PlayStation 4 Discussion

[jeremym480]

Re: PlayStation 4 Discussion

I received an email from Wal Mart saying that my pre-order will not arrive until 11/21 (standard shipping). I'm emailing them now to see if I can pick it up at the store on release day instead.

Who are the other non-Amazon guys going with? Sony, Game Stop, etc. and are they guaranteeing a release day delivery?

[Trapper700]

Re: PlayStation 4 Discussion

Stolen from GAF

hUMAton:
-only PS4 will have hUMA, Xbox One won't, says AMD's Marc Diana
-performance advantage of PS4 compared to Xbox One will be much greater than expected
-hUMA is key for the immense power gain of hetero-core systems
-unofficial interview with developer: PS4 is far ahead of Xbox One

Article from Germany's biggest IT news site.
AMD: PS4 performance advantage over XB1 bigger than many expect thanks to hUMA

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Gamescom-Playstation-4-bietet-Unified-Memory-Xbox-One-nicht-1939716.html

Translation:

Although both upcoming game consoles Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are based on AMD hardware, only PlayStation 4 incorporates hUMA [Heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access] for supporting a shared memory space. This was explained by AMD's Senior Product Marketing Manager Marc Diana to c't [big German IT magazine] at gamescom. This should put the 3D-performance of PlayStation 4 much farther ahead of Xbox One than many have expected so far. AMD sees hUMA as a key element for drastic performance improvements in combined processors. AMD's upcoming Kaveri desktop processors support hUMA as well.

Behind the scenes, c't could hear from developers that the 3D-performance of PlayStation 4 is very far ahead of Xbox One.

Back in April, AMD manager Phil Rogers explained to c't that hUMA improves 3D-performance in particular. "Game developers have been eager to use very large textures for years. Until now they had to resort to tricks in order to package parts of larger textures into smaller textures. That is because today a texture has to be located in a special place of physical memory before the GPU can process it. With hUMA, applications can work with textures much more efficiently". AMD will give more details on hUMA at its upcoming developer conference in November.

Our guy on the ground has heard this as well from multiplatform developers and publishers. Their PS4 game builds are significantly outperforming the Xbox One game builds.

On a classical system you have a RAM pool and a VRAM pool that are physically speperated. Copying data from one pool to the other creates latency. The GPU is very good ad hiding latency. What it needs most is high bandwidth. The CPU on the other hand is extremely sensitive to latency. The CPU needs extremely low latency to work efficiently. Copying data from the RAM (CPU) to the VRAM (GPU) creates latency, but that's okay for the GPU. Copying data from RAM (CPU) to VRAM (GPU) and back to the RAM (CPU) creates even more latency. It's too much for the CPU. The copying alone takes longer than the computation wich makes this roundtrip highly ineffective.

Xbox360 and older APUs have a unified RAM. This means that the RAM is no longer physically seperated, but even though it's the same RAM chips, the system still distincts between memory partition for the differenct processors. You still need to copy the data between CPU partition and GPU partition, but this will be much more efficient than copying it between physically seperated pools. But it's still too much latency for a CPU, GPU, CPU roundtrip.

PS4 will have hUMA wich means that you no longer need a distinction between CPU partition and GPU partition. Both processors can use the same pieces of data at the same time. You don't need to copy stuff and this allows for completely new algorithms that utilize CPU and GPU at the same time. This is interesting since a GPU is very strong, but extremely dumb. A CPU is extremely smart, but very weak. Since you can utilize both processors at the same time for a single task you have a system that is extremely smart and extremely strong at the same time.

It will allow for an extreme boost for many, many algorithms and parts of algorithms. On top of that it will allow for completely new classes of algorithms. This is a game changer.

hUMA: Heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/amds-heterogeneous-uniform-memory-access-coming-this-year-in-kaveri/

Even with the integration of GPUs and CPUs into the same chip, GPGPU is quite awkward for software developers. The CPU and GPU have their own pools of memory. Physically, these might use the same chips on the motherboard (as most integrated GPUs carve off a portion of system memory for their own purposes). From a software perspective, however, these are completely separate.

This means that whenever a CPU program wants to do some computation on the GPU, it has to copy all the data from the CPU's memory into the GPU's memory. When the GPU computation is finished, all the data has to be copied back. This need to copy back and forth wastes time and makes it difficult to mix and match code that runs on the CPU and code that runs on the GPU.

The need to copy data also means that the GPU can't use the same data structures that the CPU is using. While the exact terminology varies from programming language to programming language, CPU data structures make extensive use of pointers: essentially, memory addresses that refer (or, indeed, point) to other pieces of data. These structures can't simply be copied into GPU memory, because CPU pointers refer to locations in CPU memory. Since GPU memory is separate, these locations would be all wrong when copied.

hUMA is the way AMD proposes to solve this problem. With hUMA, the CPU and GPU share a single memory space. The GPU can directly access CPU memory addresses, allowing it to both read and write data that the CPU is also reading and writing.

hUMA is a cache coherent system, meaning that the CPU and GPU will always see a consistent view of data in memory. If one processor makes a change then the other processor will see that changed data, even if the old value was being cached.

As well as being useful for GPGPU programming, this may also find use in the GPU's traditional domain: graphics. Normally, 3D programs have to use lots of relatively small textures to apply textures to their 3D models. When the GPU has access to demand paging, it becomes practical to use single large textures—larger than will even fit into the GPU's memory—loading the portions of the texture on an as-needed basis. id Software devised a similar technique using existing hardware for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and called it MegaTexture. With hUMA, developers will get MegaTexture-like functionality built-in.

[Brandwin]

Re: PlayStation 4 Discussion

I received an email from Wal Mart saying that my pre-order will not arrive until 11/21 (standard shipping). I'm emailing them now to see if I can pick it up at the store on release day instead.

Who are the other non-Amazon guys going with? Sony, Game Stop, etc. and are they guaranteeing a release day delivery?

I went with Best Buy the first day they started taking in-store preorders. They guaranteed me to get launch day console.

[Picci]

Re: PlayStation 4 Discussion

Got to hand it to the Germans in cracking the tech inside the box.

This is huge. Maybe there's hope for CPU AI after all.

PS4 will have hUMA wich means that you no longer need a distinction between CPU partition and GPU partition. Both processors can use the same pieces of data at the same time. You don't need to copy stuff and this allows for completely new algorithms that utilize CPU and GPU at the same time. This is interesting since a GPU is very strong, but extremely dumb. A CPU is extremely smart, but very weak. Since you can utilize both processors at the same time for a single task you have a system that is extremely smart and extremely strong at the same time.

[greenegt]

Re: PlayStation 4 Discussion

Very interesting news about the PS4 vs Xbox One tech. I'm still on the fence about which one I will ultimately buy, but I like PS4's long term prospects with this hardware.

[ckarlic]

Re: PlayStation 4 Discussion

86 days left until Greatness Arrives.

I like to look at the amount of weeks left since the number is a lot smaller. With that said, 12 weeks (and 2 days) left until the PS4 drops. If you look at it that way, not too long from now. Can't wait!

[WTF]

Re: PlayStation 4 Discussion

To those of you who are cancelling the PS4, why? Have I missed something?

[aholbert32]

Re: PlayStation 4 Discussion

To those of you who are cancelling the PS4, why? Have I missed something?

Only 4 people are canceling in this thread. 2 of them have military obligations so they wont be around when the console launches. One is upset that the console is launching in Nov. not Oct. The other is FootballForever.

[TheBuddyHobbs]

Re: PlayStation 4 Discussion

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/WpDwTdobnFM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Wow I can't wait to see Madden and Live!!!

[Brandwin]

Re: PlayStation 4 Discussion

That FIFA video was great.

[TheBuddyHobbs]

Re: PlayStation 4 Discussion

Crowd looks and sounds great.

[Boltman]

Re: PlayStation 4 Discussion

That FIFA video was great.

The crowd standing up & cheering towards the end of the video is what stood out to me the most. I'll be picking it up either way but I would have liked to have seen a bit more actual gameplay.

Really can't wait for next-gen sports titles, the immersion with the crowds are what I look forward to.

So tired of the box cut looking clones.

Same thing applies to the backup players along the sidelines in the American Football games.

[armistead]

Re: PlayStation 4 Discussion

Thanks for posting the FIFA video. Made my day. I cannot wait for this game on the PS4.

[NikeBlitz]

Re: PlayStation 4 Discussion

The crowd standing up & cheering towards the end of the video is what stood out to me the most. I'll be picking it up either way but I would have liked to have seen a bit more actual gameplay.

Really can't wait for next-gen sports titles, the immersion with the crowds are what I look forward to.

So tired of the box cut looking clones.

Same thing applies to the backup players along the sidelines in the American Football games.

Gameplay here (it's short and off screen) :

<object width="640" height="480"><param name="movie" value="//www.youtube.com/v/uEsIG1ngSg4?version=3&amp;hl=fr_FR&amp;rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="//www.youtube.com/v/uEsIG1ngSg4?version=3&amp;hl=fr_FR&amp;rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="640" height="480" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object>

[mgoblue]

Re: PlayStation 4 Discussion

Gameplay here (it's short and off screen) :

<object width="640" height="480"><param name="movie" value="//www.youtube.com/v/uEsIG1ngSg4?version=3&amp;hl=fr_FR&amp;rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="//www.youtube.com/v/uEsIG1ngSg4?version=3&amp;hl=fr_FR&amp;rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="640" height="480" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object>

wish the guy playing that didn't attempt stupid passes that kill his offensive attack....