The Next Next Gen Thread o/\o - The Bear and Badger

monkey

cockbeard wrote:

LaunchBox

Lunchbox

cockbeard

Linford?? It'll be quick at least

hylian_elf

RoundBox

Wookienopants

GameXCube

Syph79

I reckon they'll call it PlayStation 6. It's 1 better than the inevitable Sony offering.

Wookienopants

Call it the XBOX BRACKFRIDAYBUNDURU

RedDave2

The Contrabulous Fabtraption of Phil Spencer

Skerret

Cubiferous Spangletoid 6

Vela

John Malkovich. Jump in.

Skerret

Boxn Boxovich

GurtTractor

IrkSporks

Wookienopants

The Bob

hylian_elf

ExBobStation

cockbeard

Wookienopants wrote:

The Bob

Don't forget the aftermarket gwaffix upgrade box called vagine

bad_hair_day

Wookienopants wrote:

The Bob

And it’s underperforming e-lotion engine.

djchump

https://www.engadget.com/2019/01/09/amd-ceo-cto-radeon-vii-ray-tracing/

The HBM2 3D stacked memory bandwidth is pretty incredible - 1TBps bandwidth compared to RTX 2080 TI's GDDR6 which gives 616GBps.
As Tim Sweeney has pointed out on Twitter, 1TBps means the entire 16GB of GPU memory can be read every frame at 60fps - giving 64KB of readable data per pixel at 4K res at 60fps.

Tim Sweeney wrote:

"For comparison, 64KB stores a whole frame of 8-bit color data in DOOM in 1992. So, one DOOM screenful of data per pixel at 4K resolution at 60 frames per second."

Will be interesting to see if any (or both) of the console vendors go for it in the next gen APUs. Would be funny if one did and one didn't, as it'd be a direct replay of the original PS4 unified memory vs Xbone eSRAM ball drop.

mistercrayon

The proof will be in the pudding imho. The numbers may be ridiculous but RTX felt like a genuine step change in what goes on our screens.

Yossarian

Cost concerns mean that they almost certainly won’t. The only way I could see it happening is if the rumoured new X equivalent comes in at a silly price.

djchump

mistercrayon wrote:

The proof will be in the pudding imho. The numbers may be ridiculous but RTX felt like a genuine step change in what goes on our screens.

Thing is, while it got all the headlines, RTX uses DirectX Raytracing, which isn't locked to a vendor. AFAIK, "RT cores" (and also the AI-focused "Tensor cores") aren't really anything majorly different from the general purpose compute shader cores on all graphics cards. Once AMD release a DXR compatible driver, they'll have realtime raytracing as well - and ideally Battlefield 5's raytracing will "just work" once the AMD driver support is there, as it goes through the DXR HAL.

Now, obviously the RT/Tensor cores have been specialised for that specific use-case, so in an apples-to-apples comparison I would expect perf to be better on the specialised hardware, but it'll be interesting to see how the perf stacks up for an RT core using GDDR6 vs a general shader/cuda core using HBM2. My money is always on the bandwidth being a better predictor of max performance. Also, I do wonder on the long term usefulness of including specialised hardware cores at the cost of more general purpose cores - super-specialised hardware tends not to get utilised much (e.g. the old physics accelerator cards that died out).

Anyhows, interesting to see some difference between AMD and Nvidia now - Nvidia going in big on tech that might turn out to be flavour-of-the-month (like RT and CNNs, although AI/CNNs seems to be a much safer long term proposal), AMD going for energy-efficiency and general purpose. Hopefully AMD drivers are no longer shit as well, but I'm still very wary of their cards after my last PC build.

djchump

Yossarian wrote:

Cost concerns mean that they almost certainly won’t. The only way I could see it happening is if the rumoured new X equivalent comes in at a silly price.

"Cost concerns" is why Xbone launched with 32MB* of "high-speed" eSRAM that had 102GBps bandwidth to the GPU, where the PS4's had all 8GB addressable with 176GBps bandwidth. Which is why games were 1080p on PS4 and 900p on xbone. I'd hope they learned from that mistake, as they certainly seemed to push harder in the round 2 of PS4 pro vs boneX.

*edit: I originally wrote 10MB.

digi

So after they demoed 8k 120 fps gt sport and then went and showed real time raytracing in gt sport.
Polyphony digital have too a 96" screen to Vegas to show it all again.
https://www.gtplanet.net/sony-uses-gran-turismo-sport-to-showcase-its-8k-tv-at-ces-2019/

AJ

djchump wrote:

Xbone launched with 10MB of "high-speed" eSRAM

Just to be picky for no real reason: it was 32MB, up from 10MB of the equivalent on the 360. Still nothing like enough to be particularly useful though.

Hodge360

Doesn't matter about the numbers coz we all know the Bone is best.

Yossarian

djchump wrote:

Yossarian wrote:

Cost concerns mean that they almost certainly won’t. The only way I could see it happening is if the rumoured new X equivalent comes in at a silly price.

"Cost concerns" is why Xbone launched with 10MB of "high-speed" eSRAM that had 102GBps bandwidth to the GPU, where the PS4's had all 8GB addressable with 176GBps bandwidth. Which is why games were 1080p on PS4 and 900p on xbone. I'd hope they learned from that mistake, as they certainly seemed to push harder in the round 2 of PS4 pro vs boneX.

I’m sure they have learnt and will push harder, but I don’t think that equates to putting in the very latest tech, I don’t think any console has ever done that. Unless I’m very much mistaken, pretty much all modern consoles launch with customised previous-gen technology which offers a few current gen features. I can’t see that changing, unless, as I say, the new X launches for silly money.

djchump

AJ wrote:

djchump wrote:

Xbone launched with 10MB of "high-speed" eSRAM

Just to be picky for no real reason: it was 32MB, up from 10MB of the equivalent on the 360. Still nothing like enough to be particularly useful though.

Whoops! Yes, my mistake.

b0r1s

This is an interesting video for the newer GFX cards. I was surprised how much cheaper they've made the base card...

GurtTractor

I.e not at all? The opposite of cheaper.. Yeah the 2060 is more powerful than the 1060, but it's substantially more expensive too. This latest gen of Nvidia GPUs have been worst in a good while in terms of price to performance, there's basically been little to no increase in that metric, unlike previous generations where you often got some very nice increases. This is all down to the lack of strong competition of course. The mainstream media and tech media coverage of Nvidia has been really pretty woeful recently, with most failing to point out that they are charging more for less improvement than ever before.

They're not bad cards of course, and if you really need a new GPU and have the money for one of these then go ahead, but unless you're desperate then I would recommend holding off until 7nm, or whatever the next release will be to see some real performance gains.

The RTX stuff is mainly a lot of marketing at the moment. It is the future of realtime rendering, and will be exciting to see once powerful enough silicon can be produced cheaply. The performance impact from trying to use currently though is pretty huge, doubtful we'll see it trickle down to console level hardware in the next few years even.

djchump

TBH, I doubt it's "the future" in that all games will become fully realtime raytraced. Rasterisation is still orders of magnitude more efficient.
It's nice tech though and definitely useful in all parts of the dev pipeline - from progressive lightmapping to runtime AO and soft shadowing. So in that respect, yes, it's "the future" and will get utilised to some extent in a lot of games. But right now it's a lot of staring into puddles and declaring "look! reflections from offscreen stuff!", whereas I'm far more interested in NPR styles like Sable.

AJ

It's probably things other than reflections that will be the ultimate benefit of raytracing, as I understand it. Indirect illumination and light bounce stuff, AI path-finding, more subtle things that fundamentally improve games without any "wow" factor. I think the new Metro game is meant to have an awesome lighting model that uses raytracing.

GurtTractor

Hell yeah can't wait to see how Sable turns out. Aye RT is going to be used as more of an effect for a bit, eventually we might see the odd game relying on it for the art direction. It is dependent on specifically designed cores in the silicon, so perhaps as time goes on more of the die space will be taken over by parts dedicated to raytracing. Also the machine learning supersampling and denoising stuff seems to be pretty useful for taking some shortcuts and maintaining performance.

I wonder if RT hardware could be used to do some really neat audio simulation stuff, that I would very much like to see/hear..

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