It feels like each time SCE makes a new console, it'd always come with some novelty that's supposed to change the field forever, but after two years they'd always end up just another console.
Seems they didn’t learn from the PS3, and that exotic architectures don't drive sales. Gamers don’t give a shit and devs won’t choose it unless they have a lucrative first party contract.
Noone is gonna give you some groundbreaking tech for your electronic gadget.... As IBM showed when they created the Cell for Sony and then gave almost the same tech to Microsoft :D.
I was going to say "again?", but then I recalled DirectX 12 was released 10 years ago and now I feel old...
The main goal of Direct3D 12, and subsequently Vulcan, was to allow for better use of the underlying graphics hardware as it had changed more and more from its fixed pipeline roots.
So maybe the time is ripe for a rethink, again.
Particularly the frame generation features, upscaling and frame interpolation, have promise but needs to be integrated in a different way I think to really be of benefit.
Seems like the philosophy here is, if you're going to do AI-based rendering, might as well try it across different parts of the graphics pipeline and see if you can fine-tune it at the silicon level. Probably a microoptimization, but if it makes the PS6 look a tiny bit better than the Xbox, people will pay for that.
Could the PS6 be the last console generation with an expressive improvement in compute and graphics? Miniaturization keeps giving ever more diminishing returns each shrink, prices of electronics are going up (even sans tariffs), lead by the increase in the price of making chips. Alternate techniques have slowly been introduced to offset the compute deficit, first with post processing AA in the seventh generation, then with "temporal everything" hacks (including TAA) in the previous generation and finally with minor usage of AI up-scaling in the current generation and (projected) major usage of AI up-scaling and frame-gen in the next gen.
However, I'm pessimistic on how this can keep evolving. RT already takes a non trivial amount of transistor budget and now those high end AI solutions require another considerable chunk of the transistor budget. If we are already reaching the limits of what non generative AI up-scaling and frame-gen can do, I can't see where a PS7 can go other than using generative AI to interpret a very crude low-detail frame and generating a highly detailed photorealistic scene from that, but that will, I think, require many times more transistor budget than what will likely ever be economically achievable for a whole PS7 system.
Will that be the end of consoles? Will everything move to the cloud and a power guzzling 4KW machine will take care of rendering your PS7 game?
I really can only hope there is a break-trough in miniaturization and we can go back to a pace of improvement that can actually give us a new generation of consoles (and computers) that makes the transition from an SNES to a N64 feel quaint.
There's likely still room to go super wide with CPU cores and much more ram but everyone is talking about neutral nets so that's what the press release is about.
After raytracing, the next obvious massive improvement would be path tracing.
And while consoles usually lag behind the latest available graphics, I'd expect raytracing and even path tracing to become available to console graphics eventually.
One advantage of consoles is that they're a fixed hardware target, so games can test on the exact hardware and know exactly what performance they'll get, and whether they consider that performance an acceptable experience.
It's not just technology that's eating away at console sales, it's also the fact that 1) nearly everything is available on PC these days (save Nintendo with its massive IP), 2) mobile gaming, and 3) there's a limitless amount of retro games and hacks or mods of retro games to play and dedicated retro handhelds are a rapidly growing market. Nothing will ever come close to PS2 level sales again. Will be interesting to see how the video game industry evolves over the next decade or two. I suspect subscriptions (sigh) will start to make up for lost console sales.
I know this isn't an original idea, but I wonder if this will be the trick for step-level improvement in visuals. Use traditional 3D models for the broad strokes and generative AI for texture and lighting details. We're at diminishing returns for add polygons and better lighting, and generative AI seems to be better at improving from there—when it doesn't have to get the finger count right.
I think there are a few factors that are likely to slow the pace down quite a bit soon:
1. We realistically aren't going much past 4k anytime soon. Even the few 8k sets on the market are sort of tech demos, because there isn't really the content for it. Maybe 120/240/etc FPS will be a thing, but that's really a linear growth, not exponential, and it has a pretty short path to go (will 500Hz displays ever become a big seller? 1kHz?)
2. The triple-A games market itself is strained-- too many big-money flops, and those are the ones that have historically substituted more triangles for better storytelling.
So you're going to reach a point where the hardware isn't really limiting the designers' visions anymore.
GenAI seems like a questionable approach for game rendering, both because of inefficiency and non-repeatability. If the AI renders the same scene slightly differently on two machines, it could cause bugs or unfair competitive edges. At most, we'd see AI during the development process to build assets, and that doesn't require a bigger local GPU.
The industry, and at large the gaming community is just long past being interested in graphics advancement. AAA games are too complicated and expensive, the whole notion of ever more complex and grandiose experiences doesn't scale. Gamers are fractured along thousands of small niches, even in sense of timeline in terms of 80s, 90s, PS1 era each having a small circle of businesses serving them.
The times of console giants, their fiefdoms and the big game studios is coming to an end.
So this is AMD catching up with Nvidia in the RT and AI upscaling/frame gen fields. Nothing wrong with it, and I am quite happy as an AMD GPU owner and Linux user.
But the way it is framed as a revolutionary step and as a Sony collab is a tad misleading. AMD is competent enough to do it by itself, and this will definitely show up in PC and the competing Xbox.
I wonder how many variants of the PS6 they'll go through before they get a NIC that works right.
As someone working at an ISP, I am frustrated with how bad Sony has mangled the networking stack on these consoles. I thought BSD was supposed to be the best in breed of networking but instead Sony has found all sorts of magical ways to make it Not Work.
From the PS5 variants that just hate 802.11ax to all the gamers making wild suggestions like changing MTU settings or DNS settings just to make your games work online... man, does Sony make it a pain for us to troubleshoot when they wreck it.
Bonus points that they took away the Web browser so we can't even try to do forward-facing troubleshooting without going through an obtuse process of the third-party-account-linking system to sneak out of the process to run a proper speedtest to Speedtest/Fast to show that "no, it's PSN being slow, not us".
This video is a direct continuation of the one where Cerny explains logic behind PlayStation 5 pro design and telling that the path forward for them goes into rendering near perfect low res image then upscaling it with neural networks to 4K.
How good it will be? Just look at the current upscalers working on perfectly rendered images - photos. And they aren't doing it in realtime. So the errors, noise, and artefacts are all but inevitable. Those will be masked by post processing techniques that will inevitably degrade image clarity.
This reminds me of the PlayStation/2 developer manual which, when describing the complicated features of system, said something like "there is no profit in making it easy to extract the most performance from the system."
Both raytracing and NPUs use a lot of bandwidth and that is scaling the least with time. Time will tell if just going for more programmable compute would be better
Maybe Sony should focus on getting a half-respectable library out on the PS5 before touting the theoretical merits of the PS6? It’s kind of wild how thin they are this go around. Their live service gambles clearly cost them this cycle and the PSVR2 landed with a thud.
Frankly after releasing the $700 pro and going “it’s basically the same specs but it can actually do 4K60 this time we promise” and given how many friends I have with the PS5 sitting around as an expensive paper weight, I can’t see a world where I get a PS6 despite decades of console gaming. The PS5 is an oversized final fantasy machine supported by remakes/remasters of all their hits from the PS3/PS4 era. It’s kind of striking when you look at the most popular games on the console.
How about actually releasing games? GT7 and GOW Ragnarok are the only worthwhile exclusives of the current gen. This is hilariously bad for 5 year old console.
But there are plenty of games for PS5, what does it matter to you if they're exclusive or not?
There are no exclusive games for AMD and Nvidia and yet no one complains about that, they just choose whichever brand they prefer to game on and that's it.
Funny that I thought the biggest improvement of PS5 is actually crazy fast storage. No loading screen is really gamechanger. I would love to get xbox instant resume on Playstation.
"Project Amethyst is focused on going beyond traditional rasterization techniques that don't scale well when you try to "brute force that with raw power alone," Huynh said in the video. Instead, the new architecture is focused on more efficient running of the kinds of machine-learning-based neural networks behind AMD's FSR upscaling technology and Sony's similar PSSR system."
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 64.7 ms ] threadSeems they didn’t learn from the PS3, and that exotic architectures don't drive sales. Gamers don’t give a shit and devs won’t choose it unless they have a lucrative first party contract.
The main goal of Direct3D 12, and subsequently Vulcan, was to allow for better use of the underlying graphics hardware as it had changed more and more from its fixed pipeline roots.
So maybe the time is ripe for a rethink, again.
Particularly the frame generation features, upscaling and frame interpolation, have promise but needs to be integrated in a different way I think to really be of benefit.
However, I'm pessimistic on how this can keep evolving. RT already takes a non trivial amount of transistor budget and now those high end AI solutions require another considerable chunk of the transistor budget. If we are already reaching the limits of what non generative AI up-scaling and frame-gen can do, I can't see where a PS7 can go other than using generative AI to interpret a very crude low-detail frame and generating a highly detailed photorealistic scene from that, but that will, I think, require many times more transistor budget than what will likely ever be economically achievable for a whole PS7 system.
Will that be the end of consoles? Will everything move to the cloud and a power guzzling 4KW machine will take care of rendering your PS7 game?
I really can only hope there is a break-trough in miniaturization and we can go back to a pace of improvement that can actually give us a new generation of consoles (and computers) that makes the transition from an SNES to a N64 feel quaint.
And while consoles usually lag behind the latest available graphics, I'd expect raytracing and even path tracing to become available to console graphics eventually.
One advantage of consoles is that they're a fixed hardware target, so games can test on the exact hardware and know exactly what performance they'll get, and whether they consider that performance an acceptable experience.
I know this isn't an original idea, but I wonder if this will be the trick for step-level improvement in visuals. Use traditional 3D models for the broad strokes and generative AI for texture and lighting details. We're at diminishing returns for add polygons and better lighting, and generative AI seems to be better at improving from there—when it doesn't have to get the finger count right.
1. We realistically aren't going much past 4k anytime soon. Even the few 8k sets on the market are sort of tech demos, because there isn't really the content for it. Maybe 120/240/etc FPS will be a thing, but that's really a linear growth, not exponential, and it has a pretty short path to go (will 500Hz displays ever become a big seller? 1kHz?)
2. The triple-A games market itself is strained-- too many big-money flops, and those are the ones that have historically substituted more triangles for better storytelling.
So you're going to reach a point where the hardware isn't really limiting the designers' visions anymore.
GenAI seems like a questionable approach for game rendering, both because of inefficiency and non-repeatability. If the AI renders the same scene slightly differently on two machines, it could cause bugs or unfair competitive edges. At most, we'd see AI during the development process to build assets, and that doesn't require a bigger local GPU.
The times of console giants, their fiefdoms and the big game studios is coming to an end.
But the way it is framed as a revolutionary step and as a Sony collab is a tad misleading. AMD is competent enough to do it by itself, and this will definitely show up in PC and the competing Xbox.
Why not also give a mini AMD EPYC cpu with 32 cores? This way games would start to be much better at multicore.
PS5 will be remembered as the worst PS generation.
As someone working at an ISP, I am frustrated with how bad Sony has mangled the networking stack on these consoles. I thought BSD was supposed to be the best in breed of networking but instead Sony has found all sorts of magical ways to make it Not Work.
From the PS5 variants that just hate 802.11ax to all the gamers making wild suggestions like changing MTU settings or DNS settings just to make your games work online... man, does Sony make it a pain for us to troubleshoot when they wreck it.
Bonus points that they took away the Web browser so we can't even try to do forward-facing troubleshooting without going through an obtuse process of the third-party-account-linking system to sneak out of the process to run a proper speedtest to Speedtest/Fast to show that "no, it's PSN being slow, not us".
How good it will be? Just look at the current upscalers working on perfectly rendered images - photos. And they aren't doing it in realtime. So the errors, noise, and artefacts are all but inevitable. Those will be masked by post processing techniques that will inevitably degrade image clarity.
Frankly after releasing the $700 pro and going “it’s basically the same specs but it can actually do 4K60 this time we promise” and given how many friends I have with the PS5 sitting around as an expensive paper weight, I can’t see a world where I get a PS6 despite decades of console gaming. The PS5 is an oversized final fantasy machine supported by remakes/remasters of all their hits from the PS3/PS4 era. It’s kind of striking when you look at the most popular games on the console.
Don’t even get me started on Xbox lol
so fake frames generation ?
There are no exclusive games for AMD and Nvidia and yet no one complains about that, they just choose whichever brand they prefer to game on and that's it.
https://youtu.be/Ru7dK_X5tnc
Graphic is nice but not number one.
clicks article
"Project Amethyst is focused on going beyond traditional rasterization techniques that don't scale well when you try to "brute force that with raw power alone," Huynh said in the video. Instead, the new architecture is focused on more efficient running of the kinds of machine-learning-based neural networks behind AMD's FSR upscaling technology and Sony's similar PSSR system."
"Yep..."
Sigh.