Cort Stratton is a programmer at Naughty Dog and is also a member of Sony’s ICE team. Helooks after PS4’s GPU driver / graphics API and as such he knows the ins and outs of the hardware. Stratton has shared his thoughts about claims that suggest that the PlayStation 4 is ‘already out of date’. Stratton acknowledges that the hardware is ‘no longer top-of-the-line’ but that is always how console cycles have turned out to be.

First of all, Stratton was all praise for console programmers. Pushing out of date hardware is no easy task but still we are able to see games like The Last of Us that rivals AAA PC games in terms of visuals. “Squeezing 5-10 years of performance improvements out of a fixed hardware platform is what console programmers do best!,” Stratton tweeted.

He also acknowledges that although the PS4 is no longer top-of-the-line hardware, it does not factor into quality of the games. “The HW is no longer top-of-the-line, sure. That’s how consoles have always worked & has very little to do with game quality.”

“For example: the PS3 is ~2005-era hardware, roughly. Compare TLOU (2013) to AAA PC games from 2005,” he further added.

Do you agree with Stratton’s thoughts? Let us know in the comments section below.

Cort Stratton, a senior programmer on Sony’s ICE Team has revealed a few interesting tid-bits about the PlayStation 4’s graphics capabilities. First of all he revealed that the PlayStation 4 has no issues in supporting 16 X Anisotropic Filtering, a method by which in game textures look great even when viewed at an angle. But certain games like Thief use the less impressive Trilinear filtering which led some users to raises questions whether the PS4’s GPU is capable of supporting 16 X AF.

Cort stated that there are no hardware issues restricting 16 X AF that he is aware of. “No hardware/SDK issues that I’m aware of. Sounds like a question for the developer.”

We had earlier reported that how Cort’s new code for PS4 will make surface tiling/detiling ~10-100x faster on the CPU. He clarified that the code won’t necessarily improve run time performance but will help in faster offline asset baking and GPU capture tools. “Most likely results would be faster offline asset baking and GPU capture tools for devs. Unlikely to have much runtime impact,” he tweeted.

[Baking: When game assets are readied for packaging/shipping they need to be ‘baked’ in a particular format which can be readily used. GPU Capture Tools: Tools to judge the performance of the GPU in terms of frame rate, stuttering, frame rate drops etc.]

It’s interesting to note that PlayStation engineers are hard at work, trying to improve performance across the board, something that Microsoft is doing with their updates as well. At the end of the day, all these improvements will not only result into better games but games that perform well at a technical level as well.

Sony’s ICE team programmers are basically a bunch of talented developers that work on the core graphics technologies for the PS4. One such developer is Cort Stratton who is a senior programmer on Sony’s ICE Team.

On his Twitter feed he revealed a few interesting tid-bits about PlayStation 4 games development and how his recent contributions will make things run faster.

“Finally wrote that ASM I was looking forward to. Early results: PS4 surface tiling/detiling on the CPU is ~10-100x faster now. SIMDlicious!.” he Tweeted.

Let us go in detail into what each term actually means.

An ASM is a programming language that has a strong level coupling between the language and architecture machine code. This language is specific to one architecture [in this case the PS4’s architecture] compared to high level programming languages which can be used across several architecture/devices. Basically this language gives more control over performance since the developer will essentially write code for one specific device.

Tiling is essentially dividing an image by a grid so that limited rendering is used in creating a scene. This process is performed by the CPU [all modern architectures use hardware to accelerate this process]. Once the geometry is decided for the tiles, the GPU then renders each of them to memory buffer.

SIMD [single instruction, multiple data]. As the name indicates, SIMD is essentially performing single instruction across several data points. Almost all modern CPU comes packed in with SIMD instructions for an increase in multimedia performance .

So essentially, Stratton wrote a code that will push tile performance on the PlayStation 4’s CPU by 10-100 times faster.  Note that improvement in performance will result into tiles being switched faster which also means less processing time. But the developer also needs to use the appropriate tile size since larger tiles will obviously use more processing time. It’s a balance, you see.

He also revealed that the previous code was bad and was a just copy reference from the hardware documents. “It was pretty bad. Pretty much a copy of the reference code from HW docs, evaluated in full per fragment with a memcpy at the end,” he tweeted.

“(plus an awful memory access pattern; I needed to restructure things to write full cache lines),” he continued, referencing his approach towards tiled rendering.

[memcpy is a C++ function that is used to copy the values of bytes from source to the memory block pointed by the destination.]

Given that Stratton has contributed in developing PS3’s SPU rendering code to several games such as the Uncharted and Grand Theft Auto series, it’s most likely going to be used for future PS4 titles.  But remember, as he mentions this is still an early version and things might improve even further in the future.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below