Comment by coder543
Comment by coder543 4 days ago
Well, Nvidia has powered a much more popular console... the Nintendo Switch, and Nvidia looks set to power the Switch 2 when it launches next year. So, AMD is clearly not the only choice.
Comment by coder543 4 days ago
Well, Nvidia has powered a much more popular console... the Nintendo Switch, and Nvidia looks set to power the Switch 2 when it launches next year. So, AMD is clearly not the only choice.
I think changing from AMD GPUs to Nvidia GPUs by itself has a good chance of breaking backwards compatibility with how low level and custom Sony's GPU API apparently is, so the CPU core architecture would just be a secondary concern.
I was not saying Sony should switch to Nvidia, just pointing out that it is objectively incorrect to say that AMD is the only option for consoles when the most popular console today does not rely on AMD.
I also fully believe Intel could scale up an integrated Battlemage to meet Sony's needs, but is it worth the break in compatibility? Is it worth the added risk when Intel's 13th and 14th gen CPUs have had such publicly documented stability issues? I believe the answer to both questions is "probably not."
> incorrect to say that AMD is the only option for consoles
It's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison though, even if all 3 devices are technically consoles. The Switch is basically a tablet with controllers attached and a tablet/phone CPU while PS5/Xbox are just custom build PCs.
The only reason I can see that it would matter that the Switch is a low-end console is if you think Nvidia is incapable of building something higher end. Are you saying that Nvidia couldn't make more powerful hardware for a high end console? Otherwise, the Switch just demonstrates to me that Nvidia is willing to form the right partnership, and reliably supply the same chips for long periods of time.
I'm certain Nvidia would have no trouble doing a high end console, customized to Microsoft and/or Sony's exacting specs... for the right price.
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 MIPS emulator.
- PS1 BC on PS3 was entirely software; though the Deckard PS2s make this not entirely unprecedented. 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.
- PS2 BC on PS3 was a nightmare. Originally it was all hardware[1], but then they dropped the EE+GS combo chip and went to GPU emulation, then they dropped the PS2 CPU entirely and all backwards compatibility with it. 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. I guess they consider the purchase price of the games on the shop to also pay for the emulator?
- No BC was attempted on PS4 at all, AFAIK. PS3 is a weird basketcase of an architecture, but even PS1 or PS2 aren't BC supported.
At some point Sony gave up on software emulation and decided it's only worth it for retro re-releases where they can carefully control what games run on the emulator and, more importantly, charge you for each re-release. At least the PS4 versions will still play on a PS5... and PS6... right?
[0] A Japan-only PS2 application that served as a replacement for the built-in OSD and let you connect to and download software demos, game trailers, and so on. Also has an e-mail client.
[1] Or at least as "all hardware" as the Deckard PS2s are
> 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.
> No BC was attempted on PS4 at all, AFAIK. PS3 is a weird basketcase of an architecture, but even PS1 or PS2 aren't BC supported.
To Be Faiiiirrrrrr, that whole generation was a basket case. Nintendo with the motion controls. Microsoft with a console that internally was more PC then "traditional" console (and HD-DVD). Sony with the Cell processor and OtherOS™.
I do have fond memories of playing around with Linux on the PS3. Two simultaneous threads! 6 more almost cores!! That's practically a supercomputer!!!
I remember the hype around cell processors being so high around the release of the PlayStation 3. It was novel for the application, but still fizzled out even with the backing it had.
I'll try to answer in the parent commenter's place.
Prior generations of consoles were true-blue, capital-E "embedded". Whatever CPU they could get, graphics hardware that was custom built for that particular machine, and all sorts of weird coprocessors and quirks. For example, in the last generation, we had...
- The PlayStation 2, sporting a CPU with an almost[0] MIPS-compatible core with "vertex units", one of which is exposed to software as a custom MIPS coprocessor, a completely custom GPU architecture, a separate I/O processor that's also a PS1, custom sound mixing hardware, etc.
- The GameCube, sporting a PPC 750 with custom cache management and vector instructions[1], which you might know as the PowerPC G3 that you had in your iMac. The GPU is "ATI technology", but that's because ATI bought out the other company Nintendo contracted to make it, ArtX. And it also has custom audio hardware that runs on another chip with it's own memory.
- The Xbox, sporting... an Intel Celeron and an Nvidia GPU. Oh, wait, that's "just a PC".
Original Xbox is actually a good way to draw some red lines here, because while it is in some respects "just a PC", it's built a lot more like consoles are. All games run in Ring 0, and are very tightly coupled to the individual quirks of the system software. The "Nvidia GPU" is an NV2A, a custom design that Nvidia built specifically for the Xbox. Which itself has custom audio mixing and security hardware you would never find in a PC.
In contrast, while Xbox 360 and PS3 both were stuck with PPC[2], they also both had real operating system software that commercial games were expected to coexist with. On Xbox 360, there's a hypervisor that enforces strict code signing; on PS3 games additionally run in user mode. The existence of these OSes meant that system software could be updated in nontrivial ways, and the system software could do some amount of multitasking, like playing music alongside a game without degrading performance or crashing it. Y'know, like you can on a PC.
Contrast this again to the Nintendo Wii, which stuck with the PPC 750 and ArtX GPU, adding on a security processor designed by BroadOn[3] to do very rudimentary DRM. About the only thing Nintendo could sanely update without bricking systems was the Wii Menu, which is why we were able to get the little clock at the bottom of the screen. They couldn't, say, run disc games off the SD card or update the HOME Menu to have a music player or friends list or whatever, because the former runs in a security processor that exposes the SD card as a block device and the latter is a library Nintendo embedded into every game binary rather than a separate process with dedicated CPU time budgets.
And then the generation after that, Xbox One and PS4 both moved to AMD semicustom designs that had x86 CPUs and Radeon GPUs behind familiar APIs. They're so PC like that the first thing demoed on a hacked PS4 was running Steam and Portal. The Wii U was still kind of "console-like", but even that had an OS running on the actual application processor (albeit one of those weird designs with fixed process partitions like something written for a mainframe). And that got replaced with the Switch which has a proper microkernel operating system running on an Nvidia Tegra SoC that might have even wound up in an Android phone at some point!
Ok, that's "phone-like", not "PC-like", but the differences in systems design philosophy between the two is far smaller than the huge gulf between either of those and oldschool console / embedded systems.
[0] PS2 floating-point is NOWHERE NEAR IEEE standard, and games targeting PS2 tended to have lots of fun physics bugs on other hardware. Case in point: the Dolphin wiki article for True Crime: New York City, which is just a list of bugs the emulator isn't causing. https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=True_Crime:_New...
[1] PPC 750 doesn't have vector normally; IBM added a set of "paired single" instructions that let it do math on 32-bit floats stored in a 64-bit float register.
[2] Right after Apple ditched it for power reasons, which totally would not blow up in Microsoft's face
[3] Which coincidentally was founded by the same ex-SGI guy (Wei Yen) who founded ArtX, and ran DRM software ported from another Wei Yen founded company - iQue.
Considering how the wins are blowing, I'm going to guess the next consoles from Sony and Microsoft are the last ones to use x86. They'll be forced to switch to ARM for price/performance reasons, with all x86 vendors moving upmarket to try and maintain revenues.
> Nvidia has graphics chips, but it doesn't have the CPUs. Yes, Nvidia can make ARM CPUs, but they haven't been putting out amazing custom cores.
Ignorant question - do they have to? The last time I was up on gaming hardware it seemed as though most workloads were GPU-bound and that having a higher-end GPU was more important than having a blazing fast CPU. GPUs have also grown much more flexible rendering pipelines as game engines have gotten much more sophisticated and, presumably, parallelized. Would it not make sense for Nvidia to crank out a cost-optimized design comprising their last-gen GPU architecture with 12 ARM cores on an affordable node size?
The reason I ask is because I've been reading a lot about 90s console architectures recently. My understanding is that back then the CPU and specialized co-processors had to do a lot of heavy lifting on geometry calculations before telling the display hardware what to draw. In contrast I think most contemporary GPU designs take care of all of the vertex calculations themselves and therefore free the CPU up a lot in this regard. If you have an entity-based game engine and are able to split that object graph into well-defined clusters you can probably parallelize the simulation and scale horizontally decently well. Given these trends I'd think a bunch of cheaper cores could work as well for cheaper than higher-end ones.
I think a PS6 needs to play PS5 games, or Sony will have a hard time selling them until the PS6 catalog is big; and they'll have a hard time getting 3rd party developers if they're going to have a hard time with console sales. I don't think you're going to play existing PS5 games on an ARM CPU unless it's an "amazing" core. Apple does pretty good at running x86 code on their CPUs, but they added special modes to make it work, and I don't know how timing sensitive PS5 games are --- when there's only a handful of hardware variants, you can easily end up with tricky timing requirements.
I mean, the PS4 didn't play PS3 games and that didn't hurt it any. Backwards compatibility is nice but it isn't the only factor.
>The problem with choosing Nvidia is that they can't make an x86 processor with an integrated GPU
Can't and not being allowed are two very different things
> much more popular console
which isn't a useful metric because "being a good GPU" wasn't at all why the switch became successful, like you could say it became successful even through it had a pretty bad GPU. Through bad only in the perf. aspect as far as I can tell back then amd wasn't competitive on energy usage basis and maybe not on a price basis as the nvidea chips where a by product of Nvidea trying to enter the media/TV add on/handheld market with stuff like the Nvidea Shield.
But yes AMD isn't the only choice, IMHO in difference to what many people seem to think for the price segment most consoles tend to target Intel is a viable choice, too. But then we are missing relevant insider information to properly judge that.
> the Nintendo Switch, and Nvidia looks set to power the Switch 2
Which runs a very old mobile chip which was already outdated when the Switch came out. Unless Nintendo is planning to go with something high-end this time (e.g. to compete with the Steam Deck and other more powerful handhelds) whatever they get from Nvidia will probably be more or less equivalent to an mid-tier of the shelf Qualcomm SoC.
It's interesting that Nvidia is going with that, it will just depress their margins. I guess they want to reenter the mobile CPU market and need something to show off.
We already have a good sense of what SoC Nintendo will likely be going with for the Switch 2.
Being so dismissive of the Switch shows the disconnect between what most gamers care about, and what some tech enthusiasts think gamers care about.
The Switch 1 used a crappy mobile chip, sure, but it was able to run tons of games that no other Tegra device could have dreamed of running, due to the power of having a stable target for optimization, with sufficiently powerful APIs available, and a huge target market. The Switch 1 can do 90% of what a Steam Deck can, while using a fraction of the power, thickness, and cooling. With the Switch 2 almost certainly gaining DLSS, I fully expect the Switch 2 to run circles around the Steam Deck, even without a “high end chip”. It will be weaker on paper, but that won’t matter.
I say this as someone who owns a PS5, a Switch OLED, an ROG Ally, and a fairly decent gaming PC. I briefly had an original Steam Deck, but the screen was atrocious.
Most people I see talking about Steam Deck’s awesomeness seem to either have very little experience with a Switch, or just have a lot of disdain for Nintendo. Yes, having access to Steam games is cool… but hauling around a massive device with short battery life is not cool to most gamers, and neither is spending forever tweaking settings just to get something that’s marginally better than the Switch 1 can do out of the box.
The Switch 1 is at the end of its life right now, but Nintendo is certainly preparing the hardware for the next 6 to 8 years.
> Being so dismissive of the Switch shows the disconnect between what most gamers care about, and what some tech enthusiasts think gamers care about.
What makes you think I am? Hardware wise it's an equivalent of a unremarkable ancient Android tablet, yet it's pretty exceptional what Nintendo manage to achieve despite of that.
> The Switch 1 can do 90% of what a Steam Deck can
That's highly debatable and almost completely depends on what games specifically you like/play. IMHO PC gaming and Nintendo have relatively little overlap (e.g. compared to to PS and Xbox at least).
> Steam Deck’s awesomeness
I never implied that the Switch was/is/will be somehow inferior (besides potentially having a slower CPU & GPU).
> but Nintendo is certainly preparing the hardware for the next 6 to 8 years
It's not obvious that they were the first time and still did fine, why would they change their approach this time (albeit there weren't necessarily that many options on the market back then but it was still an ~2 year old chip).
> IMHO PC gaming and Nintendo have relatively little overlap (e.g. compared to PS and Xbox at least).
That was true back in the Wii era, because there was nothing remarkable about the Wii apart from its input method. It was "just another home console" to most developers, so why bother going through the effort to port their games from more powerful consoles down to the Wii, where they will just look bad, run poorly, and have weird controls?
With the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo found huge success in third party titles because everyone who made a game was enthusiastic about being able to play their game portably, and the Switch made that possible with hardware that was architecturally similar to other consoles and PCs (at least by comparison to previous handheld gaming consoles), which made porting feasible without a complete rewrite.
In my opinion, basically the only console games that aren't available on Switch at this point are the very most recent crop of high-end games, which the Switch is too old to run, as well as certain exclusives. If the Switch were still able to handle all the third party ports, then I don't even know if Nintendo would be interested in a Switch 2, but they do seem to care about the decent chunk of money they're making from third party games.
The overlap with PC is the same as the overlap between PC and other consoles... which is quite a lot, but doesn't include certain genres like RTSes. They've tried bringing Starcraft to console before, and that wasn't very well received for obvious reasons, haha
> It's not obvious that they were the first time and still did fine, why would they change their approach this time
I'm not sure I was saying they would change their approach... the Switch 1 is over 7 years old at this point. I was just saying they're preparing the next generation to last the same amount of time, which means finding sufficiently powerful hardware. The Switch 1 was sufficiently powerful, even for running lots of "impossible" ports throughout its lifetime: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENECyFQPe-4
All of that to say, I am a big fan of the Switch OLED. I'm honestly ready to sell my ROG Ally, just because I never use it. But, being a bit of a contradiction, I am also extremely interested in the PS5 Pro. My PS5 has been a great experience, but I wish it had graphical fidelity that was a bit closer to my PC... without the inconvenience of Windows. For a handheld, I care a lot about portability (small size), battery life, and low hassle (not Windows, and not requiring tons of tweaking of graphics settings to get a good experience), and the Switch OLED does a great job of those things, while having access to a surprisingly complete catalog of both first-party and third-party games.
Actually there is one remarkle thing about the Wii, but it hardly matters in this context, it was one of the very few consoles out there that actually had something that relates to OpenGL, namely the shading language and how the API was designed.
Many keep thinking that Khronos APIs have any use on game consoles, which is seldom the case.
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 been putting out amazing custom cores.
AMD can simply repackage some Zen X cores with RDNA X GPU and with a little work have something Sony can use. Nvidia would need to either grab off-the-shelf ARM Cortex cores (like most of their ARM CPUs use) or Sony would need to bet that Nvidia could and would give them leading-edge performance on custom designed cores. But would Nvidia come in at a price that Sony would pay? Probably not. AMD's costs are probably a lot lower since they're going to be doing all that CPU work anyway for the rest of their business.
For Nintendo, the calculus is a bit different. Nintendo is fine with off-the-shelf cores that are less powerful than smartphones and they're already on ARM so there's no backward incompatibility there. But for Sony whose business is different, it'd be a huge gamble.