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You need to find a new shtick when it comes to PCs. It's obvious you know nothing about it (I think you admit as much) yet you never balk at a chance to grab your torch and pitchfork anytime anyone mentions it. I still game on my 2007 LAPTOP, and I assure you I haven't "switched out any components" or "adjust[ed] the settings constantly". You don't like PC games, believe me, we all know this. You should probably refrain from sputtering out nonsense about PC gaming though, and maybe, acting so damned closed minded about it while you're at it.
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Inside the PlayStation 4 With Mark Cerny
Launch and Beyond
The benefits of this powerful hardware will be seen in the PlayStation 4's launch games. But Cerny maintains that, in the future, they'll shine through in totally different ways.
"The launch lineup for PlayStation 4 -- though I unfortunately can’t give the title count -- is going to be stronger than any prior PlayStation hardware. And that's a result of that familiarity," Cerny said. But "if your timeframe is 2015, by another way of thinking, you really need to be doing that customization, because your competition will be doing that customization."
So while it takes "weeks, not months" to port a game engine from the PC to the PlayStation 4 according to Cerny, down the road, dedicated console developers can grasp the capabilities of the PlayStation 4, customize their technology, and really reap the benefits.
"There are many, many ways to control how the resources within the GPU are allocated between graphics and compute. Of course, what you can do, and what most launch titles will do, is allocate all of the resources to graphics. And that’s perfectly fine, that's great. It's just that the vision is that by the middle of the console lifecycle, that there's a bit more going on with compute."
What Does 'Supercharged' Mean, Anyway?
The PlayStation 4's architecture looks very familiar, at first blush -- and it is. But Cerny maintains that his team's work on it extends it far beyond its basic capabilities.
For example, this is his take on its GPU: "It's ATI Radeon. Getting into specific numbers probably doesn't help clarify the situation much, except we took their most current technology, and performed a large number of modifications to it."
To understand the PS4, you have to take what you know about Cerny's vision for it (easy to use, but powerful in the long term) and marry that to what the company has chosen for its architecture (familiar, but cleverly modified.) That's what he means by "supercharged."
"The 'supercharged' part, a lot of that comes from the use of the single unified pool of high-speed memory," said Cerny. The PS4 packs 8GB of GDDR5 RAM that's easily and fully addressable by both the CPU and GPU.
If you look at a PC, said Cerny, "if it had 8 gigabytes of memory on it, the CPU or GPU could only share about 1 percent of that memory on any given frame. That's simply a limit imposed by the speed of the PCIe. So, yes, there is substantial benefit to having a unified architecture on PS4, and it’s a very straightforward benefit that you get even on your first day of coding with the system. The growth in the system in later years will come more from having the enhanced PC GPU. And I guess that conversation gets into everything we did to enhance it."
The CPU and GPU are on a "very large single custom chip" created by AMD for Sony. "The eight Jaguar cores, the GPU and a large number of other units are all on the same die," said Cerny. The memory is not on the chip, however. Via a 256-bit bus, it communicates with the shared pool of ram at 176 GB per second.
"One thing we could have done is drop it down to 128-bit bus, which would drop the bandwidth to 88 gigabytes per second, and then have eDRAM on chip to bring the performance back up again," said Cerny. While that solution initially looked appealing to the team due to its ease of manufacturability, it was abandoned thanks to the complexity it would add for developers. "We did not want to create some kind of puzzle that the development community would have to solve in order to create their games. And so we stayed true to the philosophy of unified memory."
In fact, said Cerny, when he toured development studios asking what they wanted from the PlayStation 4, the "largest piece of feedback that we got is they wanted unified memory."
"I think you can appreciate how large our commitment to having a developer friendly architecture is in light of the fact that we could have made hardware with as much as a terabyte [Editor's note: 1000 gigabytes] of bandwidth to a small internal RAM, and still did not adopt that strategy," said Cerny. "I think that really shows our thinking the most clearly of anything."
Freeing Up Resources: The PS4's Dedicated Units
Another thing the PlayStation 4 team did to increase the flexibility of the console is to put many of its basic functions on dedicated units on the board -- that way, you don't have to allocate resources to handling these things.
"The reason we use dedicated units is it means the overhead as far as games are concerned is very low," said Cerny. "It also establishes a baseline that we can use in our user experience."
"For example, by having the hardware dedicated unit for audio, that means we can support audio chat without the games needing to dedicate any significant resources to them. The same thing for compression and decompression of video." The audio unit also handles decompression of "a very large number" of MP3 streams for in-game audio, Cerny added.
At the New York City unveiling of the system, Cerny talked about PlayGo, the system by which the console will download digital titles even as they're being played.
"The concept is you download just a portion of the overall data and start your play session, and you continue your play session as the rest downloads in the background," he explained to Gamasutra.
However, PlayGo "is two separate linked systems," Cerny said. The other is to do with the Blu-ray drive -- to help with the fact that it is, essentially, a bit slow for next-gen games.
"So, what we do as the game accesses the Blu-ray disc, is we take any data that was accessed and we put it on the hard drive. And if then if there is idle time, we go ahead and copy the remaining data to the hard drive. And what that means is after an hour or two, the game is on the hard drive, and you have access, you have dramatically quicker loading... And you have the ability to do some truly high-speed streaming."
To further help the Blu-ray along, the system also has a unit to support zlib decompression -- so developers can confidently compress all of their game data and know the system will decode it on the fly. "As a minimum, our vision is that our games are zlib compressed on media," said Cerny.
There's also another custom chip to put the system in a low-power mode for background downloads. "To make it a more green hardware, which is very important for us, we have the ability to turn off the main power in the system and just have power to that secondary custom chip, system memory, and I/O -- hard drive, Ethernet. So that allows background downloads to happen in a very low power scenario. We also have the ability to shut off everything except power to the RAMs, which is how we leave your game session suspended."
Sounds Good, But... Bottlenecks?
One thing Cerny was not at all shy about discussing are the system's bottlenecks -- because, in his view, he and his engineers have done a great job of devising ways to work around them.
"With graphics, the first bottleneck you’re likely to run into is memory bandwidth. Given that 10 or more textures per object will be standard in this generation, it’s very easy to run into that bottleneck," he said. "Quite a few phases of rendering become memory bound, and beyond shifting to lower bit-per-texel textures, there’s not a whole lot you can do. Our strategy has been simply to make sure that we were using GDDR5 for the system memory and therefore have a lot of bandwidth."
That's one down. "If you're not bottlenecked by memory, it's very possible -- if you have dense meshes in your objects -- to be bottlenecked on vertices. And you can try to ask your artists to use larger triangles, but as a practical matter, it's difficult to achieve that. It's quite common to be displaying graphics where much of what you see on the screen is triangles that are just a single pixel in size. In which case, yes, vertex bottlenecks can be large."
"There are a broad variety of techniques we've come up with to reduce the vertex bottlenecks, in some cases they are enhancements to the hardware," said Cerny. "The most interesting of those is that you can use compute as a frontend for your graphics."
This technique, he said, is "a mix of hardware, firmware inside of the GPU, and compiler technology. What happens is you take your vertex shader, and you compile it twice, once as a compute shader, once as a vertex shader. The compute shader does a triangle sieve -- it just does the position computations from the original vertex shader and sees if the triangle is backfaced, or the like. And it's generating, on the fly, a reduced set of triangles for the vertex shader to use. This compute shader and the vertex shader are very, very tightly linked inside of the hardware."
It's also not a hard solution to implement, Cerny suggested. "From a graphics programmer perspective, using this technique means setting some compiler flags and using a different mode of the graphics API. So this is the kind of thing where you can try it in an afternoon and see if it happens to bump up your performance."
These processes are "so tightly linked," said Cerny, that all that's required is "just a ring buffer for indices... it's the Goldilocks size. It's small enough to fit the cache, it's large enough that it won't stall out based on discrepancies between the speed of processing of the compute shaders and the vertex shaders."
He has also promised Gamasutra that the company is working on a version of its performance analysis tool, Razor, optimized for the PlayStation 4, as well as example code to be distrusted to developers. Cerny would also like to distribute real-world code: "If somebody has written something interesting and is willing to post the source for it, to make it available to the other PlayStation developers, then that has the highest value."
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We are incredibly excited about PlayStation 4, and we can’t wait to share more features and details with you as we get closer to launch.
As you know, one of the first major reveals during PlayStation Meeting 2013 was the new DualShock 4 Wireless Controller. Today, we’re pleased to share a brand new video where developers discuss some of their favorite DualShock 4 features, what makes each feature unique and how it will make your gameplay experience much more dynamic.Comment
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I want to see how the share features really work.
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probably not much different than how it works on your smartphone. Take a picture or take a video...hit share and it will give you a list of options to where to share it.
Dirt 3 had this feature...its not revolutionary. If I can hit the share button and have an instant stream on twitch...then that is very cool. But even still everyone that really wants to do that now...is probably already doing it.
It really is a hardcore feature. I wonder how many people actually know about twitch or justin or ustream?Comment
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Sony is just doing everything right, I think this will take game streaming...mainstream. It'll be the "cool" thing to do. You'll see dumbass celebs sharing some random shit they did and it'll blow it up.
Furthermore it could be used as a wicked feature for teams like EA with sports titles. Make a video, hey EA look at this bug. No longer do people have to explain themselves on a forum, just show them what's broken and do it so easily.
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Not really what I'm trying to get at. Madden was also a poor example because they don't do shit.
What if I press "share" and get an option "upload video to developer for bug report" or something? What if Sony permits downloadable Alpha/Beta formats and allows this?
Certainly the potential is there.Comment
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Since everything is already built in, I'll be streaming my games for sure - always wanted to but didn't have the computer for it (also didn't feel like spending the money for a capture card).Comment
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My main question is can I capture and export what I recorded to my computer? If so that really makes this console a day one buy for me.Comment
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Shuhei Yoshida on the making of PlayStation 4
Nintendo ended up becoming more profitable last generation by focusing on the user experience – has Sony taken onboard some of that same wisdom?
It’s not easy to make a system that “just works”. We’ve been criticised all the time for people having to wait to download patches, or for firmware updates, and we are gamers as well so we know exactly what people have to go through on PS3. So we wanted to really make it a focus so that our developers in Tokyo and the US who work on system software and such features were really thinking about some of these experiences.
At the reveal event, PS4 was positioned as being all about games. Does this mean other services – photos, music, and so on – will be less prominent on the console’s dashboard?
We know that people like these functions, such as Netflix, and use them a lot. And especially for those people who are not the person who purchased these consoles – like family members – they tend to use these non-game functions. So it’s not like we are no longer going to do these functions, but especially for the announcement event, we wanted to show how the game experiences will change with PS4, because that’s the biggest focus for us. Once that communication [to the public] is achieved, then probably later this year we’ll talk more about what these non-game functions [are] that we are trying to bring to PS4 as well.
Can you tell us how Mark came to be involved and how he was selected?
That’s an excellent question. As you know Mark and our studio have worked for a long time, our history goes back to the PS One days when Mark was running Universal Interactive and producing Crash Bandicoot. And we were the publisher, the licensee of the IP, and published both Crash Bandicoot and Spyro The Dragon franchises and after PS One the relationship evolved. He set up his own consulting company, Cerny Games, and became the contributor, contracted with us and Naughty Dog to help create Jak And Daxter and with Insomnia to help create Ratchet And Clank.
That continued on until the next-generation, for example with Resistance: Fall Of Man, but he was pretty much working on many projects with Worldwide Studios. But the significant work he did on the technical side was to help to develop the graphics engine, the common firstparty game engine, that we developed between the US and European teams. Mark was leading that effort, as well as Richard Lee, and Richard Lee is the CTO of our studio now. Mark was based in the States and Richard is now based in London. And I was running the studio in the States and Phil Harrison was running the studios in Europe, so we decided to collaborate and create a common engine for PS3. Mark shifted some of his time from helping on game projects to more technical work for the launch of PS3. Following that, Worldwide Studios provided the engine to thirdparty development communities in the early stages of PS3. Many thirdparty developers struggled to work with the new Cell architecture. So that’s how SCEI discovered the resource which is Worldwide Studios and we have a lot of technical people that may now source parts, like drivers or engines or toolsets, that they visit us and we package it and distribute it to thirdparties.
So we were talking following Kaz’s instructions that Worldwide Studios should be involved [in PS4], and I kind of suggested ‘What about Mark?’
So myself, Hirai-san and Mark started this idea of Mark directly working for SCEI Tokyo in addition to working on projects for Worldwide Studios. He’s more dedicated to technical work for PS Vita and PS4 than on game projects, but he never stopped work on game projects, helping out teams like Santa Monica studios, and now he’s a game director on Knack, with Japan Studio. He believes, and I agree, that he wants to continue to be hands-on making games at the same time as making hardware and platforms. So he understands the latest in game development and some pain points that the PlayStation developers may go through.
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Oh lawd. Seth Ill give you a free xbox game if u delete your post.
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