Well, as much as I would love to share the excitement, all they've come to is what essentially amounts to another gaming PC. Not sure how 'far' this is, but clearly all innovation happens now on the PC side. (It almost seems now that the fact that the earlier Playstation models and other consoles had the custom architecture that was different from PC may have had to do with the need to provide enough power in a smaller package.)
Did you watch Cerny’s presentation, specifically the part on the custom SSD architecture? I took the opposite conclusion: This is the most innovative development from the console market in possibly decades. They’re throwing everything behind optimizing the SSD-to-VRAM pipeline in a way that component-built PCs won’t be able to do until several new industry standards are developed, with potentially profound impacts on the way games are designed.
It’s specifically an interesting contrast with the Playstation 3’s exotic Cell processor architecture, which was probably driven more by a desire to appear innovative than by practical applications. By moving to standard x86 architecture, Sony has counterintuitively allowed its system designers to focus on areas that will actually give game developers some novel possibilities.
> optimizing the SSD-to-VRAM pipeline in a way that component-built PCs won’t be able to do until several new industry standards are developed, with potentially profound impacts on the way games are designed.
What are the innovations? I'm just seeing gen 4 pci-e paired with some sort of nvram solution (details are sparse). Apologies if I'm missing something spectacular here...
The only really interesting thing is that the console SoCs have decompression offload hardware, so data coming in from the SSD at 4-5GB/s can be unpacked to a 9+GB/s stream of assets, straight into the RAM shared by the CPU and GPU. A desktop PC can easily handle the decompression on the CPU with a combination of higher core counts and higher clock speeds, but then the data still needs to be moved across a PCIe link to the GPU.
The SSDs themselves are nothing special, and there's no clear sign of anything else in the storage stack for either new console being novel. It looks like they're improving storage APIs and maybe using an IOMMU, neither of which requires new industry standards for the PC platform.
When it comes to graphics assets, they've been stored compressed and decompressed by the GPU on the fly pretty much since early versions of DirectX. What is the innovative part here?
They're using lossless compression algorithms that are a lot more complicated than S3 Texture Compression and friends, and work on arbitrary data rather than being appropriate only for textures.
Custom architecture was prevalent back then because there weren't any real standards for developing a system that could render 3D graphics. If you wanted 3D rendering, you had to do it yourself. No one was selling you a pre-built stable chip.
The now defunct fixed function pipeline was still being formalized in PCs, let alone consoles. Each console was a massive exploration into what could be done and who could make the best SDK for that hardware to entice developers to make games.
The fact that all modern consoles and PC's are similar should be applauded. It's the culmination of decades of hardware and software learnings, standardized into the optimal hardware for graphics and game performance.
The fact that they all found what they needed in a similar architecture footprint is good for hardware design, good for developers, good for business, good for porting, good for optimization, and finally, good for performance.
Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft are no longer able to design the latest and greatest chipsets. The complexity is just too much for them to reasonably pay to do so. That's why AMD does it for them. Why would you reinvent the wheel when someone has already spent decades making Ferrari's and is begging you to use their engine at a discount, bulk manufacturing included?
Back during the PS1, Sony had a heavy hand in the graphics card design. Not as much anymore. They tell AMD what they want to do and AMD eschews an existing chip to do it for them.
I know it sounds less glamorous, but honestly, it's the most remarkable thing I've ever seen in the history of modern manufacturing, short of landing on the moon. Having one company able to provide chipsets for any and all applications, including gaming at a practical whim seems pretty amazing.
tldr; The consoles are all the same because AMD/nVidia are so much better at hardware design than Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo that it's not even funny anymore. If someone has the latest and greatest already available for licensing, just buy it and get on with making amazing games.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph8LyNIT9sg (Some Playstation 5 architecture highlights).