Reply With Quote
This doesn't matter at all, because, any console player will tell you..graphics mean nothing.
Sony PS4 and Microsoft Xbox One Already Hitting a Performance Wall
A couple of weeks back a developer on Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Unity was quoted that the team had decided to run both the Xbox One and the Playstation 4 variants of the game at 1600x900 resolution "to avoid all the debates and stuff." Of course, the Internet exploded in a collection of theories about why that would be the case: were they paid off by Microsoft?
For those of us that focus more on the world of PC gaming, however, the following week an email into the Giantbomb.com weekly podcast from an anonymous (but seemingly reliable) developer on the Unity team raised even more interesting material. In this email, despite addressing other issues on the value of pixel count and the stunning visuals of the game, the developer asserted that we may have already peaked on the graphical compute capability of these two new gaming consoles. Here is a portion of the information:
The PS4 couldn’t do 1080p 30fps for our game, whatever people, or Sony and Microsoft say. ...With all the concessions from Microsoft, backing out of CPU reservations not once, but twice, you’re looking at about a 1-2 FPS difference between the two consoles.
What's hard is not getting the game to render but getting everything else in the game at the same level of performance we designed from the start for the graphics. By the amount of content and NPCs in the game, from someone who witnessed a lot of optimizations for games from Ubisoft in the past, this is crazily optimized for such a young generation of consoles. This is really about to define the next-generation unlike any other game beforehand.
We are bound from the CPU because of AI. Around 50% of the CPU is used for the pre-packaged rendering parts..
So, if we take this anonymous developers information as true, and this whole story is based on that assumption, then have learned some interesting things.
- The PS4, the more graphically powerful of the two very similarly designed consoles, was not able to maintain a 30 FPS target when rendering at 1920x1080 resolution with Assassin's Creed Unity.
- The Xbox One (after giving developers access to more compute cycles previously reserved to Kinect) is within a 1-2 FPS mark of the PS4.
- The Ubisoft team see Unity as being "crazily optimized" for the architecture and consoles even as we just now approach the 1 year anniversary of their release.
- Half of the CPU compute time is being used to help the rendering engine by unpacking pre-baked lighting models for the global illumination implementation and thus the game is being limited by the 50% remaining performance power the AI, etc
It would appear that just as many in the media declared when the specifications for the new consoles were announced, the hardware inside the Playstation 4 and Xbox One undershoots the needs of game developers to truly build "next-generation" games. If, as this developer states, we are less than a year into the life cycle of hardware that was planned for an 8-10 year window and we have reached performance limits, that's a bad sign for game developers that really want to create exciting gaming worlds. Keep in mind that this time around the hardware isn't custom built cores or using a Cell architecture - we are talking about very basic x86 cores and traditional GPU hardware that ALL software developers are intimately familiar with. It does not surprise me one bit that we have seen more advanced development teams hit peak performance.
If the PS4, the slightly more powerful console of the pair, is unable to render reliably at 1080p with a 30 FPS target, then unless the Ubisoft team are completely off the rocker in terms of development capability, the advancement of gaming on consoles would appear to be somewhat limited. Remember the specifications for these two consoles:
The custom built parts from AMD both feature an 8-core Jaguar x86 architecture and either 768 or 1152 stream processors. The Jaguar CPU cores aren't high performance parts: single-threaded performance of Jaguar is less than the Intel Silvermont/Bay Trail designs by as much as 25%. Bay Trail is powering lots of super low cost tablets today and even the $179 ECS LIVA palm-sized mini-PCwe reviewed this week. And the 1152/768 stream processors in the GPU portion of the AMD APU provide some punch, but a Radeon HD 7790 (now called the R7 260X), released in March of 2013, provides more performance than the PS4 and the Radeon R7 250X is faster than what resides in the Xbox One.
PlayStation 4 Xbox One Processor 8-core Jaguar APU 8-core Jaguar APU Motherboard Custom Custom Memory 8GB GDDR5 8GB DDR3 Graphics Card 1152 Stream Unit APU 768 Stream Unit APU Peak Compute 1,840 GFLOPS 1,310 GFLOPS
If you were to ask me today what kind of performance would be required from AMD's current GPU lineup for a steady 1080p gaming experience on the PC, I would probably tell you the R9 280, a card you can buy today for around $180. From NVIDIA, I would likely pick a GTX 760 (around $200).
Also note that if the developer is using 50% of the CPU resources for rendering computation and the remaining 50% isn't able to hold up its duties on AI, etc., we likely have hit performance walls on the x86 cores as well.
Even if this developer quote is 100% correct that doesn't mean that the current generation of consoles is completely doomed. Microsoft has already stated that DirectX 12, focused on performance efficiency of current generation hardware, will be coming to the Xbox One and that could mean additional performance gains for developers. The PS4 will likely have access to OpenGL Nextthat is due in the future. And of course, it's also possible that this developer is just wrong and there is plenty of headroom left in the hardware for games to take advantage of.
But honestly, based on my experience with these GPU and CPU cores, I don't think that's the case. If you look at screenshots of Assassin's Creed Unity and then look at the minimum and recommended specifications for the game on the PC, there is huge, enormous discrepancy. Are the developers just writing lazy code and not truly optimizing for the hardware? It seems unlikely that a company the size of Ubisoft would choose this route on purpose, creating a console game that runs in a less-than-ideal state while also struggling on the PC version. Remember, there is almost no "porting" going on here:the Xbox One and Playstation 4 share the same architecture as the PC now.
Of course, we might just be treading through known waters. I know we are a bit biased, and so is our reader base, but I am curious: do you think MS and Sony have put themselves in a hole with their shortsighted hardware selections?
UPDATE: It would appear that a lot of readers and commentors take our editorial on the state of the PS4 and XB1 as a direct attack on AMD and its APU design. That isn't really the case - regardless of what vendors' hardware is inside the consoles, had Microsoft and Sony still targeted the same performance levels, we would be in the exact same situation. An Intel + NVIDIA hardware combination could just have easily been built to the same peak theoretical compute levels and would have hit the same performance wall just as quickly. MS and Sony could have prevented this by using higher performance hardware, selling the consoles at a loss out the gate and preparing each platform for the next 7-10 years properly. And again, the console manufacturers could have done that with higher end AMD hardware, Intel hardware or NVIDIA hardware. The state of the console performance war is truly hardware agnostic.
This doesn't matter at all, because, any console player will tell you..graphics mean nothing.
But of course it has hit a performance wall..the consoles are 400.00 lower tier budget PCs. In fairness, Ubisoft Kiev and with budget components = horrible outcome. Ubisoft Kiev with upper tier CPU and GPU is horrible as well, evident by a GTX 680 minimum. They suck as developers, they built a clunky ass engine that they can't figure out how to make more efficient.
Last edited by DJR210; 10-28-2014 at 08:14 PM.
Short-sighted not to do something like stick a lower end i5 and take a loss on the hardware like they did in the previous generation when that 3 core XBox 360 CPU and the 7 core Cell in the PS3 were really nice processors for the time. Or , put a 6350 if an i5 4430 is too much cost. Can't believe you'd make a console without a legit gaming CPU.
These gots were more worried about making the consoles more social heavy. Yeah, lets focus on putting facebook and let all the bags in there know what I'm up to.
Battlefield 3 on PC ting on the console version was the last straw for me. On top of that, the Xbox Live casual-centric features were out of control when I stopped ing with the 360 in 2012.
ESPN, YouTube, Facebook, 8 different streaming video providers, the music, and all this extra they focused on was a sign of the times to come. Trying to hard to replace everything in the living room instead of what it was intended to be used for. They tried to appeal so much to the casuals, now the person who bought a console for the games is stuck with weak 4-5 hundred dollar crap that can't run games the way the developers intended.
Television. Television. Television. Watch TV on your XBox One. Program Guide. Television. Television.
XBox 360 was an amazing console. But XBox One, what a piece of . Like a 2013 version of the Wii.
That's why they buy PS4s and X1s. Because graphics don't matter. Oh wait.
Yeah, if graphics don't matter why am I paying $400 for a new console?
Now if the consoles were $250 I would have gotten one in a second. Or if they were $400 but had really nice hardware like the last generation.
This generation sucks, tbh... only an ODDE would make them worth the money... eventually, they'll drop to $300 though.
I do hate all crowbarred social bull . Microsoft did the same with Win8.
If you don't really care that much about the fanciest graphics or net play, money-wise, it still likely the better deal though. Odds are you'll be paying more for your PC initially, and likely will put more money to upgrade it in a 3-4 year timespan.
Sony and Microsoft need to let piracy run rampant on their systems with absolutely no repercussions.
That's the only way to save this weak generation of consoles imho. Also free online subscriptions. In fact, they should pay me to play their ty consoles.
There's also the possibility that they don't want another 8 year cycle on the hardware, especially when they were losing money on it for the first 3-4 years. They're probably about cutting it even now with the budget hardware, and going to be making money on it in 2 years. That would put the next-gen 4 or 5 years away.
graphics dont mean
but goes out buying latest tv and
lol wankers
You think they're only breaking even? An equivalent GPU, the R7 260x, goes for $100 retail. I can't seem to find Jaguar prices, but slightly better quad core Intel Atom CPU's run $37 apiece OEM, so I can't imagine they're paying more than $160 on CPU + GPU. What's the power draw? Maybe 200 watts? Surely the power supply isn't costing them more than $30. Their 5400 RPM 500GB drive probably costs them no more than $40. I doubt the case costs more than $15. Controller sells retail for $50, so it maybe costs them $30 to make. Blue ray drive maybe $35. So that's $310, so they should turn a profit as long as motherboard + cardboard box + shipping totals less than $90.
, the RAM probably costs them $60-$70 or so, so you're right Nono, they're probably somewhere around even money or losing $10-$20 each on their consoles.
According to AllThingsD, the Xbox One costs MS $471 bucks... originally, it was priced $499, so it's basically break even. The $399 doesn't have Kinect, IIRC, so I bet they're breaking even there too.
http://allthingsd.com/20131126/micro...eardown-shows/
Dupe
Let me know when you wanna build a PC.
Uh oh, another 32X for this generation of consoles?
this
They're both losing money on each console, their plan was to make money on software from the jump. I don't see how the consoles will continue unless they can convince the casuals that a 700.00 console is acceptable.
Might as well build a Steam Box.
The 'make money on software' worked on the previous generations when they didn't support indie games and every game sold was $40-$50 bucks and the economy was doing well. I think part of the reason they skimped on hardware is because that model isn't working now. You have a lot of cheap indie sales (through Live store, etc) cannibalizing the ty full-price games and they don't get as big a cut on those because the prices are significantly smaller. Plus AAA sales have come down.
I think they're breaking even now, with plans to actually get small revenue in a couple years. It still works for them, all the social media bull is great for them to sell advertising and get demographics data they can resell.
They could've done a lot better by designing some novel hardware instead of taking off the shelf , that's where consoles normally excelled (and as BB said, the prev gen was pretty good at that, 8 year longevity doesn't lie), but I don't think they want to put the money on R&D right now. The margins aren't quite there.
I think we're already seeing a huge market shift. No one wants to develop/code a game completely differently for Xbox AND PS4 AND PC. It costs too much.
Is OpenGL that much of a performance bottleneck in comparison to DirectX, Mantle? Seems like you could hit all the consoles, Windows, and Steambox without as much difficulty just building the game from the ground up on OpenGL.
I don't even think it's that. They rebuild entire catalogs for new platforms all the time (see iOS, Android). These days, you write the engine in C++, and then a thin layer to talk to the hardware (OpenGL/DirectX).
It's just that publishers are scared. A game that tanks, really tanks. They also need to make a huge investment in marketing. Social Media, TV, etc. You can't make it without some serious marketing behind you.
Yeah, gone are the good old days of 360 launching and having better graphics than PC..I remember playing Oblivion and 2k6 and being blown away at that time.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
