Themes incoming for PS4 2.0 and PSVita 3.30

[+Asmodai MVC]

What hardware do you think is required for H.265? Please elaborate as to me it seems like you have no clue as to what your talking about.

Well "required" probably wasn't the best choice of words, what I meant was it lacked H.265 acceleration hardware.  I clarified in the next sentence that they could do a software encoder/decoder, though I don't think it likely.  H.265/HEVC was finalized on January 25, 2013 and the specification was formally ratified as a standard on April 13, 2013 but the GCN architecture the PS4/Xbox One is based on came out a year before that.  I don't believe even the latest nVidia PureVideo (Feature Set E from Maxwell) or AMD UVD 4.2 have support for H.265 yet.

 

In any event the point of my post wasn't to debate what encoding formats the consoles can and will support.  The overall point was that System Update 2.0 would not come out on or before the 7th as the post I replied to stated and it didn't.

Edited October 9, 2014 by Andrew

[DrunknMunky Veteran]

Keep it civil, please

[GotBored]

Well "required" probably wasn't the best choice of words, what I meant was it lacked H.265 acceleration hardware.  I clarified in the next sentence that they could do a software encoder/decoder, though I don't think it likely.  H.265/HEVC was finalized on January 25, 2013 and the specification was formally ratified as a standard on April 13, 2013 but the GCN architecture the PS4/Xbox One is based on came out a year before that.  I don't believe even the latest nVidia PureVideo (Feature Set E from Maxwell) or AMD UVD 4.2 have support for H.265 yet.

 

In any event the point of my post wasn't to debate what encoding formats the consoles can and will support.  The overall point was that System Update 2.0 would not come out on or before the 7th as the post I replied to stated and it didn't.

 

H.265 is a compression format, it doesn't require any special hardware to decode... 

[+Asmodai MVC]

H.265 is a compression format, it doesn't require any special hardware to decode... 

H.265 is the successor to H.264 both are Video compression standards.  Is your contention that video cards don't include dedicated hardware to support compression standards?  Google AMD UVD/VCE or nVidia PureVidio/NVENC.  These are the video decode/encode hardware blocks from AMD and nVidia that is included in their GPUs/APUs.  Both the Xbox One and the PS4 have dedicated hardware for doing H.264 as part of their GPUs, neither has any dedicated hardware to support H.265, which was my point.  Again, in theory, Sony could write a software decoder/encoder and even use the GPU shaders to try to reduce CPU usage but I doubt they'd bother.

 

You can certainly disagree with my assertion that they wouldn't bother, that's just my opinion, but it is FACT that these "compression formats" are typically supported in hardware in modern electronics (from high end GPUs to mobile SOCs and HDTVs) and the PS4 lacks such hardware with respect to H.265 (though it DOES have it for H.264).  H.265 is very new and devices are just coming out that support it.  I don't believe any AMD or nVidia Graphics Cards currently support it (though they both have extensive support for H.264, its predecessor)