[ArsTechnica] Next-gen consoles and impact on VGA market

[RussianSensation]

Yes, because it was an inferior powerPC architecture which is slower then a dual core with lower ghz using a x86 architecture of the time

Lonjberg pulled a nice article that refreshed my memory:

"Right now, from what we’ve heard, the real-world performance of the Xenon CPU is about twice that of the 733MHz processor in the first Xbox. Considering that this CPU is supposed to power the Xbox 360 for the next 4 - 5 years, it’s nothing short of disappointing. To put it in perspective, floating point multiplies are apparently 1/3 as fast on Xenon as on a Pentium 4. The reason for the poor performance? The very narrow 2-issue in-order core also happens to be very deeply pipelined, apparently with a branch predictor that’s not the best in the business. In the end, you get what you pay for, and with such a small core, it’s no surprise that performance isn’t anywhere near the Athlon 64 or Pentium 4 class. "

I guess we shouldn't be as worried about next generation consoles as much then. With just ~ 1.4-1.5ghz Pentium 4, PS3 and 360 pulled off remarkable looking games given that type of crippled CPU power. That type of CPU performance was already slow back in 2006.

"The Cell processor doesn’t get off the hook just because it only uses a single one of these horribly slow cores; the SPE array ends up being fairly useless in the majority of situations, making it little more than a waste of die space. The other point that has been made is that even if you can offload some of the physics calculations to the SPE array, the Cell’s PPE ends up being a pretty big bottleneck thanks to its overall lackluster performance. It’s akin to having an extremely fast GPU but without a fast CPU to pair it up with.
" :sneaky:

Based on that AT write-up, ironically I am feeling a lot better about next generation consoles. Even a 4-core AMD Trinity CPU in PS4 would be a massive upgrade. Pentium 4 CPU performance is dog slow for today's games and PS3/360 still do alright. Looks like specific console game optimization goes along way to get games to run on what otherwise is archaic hardware with very poor CPU performance even compared to the old A64 / Pentium 4s of the past.

 

[toyota]

if the cpu was that slow then how did it power games like GTA 4 or Prototype where cpus many many times faster could not deliver a consistent framerate? yes I know optimization is the key but those games are basically unplayable on low end core 2 duos that would run rings around the 360 cpu according to that article.

 

[Spjut]

Capcom has compared the 360's CPU to a dual core Pentium 4

Capcom itself rates the triple-core Xenon CPU as being about equal to a dual-core 3.2GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition CPU. Not a bad processor as such, but no match for the raw computational power of Cell

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/face-off-resident-evil-5-article?page=2

Some of the 360's launch games ran bad, makes sense if the single threaded performance was the culprit, since it took some time before games started being properly multithreaded

 

[Lonbjerg]

Capcom has compared the 360's CPU to a dual core Pentium 4


http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/face-off-resident-evil-5-article?page=2

Some of the 360's launch games ran bad, makes sense if the single threaded performance was the culprit, since it took some time before games started being properly multithreaded

That sounds way off base, from the pulled article:

What about all those Flops?

The one statement that we heard over and over again was that Microsoft was sold on the peak theoretical performance of the Xenon CPU. Ever since the announcement of the Xbox 360 and PS3 hardware, people have been set on comparing Microsoft's figure of 1 trillion floating point operations per second to Sony's figure of 2 trillion floating point operations per second (TFLOPs). Any AnandTech reader should know for a fact that these numbers are meaningless, but just in case you need some reasoning for why, let's look at the facts.

First and foremost, a floating point operation can be anything; it can be adding two floating point numbers together, or it can be performing a dot product on two floating point numbers, it can even be just calculating the complement of a fp number. Anything that is executed on a FPU is fair game to be called a floating point operation.

Secondly, both floating point power numbers refer to the whole system, CPU and GPU. Obviously a GPU's floating point processing power doesn't mean anything if you're trying to run general purpose code on it and vice versa. As we've seen from the graphics market, characterizing GPU performance in terms of generic floating point operations per second is far from the full performance story.

Third, when a manufacturer is talking about peak floating point performance there are a few things that they aren't taking into account. Being able to process billions of operations per second depends on actually being able to have that many floating point operations to work on. That means that you have to have enough bandwidth to keep the FPUs fed, no mispredicted branches, no cache misses and the right structure of code to make sure that all of the FPUs can be fed at all times so they can execute at their peak rates. We already know that's not the case as game developers have already told us that the Xenon CPU isn't even in the same realm of performance as the Pentium 4 or Athlon 64. Not to mention that the requirements for hitting peak theoretical performance are always ridiculous; caches are only so big and thus there will come a time where a request to main memory is needed, and you can expect that request to be fulfilled in a few hundred clock cycles, where no floating point operations will be happening at all.

So while there may be some extreme cases where the Xenon CPU can hit its peak performance, it sure isn't happening in any real world code.

 

[Red Hawk]

At the time of the Anandtech article the author clearly says that they don't expect much processing to be done with more than one or two threads. That limited performance of the Xbox initially, until developers could get used to programming for the 6 available threads on the 360. But I think it's plain to see that developers have gotten a lot more performance out of the 360 than they were initially -- could games like Battlefield 3 or Crysis 2 have been done on the 360 at launch? Does Gears of War 1 look as good as Gears of War 3?

 

[Spjut]

This interview is with the chief technical officer of 4A games

Digital Foundry: How would you characterise the combination of Xenos and Xenon compared to the traditional x86/GPU combo on PC? Surely on the face of it, Xbox 360 is lacking a lot of power compared to today's entry-level "enthusiast" PC hardware?

Oles Shishkovstov: You can calculate it like this: each 360 CPU core is approximately a quarter of the same-frequency Nehalem (i7) core. Add in approximately 1.5 times better performance because of the second, shared thread for 360 and around 1.3 times for Nehalem, multiply by three cores and you get around 70 to 85 per cent of a single modern CPU core on generic (but multi-threaded) code.
Bear in mind though that the above calculation will not work in the case where the code is properly vectorised. In that case 360 can actually exceed PC on a per-thread per-clock basis.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-tech-interview-metro-2033?page=4

 

[Bobisuruncle54]

if the cpu was that slow then how did it power games like GTA 4 or Prototype where cpus many many times faster could not deliver a consistent framerate? yes I know optimization is the key but those games are basically unplayable on low end core 2 duos that would run rings around the 360 cpu according to that article.

Could be wrong but IMO it must be due to the way it's coded, i.e. written for a triple core hyperthreaded CPU, so it wouldn't play nice on a dual core CPU with only 2 threads, not due to the IPC of individual cores.

:shrug:

 

[Red Hawk]

Probably. Just as the developers are becoming more adept and reliant on multi-threaded processing and rendering on the 360, they become more adept and reliant upon it on the PC. Which should be fine, as quad core processors are becoming the norm for gaming rigs.

That, or the coding on PC is just crap and doesn't even take advantage of more than one or two threads *coughSkyrimcough*.

 

[taltamir]

if the cpu was that slow then how did it power games like GTA 4 or Prototype where cpus many many times faster could not deliver a consistent framerate? yes I know optimization is the key but those games are basically unplayable on low end core 2 duos that would run rings around the 360 cpu according to that article.

Significant and expensive optimization investment by gaming company to make the game work on those consoles

Also, FPS dips are not unheard of in consoles

 

[RussianSensation]

This interview is with the chief technical officer of 4A games

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-tech-interview-metro-2033?page=4

Wow, that's even worse. According to Metro 2033 developer, then 3 dual-threaded PowerPC cores in the Xbox360 ~ 80% of 1 Nehalem Hyper-thread i7 core. Nehalem is a 2008 architecture though and isn't even as good as Sandy Bridge/IVB.

Well let's just hope that the PowerPC cores in the 720 are 50-70% faster per clock this round. 4C / 4T each = 16 Threaded

 

[taltamir]

Well let's just hope that the PowerPC cores in the 720 are 50-70% faster per clock this round. 4C / 4T each = 16 Threaded

I thought they are going to use AMD CPUs not PowerPC CPUs.
And why would PowerPC get any better? Apple ditched it which means nobody is using or developing for it.

 

[RussianSensation]

IBM upgraded the architecture from the one used in the Xbox360.

The AMD CPUs are rumoured for PS4, PowerPC for 720 (Project Durango, precisely the slide above ).

From the link above, "Discrete sources at GDC also confirmed to the publication that developers expect Sony’s Playstation 4 to be more powerful than the next Xbox."

 

[Lonbjerg]

IBM upgraded the architecture from the one used in the Xbox360.

The AMD CPUs are rumoured for PS4, PowerPC for 720 (Project Durango, precisely the slide above ).

From the link above, "Discrete sources at GDC also confirmed to the publication that developers expect Sony’s Playstation 4 to be more powerful than the next Xbox."

If by more "powerfull" they mean score a higher useless, FLOPS peak performance number I'm sure you right.
The question becomes if those FLOPS can be put to actual use.

It's not like, even with "code to the metal" that consoles impress...upscaled 720P at ~30FPS with no AA and subpar AF, textures , shadowmaps, lightning ect. isn't impressive to me now...and it wasn't in 2006.

 

[Wall Street]

I'm pretty sure that pic is a known photoshop. Somebody found a picture with the exact same crows outline but different text if I recall correctly.

 

[ShintaiDK]

I'm pretty sure that pic is a known photoshop. Somebody found a picture with the exact same crows outline but different text if I recall correctly.

Correctly. But people seem to believe anything today. Absolutely no critisism or healthy scepticism left.

 

[taltamir]

"Discrete sources at GDC also confirmed to the publication that developers expect Sony’s Playstation 4 to be more powerful than the next Xbox."

Considering you just stated the xbox720 will be running an (upgraded from xbox360) IBM powerPC cpu while the PS4 will run an AMD x86 CPU that expectation that the PS4 will be faster is understandable.

 

[tommo123]

will it matter though? i mean when games are made they'll tailor the game to the lowest common point right?

i mean GTA4 (i think) could have been much bigger/better but the xboxs storage limitations (dvd9) meant it made no sense to develop a bigger game for the ps3 just to cut chunks out for the xbox.

for the next consoles, i'm just hoping both are dx11 so that pc games will finally be able to move on

 

[ShintaiDK]

for the next consoles, i'm just hoping both are dx11 so that pc games will finally be able to move on

Xbox will be DX11 or higher for sure. Maybe another bastard like Xbox360 that was between DX9 and DX10.

PS uses a custom OpenGL called PSGL that is based on libGCM.

 

[RussianSensation]

If by more "powerfull" they mean score a higher useless, FLOPS peak performance number I'm sure you right.
The question becomes if those FLOPS can be put to actual use.

It's not like, even with "code to the metal" that consoles impress...upscaled 720P at ~30FPS with no AA and subpar AF, textures , shadowmaps, lightning ect. isn't impressive to me now...and it wasn't in 2006.

Good point. I still think next generation consoles will look much better than PS3/360, but I think the PC will continue to have the lead, but still be crippled with poor coded console ports.

I'm pretty sure that pic is a known photoshop. Somebody found a picture with the exact same crows outline but different text if I recall correctly.

Thanks for pointing that out. The linked I posted earlier though seems to also discuss a 16 threaded CPU in the Xbox720 development kits. I obviously can't confirm any of this. These are obviously all rumours. :thumbsup:

 

[RussianSensation]

Dark Souls PS3/360 Port shows us the real hardware power behind PS3/360, which only mimics what Metro 2033 developer and Anandtech first discovered - they are horribly underpowered

This is how the game looks like natively on a PS3/360 when ported to the PC

This is how the game looks like on a PC with a resolution mod that allows the real Dark Souls textures the developer actually created for the game to show up. This is without a texture mod, just using the original game!

The original game uses only 264MB of VRAM because PS3 and 360 can't handle much more for textures/resolution, hence the PS3/360 Dark Souls version is locked to 1024x720, and dips to 15 fps at times on the PS3/360.

Here is the performance at 2560x1600, any budget $50 AMD CPU and $60 GPU will give you 30 fps, better than PS3.

I guess that shows us just how overhyped PS3 really was, well we knew that but that's as proof as anything.

 

[railven]

Here is the performance at 2560x1600, any budget $50 AMD CPU and $60 GPU will give you 30 fps, better than PS3.


I guess that shows us just how overhyped PS3 really was, well we knew that but that's as proof as anything.

Yeah, but that's now. The $50-60 budget GPU's of today were the $200-300 mainstream parts of 6 years ago, when the console launched.

While I'm not trying to defend Sony, or the PS3, that price comparative isn't very accurate.

And holy crap does the resolution mod make this game look better.

 

[RussianSensation]

railven, what I am saying is even a $50 CPU and $60 GPU are faster than PS3/360 today. What that means is next generation MS/Sony consoles will be a quantum leap compared to the PS3/360. Looking at Dark Souls, even an X4 620 + GTS450 is miles faster than current consoles. So while even an HD6770 GPU will be vastly underpowered compared to the PC, at least we are starting to get an idea of just how slow PS3/360 really are by today's standards. While I don't expect PS4/720 to challenge the PC, it should give the gaming industry a huge kick in the pants and we should see much better looking games as a result

 

[railven]

railven, what I am saying is even a $50 CPU and $60 GPU are faster than PS3/360 today. What that means is next generation MS/Sony consoles will be a quantum leap compared to the PS3/360. Looking Dark Souls, even an X4 620 + GTS450 is miles faster than current consoles. So while even an HD6770 GPU will be vastly underpowered compared to the PC, at least we are starting to get an idea of just how slow PS3/360 really are by today's standards. While I don't expect PS4/720 to challenge the PC, it should give the gaming industry a huge kick in the pants and we should see much better looking games as a result

But we've known how underpowered PS3/360 have been...for years. When RE5 got the PC port, settings on high it ran like 100+ FPS at 1200P, while consoles chugged.

The PS3/360 were decent when they launched. I don't think there ever was a question of them NOT being underpowered.

When they did launch, you couldn't make the $50-60 dollar GPU argument. At least then, they had some oomph, course 6 years later, what do you expect? I doubt anyone here is still seriously gamming on an HD 2K or GeF-7 series.

 

[Lonbjerg]

railven, what I am saying is even a $50 CPU and $60 GPU are faster than PS3/360 today. What that means is next generation MS/Sony consoles will be a quantum leap compared to the PS3/360. Looking Dark Souls, even an X4 620 + GTS450 is miles faster than current consoles. So while even an HD6770 GPU will be vastly underpowered compared to the PC, at least we are starting to get an idea of just how slow PS3/360 really are by today's standards. While I don't expect PS4/720 to challenge the PC, it should give the gaming industry a huge kick in the pants and we should see much better looking games as a result

And then lock games to same hardware performance for another 5-6 years...like today...introducing stagnation....history repeating it self ^^

 

[Spjut]

railven, what I am saying is even a $50 CPU and $60 GPU are faster than PS3/360 today. What that means is next generation MS/Sony consoles will be a quantum leap compared to the PS3/360. Looking Dark Souls, even an X4 620 + GTS450 is miles faster than current consoles. So while even an HD6770 GPU will be vastly underpowered compared to the PC, at least we are starting to get an idea of just how slow PS3/360 really are by today's standards. While I don't expect PS4/720 to challenge the PC, it should give the gaming industry a huge kick in the pants and we should see much better looking games as a result

What I don't really like though, is that if the next-gen consoles come in 2013, with DX11/11.1 class hardware, DX11/11.1 is likely to become the "new DX9".

Sure it's a good step forward, but still, the new engines will be based on something that's been out from 2009.