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PC vs Console what's holding it back?

V

vtohthree

Senior member
Before I begin, I would like to say that I will be rather general, however I certainly invite/want the discussion to be "highly technical"(obviously). I'm also sure that this has been discussed to some extent before, but I did a search for it already.

Where do I begin? Theoretically and quite obviously, the PC is much more powerful than the console as far as hardware goes.

For example, the xbox has a modified 733 mhz Celeron Pentium III cpu, 250mhz 4pixel pipeline Nvidia xgpu, with roughly 64 megs of ram. (I know I left out a lot of the other details, again I'm being general to get the point across)

VS. the PC...(approximate specs of PC's in 2002)

For example, an Athlon 1800+, with 325+ mhz ati 9600 gpu, and standard 256megs of ram of its time.

I do not have specific frame rate comparisons or other benchmarks, but without a doubt the xbox will more than likely out perform the cpu setup from what I've seen with several games, particuarly sports games.

Now I will state the obvious, the cpu's resources are also running windows and whatever applications you may have on. The game that you play, must run through windows. While the console is soley concentrated on the game and nothing else. Though I am a noob, this need not be reposted for apparent reasons.

I will assume much of the same with the next generation of consoles. I will assume that a well programmed game for the PS3 or Xbox 360 will out perform the same game programmed for the pc(an attempt to answer my own question, maybe it is the programming). Even if the pc is an AMD 64 X2 4800+ with a next generation G70(maybe even with the SLI) with at least 2 gigs of ram.

Theoretically, it shouldn't be this way. So my real discussion is, what if you cut the crap and ran a game soley off the raw power of the PC? Not off of windows, not with windows, or nothing, basically if you made a game console with the AMD processor, and with 2 gigs of ram( I need not mention the GPU because the consoles deliver similarly for the time being). What are the bottle necks(if any, I would imagine there wouldn't be many)

This of course leads to talks of Bill Gates licensing the xbox software...but back to the focus, the PC should destroy the console's performance... why doesn't it? OR for all I know, I may be wrong, maybe the specs of the X2 system I described with a G70 SLI setup will crush an XBOX 360....let the discussion begin.
 
Actually the Xbox 360 Xenon outperfors like crazy.The Zenon is made of 3 cores running 2 threads each. A thread is basically a processor in itself, so you have like 6 processors going on in a 360. So each one of those processors can be devoted to seperate task rather than haveing 1 cpu do it. Its just a simplification
 
Most of us know about the 3 cores and the multiple threads, especially regular readers here. Anand himself and Derek Wilson did an article about it, and how USELESS the extra threads are for gaming according to developers. So the comment made can not justify, "outperfors like crazy" I won't say anything else... moving on... I applogize for sounding brash.
 
I am extremely tired right now, lets just say I haven't slept much and I'm running on over time. But I just re-read(skimmed) the article Anand and Derek Wilson pressed on the PS3 vs the XBOX 360... seems like they are saying the next gen consoles will not out perform the pc on single threaded games based on cpu power especially. However if there were multi threaded games, it may be different, but it is not expected to happen any time soon, and by then the pc will have more multi thread power. We can still continue on... I still do not have full faith that a game title released on all 3 platforms(the two consoles and the pc), will run best on the pc. I am only using inference from the past. I remember how much better my Super NES ran Super Street Fighter II turbo than on my 486 DX with 16 megs of ram 😉

The general trend: it appears that the pc specs must far surpass the console's specs in order to begin to deliver.
 
Computers do not process a program in the order that the program is written. A modern processor may have 4, 6, 8, 20? pipelines. Each of the pipelines has instructions coming down it to be performed to make the program run. So saying that there is no multi-threading is a misnomer. A computer's processor is always processing multiple instructions at the same time. This means the instructions are run out of order. Another subprocessor constantly predicts the instructions to run next and loads them up. So the amount of storage space on the registers of the CPU and the available cache storage space speeds a processor up as well. The speed of the processor is often misleading.

Toms hardware did a review of the A-Open Pentium 4 Mobile motherboard using the Dotham Core and ran some games on it. The Intel Mobile processors are basically just a PIII processor on steroids. For video games they claimed that the P4 M performs quite well. I just use this as an example because the P4 M is basically a PIII processor.

Most gamers will tell you the video card is as important or even more important than the processor.

I think of a computer and a game machine as both being computers. A game machine can be referred to as a Limited Use Computer. There is an awful lot of useless junk that windows loads that a game machine really does not need like a database for indexing files on the hard drive. However, some game consoles are becoming more like computers with networking and even the ability to save files either on a flash memory device or on a hard drive.

I think what the game console folks do is mass produce the console and then maybe even sell the console at a loss because they know that the gamers will buy games to run on the console. The Games is where they make all their money, not the console. I think the game consoles can be a good deal, however, I like being able to load the game on the hard drive. Some people also like to mod the games and download special features or custom made maps. You cant do that too much with game consoles from Sony. Sony could have put a hard drive in their consoles and made it possible to store the saved games on the hard drive. They had a hard drive interface on the PS2. They just feared people would learn to copy games illegally to the hard drive. Their own mistrust of their consumers may actually be hurting their business.

Game Console Article
http://www.tomshardware.com/business/20050708/index.html

A-Open P4 M Article
http://www17.tomshardware.com/howto/20050621/index.html
 
Just so no one gets confused, he meant the Pentium M dothan, which is NOT a Pentium 4 mobile, two VERY different beasts.
 
Sigh. Ok the problem isn?t the hardware, it?s the software. When someone develops a game for a console, they know the exact specifications of it. They know computing limit and make their program use a good deal of those resources. On a pc it is much different. To develop a game on a PC, you have to develop it for the lowest performance setup that could possible run the game. Then let wrappers like DirectX balance quality and performance, and do some hand balancing yourself. In the end you just added a lot of crap so that a game designed for a low performance computer, can up its own quality for better computers. Look at some of the games that are coming out with engines can barely run on 6800U's. The fact that is happening forces the game developer to go in and add extra code so that the engine can balance itself out. That adds a lot of performance hit. PC games have to flexible, so they can't perform as well as their console counterparts unless PC's are a world ahead of consoles. That would never happen.
 
I'd say on major reason is that consoles run at low res, pc games run at high res. If pc games were targetted for 640x480, they could look much better too.
There's also the overhead of directx, which requires like a 20% more powerful cpu.
 
Well, so theoretically, if you took the X2 system with no windows(lets just say if you could boot it on a bios that would let the game tap into the full resources of the hardware), and programmed a game for it with the hardware specs, it would be a monster, correct?
 
No doubt. With the raw power of a 7800GTX SLi configuration, you would have dazzling visuals, stunning framerates, and ultra-immersive gameplay.

Sadly...that will never happen. Computers need an operating system of some sort...or do they?

M S - D O S ! !
 
Originally posted by: vtohthree
Well, so theoretically, if you took the X2 system with no windows(lets just say if you could boot it on a bios that would let the game tap into the full resources of the hardware), and programmed a game for it with the hardware specs, it would be a monster, correct?
Click to expand...

Well, the graphics would be the same(except for any extra optimizations you could do to tweak out a bit more performance), but you'd get a decent amount of extra cpu time.
 
DOS4GW

/thread

In all seriousness though, it is mostly a software problem as mentioned previously in this thread. It is a lot easier to make a game when you know exactly what hardware it will be run on. PC game developers have to code multiple software paths because of the variety of PC hardware the game will be run on. Not to mention that televisions (and their extremely low resolution) provide free anti-aliasing, which eats resources on modern GPU's which have to output much higher resolutions (usually about 4x that of an NTSC television, your mileage may vary)

However your non-bloatware fantasy does exist. It is just that it was mostly used back when computers didn't have enough resources to do two things at once. However now programmers are much more lazy and rely highly on the crutch that is DirectX. OpenGL is making a comeback (sort-of) but DirectX is still the king and relies on Microsoft software (bloat).

As Fox said though, the GPU is unaffected by this bloatware, it is really only using extra RAM and CPU cycles. Because games are largely dependent on GPUs anyways, it is easy to over-compensate for this extra load. That is not to say that situations don't exist where the GPU is waiting for data from the CPU/RAM (the 7800 GTX comes to mind), but if you have a flagship CPU (P4EE, or A64 FX) the GPU will still be working at full capacity drawing frames, (and applying anti-aliasing, anistropic filtering).

So it really boils down to code-optimzation, which is extremely easy when you know exactly what hardware your software will be run on. (which is the case for game developers for consoles)
 
Wouldn't it be great if companies could release optimized versions of their games?

"This game is optimized for Athlon 64 processors and nVidia graphics cards."

I'm sure you'd see a nice quality boost with that kind of focused development.
 
Originally posted by: Bona Fide
Wouldn't it be great if companies could release optimized versions of their games?

"This game is optimized for Athlon 64 processors and nVidia graphics cards."

I'm sure you'd see a nice quality boost with that kind of focused development.
Click to expand...

Many games are optimized for nvidia cards, but optimized for nvidia often just seems to mean "We didn't give a damn about supporting ATI."

BTW, the original Deus Ex was optimized for 3dfx and AMD. 3dnow plus glide, yeah!(btw, both halflife 2 and doom 3 barely spend any time executing SIMD code at all, their main bottlenecks as far as cpus go seem to be latency and memory bandwidth)
 
Originally posted by: Siddy
PS3 uses the new 'CELL' processors, which are much more advance than even dual-core cpu's.
Click to expand...

As long as you are able to throw specialized work at them. A dual core processor will help even with everyday processing tasks - much more than a Cell would be able to.
However, once you use software that is optimized for the Cell, it could work 3x as fast as a dual core running dual core optimized software
 
Originally posted by: Tenshodo
Actually the Xbox 360 Xenon outperfors like crazy.The Zenon is made of 3 cores running 2 threads each. A thread is basically a processor in itself, so you have like 6 processors going on in a 360. So each one of those processors can be devoted to seperate task rather than haveing 1 cpu do it. Its just a simplification
Click to expand...

I would like to point out that 2 threads != 2 processors. Threads help with concurrency, but you must remember that threads share the same address space. Therefore, in order for threads to help, you must have to processes that share memory space, but do not depend on one another. 2 processors is much better than two threads, and two threads are almost useless by practical standards because most code is not written to take advantage of threading.

 
The prescot has 31 pipelines 🙂. Also, if the cells were that advanced why isn't IBM or Sony using it for the mainstream user? Obviously the cell needs to be forcefed optimized code to run at its max potential, while regular cpus are more flexible.
 
I don't know if anybody mentioned this, but console games are generally rendered at a MAXIMUM of 640x480 (or even 320x240 for standard TV). Computers will simply decimate the competition if you set the resolutions equal. You're comparing apples to oranges here.
 
What it essentially comes down to is that when you design for a console, you know what 100% of the system specs are. This means you can optimize, optimize, optimize! You can do all kinds of specialized adjustments so your software will take full advantage of the hardware. This is great for developers, at least the ones who take advantage of this.

PCs are very generalized, you can't focus on just one type of processor, video card, ram amount, etc... You can't optimize as much, the range of hardware is too broad to optimize to the same degree.

Not much HT about it really, been done to infinitum in software forum.
 
Originally posted by: albumleaf
I don't know if anybody mentioned this, but console games are generally rendered at a MAXIMUM of 640x480 (or even 320x240 for standard TV). Computers will simply decimate the competition if you set the resolutions equal. You're comparing apples to oranges here.
Click to expand...

Xbox 360 has a 1280x720 with 4X AA standard.

I believe PS3 has a 1920x1080 with no AA standard.
 
Originally posted by: Hacp
The prescot has 31 pipelines 🙂. Also, if the cells were that advanced why isn't IBM or Sony using it for the mainstream user? Obviously the cell needs to be forcefed optimized code to run at its max potential, while regular cpus are more flexible.
Click to expand...

Prescott has 31 pipeline stages.
This means it takes a minimum of 31 cycles to complete one instruction, but this does not mean two consecutive instructions take 62 cycles to complete - something I've touched on more than once before on these forums.

Both Microsoft's Xenon and Sony's (IBM's) Cell processor rely heavily on adequate software optimisations.
As a certain editor pointed out (shhh), single-threaded performance of these two CPUs will be less than stellar - certainly nothing in the league one can expect from present-day P4s or A64s.
Both Xenon and Cell are in-order architectures. Put simply, in-order execution = Low IPC.
Both Intel and AMD processors use out-of-order execution, that is, analysing instructions for depencies and re-ordering them, allowing more instructions to be executed simultaneously.
Cell and Xenon intend to compensate for this through more emphasis on TLP (thread-level parallelism) vs. ILP (replace: Instruction).
So in order for these two architectures to achieve high performance, software must be:
(a) Multithreaded,
(b) Optimised for in-order execution.
As many have pointed out however, it will be a while before software developers start releasing code that takes advantage of these architectures.
Having said that, both the PS3 and XBox 360 will easily out-perform the consoles they're replacing in single-threaded games, but it may be a while before they start performing on-par with contemporary high-performance PCs.

 
I wish I had a link to the clip, but somewhere online they showed a demonstration on the ps3. It was a realtime movie remake of the Final Fantasy 7 intro. It was unbelievable! Supposedly the movie was being generated using the power of the cell processor, the shading, the physics, polygons, etc. and in real time!

nevermind, I found the link:

http://media.ps3.ign.com/media/748/748460/vids_1.html

("save it as" when it guides you to it, you can play it in a better resolution without distorting it too much)

The resolution is pretty small on this, I remember seeing it on a larger resolution, the detail, color, physics, everything is pretty amazing. If they get a game to run like that on the 7800 realtime, that'd be awesome. I know, I know, we already discussed the programming issues and the resolution processing of the pc vs. console, but I just wanted to show you guys this, this is what made me question it in the first place. Enjoy(if you haven't seen it already).
 
Any thoughts of the clip? (courtesy of ign)
Click to expand...
That's not really much better than the latest 3dmark demos. The XBox was like a high-end computer (well, the CPU was relatively slow, just like the new CPUs are on general purpose single-threaded tasks) and the graphics core is basically the latest (just like the GeForce3 was at the XBox's release). I don't think it's orders of magnitude beyond PCs.
 
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