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The fact they managed to achieve this astounds me. I grew up with the PS3 as a teenager, and I just remember being told how complex the architecture was, as we
by dottjt 3y ago
The fact they managed to achieve this astounds me.
I grew up with the PS3 as a teenager, and I just remember being told how complex the architecture was, as well as just how powerful the system was. Keep in mind, the US Air force connected 1000+ of these together for super computing purposes.
...and now a large part of it has been emulated to a high degree and it kind of blows my mind. Will be crazy to think that the ps5 will likely be emulated on a computer within the next 20 years; perhaps easier so because of the simpler architecture.
- Wingy 3y agoThe PS5 is already emulated on computers today to some degree. Kyty doesn’t run any commercial PS5 games but it can run some homebrew PS5 apps.
- kevincox 3y agoThe PS5 is basically a regular old desktop computer. The PS3 has a quite unique multi-"cell" architecture.
- hypercube33 3y agoPS5 and Xbox SX are AMD Ryzen 4000 series x86 and a GPU slapped on a die with some memory so emulation isnt so far off
- dagmx 3y agoThe original Xbox proved that hardware similarity doesn’t necessarily make emulation easy. It took a long while for OG Xbox emulation to be decent , and that was with it using fairly commodity hardware and a very DirectX api. The PS5 has custom APIs that would need to be reversed out, especially graphics APIs. It also has a large-ish pool of shared memory that makes it difficult to map to most PCs which don’t have that setup. There’s several custom hardware blocks for bespoke decompression that are routinely used and the equivalent to direct storage to speed up resource access. It’s not impossible to port those games over as has been seen, but it’s also not easy to emulate that if the specific game builds make use of those features (and many many games do)
- xienze 3y agoI think what we'll likely see is that it's (relatively) easy to get PS5 games running in a PC emulator, but running them _well_ will take ages. Primarily because PCs will have to be able to out-horsepower the PS5 by a wide margin to make up for things like the shared memory setup, texture streaming stuff, etc.
- dagmx 3y agoIt would be interesting to me to see an emulator that specifically required APUs to run to not have to design around the unshared memory pool of a discrete GPU. Either an AMD APU or, if Rosetta sticks around, the Apple Silicon chips.
- jwells89 3y agoYeah, PS5 games expect to have up to 16GB of VRAM available, and thanks to GPU vendors being stingy with VRAM to upsell to get that you’d need to buy expensive high end cards. But that doesn’t do anything to help with the PS5’s shared memory architecture, where because VRAM and RAM are one in the same, textures that need to be in memory aren’t duplicated between RAM and VRAM like on bog standard PCs, which has performance implications. Windows has support for streaming assets directly from SSDs like the PS5 does now (at least if you have a fast enough NVMe SSD installed, SATA SSDs or older NVMe drives won’t cut it), but PCs still lack the hardware texture decompression of the PS5 which once again impacts performance. The mass market computers closest in architecture to PS5s are actually M-series Macs, with how they also have a large pool of memory serving as both RAM and VRAM. Once the integrated GPUs on M-series SoCs achieves parity with the PS5’s onboard Radeon, they might actually be the most straightforward to emulate a PS5 on despite needing x86-to-ARM translation.
- dagmx 3y agoExcellent points on memory architecture. Though I’d posit that the non-base M series GPUs are actually already equal or higher performing than the fairly aging Radeons on a PS4/5, depending on the respective SKUs The wild cards will be translation overhead , differences in TBDR access and thermal headroom.
- xela79 3y agoI can really recommend this tech talk regarding PS4 and PS5 hardware by their lead hardware architect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph8LyNIT9sg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph8LyNIT9sg some really interesting topics related to what kind of performance they wanted as a baseline and how to optimize to make the PS5 do what it currently does... like no other platform. a $700 console that: - outputs 4k / HDR (upscaled from lower native res. ofc) - renders games steadily at 30 / 60fps - no hitches, framedrops - always records your gameplay - live video sharing of stream with PS friends - live streaming to youtube - updates of games being installed - downloads of games/data all simultaneous, instant game switches, quick loading times. the experience cannot be replicated with a 1k gaming PC, not even a $2000 machine. They really delivered a device which is imho, more than just "an AMD gaming PC with a custom GUI and some DRM" would have loved to have widescale keyboard/mouse support, as playing Far Cry with a controller is frustrating at best. And keyboard/mouse support is in hands of the game dev if they want to support it or not.
- MikusR 3y ago- no hitches, framedrops This statement alone is pure bullshit. So the rest should be taken with a pound of salt.
- fulafel 3y agoThe hw is tricky to program (eg SPUs can't directly access main memory), but not necessarily hard to implement.
- jerf 3y ago"Keep in mind, the US Air force connected 1000+ of these together for super computing purposes." Which I have long suspected was just a marketing stunt, because even at the time it made no sense. Even on the day of release, the PS3 was merely right where we'd expect a console of the time to perform. No better, and certainly not massively better. My hat's off to Sony for the quality of their propaganda around the PS3. Lots of people still seem to believe it was something amazing, rather than... a console, which worked about as well as expected. Honestly I'd rate it a bit under par when evaluated objectively, in their zeal to pump up some of their metrics they trashed some other ones like the way memory access works in that system. They'd probably have been better off with a more traditional architecture in the end.
- throwawaymobule 3y agoThe consoles were cheaper than buying the same CPU from IBM. I think that was their logic.
- fomine3 3y agoCell was theoretically great about computing, but moderate (or worse) about gaming