Support NeoGAF

[DCKing]

Wait, so forgive me for asking this, but aren't AI script, voice, music, hit detect, calculation, etc that has nothing to do with graphic are stored in system RAM? If that's the case then don't we need beefer Ram than just to run OS?

There are no 'rules' dictating where you should store your AI or sound. In my scenario, it would all go into the large pool because that would be the best choice. What is the best choice is determined by the type of data and the system architecture.

A seperate pool is suited for the OS because it allows context switching between game and OS to be potentially smoother. Furthermore, OS memory usage would have virtually no impact on how the game is run. Since both are distinct systems, it would be nice to have them separated. All hypothetical of course.

 

[brain_stew]

I have yet to see any good argument against including BC in the PS4.

It compromises the system design to a massive degree. If you want BC, then you're going to get a weaker system, there's no way around that.

 

[CadetMahoney]

Is PS3 BC out of the question because of the lack of a cell processor? Or is it just a case of using any processor and re-writing code (which could be expensive-to-returns ratio)?

It's funny how people railed against sony for going against BC this gen and yet now they are saying who cares. Sony damned if they do and damned if they don't.

I remember all those ppl calmouring for it at the start of the gen now they ain't saying shiiit. Sony was dead serious about it too with the PS2 hardware in early models. Heck even MS was was re-writing code to work for xbox 1 games compatibility.

 

[kuroshiki]

It compromises the system design to a massive degree. If you want BC, then you're going to get a weaker system, there's no way around that.

So scalable cell is massively inferior to IBM powerpc? I thought they were pretty similar in terms of performance?

 

[ColonialRaptor]

Oh I love next gen time

 

[badcrumble]

It compromises the system design to a massive degree. If you want BC, then you're going to get a weaker system, there's no way around that.

I said I haven't seen a GOOD argument. I've seen that one.

It doesn't need to be AS POWERFUL AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE to be a good product for its customers. It just needs to be as powerful as the competition. Equivalent power to the next Xbox + full BC + great new firmware features would be ideal. Serving your customers well includes a lot more things than just hardware power.

 

[Lagspike_exe]

Oh I love next gen time

It's more exciting than when it actually launches. It's going to be hilarious to read these threads in a few years when everything turns out to be different than what we expected.

 

[vandaliser]

It compromises the system design to a massive degree. If you want BC, then you're going to get a weaker system, there's no way around that.

weaker system? unless you're working for IBM or in charge of STI then that's plain wrong

 

[brain_stew]

I said I haven't seen a GOOD argument. I've seen that one.

It doesn't need to be AS POWERFUL AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE to be a good product for its customers. It just needs to be as powerful as the competition. Equivalent power to the next Xbox + full BC + great new firmware features would be ideal. Serving your customers well includes a lot more things than just hardware power.

Its not about being "as powerful as humanly possible" but about getting the most out of your silicon budget and offering the best value for money system. To hit the same power target with BC may mean an extra $50-$100 at retail for the consumer, are you happy to pay that just to free up a HDMI socket on your TV?

 

[H_Prestige]

It compromises the system design to a massive degree. If you want BC, then you're going to get a weaker system, there's no way around that.

Will it make the system weaker than the competition?

 

[badcrumble]

Its not about being "as powerful as humanly possible" but about getting the most out of your silicon budget and offering the best value for money system. To hit the same power target with BC may mean an extra $50-$100 at retail for the consumer, are you happy to pay that just to free up a HDMI socket on your TV?

Yes. Especially when it comes to backwards compatibility with PSN games. I'd pay that extra money at retail precisely because if there's no backwards compatibility, I'll wait until the console drops in price and actually has games. If there's BC, I'd buy at launch and ditch my aging 60GB PS3. There's your $50-100 right there.

edit: not to mention I'd make up that money precisely by selling my old console.

 

[brain_stew]

Will it make the system weaker than the competition?

Its possible, who know's Sony's true power target. What it does do is put them at a cost disadvantage for a given power level, which is certainly not a situation Sony wants to find themselves in again.

Yes. Especially when it comes to backwards compatibility with PSN games. I'd pay that extra money at retail precisely because if there's no backwards compatibility, I'll wait until the console drops in price and actually has games. If there's BC, I'd buy at launch and ditch my aging 60GB PS3. There's your $50-100 right there.

edit: not to mention I'd make up that money precisely by selling my old console.

Fair enough, though I don't believe you have a common opinion considering how little BC has mattered in the past. Everything is a compromise, Sony have to decide what it is they want to compromise.

 

[somuchwater]

Its not about being "as powerful as humanly possible" but about getting the most out of your silicon budget and offering the best value for money system. To hit the same power target with BC may mean an extra $50-$100 at retail for the consumer, are you happy to pay that just to free up a HDMI socket on your TV?

Imma ask the same question again, simply because I'm curious (and stubborn): wouldn't simply including the Cell in the PS4 cost a lot less than $50 for the consumer? i.e. a la the way launch PS3's included the PS2 hardware?

Edit: or, are we saying that even if it does add $20-30 dollars to the retail cost of the PS4, that isn't enough justification given that BC is only a big deal to a small number of people (i.e. GAFfers).

 

[H_Prestige]

Imma ask the same question again, simply because I'm curious (and stubborn): wouldn't simply including the Cell in the PS4 cost a lot less than $50 for the consumer? i.e. a la the way launch PS3's included the PS2 hardware?

Including extra silicon for BC is very expensive. I don't see Sony going that route again. If there is BC, they will design a system that is compatible with ps3 software.

 

[Waaghals]

Yeah, but you need a CPU strong enough to "support" the GPU. Therefore, the middle way. You don't need an overpowered CPU, nor do I mean 50/50. The balance is the key.

What does this even mean? That you should spend equal amounts of money on the GPU and the CPU? In a games console?

For games, the GPU will always be the most important. We see this on pc's were a six core i7 isn't need for most games. A cheap quad core will suffice, and in most cases a 2 core will make due.

Looking at the current generation of consoles; the PS3 has a very powerful CPU, nobody is denying that, but it really haven't materialized in a massive difference between PS3 games and those on the X360.

PS3 developers still make fundamentally the same games type of games that we find on 360, even if they tend to look a bit better.
The Cell is mostly used to "back up" shortcomings in the RSX. This would not be needed at all if Sony went with a more capable GPU.

The CPU in a console only needs to be powerful enough not to bottleneck the GPU.

 

[Lonely1]

Didn't Sony patented an USB/(Light Peak?) attachment to offer BC? That would be ideal, let the ones who want it play the extra fee.

 

[kuroshiki]

So I don't get it, where is this 'using cell would make system inferior in terms of power' idea coming from? Any data to back this up?

 

[badcrumble]

Fair enough, though I don't believe you have a common opinion considering how little BC has mattered in the past. Everything is a compromise, Sony have to decide what it is they want to compromise.

Well, I mean, the most successful consoles of the past two generations (PS2, then the Wii) were backwards compatible and less powerful than the competition.

 

[James Sawyer Ford]

I don't quite understand why Cell would be so hard to emulate with powerful multi-core CPUs these days. Why is having CELL a requirement for backwards compatibility?

Doesn't the greatest difficulty in emulation come from the GPU-side of the hardware rather than the CPU?

That's traditionally been the case; For PS2 emulation, the difficulty was with the graphics synthesizer and not the emotion engine.

Ditto on the Xbox 360 where their partial-BC solution was largely the difficulty in switching from Nvidia to ATi.

 

[Haunted]

Well, I mean, the most successful consoles of the past two generations (PS2, then the Wii) were backwards compatible and less powerful than the competition.

Other factors (DVD player; motion controls) were much more important than these.

 

[bgassassin]

I don't quite understand why Cell would be so hard to emulate with powerful multi-core CPUs these days. Why is having CELL a requirement for backwards compatibility?

Doesn't the greatest difficulty in emulation come from the GPU-side of the hardware rather than the CPU?

That's traditionally been the case; For PS2 emulation, the difficulty was with the graphics synthesizer and not the emotion engine.

Ditto on the Xbox 360 where their partial-BC solution was largely the difficulty in switching from Nvidia to ATi.

Well you also have to acknowledge that there is a very good chance that PS4 has an AMD GPU.

 

[kuroshiki]

Well you also have to acknowledge that there is a very good chance that PS4 has an AMD GPU.

Again, where is this info coming from? AMD can't even design their own flagship CPU correctly.

 

[James Sawyer Ford]

Well you also have to acknowledge that there is a very good chance that PS4 has an AMD GPU.

I don't really see why there is a very good chance of this happening.

Nvidia's future lineup of cards seems to be even more powerful than AMD, and they're not at a competitive disadvantage which would cause Sony to switch to AMD.

It makes more business sense for Sony to stick with Nvidia.

As long as Sony sticks with Nvidia and has a powerful multi-core CPU (which should emulate CELL), I think they should be fine with respect to PS3 backwards compatibility.

 

[patsu]

It compromises the system design to a massive degree. If you want BC, then you're going to get a weaker system, there's no way around that.

This is not always true if you use a mix of software and hardware to achieve BC, instead of pure hardware BC.

 

[bgassassin]

Again, where is this info coming from? AMD can't even design their own flagship CPU correctly.

The few rumors we have available. They are indicating a possibility that Sony has an all-AMD console.

 

[V_Ben]

I think that Trophy support might go a way towards ensuring backwards compatibility. If people starting with PS4 as their console have an instant disadvantage with regards to what games they can earn trophies from, then that's a flaw in the system from my perspective. Unless they make PS3 trophies a separate category to PS4 ones, but looking at the Vita, that doesn't seem to be the case there. Also, with digital titles being such a key factor in current gen consoles, the next PlayStation not supporting those would be beyond daft.

 

[iamshadowlark]

The few rumors we have available. They are indicating a possibility that Sony has an all-AMD console.

You mean the one guy who said he works at AMD and that one rumor that also said MS will use a "Cell" cpu, right? Very credible.

 

[bgassassin]

Yep. But we've had that debate before so I'm not going to resume it again.

I don't really see why there is a very good chance of this happening.

Nvidia's future lineup of cards seems to be even more powerful than AMD, and they're not at a competitive disadvantage which would cause Sony to switch to AMD.

It makes more business sense for Sony to stick with Nvidia.

As long as Sony sticks with Nvidia and has a powerful multi-core CPU (which should emulate CELL), I think they should be fine with respect to PS3 backwards compatibility.

They most likely could get something more affordable from AMD than nVidia for a certain graphical performance target, that would also run cooler.

 

[DCKing]

I don't quite understand why Cell would be so hard to emulate with powerful multi-core CPUs these days. Why is having CELL a requirement for backwards compatibility?

Cell is fundamentally different compared to other CPUs in many ways. Where other CPUs tend to be 'good at everything', there is only one core in Cell that is as general purpose as that. The other cores are focused at heavily parallel number crunching. For gaming purposes, it has seemed that this number crunching is helpful to a degree but not a solution that pays itself back in terms of the associated costs. However, its number crunching performance is still so large that it cannot be properly emulated, and the peculiar and highly parallel way it needs to be programmed make it very hard for another more conventional CPU to do it exactly the same way. Although a new CPU will probably exceed Cell even in number crunching capabilities, a conventional CPU cannot replicate the way Cell does its number crunching close enough to make emulation possible. There really is no easy fix for this. To run Cell code, you still need Cell.

You are right that including Cell does not solve backwards compatibility completely. Considering they used a DX9 Nvidia chip last time, and will very likely use a DX11 AMD part next time, emulation might be so difficult that they won't even bother.

Again, where is this info coming from? AMD can't even design their own flagship CPU correctly.

Even ignoring the fact that that last part is simple FUD (losing to the best CPU maker in the world doesn't mean they suck), AMD's CPU and GPU teams are still very much distinct. Without question AMD's GPU team has been the best GPU maker in terms of effective GPUs since 2007. That might change with the new Geforces, but AMD still very much has the upper hand this time.

Nvidia has screwed up twice with Microsoft and Sony. Microsoft is not going back to Nvidia since they got a bad deal with Nvidia over the royalties on the NV2A chip in the original Xbox. Sony can't be satisfied at all by the RSX design, which is outdated compared to a chip launching a year earlier (while Nvidia was even ahead of AMD at the time) and other hardware faults (it doesn't have a proper hardware scaler). Rumours has it that an AMD GPU is in all three next-gen consoles, and engineers at Nvidia have indicated that they have no idea what's going to be in the next-gen consoles either.

Nvidia's future lineup of cards seems to be even more powerful than AMD, and they're not at a competitive disadvantage which would cause Sony to switch to AMD.

These decisions aren't made based on fancy roadmaps for PC gamers to drool over. If the companies are as close in competition as AMD and Nvidia, the deal isn't even made on performance but on the best deal. Nvidia has twice shown to be a bad deal.

 

[James Sawyer Ford]

Cell is fundamentally different compared to other CPUs in many ways. Where other CPUs tend to be 'good at everything', there is only one core in Cell that is as general purpose as that. The other cores are focused at heavily parallel number crunching. For gaming purposes, it has seemed that this number crunching is helpful to a degree but not a solution that pays itself back in terms of the associated costs. However, its number crunching performance is still so large that it cannot be properly emulated and the peculiar and highly parallel way it needs to be programmed make it very hard for another more conventional CPU to do it exactly the same way. Although a new CPU will probably exceed Cell even in number crunching capabilities, a conventional CPU cannot replicate the way Cell does its number crunching close enough to make emulation possible. There really is no easy fix for this. To run Cell code, you still need Cell.

This argument seems to assume a whole lot.

If Sony went with a quad core CPU design, shouldn't each of those cores be, at the very least, capable of emulating the capabilities of 2 SPE's?

Nvidia has screwed up twice with both Microsoft and Sony. Microsoft is not going back to Nvidia since they got a bad deal with Nvidia over the royalties on the NV2A chip in the original Xbox. Sony isn't satisfied at all by the RSX design, which is outdated compared to a chip launching a year earlier (while Nvidia was even ahead of AMD at the time) and other hardware faults (it doesn't have a proper hardware scaler).

We don't know the full details of their situation with Sony. At one time, I believe Sony going to go with an in-house GPU design, and only later in development realized they needed to go with a dedicated GPU maker in order to stay competitive. I would not fully blame Nvidia for what happened with RSX, as Sony probably needed a rush job component.

Secondly, with Nvidia losing business from Microsoft (and Nintendo, for that matter) to AMD, they aren't in much of a position to pull the same sort of royalty fiasco that they did with Microsoft, or that will threaten to remove their entire business from consoles altogether. In other words, they need to be amenable to Sony if they want to stay relevant in this space, which it appears they still do.

What may have been a 'bad deal' 10 years ago isn't really relevant, in context, to how the market stands now. Companies aren't static.

 

[bgassassin]

In other words, they need to be amenable to Sony if they want to stay relevant in this space, which it appears they still do.

Based on?

 

[DCKing]

This argument seems to assume a whole lot.

If Sony went with a quad core CPU design, shouldn't each of those cores be, at the very least, capable of emulating the capabilities of 2 SPE's?

No, this argument is based on actual knowledge of computer architecture (both Cell and 'normal' processors), computation and parallelization. One single core cannot emulate the Cell instruction set, the Cell performance, and the way data is passed around an actual Cell CPU all at the same time. Cell was designed to run in a way that does not comply with how normal processors run.

I agree that the details about RSX are not at all clear. What is clear is that Nvidia has got something to make up, and AMD would probably greet Sony with open arms. Nvidia's focus has shifted to high-powered GPUs, GPGPUs and SoCs a lot since 2006, so I'm not sure they are still aiming to be as relevant in the console business. Furthermore, seeing how the PS Vita could have easily had an Nvidia designed SoC, it seems to indicate to me that not all's well between these companies. That is all just speculation of course, but there's nothing positive going on for Nvidia at this time.

 

[James Sawyer Ford]

Based on?

Based on the fact that Sony is really the only major player that will possibly side with someone other than AMD next-gen.

 

[bgassassin]

Based on the fact that Sony is really the only major player that will possibly side with someone other than AMD next-gen.

But that doesn't say nVidia is being amendable to Sony.

 

[James Sawyer Ford]

But that doesn't say nVidia is being amendable to Sony.

I never said that they are; only that they have to be in order to win Sony's business.

 

[funkystudent]

Anyway I just hope they have a BC option.

Maybe a $100 add on or something but the idea of being locked out of all the hundreds of not thousands of $$ worth of PSN stuff people have bought over the years...... Sony should take any reasonable hit to make sure that stuff makes it over to the next console.

I mean you just know a big xbox 3 thing is gonna be having access to the entire XBLA library from day 1. Thats gonna be a big deal for a lot of people and a big plus during the first year or 2 of the life cycle.
I bet not having ps2 BC in the ps3 probably stopped a large number of ps2 owners jumping right over to the ps3 as well and got people to look at other systems.

If you cant bring your old library over then people are more likely to jump to another console. It just makes sense. At that point since the console will have most of the same games then its better to just buy the cheapest one.

 

[bgassassin]

I never said that they are; only that they have to be in order to win Sony's business.

You said they appear to be, and I was just wanting to know what that was based. I think this post is more exact than the other, but I think nVidia is dead to home consoles.

 

[Death Dealer]

I would not fully blame Nvidia for what happened with RSX, as Sony probably needed a rush job component.

They announced Nvidia would be in PS3 over 2 years before it launched. It wasn't rushed. ATI gave MS a forward thinking design, based off their future GPU tech. Nvidia gave Sony a GPU based off what was in contemporary high end PC tech. I don't blame either company really.

But as far as the scaling goes, that is 100% Nvidia's fault. RSX was supposed to have a fully operational scaler, but the final hardware was bugged and could only scale one way. (horizontally IIRC)

 

[James Sawyer Ford]

You said they appear to be, and I was just wanting to know what that was based. I think this post is more exact than the other, but I think nVidia is dead to home consoles.

They appear to want to still be relevant in this market. I read a quote from someone at Nvidia recently that stated that they still desire to be in the console business.

 

[DCKing]

When Microsoft launched their console, ATI struggled for 18 months to get a similar level of tech in their own PC cards. When Sony launched their console, Nvidia's new cards were already running circles around it. It's quite a contrast. There may have been all sorts of reasons for it, but the evaluation about their collaboration cannot have been great for Nvidia. To a Japanese company, that's going to count even more.

 

[teh_pwn]

I said I haven't seen a GOOD argument. I've seen that one.

It doesn't need to be AS POWERFUL AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE to be a good product for its customers. It just needs to be as powerful as the competition. Equivalent power to the next Xbox + full BC + great new firmware features would be ideal. Serving your customers well includes a lot more things than just hardware power.

Because Sony is already on the verge of going bankrupt as it is. Compromising design or including old hardware for BC is financial suicide.

If you want to play PS3 games, why not use a PS3?

 

[Romir]

When Microsoft launched their console, ATI struggled for 18 months to get a similar level of tech in their own PC cards. When Sony launched their console, Nvidia's new cards were already running circles around it. It's quite a contrast. There may have been all sorts of reasons for it, but the evaluation about their collaboration cannot have been great for Nvidia. To a Japanese company, that's going to count even more.

ATI came out with a 330 million transistor gpu a week after the 360 launched. If you want to discount that then the R600 series came out six months later and had the unified shader design like Xenos, but with DX10.

 

[tzare]

Yeah, but you need a CPU strong enough to "support" the GPU. Therefore, the middle way. You don't need an overpowered CPU, nor do I mean 50/50. The balance is the key.

There is where an updated cell could do the work since it is scalable and would be relatively cheap to design and produce. What cpu is rumoured to be used for next xbox? How many cell cores would be needed to have similar performance, plus add the extra spu power. And then a moder gpu plus decent ram

 

[H_Prestige]

Because Sony is already on the verge of going bankrupt as it is. Compromising design or including old hardware for BC is financial suicide.

If you want to play PS3 games, why not use a PS3?

A BC ps4 will not result in a gimped system (unless you think wii u and xbox 3 are also gimped, because those two are also aiming low), nor will it bankrupt Sony. Actually it will net them more money. No ps3 BC = pressing the delete button for the entire psn store. That doesn't sound like smart business decision, especially since the major goal of this company is to strengthen psn.

 

[Death Dealer]

ATI came out with a 330 million transistor gpu a week after the 360 launched. If you want to discount that then the R600 series came out six months later and had the unified shader design like Xenos, but with DX10.

No, R600 was released later than that, in 2007. They had lot of problems with current leakage and stuff.

Xenos came out in 2005. Around the same time, ATI released the X1800 cards, and Nvidia released the 7x00 cards. RSX was supposed to be out with the PS3 six months later, but PS3 got delayed six months, and didn't come out until a year after X360, at the same time Nvidia was releasing G80. R600 didn't come until about 6 months after that. (1.5 years after Xenos)
The big advantage of Xenos over RSX was flexibility.

 

[DCKing]

ATI came out with a 330 million transistor gpu a week after the 360 launched. If you want to discount that then the R600 series came out six months later and had the unified shader design like Xenos, but with DX10.

Remember that the 360 launched in 2005. Their first desktop unified shader based design, the R600, came out in May 2007. The Radeon X1800XT that launched around the same time as the 360, featured 321 million transistors which was still less than the 360 had if you count in the EDRAM (337 million) in the design. ATI did a hell of a job on the 360.

No ps3 BC = pressing the delete button for the entire psn store.

Why? Aren't half these games ported to XBLA, WiiWare, iOS, Android and whatnot anyway? Isn't there a hardware abstracting SDK they can use? It seems to me that a minority of games have strong dependencies on the actual PS3 hardware (and the ones that do somewhat should not be impossible to port either).

 

[piSquaredOver6]

Is Sony really about to go bankrupt or are you guys just a bunch of fuddruckers?

 

[gundamkyoukai]

Is Sony really about to go bankrupt or are you guys just a bunch of fuddruckers?

There are not doing so good right now but they should not go bankrupt any time soon.

 

[DCKing]

Is Sony really about to go bankrupt or are you guys just a bunch of fuddruckers?

Sony has serious financial problems, and is doing bad (or at least worse than previously) in pretty much every market they compete in. Although they are not going bankrupt right now, they cannot afford another PS3 fiasco.

 

[teh_pwn]

Is Sony really about to go bankrupt or are you guys just a bunch of fuddruckers?

They haven't been profitable in a long time for many reasons. One was that they took such a massive loss on PS3 hardware, which initially supported BC but they removed it to cut costs. Also because they used BDROM and because their TVs are selling at a loss while Samsung/Sharp/Pioneer/Panasonic/Toshiba/LG/others have taken over the mid to low range TVs.

You can google to fact check stuff like this by the way. SNE is their stock. Google results for "sony massive loss".

They'll probably have to restructure. But their performance is higher risk compared to Nintendo and Microsoft, which are very profitable most of the time.