So you must be aware of Microsoft’s claims regarding building the toughest game console ever. The tech giant claimed that its Xbox One X would be far better than the PlayStation Pro 4. We took the company to its word, but it turns out we may be wrong. AMD, the giant responsible for powering the beefiest consoles in the market, has just announced its latest cutting-edge processors; and guess what- only PS4 Pro supports it.
This new processing technology has been named Rapid Packed Math. Available through RX Vega (the high-end graphics card from AMD), there are many games currently that has already extended its support to it.
Rapid Packed Math
Fair warning: lots of technical stuff ahead.
So, the trick used in RPM is quite simple. It allows certain graphical effects to be rendered suing the 16-bit processors instead of the 32-bits ones. Since most of the effects could be well-processed by 16-bit processing units, this technique allows you to free up the remaining GPU power, to be utilized somewhere else. In ideal scenarios, your graphical processing power could be doubled. Although this isn’t the way things usually work, it would still give your graphical processing a significant boost.
Now, let’s talk about the tasks that RPM would improve will the extra GPU power. The primary focus would be on improving minor graphical effects, like hair effects, shader, lighting, etc. It would also reduce the drag in the rendering. The exact details are not out yet, so we will have to wait.
The Benefits for PS4 Pro
There is a single benefit PS4 Pro gets from this processor: the Pro supports it, while the Xbox One X doesn’t. It does seem like a far-sighted approach, since the processing technology wasn’t even launched when the PS4 Pro was released, yet Sony left enough space to support it. Here is what Mark Cerny (Architect, PS4 Pro) said about RPM:
“A few AMD roadmap features are appearing for the first time in PS4 Pro. One of the features appearing for the first time is [Rapid Packed Math] – it’s possible to perform two 16-bit operations at a time instead of one 32-bit operation. In other words, at full floats, we have 4.2 teraflops. With half-floats, it’s now double that, which is to say, 8.4 teraflops in 16-bit computation. This has the potential to radically increase performance.”
So, we can see that PS4 Pro could have up to 8.4 teraflops of power, theoretically. On the other hand, Microsoft is providing 6 teraflops of power to its Xbox One X. However, this doesn’t mean that we have a clear winner. A lot of other factors decide how successful a gaming console is. But we cannot deny that PS4 Pro has a definite edge over Xbox One X.
