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Next-Gen Console CPUs Not Up to Hype
rAiNsT0rm writes "Anandtech follows up their initial in-depth coverage of the Xbox 360 and PS3 CPU with the real truth about the next-gen consoles' Poor CPU Performance. From the article: "Speaking under conditions of anonymity with real world game developers who have had first hand experience writing code for both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 hardware (and dev kits where applicable), we asked them for nothing more than their brutal honesty. What did they think of these new consoles? Are they really outfitted with the PC-eclipsing performance we've been lead to believe they have? The answer is actually quite frequently found in history; as with anything, you get what you pay for."" Update: 06/30 21:11 GMT by Z : The original article disappeared from Anandtech, so I've changed the link to point to the story as hosted by Google Groups.
Physics processors came too late for this generation of consoles. This will really put PCs over the top. This should be coming out by the end of the year.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
I know some people who run current-gen consoles thru scalers (or use their HD set's scaler) have issues with lag: microseconds between when a controller is actuated and when the effect is displayed onscreen.
Scaler folks have had issues with HD upconversion lag when it comes to, say, DVDs. However, many HT receivers will let you customize your audio delay to compensate since lag should be fairly consistent. There's really no compensation for gaming, unless you're psychic.
Presumably, the next gen of consoles (along with decent GPUs in general purpose computers) will not have this issue since their output resolutions bypass scalers. However, some of the upcoming 1080p sets (Samsung at least) will not take 1080p via their HDMI inputs, so they'll deinterlace 1080i internally, and beyond picture quality concerns this may impact when it comes to lag. Or, use their RGB ins and suffer from D->A->D conversion.
I heartily agree. I'd like to go back and play the old LucasArts games like Monkey Island, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and Day of the Tentacle. I need to put together an old 486/DOS box so that I can load up my old Sierra (Space/King's Quest) and Origin (Wing Commander, Ultima) games. I keep saying it: Computer game companies could make a ton of money by simply updating their old classics to play easily on new computers. I don't even really care about updated graphics. I know that there are things like ScummVM that allow you to play some games and fix up the graphics a bit, but it requires the original disks, which I have but cannot use (no 5.25"/3.5" floppy drives). I, for one, would pay a lot of money to get copies of my old games that Just Work on my newer machines.
... How appropriate, you fight like a cow!
You fight like a dairy farmer!
for the lazy:
d =140
http://www.pcper.com.nyud.net:8090/article.php?ai
From the link:
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What AGEIA and even game developers envision a PPU will enable for a gamer is a world with physics unlike anything we have seen in a real time game before. We are talking about thousands of rigid bodies, real flowing water, hair simulation, avalanches of rock, clothing simulations and more. Even more impressive is the idea of a universal collision detection system that allows you to interact with absolutely ANYTHING in a game world. All of it calculated in real time with nothing scripted in the game engine.
Sure you might have seen some explosions in a game you have played before, ones that might destroy an entire building. In nearly all cases, those have been scripted, meaning the debris and fire and dust were all created specifically for that explosion scene. Their motions and reactions were probably all scripted so that they went in a particular direction at a particular time and a particular speed. But what if you could have the option of changing that? What if you could have the explostion of a dam on a river be changed in real time depending on YOUR placement of the explosives? You might place them on the very center of the dam, creating a big hole that water rushes through, or instead you might only use a small amount of explosives to destory a small side portion and let water move out more slowly and let the water pressure be the force that eventually destroys the entire dam.
Damn. That would be a cool scene, and I didn't even see a demo of that -- just made it up!
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Personally, I'd argue that this is an incorrect premise. The next-gen consoles are *not* general-purpose computers, but rather, extremely powerful media DSPs.
Arguably they are general purpose computers, their design is just such that they excel in a certain area.
DSPs are great for a lot of areas, especially graphical work where you can get away with only a minor amount of conditional logic, but a whole metric tonne of pipeline streaming. However, video games tend to be split across all sorts of hardware. The multimedia can always be enhanced with DSPs for sound, DSPs for video, DSPs for artifical music, but what about AI?
It strikes me that this next generation of consoles potentially ignores one of the key uses for branched logic: Intelligent Machines. AI was getting quite good about the time of Quake (who remembers the Reaper Bot? $$%%$@ thing kicked my ass), but it hasn't advanced much since then. For a *fun* game, better AI may not be necessary. Then again, the entire purpose of enhancing the hardware with multithreaded DSP equipment is to improve immersion. What does it help if your graphics are more realistic than ever, but your opponent is dumber than your two year old brother? (And he just hits random buttons.)
Perhaps it's time for consoles to begin considering AI hardware, or perhaps a smaller secondary procesor?
In short, these next-gen consoles are based around a very specific set of requirements, and I wouldn't expect them to replace your desktop PC any time particularly soon. Set-top box, sure. But they're not general purpose computers.
I'm not so much thinking of replacing the PC with a game console, but rather adding a strict division of labor. Why should a desktop PC be incurring the expense of fancy gaming hardware when it's just going to be replicated on the console? In the past the answer was that the PC could do a lot cooler games than consoles, especially in the areas of simulation and immersion. But now consoles have nearly as many buttons as a PC (which annoys the hell out of me) and can actually do immersive games *better*. In addition, a console can theoretically be more social than a PC. (Although the X-Box and Playstation don't show it.)
Just my random musings, anyway.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
This article really seems to take the wind out of their sails regarding what's being boasted 'under the hood' and what it's actually capable of doing.
:)
But I look at a game like doom3 running on a xbox. Yes it's low res and yes I read their changed some of the levels so there isn't as much draw distance (like removing a window from a corridor etc).
But still, it's doom3 running on what is a 733 mhz cpu with ONLY 64 megs of ram and doing a pretty good job of it.
Whereas my p4 1.6 with only 128 megs of ram (really need to upgrade) and a gf4ti4200 runs doom3 like shit. Downright unplayable. Heck I wish I could have the xbox version of doom3 to run on my pos system.
My point? Well, history has shown that the developers will eventually make these systems do tricks that no one initially thought the systems were capable of. But the pc is such a moving target with so many configurations that we don't see near as much optimizations.
But I'm a pc gamer for life and mainly cause I hate exclusive agreements and would love to see these systems be a disappointment.
I miss the days (snes/genesis) where only 1st party titles were exclusive (mario vs sonic) and with pretty much all other titles it was may the best console win.
How much do they offer these developers to only play on one side of the fence? I think one of the biggest first exclusive agreements was tombraider on the ps1. But what I always liked was the pc was ignored in these agreements. Doesn't seem to be the case these days. Cough, halo, cough. And I'll never forgive the developers dropping the pc with the oddworld series. Ok way OT now I'll stop rambling.
Now, I'm no hardware wiz, so I can really only comment on this from the perspective of the average non-techie gamer, but... I've played the new (ie. unreleased) Need for Speed on the thing, and I must say that it looks damn sweet. Sure, maybe the article's right and the machine doesn't perform as well as it should, but as a gamer, am I going to notice the limitations? Is my gaming experience going to be impacted by this? Probably not.
Basically what I'm trying to say is that while the article is certainly interesting to the geek in all of us, saying that the processors are "Not Up To Hype" seems a bit too sensational given that the only people who will notice these minor failings are the developers who, one would hope, already know about them.
The fact that people are excited about Battlefield 2, which is yet another FPS war sim army-style, just blows my mind. I have a friend who's trying to justify it to me.
"No, it's great. See, the graphics are amazing, and the netplay is wonderful. Now, you spawn on your team leader, and you all work together. It's brilliant!
My response, "So it's yet another Doom clone with new spawn rules and a graphics update. Yee-haw. Know what I was playing? Katamari Damacy and Way of the Samurai 2." Trying to explain to him these games, let alone show them to him, is an utter waste of time. He walks out at the title screen, claiming he can't stand graphics so "old".
It's really depressing, because as long as there are people like him, we're going to see more games like EAInsert-Sport-Here 200X, Halflife 2 (Just like Halflife 1, but more so).
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
A couple years ago Jason Rubin (of Crash Bandicoot/Jak&Daxter fame) gave a speech about Hollywood that seems to have been wildly misinterpreted. He likened the current state of the video game industry to the packaged goods business. People aren't buying the content of games, they're buying the box. They're buying the marketing, the [evil] publisher. The [evil] publisher wants it that way, they want to remove the public's association with talent from the purchasing of the game... they want consumers to think that all developers are the same and let hype take care of the rest (at this pointed he pointed out that Crash games are still being made, but not by Naughty Dog).
He then mentioned that if the top 300 game developers got in an airplane and it crashed, the industry would be set back a decade. If the top 300 marketing people fell into the same misfortune, the Industry wouldn't miss a beat. People hooted and cheered at this irony... laid out so eloquently, between where the publishers place the importance of moving products with where the real importance was.
He then confused a lot of people, talking about Hollywood is the future and getting invited to parties, and so that is what a lot of people walked away with... However, the real crux of the passionate speech was that Game Companies, not publishers, belong in big bold letters on the box. Game development is a talent industry, not a packaged good... Game Designers who consistently design good games deserve the same name recognition and the same selling power as the equivalent Hollywood celebrities, Robert Deniro, Kevin Spacey, etc. with their name Right There on the Box in the same way that Hollywood movies are marketed (And that there are more people making good games than just Will Wright and Miyamoto). Until developers make those demands, publishers will feel free to keep marketing and unloading the same crap on the unsuspecting public.
I do think they must have been talking to PC developers or something, especially when they say things like the original Xbox was limited by a slow CPU and "only" 64 MB of memory. At least when co-developing with the PS2, it felt like the Xbox had gobs of CPU time and RAM, and the limiting factor was fill rate and memory throughput.
Also, as someone who's written non-graphics VU0 code, to me the SPEs look like a walk in the park. Integer multiplies? We can use C? Read *and* write memory without CPU intervention? Sounds pretty good to me, although of course it will probably be hard to find enough tasks that are a natural fit to the SPEs, not to mention multi-platform issues.
I remember when we first moved to PS2 development from the PC, and all the PS1 developers were saying how awesome the seemingly crippled PS2 was and I thought they were delusional. Now I feel like an old codger telling the kids how in my day we had to pair our instructions by hand, and we liked it! Actually, I am kind of sad to see the end of the PS2; while I've certainly done my share of cursing at a black screen or a 30 page DMA log, it has been pretty satisfying to pull off all the various hacks you do to get stuff running on a PS2, plus the nice feeling that doing all your graphics straight to the metal without a single library call. I think those days are over, and in ten years, nobody will care that we once got MSKPATH3 to work with DMA call/return or whatever. Such is life.
:).
:)
:) I never have written a single statement for a console, but reading about how they're programmed it's similar to old amiga hardware as in: utilize the different hardware to get as much out of it as possible. That wasn't hard, it was FUN :). Good to know there are still people out there enjoying that kind of work :)
Nothing is more rewarding than fiddling with hardware registers, parallel execution lists and then... finally... get something visually on the screen
reading your post made me think back to the old demoscene days on the Amiga 500.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.