Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD • Hacker News Board

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#111

Post by lxgr » Tue, Sep 17, 2024, 2:29 AM UTC

senkora wrote: post #49

Danieru wrote: post #37

No one appears to have mentioned the important meta game going on: Intel bidding as a credible alternative supplier. For Intel, by bidding they get to undercut AMD's profits. For Sony, they get a credible alternative which they can pretend would be a viable choice. Thus forcing a slightly better deal from AMD. We saw similar articles related to the Switch 2. That time it was AMD acting as spoiler to Nvidia. Nvidia re…

+1. An important non-obvious detail for AMD is that they (at least in the past, I assume for this as well) have kept the instruction timings similar from generation to generation of consoles. Different x86 micro-architectures benefit from writing the machine code in slightly different ways. Games are highly optimized to the specific micro-architecture of the console, so keeping that stable helps game developers optim…

Given the size of such a contract, wouldn't it be reasonable for Sony to just request equal or better instruction latency for everything relevant from the old CPU?

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#112

Post by MBCook » Tue, Sep 17, 2024, 2:29 AM UTC

wmf wrote: post #86

t-3 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a need to ever target 120 fps? Only the best-of-best eyes will even notice a slight difference from 60.

I don't think my TV can display 120 fps and I'm not buying a new one. But they promise 4K 60 (with upscaling) on the PS5 Pro, so they have to have something beyond that for PS6.

They have 120 today, it’s just not used much.

Even if people stick to 4K 60, which I suspect they will, the additional power means higher detail and more enemies on screen and better ray tracing.

I think of the difference between the PlayStation three games that could run at 1080 and PS4 games at 1080. Or PS4 Pro and PS5 at 4k or even 1440p.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#113

Post by yangff » Tue, Sep 17, 2024, 2:32 AM UTC

MichaelZuo wrote: post #94

deaddodo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Different x86 micro-architectures benefit from writing the machine code in slightly different ways. Games are highly optimized to the specific micro-architecture of the console, so keeping that stable helps game developers optimize for the console. While that can be true, very few gamedev companies these days optimize to that degree. They almost all use off-the-shelf middleware and game engines that are built to su…

How would you explain cross PS5/PC releases being much more efficient on the PS5? e.g. Horizon Forbidden West needing a much better GPU on PC to run at the same level of fidelity as the PS5. If not for special tuning specific to the PS5’s differences. (I can imagine Windows bloat and other junk requiring an additional 10% to 20%, but not 30% to 50%.)

Horizon Forbidden West was ported from PS to PC. Decima is an engine from Sony’s first-party studio, so it's understandable that their development process would lean more towards PS's internal architecture rather than the more common GPUs on the market. Of course, even general-purpose engines can perform better on PS5, AMD, or NV. But, for these engines, they have less information about how customers will use the engines, so there's less infomation can be used to optimize. On the other side, customers using these engines often don’t have enough experience optimizing sufficiently for each platform. None of this is absolute, but I think this logic is reasonable.

For game developers using these engines, if they take optimization seriously, they typically make adjustments to lighting, LOD, loading, and model details or shaders on console platforms to achieve a similar visual effect while meeting the targeted performance goals. This is why you usually get better performance on a console at the same price point compared to a PC, aside from the subsidies provided by Sony.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#114

Post by MBCook » Tue, Sep 17, 2024, 2:33 AM UTC

fhdsgbbcaA wrote: post #55

tester756 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Intel to Apple: "We're too big to deliver what you want for cell phones." Apple: "Ok. We'll use ARM." Reality: “We ended up not winning it or passing on it, depending on how you want to view it. And the world would have been a lot different if we’d done it. The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do… At the end of the day, there was a chi…

This is from the horses mouth, and reliable as such. However, it does give the impression that they weren’t sufficiently interested to think more creatively about cost optimization, because they were riding the gravy train of Wintel ruling the world. So I think root comment isn’t too far off.

Right. It’s an accurate quote but that doesn’t mean it’s an accurate analysis.

Not only did they not seem to understand the possibilities in front of them, their chips were not well positioned at all to win. They were too hot and too power-hungry because Intel didn’t care much about efficiency at the time.

They were taking the “shrink a big chip” path. Apple, using ARM from Samsung then their own , ended up taking the “grow a little chip” path.

Which is a little bit ironic because Intel made their fortune on the “little” desktop processor that grew up to take over all the servers from main frames and the “big boy“ server chips like the SPARC and Alpha.

They became the big boys and history started repeating.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#115

Post by yangff » Tue, Sep 17, 2024, 2:34 AM UTC

ac29 wrote: post #76

johnnyanmac wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this was rigged from the start. If Sony did want to take up Intel next gen, they'd need to do a lot of work on backwards compatibility with the PS5 on the PS6. Whereas I imagine the PS6 being a "PS5 Pro Pro" at this rate. I suppose it can be seen as controlling rampant greed (especially for Nvidia), but it feels like the consoles dealt the cards here. There would have needed to either be some revolutionary tech…

> Yeah, this was rigged from the start. If Sony did want to take up Intel next gen, they'd need to do a lot of work on backwards compatibility with the PS5 on the PS6. Whereas I imagine the PS6 being a "PS5 Pro Pro" at this rate. Why would they need to do a lot more work on compatibility if they'd picked Intel vs AMD? Either CPU is presumably going to be x86_64. The GPU is almost certainly going to be much different…

They could have AMD provide a compatibility layer for the GPU (although this might be a bad idea), but implementing an AMD compatibility layer on Intel/NV clearly seems like an even worse idea. But at least you might be able to run the already compiled shaders in compatibility mode?

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#116

Post by deaddodo » Tue, Sep 17, 2024, 2:35 AM UTC

MichaelZuo wrote: post #94

deaddodo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Different x86 micro-architectures benefit from writing the machine code in slightly different ways. Games are highly optimized to the specific micro-architecture of the console, so keeping that stable helps game developers optimize for the console. While that can be true, very few gamedev companies these days optimize to that degree. They almost all use off-the-shelf middleware and game engines that are built to su…

How would you explain cross PS5/PC releases being much more efficient on the PS5? e.g. Horizon Forbidden West needing a much better GPU on PC to run at the same level of fidelity as the PS5. If not for special tuning specific to the PS5’s differences. (I can imagine Windows bloat and other junk requiring an additional 10% to 20%, but not 30% to 50%.)

> They almost all use off-the-shelf middleware and game engines that are built to support all of the platforms. The companies that do go through that effort tend to have very notable releases.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#117

Post by lxgr » Tue, Sep 17, 2024, 2:35 AM UTC

neighbour wrote: post #50

Danieru wrote: post #37

No one appears to have mentioned the important meta game going on: Intel bidding as a credible alternative supplier. For Intel, by bidding they get to undercut AMD's profits. For Sony, they get a credible alternative which they can pretend would be a viable choice. Thus forcing a slightly better deal from AMD. We saw similar articles related to the Switch 2. That time it was AMD acting as spoiler to Nvidia. Nvidia re…

This is all true. Xbox always threatens to leave their current vendors only to end up signing a renewal at the final hours of the contract. >As a gamedev I have a different perspective: Sony and Nintendo would be fools to give up backwards compatibility just for savings on chips. In your view, is this issue worse with modern consoles now that the Playstation (and possibly Nintendo) online store purchases persist acro…

There was no backwards compatibility between the PS3 and PS4 whatsoever (except for PS Plus allowing cloud-based game streaming of some PS3 titles), and Sony survived that as well.

What they did was offer some old PS2 games for purchase, though, which allowed them to tap into that very large back catalog. I could see something like this happen for a hypothetical Intel PS6 as well (i.e. skipping PS5 backwards compatibility and tapping into the large catalog of PS4 and PS4/PS5 games).

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#118

Post by lxgr » Tue, Sep 17, 2024, 2:36 AM UTC

wmf wrote: post #52

neighbour wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is all true. Xbox always threatens to leave their current vendors only to end up signing a renewal at the final hours of the contract. >As a gamedev I have a different perspective: Sony and Nintendo would be fools to give up backwards compatibility just for savings on chips. In your view, is this issue worse with modern consoles now that the Playstation (and possibly Nintendo) online store purchases persist acro…

Microsoft maintained backwards compatibility across Intel+Nvidia, IBM+ATI, and AMD+AMD so it's possible. Sony hasn't invested as much in compatibility, instead just keeping the same architecture for PS4/5.

Sony has historically invested a lot into backwards compatibility, going as far as shipping the previous gen's GPU and/or CPU with the PS2, initial PS3 models, and the PS Vita.

PS3 compatibility on the PS4 was notably absent, though.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#119

Post by TimeBearingDown » Tue, Sep 17, 2024, 2:37 AM UTC

jitl wrote: post #99

MichaelZuo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you explain cross PS5/PC releases being much more efficient on the PS5? e.g. Horizon Forbidden West needing a much better GPU on PC to run at the same level of fidelity as the PS5. If not for special tuning specific to the PS5’s differences. (I can imagine Windows bloat and other junk requiring an additional 10% to 20%, but not 30% to 50%.)

The comment above is elaborating on x86 micro-architecture, the differences between how the CPU handles x86 instructions specifically. The overall system architecture is different between PC, which has discrete memory systems for the CPU and GPU, and a very long pathway between GPU memory and system/CPU memory, versus today's consoles which have unified memory for CPU+GPU, and optimized pathways for loading from pers…

Great answer. Denuvo and other heavy anti-piracy tools are also sometimes used for releases on PCs which can seriously impact performance.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#120

Post by lxgr » Tue, Sep 17, 2024, 2:43 AM UTC

kmeisthax wrote: post #72

mdasen wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with choosing Nvidia is that they can't make an x86 processor with an integrated GPU. If you're looking to maintain backward compatibility with the Playstation 5, you're probably going to want to stick with an x86 chip. AMD has the rights to make x86 chips and it has the graphics chips to integrate. Nvidia has graphics chips, but it doesn't have the CPUs. Yes, Nvidia can make ARM CPUs, but they haven't be…

Emulating x86 would be an option - though given Sony's history, I doubt they'd consider it seriously. For context... - PS1 BC on PS2 was mostly hardware but they (AFAIK?) had to write some code to translate PS1 GPU commands to the PS2 GS. That's why you could forcibly enable bilinear filtering on PS1 games. Later on they got rid of the PS1 CPU / "IO processor" and replaced it with a PPC chip ("Deckard") running a MIP…

> Then they actually wrote a PS2 emulator anyway, which is part of the firmware, but only allowed to be used with PS2 Classics and not as BC.

To be fair, IMO that was only 80-90% of a money grab; "you can now run old physical PS2 games, but only these 30% of our catalog" being a weird selling point was probably also a consideration.

> Sony had already written POPS for PS1 downloads on PS2 BBN[0] and PSP's PS1 Classics, so they knew how to emulate a PS1.

POPS on the PSP runs large parts of the code directly on the R4000 without translation/interpretation, right? I'd call this one closer to what they did for PS1 games on the (early/non-Deckard) PS2s.