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Is the PS5 GPU Really Underpowered - What Can We Really Expect
MasterCornholio
Member
Sosokrates
Report me if I continue to console war
They said in the Eurogamer interview that the effective real world bandwidth was about 150gb/s
Hobbygaming
has been asked to post in 'Grounded' mode.
They tried to say 133gb/s and it was MS PR after getting crap
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JustP_Gaming
Banned
Definitely not under powered, not as good as Series X but not underpowered by any means.How many people here believe that Sony under delivered with the PS5's graphical capabilities based on the 10.3 TFLOP metric? Do you subscribe to the notion that the PS5's GPU is nothing more than a RX 5700/XT card or that it's only on par with midrange GPUs today?
This post is about providing real data and educated estimations to dispel the notion that the PS5 GPU is only a "midrange" GPU that is not on par with today's top tier commercial GPUs. Indeed, looking at the TFLOP number in isolation is indeed very misleading and the truth about the actual performance of the GPU points paints a very different picture. I know many of you don't know me but I can say that I am not just pulling this info from nowhere. I have over 15 years experience working in gaming and have spent nearly 5 years of my career doing critical analysis of GPU performance. Take it for what it is.
Before I begin, a full disclaimer: this post is not about a comparison to or commentary on the Xbox Series X. No console fanboyism here please. The fact is, the Xbox Series X has a bigger GPU with more theoretical horsepower. Period. Nobody is refuting that so please no Xbox defense force please.
Like many, I too was initially somewhat disappointed to when I first heard the PS5 specs mainly because there was so much information before hand that pointed to more performance being a possibility. We've all been hearing about the 12-14 TFLOP monster that Sony was building and honestly it's not about the raw numbers that matter. I was more happy about the idea that both consoles would come out being really close in power which benefits gamers by establishing a high baseline where neither machine will have subpar 3rd party releases. But after taking some time to process the specs and information Sony released as well as doing some in depth analysis, I am pretty happy with what Sony ended up with from a GPU standpoint.
Let me be clear: the goal of what I'm presenting here is not to define an absolute performance metric for PS5 with a given piece of content. In other words, I am not trying to predict that PS5 can run game X at Y Fps specifically. That is impossible since there are some many variables affecting overall performance that we do not know about: CPU, memory, driver, other console specific optimizations etc. Instead what I am doing is establishing a realistic expectation of a baseline of performance of the GPU specifically by looking at known real world performance data from comparable hardware.
How am I doing this? Let me break it down:
- Let's establish a comparison mapping to other known GPUs based on their GPU architectures and theoretical computation power based on what we know:
- We know that AMD's RDNA architecture is a general 25% increase in performance per clock when compared to GCN -> 1TFLOP (RDNA) = 1.25 TFLOP (GCN)
- We know that RDNA 2 will be even more efficient than RDNA (i.e. perf per clock and per watt will be better). Now we can guess how much more efficient based on some actual hints from Sony and AMD:
- Mark Cerny himself during the PS5 tech dive revealed that the size of each CU in the PS5 GPU is roughly 62% larger than a PS4 CU. Thus, there is the equivalent of 58 PS4 CUs in the PS5. So 36 CU (PS5) = 58 CU (PS4). Now 58 CUs running at the PS5's 2.23 Ghz frequency => ~16.55 TFLOP (GCN). So what is the conversion factor to get from 10.28 TFLOP (RDNA 2) to 16.55 TFLOP (GCN)? Well it turns out that the additional perf per clock to reach that ratio is precisely 17%. So by this data: 1 TFLOP (RDNA 2) = 1.17 TFLOP (RDNA 1)
- AMD has already said that they are pushing to deliver a similar improvement with RDNA 2 over RDNA 1 as saw from GCN to RDNA 1. They have also confirmed that RDNA 2 will see a 50% improvement in perf/watt over RDNA 1. GCN to RDNA 1 saw a 50% perf/watt and 25% perf/clock increase. A 25% further increase in perf/clock in RDNA 2 sounds pretty ambitious and i will be more conservative. But we can use this as an upper bound.
- AMD has talked about mirroring their GPU progression to that of their CPU. They have specifically talked about increasing CPU IPC by roughly 15% every 12-18 months. The 10-15% range is typical of GPU generational transitions in the past
- Using the 25% ratio of RDNA to GCN and a 15% ratio of RDNA 2 to RDNA 1, we can calculate the equivalent amount of theoretical performance (i.e TFLOPs) for the PS5 GPU in terms of both RDNA performance and GCN performance:
PS5 TFLOP = 10.282. We can also note that it is actually easier to guessestimate the PS5 GPU performance since there is a GPU on the market very similar to it in the RX 5700. The GPU config in terms of CU count, number of shader cores, memory bus size, memory bandwidth etc is exactly a match for the PS5. At a high level, the PS5 is simply an extremely overclocked RX 5700 in terms of hardware. Now typically on PC, overclocking a GPU gives limited returns due to power issues and system design limitation that will not exist in a console. So if we calculate that the PS5's typical GPU clock of 2.23 Ghz is indeed ~34% higher than the typical GPU clock of the RX 5700 at 1.670 Ghz, we can extrapolate PS5 as being roughly 35% higher than that of an RX 5700. However, doing that raw translation does not account for RDNA 2 additional efficiencies. So if we add the 15% uplift in efficiency, we can get a pretty good idea of the PS5 GPU performance. It turns out that this projected value is pretty much identical to the TFLOP conversion factors I computed above
PS5 TFLOP (RDNA 1) = 12.09 (used to compare against RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT)
PS5 TFLOP (GCN) = 16.13 (used to compare against Radeon VII, PS4)
3. Now that we have a quantitative comparison point, we can calculate a PS5 projected performance target based on theoretical performance from comparable GPUs. For example, RX 5700 XT = 9.7 TFLOPs (RDNA 1) and PS5 = 12.09 TFLOP (RDNA 1) That puts the PS5 projected performance at ~25% higher than a RX 5700 XT. Using these calculations for other GPUs as reference points we get the following:
PS5 vs Xbox Series X = -15% (PS5 is 15% slower)4. Finally, now that we have a performance factor for some common GPUs across various AMD architectures, we can see where a projected PS5 performance will rank compared to the fastest cards on the market including Nvidia cards. I've looked at several industry aggregate sites such as Eurogamer, TechpowerUP, and GPUCheck (numerous games tested) as well as a couple of high profile games such as DOOM Eternal, Call of Duty Modern Warfare, and Red Dead Redemption 2 to look at where the PS5 performance will fall. I've done this analysis across numerous performance metrics, resolutions, and difference GPU references defined above to see if the data was consistent. The goal here was to identify which GPU currently on the market had the closest performance to a projected PS5 performance. I've highlighted the 4K rows since 4K is the target resolution for the PS5. The summery table shows which GPUs came closest to the projected PS5 performance at different resolutions. The raw results are below:
PS5 vs RX 5700 = 153% (PS5 is 53% faster)
PS5 vs RX 5700 XT = 125% (PS5 is 25% faster)
PS5 vs Radeon VII = 120 % (PS5 is 20% faster)
PS5 vs PS4= 8.76x (PS5 is nearly 9x faster)
**Note: Game performance was captured from TechpowerUp benchmark analysis using max settings at all resolutions
Key Takeaways:
So is the PS5 GPU underpowered? The data shows that the actual game performance is roughly around a RTX 2080 Super at a minimum in most cases which is currently the 2nd fastest commercially available GPU on the market! Anyone that can call that under-powered or "midrange" is...not very knowledgeable on this topic. Yes, by this same analysis the Xbox Series X would be matching or exceeding a RTX 2080 Ti which is amazing! The point here is that both consoles will have plenty of graphical horsepower and the PS5 in general is still a significant step up from anything AMD has released to date and is a generational leap over the PS4!
- General takeaway is that in most cases at higher resolutions, the PS5 performance is actually slightly higher than that of the RTX 2080 Super.
Every should be excited but please stop spreading FUD about PS5 performance
Sosokrates
Report me if I continue to console war
Yes but its an apples to oranges comparison.
Its like comparing the 360s dvd to ps3 blu ray, on paper the bluray was over 100% better then dvd, but it did not translate to game quality.
Going from an ssd with 40x the improvement over last gen to an ssd which is 100x better, its completely different technology to gpu + ram, so how much improvement a percentage difference shows is going to be different.
A more powerful SoC+ram is easy for a 3rd party to utilise, apart from loading times 3rd parties cant design there game around exclusive technology. I would not be surprised if the first 4yrs of next gen 3rd parties make there game on 500-1000mb ssd bandwidth, so they have better compatibility with PC.
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Sosokrates
Report me if I continue to console war
Digital Foundry: the complete Xbox One architects interview
So here we go - a complete transcript of Digital Foundry's discussions on the Xbox One architecture with two integral m…
www.eurogamer.net
DForce
NaughtyDog Defense Force
Like comparing DVDs to Blurays? lol.
It's not.
Streaming will become more of a factor next gen and it doesn't have to even become fully utilized until mid way through the generation, but still, there will be instances where devs can use the PS5's extra speed to stream in higher quality assets in comparison to the XsX.
Hobbygaming
has been asked to post in 'Grounded' mode.
PR. Everyone was skeptical before that article including DF/Eurogamer. It's one of those "in one or two cases we got to 150 gb/s"Digital Foundry: the complete Xbox One architects interview
So here we go - a complete transcript of Digital Foundry's discussions on the Xbox One architecture with two integral m…
Hobbygaming
has been asked to post in 'Grounded' mode.
Here they try to say they can combine the memory for 200gb/s but we know that ended up being BS because that would've been over the PS4s bandwidth of 176gb/s and we know the XB1 had less bandwidth than the PS4Digital Foundry: the complete Xbox One architects interview
So here we go - a complete transcript of Digital Foundry's discussions on the Xbox One architecture with two integral m…
Sosokrates
Report me if I continue to console war
Maybe they will, but Microsoft do have new texture and data culling techniques, so we dont know how it will play out.
Also there is going to be a point of diminishing returns for texture quality, kinda like resolution in general, the higher on res you go the smaller the improvements become, i don't think anyone would notice a 4k texture vs an 8k texture.
DForce
NaughtyDog Defense Force
Textures aren't the only things that need to be loaded. Still Cerny says he wants data to be streams as fast as possible, meaning loading textures as while the player is moving the camera. I don't see XsX keeping up.
100% GPU busy does not mean it's 100% utilization. Nobody under NDA will show any real utilization numbers if it's not an approved talk.
I would say it's 40-50% PC vs 60-70% on console.
alabtrosMyster
Banned
Sony has lower years, this is obvious if you pay attention, even 2019 wasn't that big compared to the years prior... People buy their consoles because of the good games they make, not because some years they release games like DriveClub and Knack.
The problem is that on their best year MS is not much better than Sony on their low years--this has been true for at least 10 years now.
Sosokrates
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What I dont understand how can 8-9gb/s do the same jobs as 448gb/s GDDR6.
If those ssd speed can do so much why even bother 16gb of gddr6?
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
They do not replace RAM, but allow you to make better use of it. Same can be said of XSX: either they are both right or they both mislead you and cheapened out on RAM (I believe the former with a tad sprinkle of the latter is true: neither has an infinite budget and since they were already taking the hit with embedding an SSD, may as well make it as fast as possible and allow developers to stream data in and out of it at runtime efficiently... your RAM becomes your fast cache + scratchpad, think PS2’s GS 4 MB of eDRAM).
Sosokrates
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I think you are missing context of the convo. We are talking about cerny saying entire game scenes being pulled directly from ssd.
DForce
NaughtyDog Defense Force
GDDR6 is much faster, but it still needs to be fed data. How do you expect that 4GB worth of compressed data to get on to memory?
As Cerny pointed out in his presentation, current gen consoles have data stored on RAM for the next 30 seconds, that means a lot of data is just sitting there waiting to be used.
With an SSD, data can be pulled instantly when its needed.
Sosokrates
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DForce
NaughtyDog Defense Force
If that was the case, Cerny would have went with the same speed as the XsX.
He said 5.5GB SSD was their target BECAUSE of streaming. That means a half the speed wouldn't cut it.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Oh I got that, it is not like you are rendering directly from SSD, just like you would not render strait from the Direct RDRAM on PS2, same principle applies: 3.2 GB/s for the main RAM in PS2 vs 48 GB/s (actually the bandwidth between DRAM macros and page buffers was over 2x that)... Sure the speed differential was not as great but then the free memory in eDRAM when you took away front, back, and depth buffer you ~2 MB of RAM or less for textures and off screen render targets vs 32 MB of main RAM.
Both MS and Sony are essentially adopting a similar model were you are replacing the Direct RDRAM with the SSD and the eDRAM with the pool of GDDR6 memory.
Sosokrates
Report me if I continue to console war
We dont know that though, especially when we consider other things like ram bandwidth and better data culling.
Sw0pDiller
Banned
That's because love has to be earned. And it goes both ways. Sony has delivered this since the ps1. Awesome games en lots of exclusieve games to justify owning a PlayStation. Even with the dreaded PS3 sony kept pushing to make is a succes. Ms is going Al long way since the launch of Xbox one. But they tried to force us always on drm and other bs. It's because of the popularity of the PS4 that Ms needed to go a different direction.an great direction that gave us bc and the fantastic one x. They only holded out on games. And while it looks like this gen Ms got this covered we need their games to love them back.
DForce
NaughtyDog Defense Force
It's funny that people are always questioning Cerny on here like he's some compulsive liar.
D
Deleted member 775630
Unconfirmed Member
I agree with most things you say. I think they were also very unlucky with the quality of exclusive games past gen which they couldn't really help. Developers of Recore had a great track record, but eventually their game was pretty bad. Same for Scalebound... Microsoft invested in these games, but the developers didn't deliver. Sunset Overdrive was one that was released too close to launch to be scored objectively in my opinion, because it was actually a great game.
Hostile_18
Banned
So the X Box X has significantly more power than the Playstation Pro... but does anything on it look better than Uncharted 4?
Power is nice to have, but having the hardware is only part of the battle, the rest is the ability of the teams to make use of that power.
Things like how Sony plan to embrace backwards compatibility improvements is more important to me TBH.
Power is nice to have, but having the hardware is only part of the battle, the rest is the ability of the teams to make use of that power.
Things like how Sony plan to embrace backwards compatibility improvements is more important to me TBH.
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Sosokrates
Report me if I continue to console war
Im not saying he is a liar but theres a lot we dont know, how these things will work, especially considering 3rd party development.
Cernys example was 4gb of compressed data for 0.5secs, what does 4gb look like compared to 2.4gb on the XsX? and dont forget the CPU and GPU have to draw and render whats on screen, so even if the ps5 had a 100gb/s SSD its going to limited by its SoC.
Just as a thought experiment what would N64 game carts had 10gb @ 100gb/ps? Sure texture quality + audio would be greatly improved but it is still shackled by its cpu and gpu. The same will apply to the ps5 + xsx.
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DForce
NaughtyDog Defense Force
Having a faster SSD is just one part of the equation. PS5 is likely to have a better I\O setup in comparison to the XsX. Somehow, someway, people believe MS' Velocity Architecture will close or become faster than the PS5 SSD.
They're still limited in other areas on the N64, but lets not pretend that the XsX and PS5's GPU\CPU are leagues apart. As stated many times, the fact that they're removing so many bottlenecks means it will put less stress on the CPU\GPU. It may not be significant in some areas, but it does make more efficient use of the hardware.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Not sure how after his career as a business man, developer, designer, and now console architect (PS Vita SoC, PS4, PS4 Pro, and now PS5) he does not get more benefit of doubt considering what he has delivered.
Can you imagine N64 games with dramatically better texturing and audio? It would have been insane for the times.
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Sosokrates
Report me if I continue to console war
I gave an extreme example, a more precise example if n64 carts had double the storgae and bandwidth of ps1 cd roms.
Sosokrates
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So ssd can be leagues apart but the cpu/gpu are not?
I think neither are leagues apart.
And the io difference result in the different speeds.
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DForce
NaughtyDog Defense Force
Did you bother looking at the numbers?
There's about a 15% difference in GPU and the CPU is smaller than that.
SSD is like 100%+ faster
SirTerry-T
Member
The only problem with that image is that it doesn't tell the whole story, back then reviewers and gamers alike were well aware of the sacrifices that had to be made to port those games over. As long as the games captured the spirit of the game and were not an obvious cash grab they would review and sell well.
These days it's all about which version would have the best shadow graphics cast by a bloody lampost in the background.
prinz_valium
Member
The biggest advantage is the bigger SSD for Series X
Ps5 has only 768GiB of storage. With OS and some other reserved space that's only like 600GB of storage
Series X can fit 2 or 3 more games.
There will also be no external storage option for Ps5 at launch. That will take a little longer.
Ps5 has only 768GiB of storage. With OS and some other reserved space that's only like 600GB of storage
Series X can fit 2 or 3 more games.
There will also be no external storage option for Ps5 at launch. That will take a little longer.
Roronoa Zoro
Gold Member
Yeah no one was complaining about PS2 stats in 2003 or PS1 stats when they were playing crash 3. We all just accepted that Xbox One had lower res after we reached 2014 and it never really got talked about again.
Roronoa Zoro
Gold Member
MS also cut support for the OG XB early to get 360 out early. Then they cut first party support to 360 early to make games for Xbox One and Kinect. Then they cut first party on Xbox One early to get ready for THIS gen. They simply don't support their consoles for as long or fervently as Sony does.
Sony put out TLOU, GoW Ascension, Sly4, Puppeteer, Ratchet Nexus, GT6 and some smaller stuff the year the PS4 launched. They put out GoW2 in 2007 after PS3 had launched. They're putting out TLOU2 and Ghosts of Tsushima the same year PS5 is launching. They support their systems to the end and past when when the next iteration comes.
Sosokrates
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Yeah but 100% better ssd is not the same as a 100% better gpu.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
An argument nobody made...
alabtrosMyster
Banned
It doesn't do the same, a loose comparison may be a sports motor cycle (caches) V.S a sporty family car(GDDR6) V.S. a delivery truck(SSD) V.S. a train(HDD)--the faster ones can't carry much stuff, but they are very practical to move around relatively small amount of whatever fast, now if the truck goes fast enough it can overtake some of the car's duties, not all... but effectively it free up the car enough so that it doesn't have to worry about carrying unless necessary--so in this case in essence you have more car time (or you don't have to keep data in memory as much as before, because you can load it on the fly much much faster).
An extreme example of this seems to be what appears to be data loading in FF VII remake, or texture pop-ins in different games, if you have faster I/O and the proper APIs to support it not only will the textures load on time, you will have to keep less in memory (or load more detailed textures, you choose).
JohnnyFootball
GerAlt-Right. Ciriously.
The GPU is not underpowered. It's just less powerful than the Xbox Series X GPU.
The Mad Draklor
Member
Be less fixated on the SSD and think of the bigger picture, particularly the 12 lanes, 6 levels of priority, I/O complex, and cache scrubbers. There's more to it than the number of CU's and the SSD bandwidth.
For example, as the PS5 is reading from the SSD, the coherency engine in the I/O tells the GPU cache scrubbers to evict specific portions of the cache that are no longer needed. This results in less duplication and less of the RAM occupied by unneeded data. If the player kills an enemy and that enemy needs to say a few dying words, the DMA controller allows the audio data to "cut in front of the line".
The GPU can only perform as well as the rate of (usable) data fed to it. A granular hierarchical system on top of the SSD's high bandwidth allow the storage to send data that will be used as opposed to data that might be used.
Sosokrates
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I know, but it demonstrates that just because a percentage may be large, it does not represent a big change.
Normally when people about console hardware, if something is double the power its a pretty big deal, but ots not the case with ps5 and xsx ssd.
This is not like a ps2 and xbox situation where the xbox had double the ram.
Sosokrates
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Whats the point when we dont know how it compares to the XsXs velocity architecture.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
It does not demonstrate that the contrary is false, beside the “please do not be excited about the SSD potential and focus on the TFLOPS numbers instead... no SSD it is important, it is key to have 2.4 GB/s but no more than that...” I am not sure what the point is here...
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Well if we cannot reasonably say it is better based on the available data and track record of both companies (positive) we just inviting arguments such as “we do not know if 12 TFLOPS is not just a theoretical peak the console will never hit and the reality may be 9.2 TFLOPS sustained in many scenarios” as rational reality is out of the window...
Sosokrates
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So what is your point?
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
That Sony’s SSD solution is faster and more flexible enough to be a differentiating feature for PS5 games. What should it be?
