PS4 Receiving Massive Performance Boost From Team ICE, Xbox One Port gap to grow

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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.

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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.

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