6 ms·

The inclusion of ray tracing hardware is interesting to me, and sounds like good news to Nvidia, who has been pushing ray tracing as part of their RTX cards. E

by e1ven 7y ago

The inclusion of ray tracing hardware is interesting to me, and sounds like good news to Nvidia, who has been pushing ray tracing as part of their RTX cards. Even though this uses a custom GPU, if consoles don't support ray tracing, PC games are unlikely to be designed for it, since most games have cross platform releases. It's also interesting to me that they're supporting the existing PSVR - The new hardware will really help it have some amazing experiences, and it suggests they're decoupling their VR products from the console releases.

notTyler 7y ago
Ray tracing hardware being included kind of worries me actually. Unless they're selling it at a loss I can't see it being below 500 dollars with the prices of ray tracing capable cards being as high as they are. As far as PSVR, the herculean amount of effort required to get something in the vein of backwards compatibility going between PS3 and PS4 makes me think it was designed from the ground up to work with basically everything PS4.
- pwthornton 7y ago
  Almost all video game consoles are sold at a loss -- sometimes a huge loss in the first few years. Making money on console hardware has never been the name of the game. Every game sold for a Playstation comes with a licensing fee. It's in Sony's best interest to sell as many games as possible, which often means selling consoles at a loss. Sony and other hardware makers also sell a lot of accessories, which often have huge margins too. The online services they sell also have big margins. Selling hardware at a loss is one reason that consoles have always punched much higher graphically relative to price. If the PS5 comes out for $500, it probably cost Sony around $700 to make it, and this is with getting massive volume discounts (guaranteed CPU and GPU contracts over several years with huge volumes of orders coming in) that your PC can't get. And then because consoles only have one CPU and GPU combo to program to, you can get a lot more out of the hardware than you can with a PC. This is why when the PS5 and the new Xbox launch, it'll probably give you better fidelity than a much more expense gaming PC -- and it will only get better visual fidelity for years to come as developers learn to exploit the architecture better.
  - PyroLagus 7y ago
    I guess that would explain why Sony got rid of the option to run Linux on the PS3. With businesses buying PS3s as cheap servers and not buying any games, that would definitely be a bad deal for Sony if they sold the PS3 at a loss.
    - pwthornton 7y ago
      Yes that makes a lot of sense. Sony does not want to incentivize people to buy their consoles and never buy anything that they actually make money off of.
  - gspetr 7y ago
    > Selling hardware at a loss is one reason that consoles have always punched much higher graphically relative to price. Here's a 2 year old video comparing a $550 PC (with RX480) to PS4 Pro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HueyUmSHrdo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HueyUmSHrdo Also, PS4 Pro specs list its GPU perf at 4.2 Tflops, while a GTX 1080, worth $499 and predating PS4 Pro by half a year has 8.2 Tflops. It's in the ballpark of 3.8Tflops of GTX 1060, MSRP $249. The PS4 Pro's CPU at 2.13 GHz is also not what one would call punching above your weight. There are cheap i3's more powerful than that. A console's value is a very dubious proposition if you are in a country which is given a favorable regional pricing by Steam.
    - asdff 7y ago
      It was always the case that you can build a faster PC than a console at roughly the same price. The difference is the games are optimized for the console then usually poorly ported to PC so they aren't very comparable.
      - gspetr 7y ago
        The inverse can also be true, I've been recently told by console players that Diablo 3 for instance simply omits rendering of crucial enemy attacks (e.g. Molten explosions), if there are too many enemies on the screen. And console versions have less enemies than the PC version to begin with.
- jerf 7y ago
  I don't disagree with pwthornton, but I'd also point out Sony has a looooong history of hype-hype-hyping the heck out of their hardware, far beyond its actual capabilities. I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest they ship "ray tracing" capabilities that work on one launch game, and every other (serious) game developer takes one look at and says "no thanks, the 'conventional' pipeline for me, thanks" because in their rush to get it in there and get it shipping it'll have some critical oversight that renders it nowhere near as useful as it could have been. (For instance, not having enough bandwidth to and from the raytracing elements to be able to keep up or something like that, or if you use that mode it turns off too many other useful features so that nobody ever really uses it, for example, if you can raytrace but then architecturally have no practical way to post-process the image because it's all set up to be shoveled straight to the display, few game developers may find it that appealing.) I still run into about one person a year on the internet who still can't understand why we're not all running Cell processors in our desktops, or who still thinks the PS3 has never had its power "fully unlocked", the answer being Sony hyped them well beyond what the tech could actually handle. In the end, it was merely about the level of hardware we'd expect for that amount of money at that time in a console, and was somewhat ahead of the XBox 360 in some ways and somewhat behind in others, not some sort of massive cutting edge next step thing that nobody caught up to for years. I'd say take Sony's claims with a grain of salt, but that's probably not strong enough; do something more like divide everything they say by 4 or 5 and you're probably getting closer to the truth.
- britch 7y ago
  As I understand it (and I'm not an expert) the difficulty around PS3 backwards compatibility was an effect of its weird architecture. The PS4 (and XB1) are structured like most other PCs. It makes sense the peripherals would still be compatible, and it would be easy to make games backwards compatible.
alexisread 7y ago
Just a shout out to a coder who has managed realtime raytracing on a stock Atari Falcon (16mhz CPU): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTGnZTDUKd0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTGnZTDUKd0
- klipklop 7y ago
  This is pretty awesome, thanks for the link. I like what he has done with Quake 2 as well.

by e1ven 7y ago

notTyler 7y ago

Ray tracing hardware being included kind of worries me actually. Unless they're selling it at a loss I can't see it being below 500 dollars with the prices of ray tracing capable cards being as high as they are. As far as PSVR, the herculean amount of effort required to get something in the vein of backwards compatibility going between PS3 and PS4 makes me think it was designed from the ground up to work with basically everything PS4.

pwthornton 7y ago
Almost all video game consoles are sold at a loss -- sometimes a huge loss in the first few years. Making money on console hardware has never been the name of the game. Every game sold for a Playstation comes with a licensing fee. It's in Sony's best interest to sell as many games as possible, which often means selling consoles at a loss. Sony and other hardware makers also sell a lot of accessories, which often have huge margins too. The online services they sell also have big margins. Selling hardware at a loss is one reason that consoles have always punched much higher graphically relative to price. If the PS5 comes out for $500, it probably cost Sony around $700 to make it, and this is with getting massive volume discounts (guaranteed CPU and GPU contracts over several years with huge volumes of orders coming in) that your PC can't get. And then because consoles only have one CPU and GPU combo to program to, you can get a lot more out of the hardware than you can with a PC. This is why when the PS5 and the new Xbox launch, it'll probably give you better fidelity than a much more expense gaming PC -- and it will only get better visual fidelity for years to come as developers learn to exploit the architecture better.
- PyroLagus 7y ago
  I guess that would explain why Sony got rid of the option to run Linux on the PS3. With businesses buying PS3s as cheap servers and not buying any games, that would definitely be a bad deal for Sony if they sold the PS3 at a loss.
  - pwthornton 7y ago
    Yes that makes a lot of sense. Sony does not want to incentivize people to buy their consoles and never buy anything that they actually make money off of.
- gspetr 7y ago
  > Selling hardware at a loss is one reason that consoles have always punched much higher graphically relative to price. Here's a 2 year old video comparing a $550 PC (with RX480) to PS4 Pro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HueyUmSHrdo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HueyUmSHrdo Also, PS4 Pro specs list its GPU perf at 4.2 Tflops, while a GTX 1080, worth $499 and predating PS4 Pro by half a year has 8.2 Tflops. It's in the ballpark of 3.8Tflops of GTX 1060, MSRP $249. The PS4 Pro's CPU at 2.13 GHz is also not what one would call punching above your weight. There are cheap i3's more powerful than that. A console's value is a very dubious proposition if you are in a country which is given a favorable regional pricing by Steam.
  - asdff 7y ago
    It was always the case that you can build a faster PC than a console at roughly the same price. The difference is the games are optimized for the console then usually poorly ported to PC so they aren't very comparable.
    - gspetr 7y ago
      The inverse can also be true, I've been recently told by console players that Diablo 3 for instance simply omits rendering of crucial enemy attacks (e.g. Molten explosions), if there are too many enemies on the screen. And console versions have less enemies than the PC version to begin with.
jerf 7y ago
I don't disagree with pwthornton, but I'd also point out Sony has a looooong history of hype-hype-hyping the heck out of their hardware, far beyond its actual capabilities. I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest they ship "ray tracing" capabilities that work on one launch game, and every other (serious) game developer takes one look at and says "no thanks, the 'conventional' pipeline for me, thanks" because in their rush to get it in there and get it shipping it'll have some critical oversight that renders it nowhere near as useful as it could have been. (For instance, not having enough bandwidth to and from the raytracing elements to be able to keep up or something like that, or if you use that mode it turns off too many other useful features so that nobody ever really uses it, for example, if you can raytrace but then architecturally have no practical way to post-process the image because it's all set up to be shoveled straight to the display, few game developers may find it that appealing.) I still run into about one person a year on the internet who still can't understand why we're not all running Cell processors in our desktops, or who still thinks the PS3 has never had its power "fully unlocked", the answer being Sony hyped them well beyond what the tech could actually handle. In the end, it was merely about the level of hardware we'd expect for that amount of money at that time in a console, and was somewhat ahead of the XBox 360 in some ways and somewhat behind in others, not some sort of massive cutting edge next step thing that nobody caught up to for years. I'd say take Sony's claims with a grain of salt, but that's probably not strong enough; do something more like divide everything they say by 4 or 5 and you're probably getting closer to the truth.
britch 7y ago
As I understand it (and I'm not an expert) the difficulty around PS3 backwards compatibility was an effect of its weird architecture. The PS4 (and XB1) are structured like most other PCs. It makes sense the peripherals would still be compatible, and it would be easy to make games backwards compatible.

alexisread 7y ago

Just a shout out to a coder who has managed realtime raytracing on a stock Atari Falcon (16mhz CPU): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTGnZTDUKd0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTGnZTDUKd0

klipklop 7y ago
This is pretty awesome, thanks for the link. I like what he has done with Quake 2 as well.