PS4 and soon PS5.
Will it be Sony's only BC solution, probably not, but then that all depends on how easy or not a software emulation solution is.
Given that only a fraction of gamers even care about BC anyway, I'm pretty sure PS Now's current infrastructure would be sufficient to meet the demands of those gamers looking to utilize BC next-gen, and given that it's a paid service, if not the added money from increase subscriptions can be re-invested in expanding the network infrastructure (which I'm fairly sure Sony contracts out from Amazon anyway - so would simply mean hiring more server capacity).
Either way, there's a clear business case for it. If anything BC would be probably the only thing justifying PS Now's continued existence.
Theonik
Member
It's not Sony's BC solution. Sony's BC solution on the PS4 is not to have BC, choosing to sell some games on their PS2 repacks and remasters instead. They make more money this way.
PS Now is more Sony trying new business models but it's a long term investment and an effort to transition their games to a service model. Eventually Sony hopes they can make it cost-effective and popular enough that it would be THE way to play PS Games.
blastprocessor
The Amiga Brotherhood
Yeah that makes sense an AI system that learns and becomes better could be a potential.
Is it really? I actually bought a used PS3 recently precisely because the games catalogue available on PS Now is missing a ton of exclusives and major last-gen titles:
Metal Gear Solid series (all releases)
Call of Duty series (all releases)
Gran Turismo series (all releases)
Yakuza series (all releases)
Mass Effect series (all releases)
Fallout series (all releases)
Final Fantasy (all releases)
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Hitman: Absolution
NieR
Catherine
I could go on, but I think you get the point.
Not to mention you don't even get the benefit that BC on XO does of more stable framerates. Add in the subscription cost, latency that varies by connection, and non-permanent system, it's very disappointing as a replacement for other BC solutions.
Like, having RDR, Uncharted, InFamous, and Killzone 1-3 on there isn't bad, but it is not an acceptable solution for what anyone would actually use BC for (regardless of the frequency with which BC is used more broadly).
TheThreadsThatBindUs
Member
Naturally, I'm using a broadbrush definition of BC to mean "any solution that grants gamers access to legacy games", as that's the ultimate goal. Clearly, there's no emulation based BC on PS4, however, PS Now is currently the only other way of playing PS3 games on PS4 outside of remasters. Yes it's a paid service, as opposed to selling of individual remastered titles, but that's tangential to the point. The point is, that PS Now provides PS4 gamers with a way to play PS3 games and equally, it will provide PS5 gamers a way to play PS4 games. The rest is just semantics.
Whether it doesn't have all the games, whether you think it's acceptable or not based on your own subjective opinion, or whether its a service or not with all the other issues you mention is frankly irrelevant.
The fact of the matter is, PS Now affords PS4 gamers access to PS3 games, and will invariably afford access to PS5 gamers to play PS4 games.
Clearly, the business case is there, otherwise PS Now wouldn't exist. But it does....soooooo...