Destiny 2 won't run at 60 FPS on PS4 Pro because of the CPU

[Carfax83]

According to developers, Destiny 2 cannot run at 60 FPS on the PS4 Pro (features a higher clocked version of the Jaguar cores found in the PS4) because the CPUs don't have enough horsepower. Now this shouldn't come as a surprise to any of us, as it's been well known for years that the CPUs in the current gen consoles are weak sauce compared to Core series from Intel, and AMD's newly minted Ryzen CPUs.

But the question is, how will Scorpio fare? From what the devs state, it doesn't seem like a draw call bottleneck at all (which Scorpio has some excellent optimizations for reducing draw call overhead) , and is more related to physics, A.I and network calculations. Scorpio runs a heavily customized, but still Jaguar derived CPU so theoretically it should share the same weaknesses as the CPU in the Xbox One, PS4 and PS4 Pro; albeit significantly ameliorated.

It will be interesting to see whether Scorpio can induce a 60 FPS revolution for console gaming, as most console games these days are severely lacking in that department. And even when they do ship at 60 FPS, it's tenuous to say the least with framerate drops all over the place.

Originally Posted by IGN

IGN: "Why did you make that decision. You're like 'We're going to lock it at 4K/30 max on consoles.' Is it just like, you don't want to push the consoles too hard, or why do you make that choice?"

Luke Smith: "I mean, I'm going to wade into this, and you [Mark Noseworthy] can flesh it out. The console, the PS4 Pro is super powerful, but it couldn't run our game at 60. Our game's this rich physics simulation where collision of players, networking, etc, and like, it wouldn't run."

IGN: "Yeah, makes sense."

Luke Smith: "Not enough horsepower there."

Mark Noseworthy: "But there's tons of GPU power in the PS4 Pro. That's why we're doing 4K, right? It's on the CPU side. Destiny's simulation, like we have more AI, more monsters in an environment with physically simulated vehicles and characters and projectiles, and it's part of the Destiny magic, like that, like 30 seocnds of fun, like coming around a corner and throwing a grenade, popping a guy in the head, and then you add like 5, 6, 7 other players in a public event; that is incredibly intensive for hardware."

Source

 

[mohit9206]

AMD Jaguar is weak as hell. Its a huge bottleneck for the gpu in ps4 pro and scorpio.

 

[itsmydamnation]

Want to point out some things:

1. Scorpio runs regular puma cores just like ps4pro
2. Both the PS4(liverpool) and PS4pro have 'draw call off loading', in fact they had it well before XB1 did because XB1 only launched initially with a dx11 based stack.
3. 8 jaguar cores still has quite high throughput, thats 16x 128bit AVX ops a cycle at 2ghz in a 20ish watt TDP. Your not easily going to replace that with less cores that are better at ILP.

 

[NostaSeronx]

thats 16x 128bit AVX ops

Uhh, not so fast. It's more like 8x 128b AVX ops. Most of important stuff for gaming was only added with AVX2. Only Excavator of the 15h/16h generation got that.

 

[itsmydamnation]

Uhh, not so fast. It's more like 8x 128b AVX ops. Most of important stuff for gaming was only added with AVX2. Only Excavator of the 15h/16h generation got that.

Err no it can do 16x AVX 128 bit ops cycle across its 8 cores. I didn't know all the fp operations found in sse are useless for games

Let's just remember pc games are all still like sse4.....

 

[NostaSeronx]

Err no it can do 16x AVX 128 bit ops cycle across its 8 cores.

- Pipe01 -2x 128-bit VIALUs (packed-add, packed-shift, packed-logicals, data packing, and miscellaneous operations to support the SSE4.2 string instructions.)
- Pipe 0 -1x 128-bit VIMUL (Packed integer multiplies of various bit-widths and sign modes. Additionally, for reasons that include shared control logic and similar latencies (albeit in the presence of different dedicated execution hardware) the vector integer multiply unit supports Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and carry-less multiplication (i.e. PCLMULDQDQ, or CLMUL) instructions.)
- Pipe 1 -1x 144-bit STC (data type conversions (e.g. CVTPS2PI instructions) and storing data from the PRF to the main processor data cache.)
- Pipe 0 -1x 144-bit FPA (FPA handles transcendental 68-bit significand internal-precision (IP), x87 EP (which may be rounded to 24, 53, or 64 bits), scalar/packed DP, and scalar/packed SP. The main operations include floating-point addition/subtraction, floating-point compare/max/min, logicals, moves in floating-point format, and all FPU-to-main core architectural register operations. The FPU-to-main core operations include integer PRF data writes, EFLAGS results, and condition code flags.)
- Pipe 1 -1x 144-bit FPM (The Jaguar floating-point multiplier handles all floating-point operations that require multiplication, as well as division, reciprocal, and square root operations.)

144-bit is Hi -> 64-bit(SSE/AVX) and Lo > 80-bit(x87/SSE/AVX).

If the bottom units were FMAC and FPA, then ya 2x 128-bit would happen.

Interesting bit of info:

128-bit floating-point adder that has been improved from the K7 architecture, and a 128-bit floating-point iterative multiplier that has been enhanced from the Bobcat.

 

[Carfax83]

Want to point out some things:

1. Scorpio runs regular puma cores just like ps4pro
2. Both the PS4(liverpool) and PS4pro have 'draw call off loading', in fact they had it well before XB1 did because XB1 only launched initially with a dx11 based stack.
3. 8 jaguar cores still has quite high throughput, thats 16x 128bit AVX ops a cycle at 2ghz in a 20ish watt TDP. Your not easily going to replace that with less cores that are better at ILP.

Well if the PS4 and PS4 Pro both have the draw call off loading mechanism and they still can't hit 60 FPS, then Scorpio doesn't have much hope either. An extra 200mhz on the core isn't going to make much of a difference. The only way I can see them getting 60 FPS is by offloading physics to the GPU instead, but I don't know if their engine supports GPU accelerated physics.

I can sort of understand why Microsoft and Sony sacrifice CPU performance in the consoles in favor of GPU performance, as the GPU is the most essential component that will dictate gaming performance. But weak CPUs means that we'll continue to have less sophisticated A.I and physics in cross platform games as developers always develop for the lowest common denominator first and foremost.

 

[NTMBK]

Want to point out some things:

1. Scorpio runs regular puma cores just like ps4pro
2. Both the PS4(liverpool) and PS4pro have 'draw call off loading', in fact they had it well before XB1 did because XB1 only launched initially with a dx11 based stack.
3. 8 jaguar cores still has quite high throughput, thats 16x 128bit AVX ops a cycle at 2ghz in a 20ish watt TDP. Your not easily going to replace that with less cores that are better at ILP.

Total SIMD throughput is only a useful tool for certain problems (the kind that often would be better offloaded to GPU anyway). Doesn't help with branching, hard to predict, inherently single threaded problems.

 

[itsmydamnation]

Total SIMD throughput is only a useful tool for certain problems (the kind that often would be better offloaded to GPU anyway). Doesn't help with branching, hard to predict, inherently single threaded problems.

I know, thats why i said its not a simple exchange especially 5 years ago when the consoles were being designed, get more ILP in same TDP would likely mean less SIMD in same TDP.

Now its a no brainer with Zen likely giving both more ILP and SIMD at the same TDP, but the cost then will be extra area.

 

[MajinCry]

The guy mentions physics; what middleware are they using?

Using OpenCL (Bullet?) for hardware acceleration ought to do a bit of good there.

 

[nurturedhate]

Bungie kept Destiny 1 locked at 30fps across all five console platforms for competitive reasons (PS3, 4, Pro, 360, ONE) and they'll more than likely do it here also.