FXAA creator Timothy Lottes has wrote a blog post on the next-gen systems from Sony and Microsoft and it is based on the assumption that the current specs that are leaked from Eurogamer and other credible sites are accurate to some extent.
He has revealed his thoughts on both the PS4 and Xbox 720, and what he things of the systems.
Regarding the PS4, and the leaks about it, we were just confused about one thing: DMA engines. We don’t know what it means, however, Timothy has written about it and here’s what his explanation means.
“Developers would get access to do async CPU->GPU or GPU->CPU memory transfers without stalling the graphics pipeline, and specifically ability to control semaphores in the push buffer(s) to insure no stalls and low latency scheduling,” he wrote.
“This is something the PC APIs get horribly wrong, as all memory copies are implicit without really giving control to the developer. This translates to much better resource streaming on a console.”
Regarding the Xbox 720, he thinks that it will be a DVR and the 8GB memory they have for it, 2 or 3GB could be used for the OS as rumoured, and the console could actually run Windows instead of the normal stuff you find on consoles.
“If 720 was based on “Windows” they could use dedicated CPU hardware threads to remove some of the latency problem with a PC based DX driver stack,” he revealed. “The OS would simply have one CPU hardware thread 100% dedicated to the user-mode driver background thread, and then a second CPU hardware thread 100% dedicated to the kernel mode driver (both the Microsoft layer, and the GPU vendor kernel mode driver).”
You can read his entire analysis here. Tell us what you think in the comments section below.