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Amd to clean sweep the next gen consoles

TheRealDeal

TheRealDeal

TheRealDeal

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http://semiaccurate.com/2012/03/02/sony-playstation-4-will-be-an-x86-cpu-with-an-amd-gpu/

I have been hearing these rumours for quit some time now. It does seem likely that nvidia may not be in the next gen consoles which are looking more like pc's by the minute.

With more and more games being made for console, could this handicap nvidia in a way, as most games will be developed on amd hardware.

We have seen a lot of games developed on the xbox360 which has a amd/ati gpu and then ported to ps3 and pc. This never seemed to affect nvidia but at the time amd moved to a totally different architecture all together.

In reality amd should benefit from this on a few fronts. I just wonder if this could help amd close the gap on nvidias twimtpb.
 
The Xbox was a PC console, so was the 360. Heck, even the Gamecube used ATI's "Flipper" chip (hence the code name Dolphin).

I also heard AMD had "won" Microsoft's affections. Hence for the past two years we have been Direct X guinea pigs. Once they finally poo on the potty though things will improve for PC gamers. Once one of these DX versions become a standard we will get far better games.
 
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I remember watching a show on .tv 10/11 years ago now and journalists, broadcasters, industry insiders were all talking about standardisation and the difficulties developers faced when writing games for various platforms.

Now in 2012 it looks like developers and publishers have finally got there way as CPU's will either be x86 based which is the defacto standard for decades or IBM's power PC which has been used in consoles for over a decade. I just wonder what architecture AMD will use for the next generation of consoles? VLIW or GCN?
 
Consoles usually contain PC chip designs re-jigged into a smaller package. This suggests a VLIW Chip. Given these new machines will probably be out by 2013 this makes VLIW almost a certainty.

Of course, Nvidia could even pop back into the running. There's lots of money at stake here.
 
Is the next generation of consoles as big a deal as it was before though? People play causal games on a lot more platforms other then PS3/360 - PS Vista, the new gameboy 3D, iPad 2, Android etc all these use ARM, Power VR or Tegra for their graphics. If people are paying for games for these platforms then that will less money is being spent on the on the big block busters.
 
Freddie1980 said:
Is the next generation of consoles as big a deal as it was before though? People play causal games on a lot more platforms other then PS3/360 - PS Vista, the new gameboy 3D, iPad 2, Android etc all these use ARM, Power VR or Tegra for their graphics. If people are paying for games for these platforms then that will less money is being spent on the on the big block busters.
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I don't think that's true at all. The market is growing, not shifting.
 
For now it is... but for how long?

My phone can play GTA3 in all its original glory (high res, mostly 30+fps, doesn't even hit battery that hard) - connect to TVs via HDMI and people have even managed to hook controllers upto them - next generation phones will probably be almost as capable as this generation consoles if not more so as most have more RAM.

I can't see AMD having their GPUs in future consoles having and advantage for the PC version of the game as unless things change a lot console architecture and APIs tend to be a lot different even when based on PC designs and don't translate directly to the PC.
 
Rroff said:
I can't see AMD having their GPUs in future consoles having and advantage for the PC version of the game as unless things change a lot console architecture and APIs tend to be a lot different even when based on PC designs and don't translate directly to the PC.
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This is because not all the hardware inside modern consoles is the same as desktop PCs.
The next generation of consoles will be a lot closer to standard PC arch, probably with their own shortcut solutions for certain tasks (eDRAM in the X360 for instance).

I can't even guess at future consoles, perhaps games will move towards a SaaS approach like OnLive! or similar.
 
PCplod said:
Whatever is in them I damn sure hope it can keep up with at least a 7870.
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Technically? no chance. There is no way they would be able to afford to make consoles with such a high end part in.

If you're lucky it'll be something along the lines of a 7750, but it will probably be more like a 5450.

In reality? the poo little GPU core they put in will end up putting out games that look every bit as good as they do on a 7870 and run just as fast.

It's the O word again. Optimisation.
 
There are rumours that the next Xbox iteration will have an AMD custom GPU similar in performance to a 6670 which they've said means rendering-wise it's about 6 times the performance of the current Xenos.

I find that quite interesting though because by the time the next Xbox is due to ship, that technology is going to be 3 generations out of date. If we harken back to the Xenos, it's architecture at the time of release was quite groundbreaking - utilising the now defacto-standard unified shader architecture. Bear in mind as well that core speed of the Xenos @ 500Mhz was quite high for a GPU during this release window.

Compared to the upcoming consoles, if there is any truth to the 6670-esque comment, then it's pretty underwhelming; optimisation or not. Remember as well that current console titles look as good as they do presently because developers can program at an extremely low level whereby they're bypassing API overheads. You can't do that from the very beginning and they didn't with the current consoles which is why games have steadily progressed to look better using the same hardware. At first, it's a brute force approach. Thing is, that only works when you've got powerful hardware to drive it. A 6670 is not powerful hardware.
 
ALXAndy said:
the poo little GPU core they put in will end up putting out games that look every bit as good as they do on a 7870 and run just as fast.

It's the O word again. Optimisation.
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it isnt just optimization of the code, they also jig about with the field of view and textures etc to get it to run nicely on consoles - we dont need that on the pc as most things can run it fine :D
 
The difference being, top end gpu's at the time used realistically, 1/3rd of the power they do now, so a similar level chip powerwise, is significantly lower down the performance tree in any recent generation of cards.

I still don't buy the 6670 rumour particularly, it depends when the xbox 360 comes out frankly. It will also likely be gutted, tweaked to hell, but its likely to be something much newer than that, and faster.

Thing is realistically 1920x1080 will be the max res of consoles and the majority of home tv's for the next decade so they don't really have to factor in higher resolutions, nor surround gaming resolutions.

WE'll see at a later date, but we could also be looking at something that ends up vastly underpowered vs the PS4, and we could be looking at MS going with a different strategy, something with a decent but not extreme performance increase, but a vastly cheaper box. Then update after 3-4 years rather than closer to 8 years, who knows.
 
drunkenmaster said:
...and we could be looking at MS going with a different strategy, something with a decent but not extreme performance increase, but a vastly cheaper box. Then update after 3-4 years rather than closer to 8 years, who knows.
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There is no reason for them to follow through with such a strategy though. If this generation of consoles has proven anything it's that you can seriously draw out the lifespan of a console providing that it starts off with a bit of headroom to develop. This has played into the hands of MS extremely well as they can pump out consoles that are cheap for them to manufacture, year after year and people are still buying games for them that are around the £50 mark.

Having a shorter predicted lifespan means that they have to re-jig their strategy and pull something out of a hat to entice the existing customer base to transition from one established and stable platform to the next - during which time there is a significant risk that the consumer will opt for a competitor's product. Why would they open themselves up to that?
 
Im definitly looking to make the switch to consoles next gen if they will be even more media center based

There really isnt much point paying 400£ for the top gpu when a console will work for 5 years+

Will save me a lot of money
 
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