Comment by Our_Benefactors
3 days ago
Cell processor 2: electric boogaloo
Seems they didn’t learn from the PS3, and that exotic architectures don't drive sales. Gamers don’t give a shit and devs won’t choose it unless they have a lucrative first party contract.
This isn’t exotic at all. This is the future roadmap of AMD even for their own PC GPUs.
Since Mark Cerny became the hardware architect of PS they have not made the mistakes of the PS3 generation at all.
Custom graphics architectures aren't always a disaster - the Switch 2 is putting up impressive results with their in-house DLSS acceleration.
Now, shackling yourself to AMD and expecting a miracle... that I cannot say is a good idea. Maybe Cerny has seen something we haven't, who knows.
The entire Switch 1 game library is free to play on emulators. They probably put a custom accelerator to prevent reverse engineering. A consequence of using weaker spec parts than their competitors.
The Switch 1 also had CUDA cores and other basic hardware accelerators. To my knowledge (and I could be wrong), none of the APIs that Nintendo exposed even gave access to those fancy features. It should just be calls to NVN, which can be compiled into Vulkan the same way DXVK translates DirectX calls.
What is "in-house dlss acceleration" in your context? What's in-house about it?
It's better off if I let Digital Foundry take it from here: https://youtu.be/BDvf1gsMgmY
TL:DW - it's not quite the full-fat CNN model but it's also not a uselessly pared-back upscaler. Seems to handle antialiasing and simple upscale well at super low TDPs (<10w).
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