@Kosmoz I don't think that tone is proper to the conversation, please behave like you would with someone face to face.
Not only does it have a Kraken co-processor/chip, but also and 3d audio co-processor/chip (which does physics too + other jobs), those are not Zen2, not AMD, and you can ask Mark Cerny why, so far I can see the results and these are just the beginning. If last generations were a sing of things to come, I can't wait for mid and late gen games which will bring even more next gen improvements.
Actually, I doubt the design isn't a semi-custom block by AMD under guidance or specifications by Sony. They had made similar decomp hw for the PS4 BluRay drive data. And they made almost identical designs for MS on Zlib, and a custom one for BCPack. Audio, as well.
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60fps, yes is very noticeable vs 30fps, but 1440p vs 4k barely; and with the latest upscaling tricks even 1080p upscaled (depending on the game) can be very close to native 4k in image quality. But hey, the bragging rights are more important than the game itself... like XSX being the most powerful console is more important than actually having great games to play on said console...
I can agree w/ the 30 vs 60, but not so much on the 1440p to 4K. Upscaling only leads you so far. Not every game makes use of it, if you have large view distance, it will make a big impact, otherwise, maybe not so much, especially if you need the performance gains to push better framerates or more details, like on consoles.
**** don't differentiate between the importance of a high rez image and a high rez texture / asset. The latter are more important than the former, also the scale and world density is also more important.
Nowadays image resolution is actually at the back of importance when it comes to image quality, thanks to all these more important features and the new tricks implemented to achieve similar results, but with a lower rez image.
Both are equally important if the end goal is high detail, and world density as you said. I think older games with resolution boosts, framerate boosts etc also look great. Unless you mean 10-15 years old games, but then you don't look for the graphics most.
Remember DLSS 1.0 was about 1600p-1800p and the difference was noticeable, afterwards, it indeed got better with a lower baseline resolution reference. Consoles are bound to get support for something at least better than DLSS 1.0 and quite efficient by AMD soon. At that point the performance targets will finally be proper on both systems. That resolution claim you made is true only if you get proper reconstruction on top of it.
What‘s special is that PS5 has dedicated hardware decompression that‘s equivalent to about 9 (!) Zen 2 cores for that task.
I really hope that AMD integrates something comparable into their CPU / GPU in the future.
I don't really think you should refer to that estimated performance requirement figure. I have seen too many people online adding those "cores" up, to reach ridiculous comparisons. Circuit's an ASIC, it's purpose-made to do work that you don't want to brute force in the first place. However, like most DSP workloads, it maps pretty well to SIMD or iGPU/dGPU cores, that's also the solution envisionned on PC.
Also keep in mind a PC doesn't suffer from economic design limitations, so out of the box, VRAM isn't constrained and DRAM is also (already) used to reduce the overhead access to SSDs.
Let's not follow MS/Sony's narrative to the letter: yes, both consoles are innovating on technologies unique to them now (and later for quick resume), but that's the normal course of innovation, but consoles were definitely the reason developers took so long to properly design for SSDs. It likely wouldn't have been the other way around. Now that AMD has made custom designs for it, they'll be widely adopted elsewhere.
On another note, I don't think we should be dismissive about previous gen titles running properly. Consoles have released for over 6 months now, and I doubt people have been playing the 2, 3 exclusive or nextgen titles on their new hw. And it's where the SSDs actually matter the most, imho. With new consoles, a load time delta of less than 10s is very little compared to 30s to entire minutes apart on games with lots of loadings.