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ARM: Mobile Graphics Will Surpass PlayStation 4, Xbox One In 2017 (venturebeat.com)
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.
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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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It's not really an accomplishment considering the hardware in the PS4 and XB1 were already outdated when they released compared to what was available on a PC platform.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.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
but eventually sure. Android boxes already do emulation of multiple consoles. Nintentdo, Super nintendo, N64, gameboy,etc.
They custom ordered the designs by the millions? Why would it be a discrete card? Consoles have always had "integrated" graphics. You make it sound like the XbO and the PS4 have an Intel HD chipset or something.
Because by then, PS4 and XBone will be 4 year old technology.
PS4/XB1's GPUs were already were considered fairly mid-range when they were released in 2013. With a few process node shrinks and 4 years of development, and given the increasing power budgets (and turbo/throttling that comes with that) afforded to mobile devices, I'm not surprised a mobile GPU from 2017 can match or exceed a mid-range GPU from 2013. So what's the point of announcing this? That consoles are going to die and be replaced by VR headsets running Android?
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 focussing issue.
Our brains get conflicting messages - the focus system says "The object is at X distance" and the convergence system says "No, it's at Y distance"...our higher brain functions see an impossible contradiction...and the caveman part of the brain says "Oh no! We're hallucinating! Maybe we ate a magic mushroom!" - and we try to vomit it out of our system.
Without fixing focus - a bunch of people will get sick - and that's going to prevent widespread acceptance of the tech.
3D movies largely fix this by having control of content - but in games, that's largely impossible.
-- Steve
www.sjbaker.org
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?
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 bandwidth issue before the end of the decade; yeah, the P.A. Semi guys that Apple bought had a lot of experience prior working on the DEC Alpha, but there *has* to be other engineers capable of solving the problem, right?
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.
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, 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 sales figures for those products, and without sales figures, developers can't be sure that there's enough audience for a port of their games.
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 graphics system unless they're gonna also make the rest of the peripherals available, and when you start toting around a bunch of peripherals with your tablet or phone.. why not just get a laptop??
Stop signs are only Suggestions
To reach that level of performance, the mobile graphics processors will burn through the battery and make ones phone into a hand warmer. They're probably only practical larger tablets with large batteries.
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 graphics board and data bus size dictates the number of pixel writes that can be done in one second, currently billions of pixels.
Rendering is done through shaders, which are mathematical programs to do vertex transformation, perspective projection, parametric surfaces, subdivision, vertex removal, silhouette generation, doing shadowing tests, calculate ambient, diffuse, specular lighting, and many other advanced lighting models, texture mapping, and all sorts of other mathematics.
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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.