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

[AnandThenMan]

Did you have to quote the entire post? Use some common sense.

 

[Pray To Jesus]

LOL wut i think THE GRAPHICS ON FORZA 4 LOOKS BETTER from the screens

 

[jpiniero]

Thoughts on why?

The rumors insist it's going to be a 6670.

How much ram the consoles are going to have is something to watch. I'll say 4 GB. Wouldn't be surprised if the PS4 ends up being 2 GB+2GB.

 

[Blitzvogel]

4 GB sounds appropriate, but something like a Turks GPU (which I don't believe anyways) would be at home on a console with a 2 GB GDDR5 UMA.

 

[RussianSensation]

Dude, you're completely biased towards cheaper products. This is such good proof. Forza 4 does not look better than GT5. I have both. So does the other poster. Everyone who has both admits GT5 looks more photorealistic and has better graphics. It's also hilarious how the screens use a non premium car for GT5.

Did you at all read this entire thread and look at what we are talking about?
Did you at all watch the Gametrailers and other websites reviews of GT5 vs. Forza 4 graphics? I took those screenshots from a video comparison. It wasn't cherry-picked by me. If you find a better comparison, feel free to link it. I am not stopping anyone from sharing information in this thread. Furthermore, it's not just the cars, but lighting, tracks, crowds, asphalt. Sorry but GT5 looks worse than Forza 4 imo.

You keep attacking me for being biased towards cheaper products? Last time I checked money doesn't grow on trees or we'd all have GTX690 Quad-SLI. Regardless, what does that have anything to do with the discussion of the Cell CPU vs. Tri-core PowerPC CPU in the Xbox360? What are you saying now I prefer Xbox360 over PS3 because it was cheaper? The discussion about price is related specifically about how I think that Sony overpaid for the Cell and didn't spend enough for a faster GPU instead. After looking at PS3 vs. Xbox360 graphics, it doesn't appear to me that the Cell provided a tangible advantage (i.e., if it is, it's only in a handful of games out of 1000 games). So in the end that means the Cell CPU didn't live up to its hype.

PS3 graphics on multiplatform games look a little worse because its easier to design a game for the 360 and then port it over to the ps3.

That's yet another reason the Cell was a failure. If developers cannot quickly and efficiently extract good performance out of the CPU, it was not engineered well. Companies have to design games within their own budgets. If it costs 2-3x more $ to make games look 10% better on the PS3 vs. the 360, then it's not worth it. This is exactly what happened with the PS3.

Stop acting like you know everything when you don't.

Is this coming from a guy that in the first 40 posts crapped all over AMD products, called AMD budget brand and advocates spending $100-150 extra on a GTX680 over Sapphire Vapor-X 7970? 🙄 Good one.

I never said I know everything. What we are doing in this thread is sharing our views regarding rumours and a balance of CPU vs. GPU design and discussing how the Cell did or did not live up to the hype. You seem to get very defensive the minute anyone attacks anything that has an NV GPU in it (like you are eagerly defending PS3 already) and this thread isn't even about AMD vs. NV.

 

[BenSkywalker]

I thought we all figured this out years ago. Xbox GPU is marginally faster than the PS3 GPU. PS3 CPU is substantially faster than the Xbox CPU.

Yes, that is an accurate summation.

All they really ended up doing was spending a ton of money on a CPU that developers ended up mostly using to aid the GPU

Total Cell R&D was $400 million. Let's forget Toshiba, IBM and even MS helped pay for that, we will say Sony paid for it all. Then let's forget that they use Cell in other devices, let's just assume that they only put it in PS3s. With their current sales that works out to a bit under $7.00 per chip. That is 'a ton'?

Although to be fair we are all tech nerds here

If you are honestly believing that Cell has issues because of Core 2 versus i7 benchmarks then you aren't remotely in the league of being a tech nerd. Performance/$, performance/watt, performance/mm all are heavily in Cell's favor *today*, six years later. You won't find anyone that disagrees with any of that that knows anything at all about CPUs. Also the rumor that the PS4 that people seem to be taking as fact, AMD CPU, was started by Kotaku and has no other source(I spent hours trying to trace it down, it all links back to Kotaku, who already let us know that the PS4 and 720 would both be on sale in a few weeks, not have any optical drives and be cloud based computing devices. That's the source of this talk 🙂

You are also listening to a guy who doesn't know the difference between a frame buffer alpha processing trick and a physical simulation, nor could he tell which platform would work best for either one. You are also listening to a guy who has no clue that Cell has been doing post processing AA for the RSX for years, and he probably would be even more surprised that this approach was actually developed by Intel during the Larrabbe project, you know the one where Intel spent billions trying to build a better Cell? You are also believing that GPGPU computing is a dead end and that it won't be used in gaming. GPGPU is very much a copy of Cell's approach to computing(some differences in memory layouts, but they are quite close).

In terms of what was the "Cell killer", it wasn't Intel or AMD or ARM, more then anything it was nVidia(although AMD is trying to go along for the ride now too). The advent of GPGPU is that makes Cell redundant.

GT5 versus Forza4 argument is honestly just dumb. Anyone feel free to link a Forza4 race running like the GT5 one below-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wk5wI9idphM

You can't, why? Because Forza4 can't do it. Forza4 can't do night time racing, and it can't do weather. Weather is mainly a function of physics, night time is just an issue with your rendering engine not being able to handle different lighting models. The comparison between the two is rather comical from a technical standpoint, end visuals at least you can have some debate, as long as GT5 isn't allowed to show off its' best stuff(because Forza4 can't render it *at all*).

If it costs 2-3x more $ to make games look 10% better on the PS3 vs. the 360, then it's not worth it. This is exactly what happened with the PS3.

You just keep trying to make yourself sound less and less knowledgeable about this subject, don't you?

The overwhelming majority of development costs is in asset creation. The code structures that Cell makes developers use is faster on the 360 too, and the overwhelming majority of additional costs are of the sunk variety, you pay for them the first time you make a game for the PS3, after that you know how to do it. The "2x-3x more $" comment is profoundly stupid. Try more like 5%.

 

[Ancalagon44]

Dude, you're completely biased towards cheaper products. This is such good proof. Forza 4 does not look better than GT5. I have both. So does the other poster. Everyone who has both admits GT5 looks more photorealistic and has better graphics. It's also hilarious how the screens use a non premium car for GT5.

PS3 graphics on multiplatform games look a little worse because its easier to design a game for the 360 and then port it over to the ps3. However, ps3 exclusives look better than 360 exclusives. I have both systems, along with everyone else who has both agree that this is the case.

Stop acting like you know everything when you don't.

No, those are premium cars. The Veyron is definitely premium, and the fact that we can use cockpit view for the Ferrari means it is also premium. So they are both premium cars, and still look nowhere near as good as Forza.

Forza: 550 odd, or more, premium cars
GT5: 200 odd premium cars.

Thanks I'll take Forza.

EDIT:

You just keep trying to make yourself sound less and less knowledgeable about this subject, don't you?

The overwhelming majority of development costs is in asset creation. The code structures that Cell makes developers use is faster on the 360 too, and the overwhelming majority of additional costs are of the sunk variety, you pay for them the first time you make a game for the PS3, after that you know how to do it. The "2x-3x more $" comment is profoundly stupid. Try more like 5%.

Okay Mr Smarty Pants, if asset creation is the overwhelming majority of the costs, why do so many multiplatform titles look worse on PS3? Why do so many developers say that coding for the PS3 is a PITA? If everybody did as you say, and simply wrote the PS3 stuff first, then everything should be fine, and they would have to tone down the graphics to run on 360, because its "worse" according to you? Right?

Reality disagrees with you. 9 times out of 10, multiplatform games look and perform worse on PS3. Why?

Come on, code structures. Be clear - do you mean data structures or threading model? If its threading model, it most certainly will not help 360 coding efforts, since the 360 has no SPEs.

 

[BenSkywalker]

No, those are premium cars. The Veyron is definitely premium

Veyron wasn't premium at launch. GT5 has had some rather massive updates post launch.

Okay Mr Smarty Pants, if asset creation is the overwhelming majority of the costs, why do so many multiplatform titles look worse on PS3?

Take an i7 paired with a 9600GT against an Phx3 paired with a 680GTX and which is going to look better? Bigger gap in GPUs, much smaller gap in CPUs compared to the consoles, but you should get the general idea. Either you have a game that can't run on the Phenom, or it will look better on it. Noone should be shocked about that.

Why do so many developers say that coding for the PS3 is a PITA?

Programming for GPGPUs is a huge PITA to, anyone care to argue they are less powerful then CPUs? Difference being GPGPUs are much better at this point at specialized code and obviously are far worse at general purpose when compared to Cell.

If everybody did as you say, and simply wrote the PS3 stuff first, then everything should be fine, and they would have to tone down the graphics to run on 360, because its "worse" according to you?

Take ForceUnleashed2, just to use as a generic example. The games are comparable overall, the 360 showing a bit better on texture quality while the PS3 has superior AA, particularly on long edges. Is one "toned down"? This isn't a matter of 'Bungholio Marks' or whatever else people seem to associate with visual fidelity, there are trade offs. Would the PS3 have been better off with a better GPU? Absolutely. Would the 360 have been better off with a better CPU? Absolutely.

Reality disagrees with you. 9 times out of 10, multiplatform games look and perform worse on PS3. Why?

If you make a game that pushes the limits of what Cell can do, it won't run on the 360. If you make a game that pushes the limits of what Xenon can do, you can reduce their fidelity and it *will* run on the PS3. If the 360 was at an actual advantage, why wouldn't its' exclusives look *much* better? That the PS3 wins fairly easily when you compare the best vs best(normally agreed to be UC vs GoW), its' GPU is clearly weaker, it has less RAM that games can use, it has *much* slower FB access, and yet it loses when looking at best vs best. Clearly *something* is causing this.

Be clear - do you mean data structures or threading model?

Both.

If its threading model, it most certainly will not help 360 coding efforts, since the 360 has no SPEs.

It does have vector units. Something that may be a 1400% increase in speed on the PS3 may only be a 20% increase on the 360, but overall with very few exceptions what runs fastest on the PS3 in terms of code will also run fastest on the 360.

As far as the PS3 being the lead development platform, ask anyone who is working on a second or third cross platform title, they almost always put the PS3 as the lead platform as they have all realized what works best on the PS3 also almost always works best on the 360(obviously exceptions, you aren't going to be using Xenos for graphics calculations the way you will with Cell).

 

[Ancalagon44]

If you make a game that pushes the limits of what Cell can do, it won't run on the 360. If you make a game that pushes the limits of what Xenon can do, you can reduce their fidelity and it *will* run on the PS3. If the 360 was at an actual advantage, why wouldn't its' exclusives look *much* better? That the PS3 wins fairly easily when you compare the best vs best(normally agreed to be UC vs GoW), its' GPU is clearly weaker, it has less RAM that games can use, it has *much* slower FB access, and yet it loses when looking at best vs best. Clearly *something* is causing this.

Sorry, not convinced that there are any games that run on PS3 that would not run on 360. Forza 4 is a case in point - it may not have night races, but in day races, it looks clearly better.

It does have vector units. Something that may be a 1400% increase in speed on the PS3 may only be a 20% increase on the 360, but overall with very few exceptions what runs fastest on the PS3 in terms of code will also run fastest on the 360.

As far as the PS3 being the lead development platform, ask anyone who is working on a second or third cross platform title, they almost always put the PS3 as the lead platform as they have all realized what works best on the PS3 also almost always works best on the 360(obviously exceptions, you aren't going to be using Xenos for graphics calculations the way you will with Cell).

Vector unit != SPE

I highly doubt any dev would follow your logic and hope that his SPE code would execute "good enough" with some tweaks on the 360. It would be suicide. Plus you would be throwing away the fact that the 360 has 3 PPE cores, not 1.

In any case, you havent answered my question properly. Let me rephrase:

According to you, the best way to develop multiplatform games would be to:
1. Code for the PS3 first, taking full advantage of the SPEs.
2. Port to 360, changing some of the SPE code so that it runs on the vector units, possibly porting some of that code to run on the PPEs instead.

Right so far?

And also according to you, the PS3 is more capable than the 360 chiefly because of the Cell processor, even though in some GPU and memory related aspects it is a little behind.

Correct?

So, we have professional developers, some of whom are probably the best in the business, hopefully developing for PS3 first, the more powerful of the two consoles, and then porting to 360 later, possibly with a decrease in visual fidelity. End result should be that PS3 version runs and looks better, 360 version is nearly but not quite as good.

So my question is, why is it the other way around in reality? I'm not interested in best vs best here - its not applicable because according to you they should develop for PS3 first in any case. Get the game looking as good as they possibly can on the PS3 and only then port it to 360. So why does the 360 version end up looking and performing better?

A) Those professional devs with combined centuries of experience are not as good as you?
B) Microsoft's hardware choice, while including a "weaker" CPU, makes for an overrall better experience?
C) Developers are not inept but simply lazy and take the easy way out.

Which is it?

 

[BenSkywalker]

Sorry, not convinced that there are any games that run on PS3 that would not run on 360.

Any of the UCs, either KZ, GT5 to list a few. You know what though, you could respond with games that wouldn't run on the PS3 that do on the 360 too if you pick out some titles that rely on FB access for a significant part of its rendering performance.

Forza 4 is a case in point - it may not have night races, but in day races, it looks clearly better.

How many hundreds of hours do you have comparing each title? I haven't ever heard anyone that has at least a couple hundred hours in to both games that agrees with you.

I highly doubt any dev would follow your logic and hope that his SPE code would execute "good enough" with some tweaks on the 360.

You do realize that the 360's CPU is a Cell based processor, right?

Plus you would be throwing away the fact that the 360 has 3 PPE cores, not 1.

If you are running single threaded code on either platform, go write code for calculators 🙂

2. Port to 360, changing some of the SPE code so that it runs on the vector units, possibly porting some of that code to run on the PPEs instead.

The SPUs are souped up vector units with manual memory management.

So, we have professional developers, some of whom are probably the best in the business, hopefully developing for PS3 first, the more powerful of the two consoles, and then porting to 360 later, possibly with a decrease in visual fidelity. End result should be that PS3 version runs and looks better, 360 version is nearly but not quite as good.

Not even close. If you are making a cross platform title, you start out figuring out what you want your game to do. If the PS3 is the lead platform, you get your code base up and running effectively on that, then port it over to the other platforms. You have some physics calculations that can be handled by vector ops very nicely on a SPU? Then that's what you do, when you port it over to the 360 you use AltiVec, when you port it to x86 you use one of the SSE versions. Code that is written to run well on the SPUs, is going to port over very nicely. Under such an environment you are not thinking "hmm, I only am using 3 of the SPUs, and two of them are idel 40% of the time, what else can I throw at it". Instead you look at "alright, it works without bugs at a decent framerate, next item".

When you take that approach, and that is the *only* viable approach for multiplatform games, you lead on the PS3 and the 360 ends up looking the best because all of the code runs well enough and the 360 has more GPU power. There is *nothing* wrong with developing things this way.

To bring up a contrast, I will use UC because I actually know that this happened. After they got things running the way they wanted to, they realized they had idle SPUs and thought about what they could do with the additional resources. They decided that they were going to use the most advanced sound engine ever put into a game. The SPUs are extremely well suited for such uses as the extremely low latency and extremely high throughput are a perfect match. Now, if this title was going to be cross platform would this have ever happened? Of course not, why spend a bunch of additional development resources that you can't leverage across all titles? But this is precisely the type of situation where Cell can bring something to the table above and beyond the other CPUs in the discussion.

Which is it?

D) Most Devs are doing their job and getting the game running on all the different platforms.

 

[tommo123]

wouldn't they just port it to the ps3 due to it being a PITA to code for and take advantage of it's theoretical power? kinda like ATI cards? high theoretical flops - not so high practical?

 

[BenSkywalker]

wouldn't they just port it to the ps3 due to it being a PITA to code for and take advantage of it's theoretical power?

So one of the huge problems most devs have is dealing with manual memory management on the PS3. In abstract terms, you can have buckets or lists of data, and you have them arranged can have performance impacts. On the traditional CPU side(I use traditional to mean non Cell) optimizing this may give you a ~20% speed boost where on Cell it could be 2000%. So if you code for Cell first, you get the benefits of the speed ups from Cell forcing you to do it right on all the platforms. If you handle PS3 last, you end up going and reporting your code back the other way because you figured out a better way to do it altogether.

high theoretical flops - not so high practical?

It is a bit different. Cell's theoretical is *much* easier to attain in a variety of circumstances(close to peak anyway). AMD's older GPGPU architectures required Vec5 for ideal performnace, some things just couldn't be done that way so you paid a huge penalty. Cell you don't have nearly as large of a penalty for doing things that are sub optimal, at least in terms of what *type* of math you are doing, but you don't have as much as an upside either. I guess you could say that AMD's older version of GPGPU is a more extreme example of the Cell style of processor design in an abstract sense.

 

[Lonbjerg]

It is a bit different. Cell's theoretical is *much* easier to attain in a variety of circumstances(close to peak anyway). AMD's older GPGPU architectures required Vec5 for ideal performnace, some things just couldn't be done that way so you paid a huge penalty. Cell you don't have nearly as large of a penalty for doing things that are sub optimal, at least in terms of what *type* of math you are doing, but you don't have as much as an upside either. I guess you could say that AMD's older version of GPGPU is a more extreme example of the Cell style of processor design in an abstract sense.

Funny, I keep hearing the opposite, that the peak FLOPS are very hard to reach on the Cell...outside uselessloop-code...you seem to be polar opposite of everyone else...and in staring contrast to the market share of the cell...

 

[Olikan]

Funny, I keep hearing the opposite, that the peak FLOPS are very hard to reach on the Cell...outside uselessloop-code...you seem to be polar opposite of everyone else...and in staring contrast to the market share of the cell...

Cell is a bad comparing an CPU
Cell is good comparing an GPU

😎

 

[NTMBK]

Any of the UCs, either KZ, GT5 to list a few.

Those are all published by Sony, which is why they aren't on the 360. Try again.

 

[Lonbjerg]

Cell is a bad comparing an CPU as in the PS3...
Cell is good comparing an GPU as in...something else?

😎

:sneaky:

 

[Rezist]

Total Cell R&D was $400 million. Let's forget Toshiba, IBM and even MS helped pay for that, we will say Sony paid for it all. Then let's forget that they use Cell in other devices, let's just assume that they only put it in PS3s. With their current sales that works out to a bit under $7.00 per chip. That is 'a ton'?

Actually something people seem to completely forget, cell was supposed to be used in other devices and it never happened. Didn't IBM drop cell based servers around 2008? it was basically a ps3 only chip. Yet they did sucker in toshiba.

I think it's failure outside of gaming says something to the poor design.

I'm sure we would have seen intel/amd consoles if the manufacturers could get the rights to build the chips themselves and not have to pay by the unit but as I understand back then you could not do that.

 

[markydV2]

Did you at all read this entire thread and look at what we are talking about?
Did you at all watch the Gametrailers and other websites reviews of GT5 vs. Forza 4 graphics? I took those screenshots from a video comparison. It wasn't cherry-picked by me. If you find a better comparison, feel free to link it. I am not stopping anyone from sharing information in this thread. Furthermore, it's not just the cars, but lighting, tracks, crowds, asphalt. Sorry but GT5 looks worse than Forza 4 imo.

You keep attacking me for being biased towards cheaper products? Last time I checked money doesn't grow on trees or we'd all have GTX690 Quad-SLI. Regardless, what does that have anything to do with the discussion of the Cell CPU vs. Tri-core PowerPC CPU in the Xbox360? What are you saying now I prefer Xbox360 over PS3 because it was cheaper? The discussion about price is related specifically about how I think that Sony overpaid for the Cell and didn't spend enough for a faster GPU instead. After looking at PS3 vs. Xbox360 graphics, it doesn't appear to me that the Cell provided a tangible advantage (i.e., if it is, it's only in a handful of games out of 1000 games). So in the the that means the Cell CPU didn't live up to its hype.



That's yet another reason the Cell was a failure. If developers cannot quickly and efficiently extract good performance out of the CPU, it was not engineered well. Companies have to design games within their own budgets. If it costs 2-3x more $ to make games look 10% better on the PS3 vs. the 360, then it's not worth it. This is exactly what happened with the PS3.



Is this coming from a guy that in the first 40 posts crapped all over AMD products, called AMD budget brand and advocates spending $100-150 extra on a GTX680 over Sapphire Vapor-X 7970? 🙄 Good one.

I never said I know everything. What we are doing in this thread is sharing our views regarding rumours and a balance of CPU vs. GPU design and discussing how the Cell did or did not live up to the hype. You seem to get very defensive the minute anyone attacks anything that has an NV GPU in it (like you are eagerly defending PS3 already) and this thread isn't even about AMD vs. NV.

I am not getting into the xbox 360 vs ps3 debate, i have both. They are both good in their own ways. Regarding the cell comments, you guys can debate that all you want, i'm not agreeing or disagreeing with anything.

However, i'm just saying that GT5 does indeed look better than Forza 4. Almost everyone who has both would agree with this. Try putting in hours in each title and im sure you'll think GT5 is better. The veyron is not a premium car. The premium cars in GT5 are unlike anything you'll see in forza 4. Where forza 4 shines (esp what i love about forza) is the engine sounds and customization, in that sense forza is way better than gran turismo, but simulator wise and graphics, gt5 wins.

 

[markydV2]

No, those are premium cars. The Veyron is definitely premium, and the fact that we can use cockpit view for the Ferrari means it is also premium. So they are both premium cars, and still look nowhere near as good as Forza.

Forza: 550 odd, or more, premium cars
GT5: 200 odd premium cars.

Thanks I'll take Forza.

GT5 premium cars > Forza 4 'premium'. You can't compare GT5 car models to Forza 4. It's on a whole nother level. There's a reason why they tried so hard to achieve something better with the car models for forza 4.

The veyron is not premium, do you even have GT5? I HAVE BOTH! Don't be bias.

 

[RussianSensation]

If you are honestly believing that Cell has issues because of Core 2 versus i7 benchmarks then you aren't remotely in the league of being a tech nerd. Performance/$, performance/watt, performance/mm all are heavily in Cell's favor *today*, six years later. You won't find anyone that disagrees with any of that that knows anything at all about CPUs.

Professional developers who coded Metro 2033 - in the top 5 best looking PC games of all time, seem to disagree with your viewpoint. Actually you are THE only person as far as I am aware out of entire CPU forum that believes that the Cell is superior for games than a modern x86 CPU, especially one from the modern Core i7 family tree. Go ask idontcare, or anyone else with actual knowledge of how CPUs work if you need confirmation. You seem to be very focused in on the theoretical Floating point performance and yet don't consider that it's not easily extracted in the real world because the Cell's 1 core + 7 SPE design is fairly complicated to code for efficiently, despite countless people telling you this. Sony wants to allow developers/programmers to tap into PS4's potential at a much quicker pace, which may be another reason why they are going to abandon the Cell's architecture.

You are also listening to a guy who doesn't know the difference between a frame buffer alpha processing trick and a physical simulation, nor could he tell which platform would work best for either one.

Everything that comes out of your mouth can be summarized as follows:

1) I state an opinion with no facts;
2) When people refute my opinion with facts, and I have no facts to back up my opinion, I call them stupid and attack them personally.

Should we even discuss how you attacked member PC gamers on our forum when you started arguing with everyone that textures and gaming resolution are not inter-related? You yourself made such startling attacks on PC gamers and in general showed time and time again that you have no idea how to present an argument by focusing on the argument itself rather than on the people discussing it. You have also opposed the views of many resident forum members in the Dark Souls thread who tried to suggest that the game would look a lot better if the native resolution was increased from the internal frame-buffer of 1024x720 (upscaled to 1280x720). Then when the modding community fixed this issue and the game looked significantly better, your response was that Dark Souls' original art was of very high quality, but ironically you never agreed with many of us that to expose those original art assets an increase in resolution was necessary. This is all we were saying in the beginning and yet you attacked us for being "graphics whores" and "PC snobs" who like easy games, save anywhere, etc.

You even argued against professional publications that universally agreed that Dark Souls was a terrible console port in its original state in this thread and made a fool out of yourself doing it. Seriously, I have no idea how you got your Elite Member status since all you are good at is spewing personal opinion, disrespecting other forum members when they don't agree, and resort to personal attacks on knowledge matter when you yourself have been proven wrong by countless knowledgeable members in this very thread.

You just keep trying to make yourself sound less and less knowledgeable about this subject, don't you?

So you are implying that all the developers who have for years complained about how hard it was to code for PS2 and PS3 are just making up the programming costs (which are part of development costs)? It's a lot harder to achieve a similar level of graphics on the PS3's Cell than it is on the Tri-Core Xbox360 CPU since that involves tapping into the 7 SPE units as the Cell is just a 1-core PowerPC CPU. Therefore, out of the gate, the PS3's Cell is less powerful than the 360 is. The additional costs that require learning how the SPE's can aid the single PowerPC core are time and $ required to optimize the game specifically for PS3. This explains why for the first 2-3 years, PS3's games looked worse than 360's games.

After 5 Graphics Comparison Rounds, Gamespot concluded:

"We're now getting onto our fifth installment of this feature, and with every passing year the differences between the consoles continue to melt away. When we first started this feature, the differences between some versions of games were astounding. Fight Night Round 3 looked drastically better on the Xbox 360 with its improved lighting and shadowing effects. The following year, the graphics on both platforms got considerably more even--Oblivion even looked better on the PlayStation 3. Every subsequent comparison pretty much ended the same, with the Xbox 360 getting the benefit of slightly higher-resolution textures and other marginal improvements that wouldn't be noticed unless the images were put side by side."

That supports the view that it was harder to optimize games for the PS3 to look as good as they did on the 360 and it took years of programming and understanding of how to utilize the 7 PPEs to actually make games look as good or better than the 360. Despite that, Gamespot still concluded that PS3's games on average didn't look better than the 360's.

That only supports the view that developers had a hard time extracting that maximum performance out of the Cell you keep alluding to. That means there are real costs involved in terms of finances and programming/coding time required to achieve better graphical fidelity out of the PS3's hardware. Considering the console launched 1 year later and your claims that PS3's Cell is far superior to x86 CPUs in terms of all those metrics you listed, it shouldn't have been the case that PS3 took years of development to just match the Xbox360 in some games, and yet still have worse resolution textures in many games such as Batman Arkham Asylum, Sleeping Dogs, Assassin's Creed II, Crysis, etc.

You keep telling me that I don't know anything and that the graphics card in the 360 is way more powerful. First of all there is no indication that the GPU in the 360 is way more powerful. It may be slightly more powerful but given your claims that the Cell is vastly superior to modern i7 CPUs for running games, surely it should have compensated for what is perhaps a 15-20% GPU advantage of the 360? If anything that strengthens my view that a faster GPU is more important than a faster CPU for running games and that PS3's design was much more unbalanced than the 360's in regard to videogame graphics. Even after 6 years on the market, most objective console gamers would not conclude that PS3's games look tangibly better.

If you compare a slow CPU to a fast CPU, the performance difference is dramatic, especially at lower resolutions at which Xbox360 and PS3 run games (generally 1280x800 or lower):

This is exactly where the Cell should have allowed for PS3 to have more consistent framerates and higher minimum framerates in games, and yet the opposite is true = Xbox360 games tend to use higher resolution textures and run smoother at the same time.

If the PS3's Cell CPU was so superior to modern x86 CPUs, why does the Cell still struggle to maintain 60 fps in many cross-platform games, drops below 60 fps in GT5, can't run local split-player co-op with AI cars in GT5? BTW, there is no evidence that Xbox360 cannot handle night racing or weather effects. That's just your opinion. What we do know is the supposed 4-5 generations ahead of Core 2 Duo superiority of the Cell is nowhere to be found in real world PS3 games. It cannot even compensate for the slightly faster GPU in the 360!! It appears more and more the more games we look at on PS3 vs. 360 that your claims are just an opinion.

Time and time again, PS3 shows that it's a less powerful console than the 360 under realistic time development and financial programming constraints. Only few developers were able to make games look better on the PS3 and these fall into the camp that spend years and years learning how to optimize for the PS3's hardware - again a sign of poorly engineered Cell architecture, lack of memory on the PS3 and slower GPU - all aspects of an unbalanced, inefficient CPU+GPU integrated design.

Crysis
Xbox 360 runs the game at a native resolution of 1152x720, with higher resolution textures, and higher performance too!
PS3 runs the game at a native resolution of 1024x720

360

PS3

"The PS3 offers marginally less blocky shadows, but the 360 showcases higher quality textures in places - particularly during the icy Paradise Lost level." ~ EuroGamer
"No doubt the more obvious dividing factor between the two versions is performance - as you'll see in the video below, the 360 commands a considerable advantage here in the same like-for-like cases. Cut-scenes based in indoors settings fare well in either case, but travelling over long stretches of terrain challenges both consoles' target 30FPS, with the PS3 dropping more frames." ~EuroGamer Video

"Performance doesn't improve during sequences of heavy gunplay either, with the general rule of thumb being that the PS3 will run at 5-10FPS less than its 360 counterpart under equivalent periods of strain. This is regardless of the situation, be it when particle and smoke effects are flying from an exploding tank, or when a hut collapses to charging truck. It's in these cases especially that performance takes its greatest hit, going all the way down to 12FPS on PS3 at one point." ~ EuroGamer

As I said for this entire thread:

1) You have not proven that the Cell is more powerful than the Tri-Core PowerPC CPU in the 360 using real world examples of games; by extension that means you have not proven that the Cell is faster in running real world games than a modern x86 CPU (of course the Cell's inferiority to modern x86 CPUs was already reiterated re-iterated by Oles Shishkovstov, chief technical officer of 4A Games, who gave us Metro 2033 graphics.)

2) You have not disputed the claim that it's harder to optimize games to run as well on the PS3 as it is for the 360 since it requires the full utilization of 7 SPEs of the Cell. Otherwise, the console's available CPU power is just a 1 PowerPC core, which is actually slower than the Tri-Core PowerPC in the 360;

3) You have no proven that the Cell's superiority for running games is even enough to compensate for what is a slight GPU advantage for the 360. Thus it cannot be true that the Cell is 4-5 generations ahead of performance of Core 2 Duo since the CPU performance is specifically critical for running games at low resolutions such as 1280x800, where the Cell's superior gaming performance would have precisely shown up -- yet it did not.

4) You have not disputed the claim that the Sony's capital allocation on PS3's hardware which resulted in them spending more $ on the Cell than the RSX GPU was not a major mistake in its design as for many years PS3's games have lagged far behind 360's in terms of graphics and performance. Even now the general consensus by professional reviewers is that cross-platform games have higher texture resolution and smoother performance on the 360 (further supporting the view that the Cell was extremely difficult to code for and most developers didn't bother optimizing for it -- thus it's theoretical performance advantage over the 360's Tri-core CPU was mostly on paper).

In other words, in the real world the Cell has not lived up to the hype and thus far you have not provided sufficient support to the contrary using real world examples. Instead, you keep proclaiming that we are all idiots and that you are the only knowledgeable person in this thread. If anyone doesn't agree with your opinion, which you yourself presented without concrete facts to support it, you label them as lacking understanding of modern CPU design. The irony is that not a single credible programmer or chief technical officer who designs modern games has once agreed with your view that the PowerPC / 7 SPE Cell design is superior for running games than a modern Core i7 processor is. It may be superior for running certain lines of code, but not the overall game game code. There is a reason the Cell project was shelved - it is very slow compared to modern CPUs and inefficient. As has been linked earlier, PS3's power consumption was largely driven by the inefficient power use of the Cell CPU, which was only curbed later through countless node shrinks.

The main "Processing Element" of the Cell is just a 3.2-GHz PowerPC core equipped with 512 KB of L2 cache. The computational workload comes in through the PowerPC core. The core then assesses the work that needs to be done, looks at what the SPEs are currently processing and decides how to best dole out the workload to achieve maximum efficiency. That PowerPC core design is what was used in the Apple G5, a completely outdated architecture. And here you are trying to prove to us that this design is vastly superior to a modern CPU for games.

 

[BenSkywalker]

Only have time for a quick post, your continual posting of PC benchmarks using modern GPUs is a pathetic fail on a logical basis, a quick demonstration of why-

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2365/11

Pay attention to the 1280x1024 benchmarks- over 200% performance disparity on one of the benches. That is at 1280x1024.

The computational workload comes in through the PowerPC core. The core then assesses the work that needs to be done, looks at what the SPEs are currently processing and decides how to best dole out the workload to achieve maximum efficiency.

That isn't how it works at all. If the CPU assigned tasks on its' own developers wouldn't have been nearly as hostile towards its' difficulty as they are. I'll cover the rest of the logic fails later. BTW- I'm not insulting you, I'm insulting your understanding of this particular topic- the man who designed both CPUs agrees with me, I linked you the book he wrote about it, you should read it.

 

[Cerb]

I highly doubt any dev would follow your logic and hope that his SPE code would execute "good enough" with some tweaks on the 360. It would be suicide. Plus you would be throwing away the fact that the 360 has 3 PPE cores, not 1.

It's not like that. SPE coding is hard, and the really hard part is not the loops, but data structures. Making them nicely regular and sized in big enough chunks to keep such a unit busy, but small enough to fit in what's left of the local store, is no easy matter.

Once you have that done, re-implementing it as pthread-ish code with AltiVec or VMX aught to be fairly easy (especially since MS to went to great lengths to allow detailed hardware profiling and debugging on Xenon). All the memory work that was done for SPEs should make it duck soup to code up for the 360.

That PowerPC core design is what was used in the Apple G5, a completely outdated architecture. And here you are trying to prove to us that this design is vastly superior to a modern CPU for games.

No, it wasn't. While the feature set was similar, the Apple G5 (PPC970) was a derivative of the Power4, to be used in blades and the like. It was a high-throughput fat highly speculative OOOE core (actually, a lot like what some of us hoped BD would be), and was somewhat competitve with the K8, clock per clock (better at lower speeds, but it didn't scale to 2.5GHz+ very well). If modified to scale up a little better, it would have used way too much power, so MS didn't have too many options within their budget. They could basically use MIPS or PPC, and there were major bottlenecks with either one, at the time. I'm sure IBM had some non-technical merits, like licensing flexibility, that were useful to them, as well.

The core found in the Cell and Xenon was not a direct derivative of any particular Power- or PPC-series core, but shares its most important features with the Power6, which was being worked on around the same time.

Clarification edit: the PPC970 may have technically been a starting point (officially I believe it was the Power4 itself), though it's based on a PCC970 or Power4 like an Atom is based on a Pentium-M: possibly interesting for historical purposes, but too different to be an apples to apples comparison of CPUs.

 

[BenSkywalker]

Funny, I keep hearing the opposite, that the peak FLOPS are very hard to reach on the Cell...outside uselessloop-code...you seem to be polar opposite of everyone else...and in staring contrast to the market share of the cell...

Whoa, slow down there, that was out of context, I brought that up in explicit comparison to GPGPU computing hitting peak Vec5 numbers 🙂

Actually you are THE only person as far as I am aware out of entire CPU forum that believes that the Cell is superior for games than a modern x86 CPU, especially one from the modern Core i7 family tree.

Hmm, the CPU forum or Carmack, tough call there 😉

You seem to be very focused in on the theoretical Floating point performance and yet don't consider that it's not easily extracted in the real world because the Cell's 1 core + 7 SPE design is fairly complicated to code for efficiently, despite countless people telling you this.

When I have I stated that Cell is easy to develop for? When did I ever even imply that it didn't take extra work to get it performing well? Quote me. Stop making things up and quote me.

Sony wants to allow developers/programmers to tap into PS4's potential at a much quicker pace, which may be another reason why they are going to abandon the Cell's architecture.

That wouldn't shock me, but I've seen nothing concrete saying that will be the case at all. I've seen the x86 rumors, Power8 line rumors and Cell2 rumors. You know that all three of them would have in common? Any of them would be easier to deal with then the PS3 or PS2 when they launched. Again, not saying Sony won't drop Cell, just the only thing I have seen that stated they were dropping it and going x86 came from one of the least reliable rumor sites around.

So you are implying that all the developers who have for years complained of how hard it was to code for PS2 and PS3 are just making up the programming costs (which are part of development costs)?

Not at all, it's just I can add 🙂

The PS3 could take ten times the coding expense of the 360 and it wouldn't be in the league of a 50% increase in development costs. Does that imply that the PS3 is easy to code to you? My point is that writing code is actually a fairly small part of development costs at this point. Don't believe me, watch the credits on any modern game 🙂

If you compare a slow CPU to a fast CPU, the performance difference is dramatic, especially at lower resolutions at which Xbox360 and PS3 run games (generally 1280x800 or lower):

Touched on in my previous post, but let's do it again-

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2365/11

Those are GPUs from the same generational era as the ones in the 360 and the PS3. Even if we ignore the 8800GT that is also on the chart, we are seeing more then 50% speedup in one of the tests looking at the 1900xtx vs the 7950GT- at 1280x1024. If we were using 2012 GPUs then performance at low resolutions would probably be a good indicator of other limitations of the system, but we aren't. We are talking about '05 GPUs and they very clearly show limits even at 1280x1024. This I why I continue to laugh at you when you post i7 benches with modern GPUs, you don't seem to understand what you are comparing.

of course the Cell's inferiority to modern x86 CPUs was already reiterated re-iterated by Oles Shishkovstov, chief technical officer of 4A Games, who gave us Metro 2033 graphics.

Did you actually read that article? They didn't port the game to the PS3 because the publisher was worried they couldn't handle it, what he said was, to quote-

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. So, is it enough? Nope, there is no CPU in the world that is enough for games!

He didn't say the 360 was superior to Cell, he said it could be superior to x86(you know, what you have been saying is absurd, you just linked another dev saying it wasn't 😉 ).

It may be slightly more powerful but given your claims that the Cell is vastly superior to modern i7 CPUs for running games, surely it should have compensated for what is perhaps a 15-20% GPU advantage of the 360?

In situations where fast FB access is the bottleneck, the 360's GPU is orders of magnitude faster then RSX(that's kind of tricky as it just won't be a bottleneck on the 360 while it will on the PS3).

Again, UC3, KZ3- what 360 games are you saying look better? We have covered, ad nauseam, that if a game can run on a given CPU the platform with the better GPU *should* look better. Tell me what games on the 360 look better then UC3/KZ3. I keep pointing out to you that the PS3 exclusives are better, you keep ignoring it.

Only few developers were able to make games look better on the PS3 and these fall into the camp that spend years and years learning how to optimize for the PS3's hardware - again a sign of poorly engineered Cell architecture, lack of memory on the PS3 and slower GPU - all aspects of an unbalanced, inefficient CPU+GPU integrated design.

Hard to develop for is accurate, less powerful isn't even close.

Should we even discuss how you attacked member PC gamers on our forum when you started arguing with everyone that textures and gaming resolution are not inter-related?

Really? I was being nice and hoped that you learned a few things, to quote you-

If someone is trying to sell a $40 game on the PC, there are certain standards that are considered almost a standard on the PC - like being able to change the resolution, not running into a locked 30 fps, not having your $500 graphics card drop to 20fps because the developer couldn't optimize the game for the life of them, not having to upscale 1024x720 textures to fake 1080P?

I quoted the bolded part and responded-

/facepalm

If you want to pretend you know anything at all about graphics don't post things as profoundly moronic as this. Rendering resolution has nothing to do with texture resolution.

Seriously, upscale 1024x768 textures to fake 1080p? I insulted that statement because it was idiotic. I did also very clearly state that rendering resolution has *nothing* to do with texture resolution. That is an absolute fact. The game was patched to run at higher resolutions and, oh my, what's that, the textures looked much better? How could that possibly have happened, oh wait, I said as much and was flamed for being stupid and not understanding PC graphics, heh.

Seriously, I have no idea how you got your Elite Member status since all you are good at is spewing personal opinion, disrespecting other forum members when they don't agree, and resort to personal attacks on knowledge matter when you yourself have been proven wrong by countless knowledgeable members in this very thread.

Hmmm, see Cerb, maybe someone else posted I'm forgetting about, who else is knowledgeable in this thread? I have a markedly different approach to people who are willing to learn. People who scream ignorance and refuse to listen I belittle. I've always been like this 🙂

In other words, in the real world the Cell has not lived up to the hype and thus far you have not provided sufficient support to the contrary using real world examples.

Unchartered, Unchartered2, Unchartered3, God of War 3, Killzone 2, Killzone 3. Do you have a counter? It isn't like I've been holding out mentioning these.

 

[poohbear]

i can't imagine the next gen consoles NOT having cutting edge graphics. The developers will surely tell them otherwise like they did with the Xbobx 360 and forced MS to up the amount of RAM in game.

If tablets out now can run UE3.0 games, the PS4 will become obsolete in 3-4 years when tablets can run UE4.0 games just as well. They need a graphics edge to remain relevant.

 

[Lonbjerg]

Hmm, the CPU forum or Carmack, tough call there 😉

Pre-Rage carmack...or Post-Rage carmack...his views are different today...he considers console a dead end...so from what year does Carmack support you...and from what year did the stop supporting your view and return to reality? :sneaky: