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PlayStation (Games) Graphics Sony XBox (Games)

Is Sony Developing a Dual-GPU PS5 Pro? (collider.com) 60

Posted by BeauHD from the next-gen-console-king dept.
According to a Sony patent spotted by T3, the console maker may be working on a new PlayStation 5 with two graphics card. From the report: The patent describes a "scalable game console" where "a second GPU [is] communicatively coupled to the first GPU" and that the system is for "home console and cloud gaming" usage. To us here at T3 that suggests a next-gen PlayStation console, most likely a new PS5 Pro flagship, supercharged with two graphics cards instead of just one. These would both come in the APU (accelerated processing unit) format that the PlayStation 5's system-on-a-chip (SoC) do, with two custom made AMD APUs working together to deliver enhanced gaming performance and cloud streaming.

The official Sony patent notes that, "plural SoCs may be used to provide a 'high-end' version of the console with greater processing and storage capability," while "the 'high end' system can also contain more memory such as random-access memory (RAM) and other features and may also be used for a cloud-optimized version using the same game console chip with more performance." And, with the PlayStation 5 console only marginally weaker on paper than the Xbox Series X (the PS5 delivers 10.28 teraflops compared to the Xbox Series X's 12 teraflops), a new PS5 Pro console that comes with two APUs rather than one, improving local gaming performance as well as cloud gaming, would be no doubt the Xbox Series X as king of the next-gen consoles death blow.

The cloud gaming part of the patent is particularly interesting, too, as it seems to suggest that this technology could not just find itself in a new flagship PS5 Pro console, but also in more streamlined cloud-based hardware, too. An upgraded PS5 Digital Edition seems a smart bet, as too the much-rumored PSP 5G. [...] Will we see a PS5 Pro anytime soon? Here at T3 we think absolutely not -- we imagine we'll get at least two straight years of PS5 before we see anything at all. As for a cloud-based next-gen PSP 5G, though...
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Is Sony Developing a Dual-GPU PS5 Pro? More

Is Sony Developing a Dual-GPU PS5 Pro?

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  • I hope this makes PC ports better as systems become more PC like with more hardware range.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      dual GPU PC's are a dying market with even Nvidia giving up on SLI, they just don't make sense anymore and it is such a tiny market that games just don't bother to support it. So this doesn't really make them more PC like unless you mean going to support configs that are useless and unused by most game devs.
      • Sli died because directx and I think vulkan added support for multi gpu using different brands and models. Also the sli bridge fell behind and nvidia never upgraded its bandwidth.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Xenx ( 2211586 )
          SLI/Crossfire died because the majority of users only need/use one gpu, a mid-range one at that. If only a small subset of users are multi-gpu, there is little reason for developers to spend much time improving performance in that area. If Sony does release a multi-gpu console, this trend could well reverse.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Armonk ( 5413686 )

            SLI/Crossfire died because the majority of users only need/use one gpu, a mid-range one at that. If only a small subset of users are multi-gpu, there is little reason for developers to spend much time improving performance in that area. If Sony does release a multi-gpu console, this trend could well reverse.

            as far as I know, AMD still supports crossfire and AMD are the ones that are supplying GPUs for this generation of consoles most likely the next console generation will also be using AMD GPUs it could mean that PC games will also start suportting crossfire on a bigger scale once again, if thois type of expandable consoles takes off

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Xenx ( 2211586 )
              Nvidia still has SLI(NVLink) it just isn't physically supported on all but the 3090. But, realistically, the group of consumers that would SLI largely overlaps with the group that would buy the fastest GPU as well. The only reason people would want the 3080 over the 3090 with SLI is because the 3090 is a terrible value.
              • traditionally people have been buying midrange cards then adding another card later to bump up performance instead of buying the highend card thus saving money having only 3090 support sli defeats the purpose of sli for a lot of users

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by Xenx ( 2211586 )
                  That might have been the case in the early days, and some people may still do it. But, it's most definitely not the recommended purchase path. By no means is it traditional. For at least 5 years, SLI has been recommended for the high end and not mid-range.
    • The best thing they could do to make PC ports better is mandate compulsory kb&m controls in all games. Since the last 2/3 generations consoles support kb&m but most games don't. Its sad when a pc game is ported to console and the km&m controls are gutted out. If more console games supported kb&m along with controllers it would be more viable for consoles to take on pc gaming. Then all Sony has to do is add a dev mode/other os/bootcamp for stuff like word processing/spreadsheet/serious brow
      • That would be nice but consoles are designed to be used confortably while using on a couch. A keyboard and a mouse are devices that require a surface to support them and a somewhat upright posture to use them. Other than that, sure, there's no other problem.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      They already are, since Microsoft tools practically let you target PC and Xbox with the same codebase.

      Even though the GPUs are fairly custom, the Xbox is effectively a Windows 10 PC internally and the GPU is accessed using DirectX, which explains the ease at which Xbox staples crossed over into PC.

      Playstation is a bit more diverse as it's a variant on NetBSD and I believe is using Vulkan. While that is supported on PC, the rest of the code does need porting to DirectX

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by deek ( 22697 )

      I hope this makes PC ports better as systems become more PC like with more hardware range.

      When Sony use their own custom API for game development, one can assume that it will not help PC ports.

      PS5 hardware is diverging from PC hardware, just as much as it is converging. Search for PS5 flash controller, IO unit, Kraken decompression, dma controllers, I/O coprocessors, coherency engine, cache scrubbers, Tempest engine. All custom hardware specifically designed for the PS5.

      Kind of thr

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Armonk ( 5413686 )

        I hope this makes PC ports better as systems become more PC like with more hardware range.

        When Sony use their own custom API for game development, one can assume that it will not help PC ports.

        PS5 hardware is diverging from PC hardware, just as much as it is converging. Search for PS5 flash controller, IO unit, Kraken decompression, dma controllers, I/O coprocessors, coherency engine, cache scrubbers, Tempest engine. All custom hardware specifically designed for the PS5.

        Kind of throws a spanner in the works as far as porting to PC.

        Hopefully this could mean trouble for Sony in the long run.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by deek ( 22697 )

          Why would it? Sony have created hardware that deals with game workload bottlenecks, precisely because there is no such equivalent hardware in the PC scene. If there was, I'm sure they'd go with the PC solution, because it would drive their costs down.

          Sony have created a console that is designed purely for running games, and running them extremely efficiently. This is a bad thing?

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Armonk ( 5413686 )

            Why would it? Sony have created hardware that deals with game workload bottlenecks, precisely because there is no such equivalent hardware in the PC scene. If there was, I'm sure they'd go with the PC solution, because it would drive their costs down.

            Sony have created a console that is designed purely for running games, and running them extremely efficiently. This is a bad thing?

            not a bad thing per say.. but if it becomes a sony-only thing, then they will run the risk of going in to a blind alley. If it is more difficult to develop to PS5 now than to xbox, then they are already at a disadvantage that may or may not be worth it to have that feature. I do however hear that both AMD and nVidia are both on the verge of launching something similar to PC... that will make sony stand alone... and without their current theoretical advantage

    • I hope this makes PC ports better as systems become more PC like with more hardware range.

      Well it depends on how this gets implemented. The SoC design of the games consoles means the programming model is different, you're not dealing with separate dedicated system and gpu memory over a PCIe bus, instead it is a unified memory model. Applications optimized for a unified memory model are going to struggle if you just do a straight port to a typical gaming PC architecture, the naive porting approach would be to simply use coherent memory which is an enormous performance bottleneck.

  • or it could be PS5VR (Score:3)

    by DMJC ( 682799 ) on Wednesday December 02, 2020 @07:12PM (#60787534)
    This all makes sense if the plan is for a PS5VR with PSVR2 at 8K resolution. It'll be a massive leap forward for VR and could become the dominant headset/platform very quickly.

    • There area already rumors of the PSVR2 coming out, I was thinking this coming year but maybe it would come out in line with a PS5Pro...

      One year later seems a bit too early for a PS5Pro though, and any later seems a bit too late for a new PSVR (especially when you have to use an adaptor and the old camera, not the new camera, to use the older PSVR on a PS5).

      Could be Sony is OK waiting a few more years before another PSVR if as you say, they have such a leap planned... but competitors are not standing still I

      • Could be Sony is OK waiting a few more years before another PSVR if as you say, they have such a leap planned... but competitors are not standing still In that space which was part of the reason I thought we'd see a PSVr2 next year.

        I'm not convinced Sony even considers the PSVR a success. At the point when it launched the PS4 didn't need the halo-effect, and the market for PSVR games crashed extremely quickly. On top of that, the competitors in that space are moving towards headsets which are fully self-con

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fazig ( 2909523 )
      8K VR? In 10 years maybe.

      Disregarding the astronomic cost of displays with such a high resolution and pixel density, today not even a (single precision) 36 TFLOP RTX 3090, with 24GB memory and a memory bandwidth of 936GB/s, can push such a high pixel amount with significantly more than 30 FPS.
      Now combine that low frame rate with VR and you've got yourself a vastly overpriced emetic.
    • Despite the false promises on the package, the PS5 does not offer any 8k output at all at the moment, not even up-scaled output from internally rendered smaller resolutions. Dreaming of 2 different images being rendered in 8k is kind of a very far illusion given the current state of things.

      • As a developer and PS5 owner, it's pretty obvious that (like many things released in 2020) the PS5 wasn't fully baked. Using rest-mode seems to guarantee system crashes, I see corrupted video in PS4 games running in backwards compatibility mode, when 3D audio is turned on it makes my headset sound like garbage, it forgets settings, and last night I turned it on and the controller connected but the console refused to acknowledge any controller input.

        I know being an early adopter means you are signing up for

    • This all makes sense if the plan is for a PS5VR with PSVR2 at 8K resolution. It'll be a massive leap forward for VR and could become the dominant headset/platform very quickly.

      This is incredibly unlikely. Sony would never make that kind of investment in a custom APU just for a new version of PSVR. From a business standpoint, I don't think they would even consider the PSVR a success, let alone worth that kind of investment. I know fans of VR would like to see new versions, but if you read what developers wh

  • Geez I hope not, multi GPU systems are a nightmare and really with the strength of current and future GPU's a second GPU doesn't make much sense when they aren't even close to the top end of GPU's now.

    • multi GPU systems are a nightmare

      My potato has SLI and it doesn't keep me up at night in cold sweats. It doesn't work in some games, so that's a thing, but your hyperbole is excessive.

  • It need a better solution to cool down the chips under the PCB, because 93C is a bit too much.

  • A gaming console is a computer. Are they trying to patent duel GPU computers? Would this really keep Microsoft from creating a duel GPU XBox?
  • I mean, it's a console. They can optimize the unexcreted poo out of it but I multi gpu has proven horrible for latency sensitive applications. There are too many concurrency issues even with high fps

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by JDeane ( 1402533 )

      My guess is they wouldn't use the second GPU for like SLI but more like encoding for streaming and other tasks? Maybe for ray trace acceleration?

  • Maybe they can use the extra compute power to figure out a way to fix the distribution channels of the current console.

  • From Mark Cerny discussing the PS4 Pro [eurogamer.net] in 2016:

    "First, we doubled the GPU size by essentially placing it next to a mirrored version of itself, sort of like the wings of a butterfly. That gives us an extremely clean way to support the existing 700 titles," Cerny explains, detailing how the Pro switches into its 'base' compatibility mode. "We just turn off half the GPU and run it at something quite close to the original GPU."

    Since the patent was filed in January, I think the article is right and it's probably

    • This is very different to the way the PS4 Pro works (hence the patent, because it's a different thing to what they did before). The PS4 Pro was still a single GPU, just doubled in size, this is multiple GPUs. Per the patent they talk about them being on the same die or on separate dies. They even mention multi-GPU with multi-CPU setups:
      ...wherein the first GPU is associated with a first central processing unit (CPU) and the second GPU is associated with a second CPU...

      That means you have a different progr

      • I understand your point, but still partly disagree. In one of the first examples in the patent, they specifically talk about a version where the GPUs "share a common die" and "common memory controller", so we're basically at a PS4 Pro... a single chip with double the GPU cores and ROPs, with one half that's separately addressable. I get that the programming model might be slightly different, because when a shader can safely access the results in a render target could be an issue, but things like tile-based

        • I understand your point, but still partly disagree. In one of the first examples in the patent, they specifically talk about a version where the GPUs "share a common die" and "common memory controller", so we're basically at a PS4 Pro... a single chip with double the GPU cores and ROPs, with one half that's separately addressable.

          Well no, because the PS4 Pro does not present multiple GPUs. That's why, if you've read much about it, they say they "turn off half the GPU" not "turn off the second GPU", because what they did is a Jaguar APU die shrink (down to 16nm ff) and a polaris-based GPU (GCN4 vs GCN2) with twice as many CUs, so for supporting the older titles they simply switched off half of those CUs. In the patent they're not laying claim to "a new gpu with twice as many CUs" but that's what they did with the PS4 Pro, this patent

          • Well no, because the PS4 Pro does not present multiple GPUs. That's why, if you've read much about it, they say they "turn off half the GPU" not "turn off the second GPU"...

            I still partly agree with you and partly disagree, and I think the main part where we're disagreeing is that I think a "GPU" is actually a very loosely defined abstraction [wikipedia.org]. There isn't a strict formal definition of what it means, and you seem to think it includes a lot of things that Wikipedia and the patent itself don't seem to think ne

            • I'm still not sure how you think "adding more CUs" (which is what they did with the PS4 GPU) is a claim in this patent.
    • I'm a bit surprised by Cerny's statement in the quote. Are console games and engines still programmed in a way that are tied to the hardware so much that the only way to make a game work ok in another console is to essentially have a clone of the original software?
      I mean, I assumed having a GPU with the same API but more power would run the games for the older model just fine. We aren't in the 16 bit era where the games were programmed in assembly and completely tailored to the specific hardware. But if Ce

  • Communicatively coupled (Score:3)

    by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Wednesday December 02, 2020 @08:30PM (#60787734)

    I like it. Finally some real development. They should make some kind of Industry Standard Architecture for this, maybe use a bus of some description to interconnect these Peripheral Components.

  • To summarize, SLI = bad, proper multi-GPU = okay.

    I think SLI should be dead, and buried. It was a total nightmare in terms of title support, and the results were hit and miss. In almost all the cases migrating to a more expensive GPU would bring better results.

    However scaling up to more GPU cores is not easy either. And our current PS5 vs Series X situation sums it well. Review after review, PS5 gets slightly ahead in performance even though it has less theoretical GPU power. Why? Because it has 36 very fas

  • This might mean crossfire support in future pc games?

  • How about they just work on VR gaming console instead? Something with 5K per eye (15 million pixels) or higher display. They'll need about double the GPU power of the nVidia RTX 3090 to support that (@120 fps). That would enable the ultimate gaming and virtual tourist experience.

  • Dual (Score:2)

    by dohzer ( 867770 )

    Is that so you can run two PlayStation Network accounts just in case one gets banned?

  • No.
    That's the answer, glad we cleared that up. Until next time!

  • SLI is just a really, REALLY dumb way to solve this problem: that's why it's been dropped from even the PCMR space these days, though it lasted years longer than it should have.

    A version of the PS5 with a BEEFIER GPU, i.e. more CUs/etc, "makes sense" if they decide to release a better version of the console at some point. Adding a second distinct GPU though is just a very expensive way to get a pitiful performance improvement (and an approach that also needs to be programmed for in "special" ways to get eve

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