Sony Is Working On AMD Ryzen LLVM Compiler Improvements - Possibly For The PlayStation 5

[TemplarGR]

Valve gets a 30% cut of every game sold on Steam and literally has the most leverage of any company in the game industry to get others to do what they want. You really want to take that stance when what they could and should have done is hired an entire division similar to Sony or Microsoft to do OS development which would have easily made all those problems go away well before launch. Then at launch they could have actually spent the time and money to actually market the thing to the general public, and set up stores to have proper display units rather than just shoving them into gamestops to have a wall of before promptly seeming to forget the whole project even existed.

You don't seem to realise how development works. You don't just hire developers and suddenly you are able to create a proper console OS with drivers and all in just a couple of years. Even if they hired the whole India programmer population to work on SteamOS, it would still be incomplete.

Microsoft didn't develop Xbox One OS from scratch. It is an evolution from Xbox360, which was an evolution from the original Xbox. And they use DirectX which is not exactly a brand new API...

Yes Valve is going to use Linux, so they already had an OS available, but the driver situation in that OS was a mess, gaming libraries were a mess or non-existent, etc. Those things can't develop from scratch in a year, no matter how many developers you hire. Keep in mind, for a console OS, they aren't going to put normal SteamOS on it. They are going to have to use custom libraries, DRM, various big picture modes, specific drivers for their own specialized hardware, etc. So even when upstream Linux + Userspace will be in a good shape, they still going to have to do extra work in order to support a proper console.

[coder]

This is not entirely true. Mr Bridgman could elaborate since i do not work in the console hardware industry, but semi-custom designs often use evolutions of hardware that haven't made it to public consumption on pc yet. For example PS4Pro uses FP16 "packed math" even though it was released before Vega.

That's why I said "with tweaks".

PS5 may use Zen 2 or even Zen 3 by the time it launches.

Obviously, it depends on the launch window, but I would direct your attention to the XBox One X, which launched at least 6 months after Ryzen hit store shelves. Did it use Ryzen? No! When asked why not, the answer MS gave (and I'm sorry I don't recall where I read this) was that Ryzen wasn't ready in time for them to use. Instead, they customized some Jaguar cores.

[carewolf]

If they care about performance of the end code, why not use GCC then? Can the game develop choose the compiler or is that a hardcoded part of the SDK?

[CuriousTommy]

If they care about performance of the end code, why not use GCC then? Can the game develop choose the compiler or is that a hardcoded part of the SDK?

It probably because GCC is GPL licenced.

[starshipeleven]

You don't seem to realise how development works. You don't just hire developers and suddenly you are able to create a proper console OS with drivers and all in just a couple of years. Even if they hired the whole India programmer population to work on SteamOS, it would still be incomplete.

total bs, with so much manpower they could at least keep the damn thing updated to something recent so it boots at all on my Ryzen 1600x + rx570, and have enough manpower to spare so they could also devise some kind of flatpack-like game packaging system that versions the libs for the games and does not break havoc with the distro the Steam client is installed in.

That said, there is some middle ground between "throwing millions of able-bodied men at the obstacle" and "having the whole SteamOS basically maintained by a couple guys".

Really, Valve has an internal structure that allows the people inside it to do kinda side-projects like this, but for the same reason they just didn't get the manpower to do a serious job.

Seriously, the whole Steam client on linux is a bunch of horrible hacks. The more time goes on the more it becomes apparent how it should die in a fire. The damn thing pulls down a half the libs from an old Ubuntu OS image, and drops them in its folders with no sandboxing, nor any crap given about security, this is NOT a viable way going forward.

Games can't continue to be built against the same old crap forever, they should have at least devised a way forward like with Flatpack where each base "OS image" is versioned and you can have any amount of these images at the same time, depending on what the applications you use actually need.

Microsoft didn't develop Xbox One OS from scratch. It is an evolution from Xbox360, which was an evolution from the original Xbox. And they use DirectX which is not exactly a brand new API...

Technically speaking, the Xbox One OS is a locked down version of Windows, not an evolution of older Xbox firmware.
Afaik it's the same story with the others, they branched off a Windows version and adapted it to the console's architecture and whatnot.

Which is why they went with x86 this time, why the fuck waste time porting a whole OS to yet a new architecture when you can just run basically the same OS you run on PC hardware?

Yes Valve is going to use Linux, so they already had an OS available, but the driver situation in that OS was a mess, gaming libraries were a mess or non-existent, etc. Those things can't develop from scratch in a year, no matter how many developers you hire.

The point here is that they announced the whole thing as if it was imminent when it was obviously (for most Linux users anyway) NOT exactly anywhere in the near future.

[starshipeleven]

If they care about performance of the end code, why not use GCC then? Can the game develop choose the compiler or is that a hardcoded part of the SDK?

You are talking of a company that is using a BSD derivative (maybe FreeBSD, or maybe their own, I don't remember) because they don't want to release the source. They don't like the GPL.

[Luke_Wolf]

You don't seem to realise how development works. You don't just hire developers and suddenly you are able to create a proper console OS with drivers and all in just a couple of years. Even if they hired the whole India programmer population to work on SteamOS, it would still be incomplete.

Microsoft didn't develop Xbox One OS from scratch. It is an evolution from Xbox360, which was an evolution from the original Xbox. And they use DirectX which is not exactly a brand new API...

Yes Valve is going to use Linux, so they already had an OS available, but the driver situation in that OS was a mess, gaming libraries were a mess or non-existent, etc. Those things can't develop from scratch in a year, no matter how many developers you hire. Keep in mind, for a console OS, they aren't going to put normal SteamOS on it. They are going to have to use custom libraries, DRM, various big picture modes, specific drivers for their own specialized hardware, etc. So even when upstream Linux + Userspace will be in a good shape, they still going to have to do extra work in order to support a proper console.

Or rather... You are the one who doesn't understand how development works, and thinks that somehow magically development occurs at the same pace regardless of manpower. Which is simply untrue.

Unless you mean to say that FreeBSD which is in even worse shape than Linux in it's graphics department is somehow infinitely better and easier to work with than Linux is. Sony did exactly that, taking the pre-existing OS of FreeBSD forked it internally and poured on the manpower until they got an OS capable of doing gaming out of it. Are there limits to what you can do with that? Sure, but you're full of shit Templar.

Also that doesn't change the fact that when they did launch the Steam Machines originally with the Nvidia binary drivers there was no real marketing and not a single gamestop anywhere put out display units for people to play on, not to mention failure to put stock in other stores, which basically ensured a failure to launch.

[coder]

If they care about performance of the end code, why not use GCC then? Can the game develop choose the compiler or is that a hardcoded part of the SDK?

Perhaps they have some kind of IDE into which they've integrated LLVM.

[TemplarGR]

That's why I said "with tweaks".


Obviously, it depends on the launch window, but I would direct your attention to the XBox One X, which launched at least 6 months after Ryzen hit store shelves. Did it use Ryzen? No! When asked why not, the answer MS gave (and I'm sorry I don't recall where I read this) was that Ryzen wasn't ready in time for them to use. Instead, they customized some Jaguar cores.

The Microsoft response was BS. The true reason they used jaguar cores was to avoid compatibility issues with existing software.

[TemplarGR]

total bs, with so much manpower they could at least keep the damn thing updated to something recent so it boots at all on my Ryzen 1600x + rx570, and have enough manpower to spare so they could also devise some kind of flatpack-like game packaging system that versions the libs for the games and does not break havoc with the distro the Steam client is installed in.

That said, there is some middle ground between "throwing millions of able-bodied men at the obstacle" and "having the whole SteamOS basically maintained by a couple guys".

Really, Valve has an internal structure that allows the people inside it to do kinda side-projects like this, but for the same reason they just didn't get the manpower to do a serious job.

Seriously, the whole Steam client on linux is a bunch of horrible hacks. The more time goes on the more it becomes apparent how it should die in a fire. The damn thing pulls down a half the libs from an old Ubuntu OS image, and drops them in its folders with no sandboxing, nor any crap given about security, this is NOT a viable way going forward.

Games can't continue to be built against the same old crap forever, they should have at least devised a way forward like with Flatpack where each base "OS image" is versioned and you can have any amount of these images at the same time, depending on what the applications you use actually need.

Technically speaking, the Xbox One OS is a locked down version of Windows, not an evolution of older Xbox firmware.
Afaik it's the same story with the others, they branched off a Windows version and adapted it to the console's architecture and whatnot.

Which is why they went with x86 this time, why the fuck waste time porting a whole OS to yet a new architecture when you can just run basically the same OS you run on PC hardware?

The point here is that they announced the whole thing as if it was imminent when it was obviously (for most Linux users anyway) NOT exactly anywhere in the near future.

I love totally ignorant commenters trying to "call me out" and using bullshit arguments...

1) Complex code can't get written by a commitee. Development pace doesn't scale linearly with the number of developers a projects has. Especially when said project is low level programming trying to hit new ground (game/console support on a server OS with an obscure desktop use case). At best you can get multiple developers working in parallel in different aspects, but this can only speed up things up to a point. And this is ESPECIALLY hard when there is a huge shortage of experienced linux developers to hire in order to do that short of thing... When you see retarded game developers use the excuse that Linux has "many different distros to support" as the reason for not supporting it, do you seriously believe Valve would be able to hire plenty of competent low level Linux software guys in a couple of years back in 2010?

2) Valve could definitely hire a few more devs to help with Steam on Linux, but they decided that for the time being it was not worth their time. In the business world, once you grow up, you will understand that you don't throw all your investment money over gambling bets. Linux had very poor odds at that time and since Valve correctly realized they couldn't make a competitive console back in 2013, they decided to take it slow with Linux in order to avoid wasting money, in case they changed their minds, the market changed, etc.

3) As i said, Xbox one OS is an evolution of older Xboxes. Obviously that meant it was a specialized version of Windows. Like the original Xbox used a specialized version of Windows CE. But there are tons of software libraries that are Xbox-line specific, and even the DirectX version is custom-made for the console. Do you seriously think Xbox One uses Windows 8? No, it does not. It borrows specific parts of it and modified after a decade of work... You can't run win32 software on Xbox One. Even if it didn't have DRM. And most of the Xbox One libraries are evolutions of the 360. You don't throw away good console code. There is a reason Xbox One can run games decently that you need 3x the hardware on PC...

4) X86 was not used for software reasons by modern consoles. The only reason it was used was because there was no valid competition. What RISC cpu could they have used, that would be considerably more efficient/powerful and at the same time paired with good graphics? Do your research, i am waiting... AMD's proposal was very good, so they took it. AMD was able to offer them good gpu power tightly paired with decent cpu power... x86 was irrelevant, and quite frankly, i am sure they would have prefered a RISC solution, but ARM was shit at that time and in some ways was still shit. What would they have used back in 2012 to develop consoles, Tegra 2? PLEASEEEEEEEEE....