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How powerful is the Vita really?
- Thread starter Chief Malik
- Start date
- Sony
- Status
This is so wrong.
First thing, Switch>WiiU in handheld mode.
Piccolo before fusion with Kami is much weaker than Frieza. So, to take the only period where power leve were consistent, we have:
Vita= Nappa 6k
HD Twins = Cui 18k
WiiU = Base Vegeta, before fighting on Earth 18k
Switch handheld = Zarbon 23k
Switch docked = Zarbon transformation 30k
Xbone = Jeice 60k
PS4 = Borter (faster than Jeice) 60k
PS4Pro = Captain Ginyu 120k
Xbone X = Goku (vs Ginyu) Kaioken x2 180k
Gaming PC = Frieza first form 530k
Seem accurate to me.
There was a new video that showed an area that had framerate problems on PS3 (Schandstadt), on Switch it seems much more stable. But that was also offscreen footage an it seems to be removed from youtube.
That's actually quite a good shot, it looked worse than that most of the time and as mentioned, draw distance was shocking and blurry, didn't stop me from loving it as a 1:1 port from the PS3 at the time.
I didn't have my Vita for super long (handheld just isn't my thing) but man must be some nostalgia goggles or something, I remember it looking way way better than it does
Was a nice idea though, even if it didn't turn out well
It absolutely was not. The iPhone 4s came out a few months ahead of the vita and it edges the vita out in both cpu and gpu
FP16 is a real thing. It simply is the output from the GPU in 16bit rather than 32bit, it can't be used for lots of things, but it can be used for shader code. I actually have been developing game software as a hobby for years, and I just took on this method not long ago, my figure is my own findings. There is also an ex Ubisoft employee on a beyond3D forum saying that he can do about 70% of his code in FP16. It's not what you think it is, it's just what it is.
"supposed to". I think you're confusing theoretical maximums of the ARM A9. no system hits their chipset's maximums dude to issues
It helps, but it isn't double performance gains like people imply by quoting pure FP16 TFLOPS as if that was the "true" power of the machine, since like you said, it can mainly be used for shader code, which is not everything in a game. Logic, draw calls, much more.
Yeah, this is why I said about 50% increase, that isn't an exact number and it is on the higher end maybe, but shader work is where you get all the cool effects anyways. Logic and draw calls are often a CPU task, but stuff like polygons, textures and positions is where FP16 just isn't exact enough.
Vita was stated to be 2Ghz for a long time, even the Wikipedia page had it at 2Ghz & Sony refused to talk about the actual specs for us to get 100% confirmation. It really wasn't until it was hacked that people accepted it was 333/444Mhz.
Well ill take your word for it, just it sounded like another one of Cerny's famous cases of embellishing the PS4 (Supercharged PC) & Far Cry 5 has FP16 & it really doesn't give it a massive boost, maybe if a game was completely designed with it in mind, but would that be possible this gen even with PS4 exclusives since you need to make sure it runs on Base PS4?
I haven't opened my copy, but i had heard it looked pretty good in motion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE6Uw3glK5E
Judging by the video here, it looks alright for an early vita game, its about as open world as you're going to get on Vita.
weird because it looks like Sony squashed those 2GHz rumors early on (quote was from 2011, before it was even called the Vita)
https://web.archive.org/web/2011030....com/news/43308/Sony-tempers-NGP-power-claims
and the ARM A9 does go up to 2GHz, so there was probably people spreading fud to circlejerk
OP
OP
Ah right, it was years ago & im remembering it a bit wrong, but i do for sure remember tons of people saying Vita was 2Ghz for the longest time.
It was Resistance. While I was initially just there to assist with lighting, as there was a lot of content that was coming in hot a lot of what I did ended up being optimization since the assets coming in were made for PlayStation 3 level hardware, but it was killing performance. I believe it was one of the reasons why the project didn't output to native resolution- and it got ripped apart for that. I lit / optimized some of the singleplayer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej_7X1iCKvc) and all of the multiplayer.
The VITA was, however, much more powerful than iPhone and mobile at the time. The engine that powered resistance and black ops used deferred lighting which was pretty unheard of on a portable device until I guess the Switch. It supported a lot of modern render features at the time. I think Wipeout was the only other title I saw that had a comparable feature set while Killzone chose a different route(and I think it worked out better).
You didn't really anything on mobile come close until after the iPhone 6s mainly because it took a while for the iPhone 6 to become the base iOS model.
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It's the trademark feature of the PowerVR line of GPU cores. It's the primary difference in rasterization between other GPU manufacturers. Traditionally, on a conventional GPU, rasterization of primitives happens early in the rendering pipeline. i.e. you send your vertices to the GPU per primitive, those primitives are "scanline" by "scanline" translated into pixels, those pixels are stored, then placed onto the output framebuffer, like so:
The PowerVR line of GPU cores defers rasterization until late in the pipeline. Before it rasterizes, it takes the vertexes in VRAM and quantizes them into bins according to position on screen and z-depth. Each bin represents a 2D tile of X by Y size that renders in a fixes position on screen. To give an example, imagine the following screen, with 3 vertexes pushed onto it:
In this example, we divide the screen up into 4 bins (essentially, 4 tiles to cover the entire screen):
Later in the rendering pipeline, after these vertices have been binned, the PVR core does what is, essentially, fixed screen space "raycasting" calculations to determine the resultant output pixel of each binned tile, using a painter's algorithm to draw only the front-most pixel fragment from the front-most vertex, like so:
These tiles are then moved to a unit inside the PVR Core called the tile accelerator, which is a powerful 2D blitter that draws the screen. The benefit of doing this deferred rasterization in this manner is that it gives your hardware extremely fast fill rate, and you never have to rasterize unseen pixels. It only ever rasterizes what is seen on screen, nothing else. It's an extremely efficient way to draw. If two triangles overlap, the "raycasting" will only ever hit the first triangle closest to the screen and draw it's pixel fragment, never reaching the pixel fragments of the triangle below it. They're literally never drawn. This is also coupled with PVR's texture memory being swizzled, i.e. arranged according to a z-order curve. This provides locality in memory for texels, i.e. texels that are close together are physically close together in memory, in the precise order that makes for things like bilinear texture filtering essentially "free."
All this helps the PVR punch way above its weight. Thats why you use a PVR Core in the first place. They've traditionally been used in machines with weak or throttled CPUs because of how efficient they are. The Dreamcast and PSP used the same type of rendering.
EDIT: Heads up -- this is different from NVidia's Tiled based rendering, if you've read about that. Similar name, different technique.
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I feel like people tend to forget the difference from AMD flops and Nvidia flops.
On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being PS2 and 10 being PS3, I'd put Vita around a 7 at a guess. Though it's hard to really judge when there were so few games that genuinely pushed the hardware like Killzone Mercenary did. Still managed a lot of really nice looking games though, and it was pretty great in terms of online features at the time... hell, even newer handheld consoles seemingly remain inferior in terms of online implementation and feature-set compared to the Vita.
remember the "mind-blowing development magic" frustum culling gifs that were going around a few years ago?
except tile-based deferred rendering is actually really, really cool shit, and not widely used. It's not common knowledge, and is indeed "secret sauce" for the PowerVR line.
not even that, the difference between the Wii U's GPU and the XBO/PS4 GPU is big from an architecture standpoint
From my understanding, instead of rendering the entire screen at once, the screen is broken down into smaller tiles and the GPU dedicates it's resources to one tile at a time, rendered to a small, internal, highspeed cache. Essentially allows the system to sidestep memory bandwidth bottlenecks for most (though not all) effects, without needing a giant pool of embedded RAM (as seen in the GCN, Wii, X360, Wii U and Xbone). The cache only needs to be big enough to store one tile, rather than the whole framebuffer. Or at least that's the tile-based part. Have no idea what the deferred part is meant to achieve in practical terms (It would mean you render different stuff to different to different buffers before combining, but I don't personally know to what benefit that's done).
It's a big part of the reason why the Vita is capable of pushing the graphics it can with the hardware and power draw it has. Whilst TBDR is common in the mobile space, it hasn't caught on elsewhere (until recently), so the Vita is the first time we've seen it used in a dedicated game console since the Dreamcast. The Nintendo Switch (and all Nvidia Maxwell and Pascal GPUs for that matter) uses a similar tile-based forward rendering solution, that seems give it a similar performance advantage. It's expected AMD will implement TBFR into it's next gen Navi architecture too, meaning next gen consoles will also get it. Should mean good things for the future.
Edit: Krejlooc's description is probably much better and more accurate than mine. You should probably pay closer attention to him.
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It's one of the reasons I think this gen will last even longer in support. Most developers have more than enough RAM to work with these days on all 3 consoles.
The deferred part refers to the rasterization of said tiles. Also, the cache is usually big enough to store multiple tiles at once, to allow for parallelization.
You are confusing tile-based rendering with tile-based deferred rendering unfortunately. What pushes the PVR isn't just the tile-based rendering, it's the deferred part. Some games use deferred rendering, some games use tile-based rendering, but it's very, very rare to see tile-based deferred rendering outside of the PVR.
And well, I guess that marketing didn't really work out for them considering the sales of the console!
I remember the people who ported Bastion to the PS Vita said something similar:
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/Migu...0265/Postmortem_Porting_Bastion_to_PSVita.php
(Something is wrong with the text. Strange)
Whilst we're talking about the Vita's hardware, I find the way it's RAM has been packaged in the SiP to be rather neat. Crazy how little space the whole thing takes up on the motherboard. That said, I can't imagine this set up is particularly great for thermals, which is probably part of the reason why the Vita is clocked so low. Anyway, you can read more about it here.
Whilst we're talking about the Vita's hardware, I find the way it's RAM has been packaged in the SiP to be rather neat. Crazy how little space the whole thing takes up on the motherboard. That said, I can't imagine this set up is particularly great for thermals, which is probably part of the reason why the Vita is clocked so low. Anyway, you can read more about it here.
what a crazy design, I've never seen chips stacked like that.
Well, yeah.
Youre not going to get a handheld game console matching the current generation of console in graphics. It's obviously going to be closer to the last.
PS4: just how powerful is it?
If you compare the PS3 to FreezaÂ’s first form (battle power 530,000)
PS4 is a monster machine like the fourth form of Freeza (battle power 60 million).
[8GB Memory] -> 16 times the PS3. Power: Can use the Death Beam 16 times at the same time.
[8 Cores] -> 8 Times the PS3. Number of programs that can be executed: The Ginyu Force is now 40 people.
[Memory GDDR5] -> 7 Times the PS3. Processing Speed: Will move seven time quicker.
Some ports are really impressive, DOA5 is pretty much the console version with a few missing effects. On a hacked vita you can actually force the game at native res, and with the vita overclocked its still a full 60 fps, minus 1 or 2 stages. The wipeout HD and fury ports are impressive as well.
It was a marvel of engineering.Whilst we're talking about the Vita's hardware, I find the way it's RAM has been packaged in the SiP to be rather neat. Crazy how little space the whole thing takes up on the motherboard. That said, I can't imagine this set up is particularly great for thermals, which is probably part of the reason why the Vita is clocked so low. Anyway, you can read more about it here.
Can you increase the clockspeed when you are using Custom Firmware? And if so, where it will get unstable? On PSP you could increase the clockspeed from 222 Mhz to 333 Mhz.
Oh, that's pretty cool. I should look deeply into this.
Yeah I know they're not exactly the same thing, that's why I did make the distinction that Nvidia uses tile-based forward rendering. I was under the impression Nvidia's solution was at least somewhat similar in execution to ImgTech's and still offered much of the same benefit, except for those linked directly to the deferred part, but I admittedly that was purely based off second hand impressions, so I'll concede if I'm wrong about that.
I'll be honest that I wasn't sure if you were referring to tile based forward rendering or if you slipped and hit the f key instead of D and meant to type TBDR instead, lol. my bad.
You can overclock the vita to 444/222 for any game which to my knowledge no game released ran at natively. This irons out every singles games bad performance apart from the odd ones that absolutely stink like resident evil revelations, Jak and daxter, and assassin's creed. To my knowledge (and a 256gb full memory card) it nails performance to a 30fps or 60fps lock on every single title if they underperformed at stock.
Like others have said, patches are slowly appearing where by games that didn't run native resolution are now being upscaled to the full 544p and these games overclocking are still holding performance fully.
Like I said before, the vita was crippled by downclocks forced by Sony to keep battery life up. With the console at full tilt, it's pretty impressive still even 6 years after release.
As a layperson, I always placed it as more powerful than all of the SD consoles (up to and including the Wii/OG Xbox), but less powerful than all the HD consoles. I see it as sort of the hardware that perfectly straddles the SD/HD distinction.
Is that accurate? Obviously, there are going to be exceptions to that simplification as different systems are better at different things, but am I largely correct?
Is that accurate? Obviously, there are going to be exceptions to that simplification as different systems are better at different things, but am I largely correct?
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