It's not like dx12 is out right now. There is a lot more devs can get out of DX11 at this point since most games are just DX9 with a few DX11 features tacked on for marketing purposes.
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Yeah I know that, but it can still be considered as "old". We haven't heard anything official about DX12 yet, but one can assume it's going to come with Windows 9. I'm personally guessing that Nvidia's Maxwell will be DX12.
I've also seen some devs's inputs on DX11 here and there, some are alot harsh on how expensive the draw calls in particular are.
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I fear the leap this gen will be smaller due to the failure rates of 360/ps3 for being so cutting edge for there time relatively. Also DX12 would have to be out today if they wanted it in 2013 consoles hell there's no DX 12 hardware yet and you can count yourself lucky if ps4/740 use kepler/GCN class hardware.
The "consoles being underpowered" stems from this generation simply being too long. The 360 launched in 2005. We are in 2012 and still don't have previews of its successor, just leaks.
RussianSensation
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Can't escape that though given the nature of fixed hardware in consoles. Even if they put 4x GTX690s, sooner or later it would be slow, just a matter of time. I am hoping for an HD7850 2GB but that's probably unrealistic. I'd say if they put at least an HD7770, it'll be a huge improvement over the RSX/R500.
DX11 is still new. It hasn't even been fully taken advantage of. I am perfectly fine with DX11 as long as the games use better. Plus, the way tessellation is used right now involves pre-tessellated assets in games. The next step is dynamic tessellation in DX11. That still hasn't been done in any PC game so far.
That's definitely a huge part of it. Normally we would have seen a new generation in 2009-2010.
Xbox 1 = November 15, 2001
Xbox 360 = November 22, 2005 (that's 4 years life cycle between the 2)
Xbox 720 = November 2013 (?), that's 8 years or twice as long
Pretty amazing that consumers put up with this non-sense. Xbox360 250GB Kinect bundle still goes for $375, which is a joke for a 7-year-old console. I mean MS is probably going to sell Xbox 720 with Kinect 2.0 for $499 or less. How are they even selling these 7 year old outdated consoles for almost $400? :sneaky: That's a lot of $ to waste on a console that's almost EOL.
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railven
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While I agree with you guys that this generation is too long for consoles, don't forgot the Xbox 1 launched 1 year late and the 360 launched one year early, which makes their time line a little skewed.
PS2 = March 2000
PS3 = November 2006
EDIT: Assume 2013 for the PS4, that's only 7 years for Sony, and 2012 for Nintendo's Wii U that's 6 years for Nintendo.
That's 6 years, while the GC to Wii was about 5 years (2001 to 2006). I personally think what is making these generation the most painful in all my years of gaming it wasn't until this generation that PC games were affected by consoles. Historically PC had their own segment of gaming and Consoles had their own, with only a few actually going cross-platform.
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RussianSensation
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StrangerGuy
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If you count Dell deals $400 can already net one a i3 2120/6GB DDR3/aftermarket 7750 complete PC which is probably miles better than any next-gen consoles in real world gaming. Ironic when consoles used to be much cheaper gaming solutions and now they are falling behind PCs.
BTW if the next-gen is going to overhype another underpowering PowerPC crap again rather than simply using a top end AMD APU I'm just going to laugh my ass off.
MrK6
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Never underestimate that absolutely brain-dead stupidity of the general public.
RussianSensation
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Even though when we compare CPUs, we strive for near the top performance and criticize AMD's Phenom / Bulldozer CPUs, etc., for consoles they would be miles better than that PowerPC crap. An A8-3850 is actually pretty close to getting 60 fps in modern games, based on TechReport's quick overview. It would actually be a no brainer for a console to just use a cheap quad-core AMD CPU and instead spend $$ where it counts the most for graphics -- the GPU. Knowing MS though, they are probably going to do the opposite - go for a 4C/4T PowerPC and then market the Xbox720 as a 16-core console to make it seem 3-4x powerful as the average PC.
I can already see it: PS4, engineered for 4K graphics! (i.e., the HD7000 series GPU will be capable to output 4K resolution to a 4K TV, but good luck getting PS4 to run games at 4096x2160 natively). I bet Sony execs will market that output as gaming capability though.
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I think it'll be similar to the current gen in that it'll support 4k but most games will run at some sub-1080p res with light AA... which is actually a pretty large improvement over what it is now. Maybe the PS4 will support Bluray 4k.
PS3/360 Dark Souls 1024x720
vs. PC modded
PS3/360
PC modded
We need new consoles ASAP!!
The details on the walls and rubble looks amazing! Does the game use DX11 tessellation?
RussianSensation
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No, that's just a form of a bump-mapping technique. With the move to DX9, parallax mapping and displacement mapping techniques built upon bump mapping to allow for improved depth effects without actually building the geometry. Tessellation is the next step to actually create a real 3D depth to objects, but it's currently a very costly technique.
You can have a quick look here on how parallax and displacement mapping look:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hollywood-nature-compared,2049-8.html
I think you missed the extreme sarcasm.
Even after the resolution fix that game looks sub par.
Actually, I would argue that those Dark Souls screen shots do nothing more than prove that consoles are good enough. Sitting six feet from the screen, those extra details don't matter at all in enjoying a game. Not that consoles aren't antiquated - they certainly are. But for the average gamer, they still have a lot to offer. The jump to HD seven years ago was a huge leap and is still carrying these consoles through.
Take for example Borderlands 2. I'm a computer enthusiast and just pre ordered it on PS3, even after watching the nvidia videos showing the major physx effects. Why? Because the game will still be a ton of fun and my friends who play it will be buying it on playstation. I have no doubt the PC version looks better, but that will take very little away from the enjoyment of the game.
This thread wasn't really about PC vs. Console anyway. It's more about how the development of the two gaming arenas interact.
Take for example Borderlands 2. I'm a computer enthusiast and just pre ordered it on PS3, even after watching the nvidia videos showing the major physx effects. Why? Because the game will still be a ton of fun and my friends who play it will be buying it on playstation. I have no doubt the PC version looks better, but that will take very little away from the enjoyment of the game.
This thread wasn't really about PC vs. Console anyway. It's more about how the development of the two gaming arenas interact.
Lonbjerg
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x86 CPUs are very weak at gaming computations, the POWER architecture is far better suited(PC devs are the only ones you see complaining about in order architecture, they have been spoiled by Intel's phenomenal compilers). Nothing is stopping IBM from producing an OoO POWER based CPU if the console makers are willing to take the rather sizeable hit in perf/watt. As of 2010 the fasted six core i7 was able to exceed half of Cell's floating point performance, in gaming the overwhelming majority of the code base is floating point. When we talk about GPUs it is very easy to see the superiority of PCs, when it comes to CPUs PCs are actually shockingly poor when looking at gaming explicitly. In relative terms, the CPUs the consoles shipped with were four to five generations ahead of PCs when looked at from a GPU based perspective.
Don't confuse limitations of the GPU or RAM with the CPUs. When Carmack was posting notes on Rage one of the things he mentioned was that the PS3 had an advantage over the 360 and PC because it had so much raw CPU power they could use an entirely different and more intensive compression method to save IO overhead, this was versus the i7 too. That's the 'terrible' POWER architecture. Wasn't very good as a general purpose CPU, it is a *beast* at floating point computations as configured in the consoles particularly when compared to the extremely weak x86 offerings of the time era.
Polyphony will almost certainly run at 4K resolution for their games on the PS4. You take a top tier console developer and it is amazing what they can do with fixed hardware. It is a completely different development process then dealing with PCs where you need to worry about code flexibility. It tends to be why console devs suck at PC ports and PC devs suck at console games(nothing this generation has changed that perception either).
Forgot to mention, perf/xtor is significantly higher on the POWER parts too, a "cheap" AMD CPU is considerably more expensive on a performance basis then the rather tiny POWER chips that MS used this generation. Not saying they won't go x86, but if they do it won't be to save money.
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Lonbjerg
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You sound like you have choosen to ignore Anand's pulled article...ignoring facts won't make them go away.
RussianSensation
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I wouldn't say that. It looks like a 2008-2009 game not a 1996 game without the mod. It actually shows that the original artists for Dark Souls did a great job. To me the difference is night and day. No it's not Crysis or Metro 2033, but compared to how the game was ported originally, it's a huge improvement.
Can't have a non-biased conversation with a person who thinks PS3 used advanced tech and says: "x86 CPUs are very weak at gaming computations, the POWER architecture is far better suited" when Metro 2033 developer has stated that the entire 3 Core dual-threaded Xenon (same PowerPC architecture as the Cell) only has 70-85% of the performance of Single Core i7 Nehalem. He seems very bitter any time anyone brings anything negative regarding PS3 and especially the 'all-mighty' Cell. I am anxiously awaiting PS4 and his rebuttal when Sony throws out the Cell into the garbage and replaces it with an AMD or Intel CPU. That'll validate how overhyped the Cell was. Considering PowerPC CPU architecture was a miserable failure when used in Apple PCs compared to Intel's / AMD's offerings at the time, we have plenty of examples that it's not a very good CPU for general tasks or games. It was already mentioned that Sony was sold on by all the theoretical flops of the Cell, but that spec proved meaningless in the end.
Who cares. Theoretical floating and even arithmetic performance, GFlops, TFlops metrics, etc. are mostly meaningless for games. You can't just compare CPUs on a piece of paper or how they perform in a synthetic benchmark. Otherwise, 2500K would be a slow CPU for games. Can the PowerPC/Cell in the PS3 use its full potential as it can in Bitcoin mining? Not a chance.
Dark Souls runs at just 1024x720 on the PS3 and the Cell + RSX can't even keep the game from chugging at 15 fps in Blighttown. So much for the theoretical performance of the superior Cell/PowerPC for games. A $40 Phenom II X4 will provide 30 fps locked in the same game at 2560x1600.
You can't just compare total floating-point calculations of PS3 and then magically apply that to games. The Cell can't put that power to the ground; so it doesn't matter at all how fast it is in theoretical floating point calculations. 2600K with HT is way faster in floating-point than 2500K is (LinX, SiSoftware Sandra theoretical testing) but it doesn't make it much faster in games. PS3 may be amazing for Folding@Home but if the CPU can't put that power to the ground in actual game code, it's all marketing. Sony will ditch the Cell because it was slow. You are the only person on our tech forum that thinks the Cell is faster than modern x86 CPUs despite even PC developers saying otherwise. I know who I am going to listen to - the guys making the games. So far every single credible person who was asked about the Cell has said it is horribly underpowered for games. AT published a detailed article explaining it from a technical perspective. PowerPC cores already existed in Apple PCs and their performance was underhwleming compared to Intel's or AMD's offerings, another reason why Apple ditched the PowerPC Mac.
For someone that attacks other posters based on their technical knowledge, it's almost mind-boggling that you would use theoretical FLOPs and convert that to real-world gaming performance. Using an excuse that PowerPC architecture isn't given proper compilers like Intel CPUs are on x86 is irrelevant. PowerPC was already given an opportunity in both the PS3 and Apple PC and it has failed miserably in both cases to translate all that theoretical performance into real world performance. The way you defend the PowerPC architecture is almost as if you worked on designing it. The degree to which Cell, which gives the PS3 higher peak theoretical performance than the Xbox 360, has worked out for Sony is debatable since it didn't translate into any tangible real world gaming advantage for the PS3. The fact that PS3 games don't look any better than Xbox360 games is even more evidence that the 7 SPEs in the Cell were wasted transistor space.
Even if the Cell / PowerPC architecture works on paper, no one in the world has been able to harness that power via Linus, Windows, OSX or on the PS3. CPUs are designed with an expectation that they will work to accelerate certain software code and Cell's inability to do that for games on the PS3 over the course of 6 years already has proven to us that it was all hype.
Putting the Cell into PS3 was arguably Sony's greatest mistake and what stopped them from having a powerful PS3. They did the complete opposite of what we recommend PC gamers do when building a gaming PC -- spend more on the GPU. Instead what Sony did was put a $230 CPU with a $70 NV GPU into a console whose main function is to play games and serve as a media center for the living room is the great funds imbalance ensured that Sony would lose a lot of $ on each PS3 sold for years to come and the $70 RSX GPU didn't hold any advantages over the 1-year-old R500 Xbox360 graphics card.
It was most likely the case that Sony bought into the theoretical FLOP hype during IBM's presentation of the Cell and they were sold on the idea that the price of the Cell would drop significantly over time. The huge cost savings on the PowerPC architecture is likely another major reason that swayed Sony execs to choose it over the AMD and Intel CPUs since it would have very unlikely that AMD or Intel would be only charging $40-50 CPU to Sony in 2009:
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Cerb
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BS. Everyone sane complains about in-order uarches, because for almost 50 years, they've solved performance problems that either can't be solved any other way, or which require too much bandwidth to try to solve some other way. And, you what, it's turned out quite good in many ways. A wealth of home routers are running OOOE uarchs, today (MIPS 74K, in-order issue, in-order completion, OOOE--jut what C wants).
There is nothing that a compiler can do to make up for in-order execution. It can software pipeline, but that benefit OOOE CPUs every bit as much. They can use profile-guided optimization, but again, that benefits OOOE just as much. Run-ahead has yet to work well enough, outside of research papers. OOOE has been fundamentally good since 1964. Great programers and fancy compilers have not been able to beat OOOE in almost 50 years. Maybe one day they will, but not as long as have to contend with the memory wall. Worse, you don't always know what code is going to encounter the worst hang-ups.
Even then, that it was in-order was only part of the problem. It had seriously long latencies for basic crap like logic ops and jumps. That might be fine for a many-core SMT CPU server trying to get the best SPEC scores, but when cut down...ugh (for that matter, they quickly changed course and went all OOOE on Power since then).
What perf/W loss? The PPC470 can be efficient enough, and they have been made at at least 2GHz, now. It would still suck compared to modern PC CPUs, but it aught to be quite respectable, and actually worth the savings in space/power.
The Xbox 360 got a high-speed high-latency in-order CPU largely because IBM went in-order for the Power of the day, and it trickled down. Their choices were Cell CPU units, updated G4-alikes, or updated G5-alikes. The G4s would have been worse as much as better, and highly limited. The G5s would eat too much power, itself being clearly derived from Power. In defense of MS, there was nothing suitably in the middle, unless they wanted to pay for a full custom design.
That's a good reason for choosing PPC, for the relevant games (most code is not necessarily floating point; most code in any one game might be) but has nothing to do with in-order or not. Not all FP is vectorizable, and benefits from OOOE, too. Some vector FP can even benefit from OOOE, though I think that will become rarer as time goes on (cache effects are leading to having to align data to cache lines, where that alignment and total sizing will have more of an effect, for wide vectors and long-running vector loops).
LOL. Really, that deserves little more than that. The PS3 had a basically bandwidth-crippled 7800GT (not ahead at all), and the XB360's GPU would be superseded within a year or so. The XB360's GPU was high-end for its time, and it did have features that gave it an advantage over the generation of GPUs in PCs with the same raw performance, but it was 1 gen ahead.
That's called luck and ingenuity. The Cell is very good at certain things. It just sucks at the other 99%. Also, it's PowerPC. Power is another beast. And, the Cell SPEs are their own little things, too.
Ultimately, I think that if Sony hadn't pushed the Cell in the PS3, it might not have gotten such bad PR, being used instead where it made more sense (as a flexible DSP), and probably wouldn't have been canned. It was kinda neat, and if it could have grown out of some of its fixed forms (OS SPE use allocation, hardware multitasking), it could have grown up into something more interesting.
Yes, a beast at floating point computations. That made it much faster at those things we already had enough power for, 99% of the time, which is also why we haven't had sufficiently good vector extensions on the PC--it was fast enough we didn't need them, up until recently. The problem, though, is that you're living in the past, where games were simple loops. Today, they are giant branchy messes, like most any other big computer application. Fast FP can make up for a few things being slower, but it can't make up for cache misses, it can't make up for branch mispredictions, and it can't make up for slow ALUs. All those threads and all those Altivec/VMX engines are needed to barely reach what 1 and 2 core x86 CPUs could do. Lots of potential, but it's too hard to use, because some code is fundamentally sensitive to CPI.
One reason the Atom didn't suck nearly that bad was that Intel made it a spiritual successor to the Pentium, keeping critical latencies generally low, and integrating memory work into its uops. OTOH, that's also part of why it was never going to see >2GHz, and I hope we see an OOOE version soon, because it would be awesome for low-cost low-power systems.
Perf/xtor is not only filled-pipeline MIPS and FLOPS, though people can sometimes be sold on those. If it takes tens of cycles to do a function call, or a few shift and adds, there's no hope, not matter how good the numbers are when you fill the pipelines.
It's worse than just irrelevant: they have MS' compiler. Intel's might be better at automatically leveraging vector extensions, but MS' compiler on x86 is no slouch, and I doubt it's at all bad on PPC. Given that MS has historically not had microbenchmark blinders on, like GCC devs often have, I imagine it's fairly good. I have also heard nothing but praise for their dev tools. Personally, I'd just about bet that MS has kept basic IR->ISA backends alive internally for ARM and PPC for years, even after they went all-x86 around 2000. The added cost would be fairly small, while the ability to jump right into using HW based on such an ISA would be huge (also the chances of needing to support anything more esoteric than PPC is pretty small, today).
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RussianSensation
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I am sure Borderlands 2 or Dark Souls is still fun to play on the PS3. However, PS3 and 360 could never run any modern game that I am aware of at HD resolution. You saying that the jump to HD 7 years ago was a huge leap is strange since PS3 doesn't actually render the games in HD.
Dark Souls only runs at 1024x720 on the PS3.
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=46241
If you think that it's not a big deal, then you wouldn't think in general that PC games look better than console games. In that case why even buy a $400 graphics card for the PC? You could just get an HTPC and game 8-9 feet away on an HD7770 Ghz edition like Adam_the_giant did on his Plasma. If you are going to argue that the added graphical quality on the PC isn't worth it, then why waste $ on high-end GPUs?
The whole point of a GTX670/680/7970 and other such setups on the PC is to be able to bring out the added texture resolution, details and DX11 features in modern games. Otherwise, what's even the point of buying such high-end graphics cards over the HD7770? You can get 100 fps in most games on a 7770 if you turn everything down to 1280x720 on the PC and set everything to Low. It would still look better than a PS3/360.
To me Dark Souls original port on the PC looks like a 1996 game and the fixed resolution mod looks like a 2008 game. It's 1-2 generations apart.
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Lonbjerg
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RussianSensation
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That link showed Dark Souls = 1024x720 (2xAA). I am guessing PS3 at least renders it at 1024x720 internally, not 640x480 upscaled to 1024x720 lol.
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