ARM: Mobile Graphics Will Surpass PlayStation 4, Xbox One In 2017 (venturebeat.com) 90
AmiMoJo writes with a report from Venturebeat on the state (and predicted future) of mobile-device graphics: ARM, the technology design company responsible for the popular ARM CPU architecture, is preparing for another big leap in computational power for smartphones and tablets. ARM ecosystem director Nizar Romdan explained that the chips that his company creates with partners like Nvidia, Samsung, and Texas Instruments will generate visuals on par with and then surpass what you get from the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles by the end of 2017. PS4 can compute around 1.84 TFLOPS (tera FLOPS), with mobile chips approaching 2 TFLOPS by the last quarter of 2017. Romdan points out that virtual reality eliminates that form factor difference. Wearing a headset on your face is the same if you're tethered to a PC or using a phone.
Yeah, whatever ARM (Score:5, Insightful)
I like how they subtly segue from "BETTER THAN CONSOLEZ!!" to VR in such a sneaky markety way.
Considering that there is literally no way that these ARM parts are going to beat a GT4+ Skylake's GPU -- and that the GT4+ Skylake's GPU is going to be trashed as being completely worthless for VR -- I'm not holding my breath.
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However Consoles are uniformed in their Graphics, allowing game makers to make their games directly for the graphics hardware, taking advantage of all the new features.
If you get the Latest and greatest GPU you have features that Game makers will not publish in decades, Thus you will have less of of an overall benefit from the upgrade.
In terms of raw power your PC is almost always superior to the console. However Consoles tend to have better quality games because it can take advantage on what it has. Becau
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Re:Yeah, whatever ARM (Score:4, Insightful)
Using car analogy, you are saying out that using old Civic is better than Ferrari, because not everybody could handle driving a Ferrari? Well, I know which one I would rather drive.
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Why would I choose performance over the games I want to play?
I mean given the choice of playing some generic "gritty" arena shooter or the highly innovative game "Splatoon", I would choose "Splatoon". It performs good enough and the graphics look pretty slick. I don't need to see an inkling's nose hair with realistic nose hair physics to enjoy the game. In fact I prefer to not be in the uncanny valley that caused the hardcore PC games of yesterday to age so poorly while the console games still look pretty g
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However Consoles are uniformed in their Graphics, allowing game makers to make their games directly for the graphics hardware, taking advantage of all the new features.
I'm not sure what this means. Even the current generation of consoles which use AMD GPU chipsets are not uniform. The PS4 clearly has an advantage. On top of this, the development systems are clearly different so a game on one console is not really the same as another.
If you get the Latest and greatest GPU you have features that Game makers will not publish in decades, Thus you will have less of of an overall benefit from the upgrade.
Decades? No. A few years. Maybe a decade if you are lucky.
In terms of raw power your PC is almost always superior to the console. However Consoles tend to have better quality games because it can take advantage on what it has. Because not all gamers will shell out $10,000 for the ultimate gaming system that will be out of date next year.
That isn't the advantage of a PC. You can upgrade the hardware if you want. You cannot do that with a console. So consoles having better quality games is not a good argument. Console g
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The PS4 clearly has an advantage.
From what we've seen so far, the advantage is negligible. Sony tends to go for the higher resolutions, but it more often than not kills the framerate, making you wonder how big that gap actually is, and if it's there at all.
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However Consoles are uniformed in their Graphics, allowing game makers to make their games directly for the graphics hardware, taking advantage of all the new features.
I'm not sure what this means. Even the current generation of consoles which use AMD GPU chipsets are not uniform. The PS4 clearly has an advantage. On top of this, the development systems are clearly different so a game on one console is not really the same as another.
I'm pretty sure the point was that all PS4 consoles have the same graphics hardware, which would allow the developers to eliminate one layer of abstraction that you would need for PCs that have a wide range of graphics hardware (particularly nVidia vs. AMD). In theory, having that abstraction layer comes at the cost of some amount of processing power, and removing that cost gives you better overall performance.
I'm not a game developer, so I don't know offhand what that cost might be. It's quite possible
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allowing game makers to make their games directly for the graphics hardware
and to make their graphics slightly too complex to allow continuously smooth frame rates, it usually seems.
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If you get the Latest and greatest GPU you have features that Game makers will not publish in decades, Thus you will have less of of an overall benefit from the upgrade.
Decades, really? A couple of years a most.
In terms of raw power your PC is almost always superior to the console. However Consoles tend to have better quality games because it can take advantage on what it has. Because not all gamers will shell out $10,000 for the ultimate gaming system that will be out of date next year.
What? What are you smoking? First, a very solid PC (much better than a console) doesn't cost $10K, second, it's definitely not out of date next year, and third, opposite to consoles, a PC doesn't get obsolete "at once". You can upgrade components piece-wise, and keep your PC at whatever distance you want from the top of line.
Either you're a troll or you don't understand the economics and IT aspects of PCs
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It could be huge for Android. Many phones offer HDMI output and Bluetooth controller support. They combine the best of PC and console - powerful and constantly updated, but also a limited number of hardware variants and software configurations.
Mobile devices could become as big as consoles for gamers.
For VR, the key is low latency and high frame rate. Google Cardboard works amazingly well. You only need a monster CPU/GPU combo if you want to run games with equal graphical quality to normal PC games. I'm sur
Re:Yeah, whatever ARM (Score:5, Insightful)
[..]constantly updated, but also a limited number of hardware variants and software configurations.[..]
Are we talking about the same Android? You seem to have enumerated where android is the weakest; poor vendor update frequency, many varied hardware platforms, a plethora of vendor or user customized software configurations.
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Android hardware is actually fairly homogenous, especially at the top end. There are a handful of SoCs in use. The Android API is very stable.
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Perhaps i'm showing my age here, but is anyone else floored that you can buy a battery powered device that can fit in your pocket that outperforms something like ASCI Red. Obviously it lacks the same memory and memory bandwidth but that's still astounding to me. Of course ASCI Red would now be 20 years old, so maybe not that surprising.
You aren't saying much either... (Score:2)
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Shader programs are almost exclusively floating point maths. And a big part of rasterization (drawing triangles) is interpolation, floating point maths again.
The two big things that define the power of a GPU are floating point computing power and memory bandwidth. Which one is more important depend on the engine used, with possible tradeoffs between the two.
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A GPU consists of anything from four to thousands of processing cores. Each core in turn will have multiple logic units to handle integer operations, floating-point and vector instructions (linear algebra like dot and cross products), so that it can perform multiple instructions at the same time along with instruction pipelining. Add several layers of cache to minimize the amount of data read and written to main memory, and you get something like the Titan Z which can do 8 TeraFlops.
The clock speed of the g
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Hay, I'm a white man, I'm hardly going to blame myself!
FYI, it's all the MRAs fault. The PS4 would be so much better if it wasn't full of toxic masculinity and employed more women. Our lady Sarkeesian told me to say that.
Try again... (Score:2, Informative)
All aboard the hype train.....not.
It's not really an accomplishment considering the hardware in the PS4 and XB1 were already outdated when they released compared to what was available on a PC platform. Take also in to account that a GF970/RD290 is the baseline for VR gaming, ARM platforms won't be gaming at decent resolutions for a few more years at the minimum.
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It's all about the power consumption.
Unless they come up with some new radical semiconductor processes they can neither supply nor dissipate enough power to do anything really interesting.
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Is it hype? People tend to update their phones regularly, while consoles remain fixed for many years and as you point out tend to start out fairly pedestrian in the first place. I can see Samsung releasing a dock to turn their phones into high end games consoles, complete with controllers and HDMI output.
Sure, they will never complete with PCs, but neither do consoles. Performance hasn't been the main attraction of consoles since the early 90s.
As for VR, considering that a reasonable PC set up with headset
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I agree with you...mostly.
Performance is still a primary factor for consoles. Without the proper hardware, you will never achieve the visuals desired at the resolutions wanted.
Now for video playback and some AR, this won't be a problem, the amount of graphics horsepower required is fairly modest, but for any games that are pushing the envelope on graphics and physics, ARM will not do for quite some time.
Also, I'm not bashing Google Cardboard or any of the other VR options out there, I think they all have t
Im not sure by 2017... (Score:2)
but eventually sure. Android boxes already do emulation of multiple consoles. Nintentdo, Super nintendo, N64, gameboy,etc.
Of course it will. (Score:2)
Because by then, PS4 and XBone will be 4 year old technology.
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Or possibly discontinued for a newer model.
PS4/XB1 are mid-range 2013 devices (Score:3)
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VR makes 25 to 50% of people sick (Score:2)
The problem is that VR doesn't work for everyone...a very large percentage of people get nauseous when wearing a VR headset - especially for gaming.
Most VR companies claim (perpetually) that the next rev of their tech will fix this by means of lower latency, brighter or higher resolution screens, improved lenses, better field of view.
That's missing the problem. The problem is that we perceive distance by two mechanisms - focus and convergence. Everybody has fixed convergence - nobody has fixed the focussi
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Note that for experiences with 1:1 movement, I've never seen anyone get sick as of the DK2 generation of VR. I have made people sick by having their character move without them moving, and that's a significant challenge, but I don't think the Magic Leap multi-focal approach does anything with sickness.
And also, even for the locomotion problem, it's far from ubiquitous. There's also a decent chunk of folks who get nauseous seeing a FPS genre game on a monitor. Somehow that genre thrives in spite of that.
3
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I didn't think focus was the big problem - doesn't that just lead to headaches, not vomitting?
I thought it was the imperfect timing of real movement to VR movement (or the lack of real movement for a VR movement) that brings on the chunders.
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IIRC, the problem with nausea is caused by lag and the apparent disconnection between head movement and display update. Carmack had a number of write-ups on this matter; it was basically the single most important problem the Occulus Rift team had to tackle during development.
Re:VR makes 25 to 50% of people sick (Score:4, Interesting)
...The problem is that we perceive distance by two mechanisms - focus and convergence. Everybody has fixed convergence - nobody has fixed the focusing issue....
There is a fix for the focusing issue, but it is quite expensive: Holography [wikipedia.org]. You feed each eye with the same light waves that they would have received if they had been looking at the objects being depicted--two virtual images [optique-ingenieur.org]. I suspect this technology is too expensive for today's market, but it is the only good solution to the problem.
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Its not just the convergence/focus system, balance and the missing g-forces also factor in.
But it seems to me this can be "trained". when i got my set 2 months ago, i could play for about 15 minutes until i got sick, now i can go for about 2 hours before i get slightly uncomfortable
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Try a slackline instead. Good fun, and can be set up anywhere with two decent anchor points.
Even better, try slacklining while wearing a pair of VR goggles. Best of both worlds.
AAA Titles (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, now all we need is a handful of AAA titles and we're good to go!
What?
What do you mean I can't load all 48GB of Titanfall on my 16GB phone?
I'll just put in this SD.... errrm where's the expansion slot? Guys?
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> What do you mean I can't load all 48GB of Titanfall on my 16GB phone?
Most of that was uncompressed audio data. Before you go "that's dumb" they tried to justify it with this excuse:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.co... [rockpapershotgun.com]
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> Six channel mp4 audio vbr and coud have avoided that.
Partially. You still need code / library / middleware to implement if the hardware doesn't.
> Why do you want lossless audio in a game of all things?
Loss, not Loose. :-)
Because it simplifies the audio mixing code.
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In that specific case it was. But quite frankly are there any AAA titles that came out since midway last year under 20GB? Heck even some of the recompressed repacks are approaching that size now.
Buttons are the difference (Score:2)
Unless you're developing a game in an inherently point-and-click genre, such as adventure games or strategy games, there's only so much you can do with just a touch screen. The Nintendo 3DS works around that by including a directional control and fire buttons alongside the touch screen. There are controllers that clip onto a phone, such as BD&A's MOGA line [mogaanywhere.com], and there exist gaming tablets with buttons on either side, such as NVIDIA's SHIELD tablet and plenty of tablets made by JXD. But I haven't seen any
The problem with ARM and graphics... (Score:2)
The problem with ARM and graphics... is memory bus bandwidth.
Apple has been addressing this in their CPU, but everyone else is 6-8 years behind the curve, even with the most recent nVidia offerings. Fast graphics engines are great, and all, but if you are limited to operating quickly only on what's in cache, and then you have to push across a slow memory bus to get that data to the frame buffer, you are going to be pretty limited in what you can accomplish.
Please, please, please address the memory bus band
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Well, there has to be something better than a bus to carry a lot at once. I'm proposing memory planes or memory boats.
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Never undervalue the transfer power of a memory station wagon filled with bits.
What good does that do us? (Score:2)
What good does great graphics ability serve if the processors and input systems still suck? Lets be blunt, its not like office aps are brutal, but they're still a pain in the buttox to use on a tablet or phone.. Why? Because the input system isn't suited for that type of work. OK, we have graphics, which will probably mean games or vr. Well, thats gonna require a pretty hefty CPU behind it as well, something very few tablets can even start to claim to have. I just dont see a large market for a beefed up
As Powerful, for about an hour... (Score:2)
Mobile graphics will surpass PS4, Xbox One in 2017 (Score:2)
But Apple still won't put any dedicated GPU in their entry-level Macs.
Granted, Intel integrated GPUs are getting better, but they still suck compared to even entry-level GPUs that are three years old.