Slashdot Mirror
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.
1. With the next generation of consoles becoming nothing more than computers, what becomes the purpose of having two separate machines? Or perhaps the real point is, why use your computer for gaming?
2. What will the next generation of consoles actually do to improve the quality of games? Polygon technology has reached an apex whereby increases in graphical quality are hardly noticable in most cases. What about the *fun* factor? Early generation consoles used increases in technology to give us better gameplay than before. This is easily visible in going from Atari 2600 -> NES -> SNES -> N64. The Atari was actually capable of very little (but was fun), while the NES had full graphics capabilities, but low color support. Jumping to the SNES provided tons of color, scaling, rotation, and other features that made games more fun. The N64 proved that 3D environments didn't have to be boring, linear, or only for shooting zombies (or demons as your preference may be). For example:
Zelda -> Zelda III: A Link to the Past -> Zelda 64
Contra -> Contra III
Super Mario Bros. (I-III) -> Super Mario World -> Mario 64
StarFox -> StarFox 64
Today's games, OTOH, are mostly just regurgitations of the FPS. Doom was a lot of fun when it came out, Quake was a hackers dream, and Quake III made blasting your buddies the best thing since sliced bread. (Unreal Tournament wasn't bad either.) But it really gets old after awhile. How many times can you run around shooting the same bad guys with the same tired weapons? Where's the new game play frontiers? While consoles were screwing around, I had fun playing RTSes on my computer. Or flying a starship in Bridge Commander. Or driving mechs around. i.e. Varied and interesting game play. Sadly, even that has disappeared on the PC.
Where's the gaming goodness? Where's the pointy sticks? Where is the Coconut Monkey!?!
While I realize that the gaming industry thinks that games are Hollywood productions, I honestly think fun games require nothing of the sort. Sure, I'd love to see another Wing Commander game with Mark Hammil and Tom Wilson, but that's not what the gaming industry is producing. What we need is for games to again break out of the mold and try new things. Keep riding the bleeding edge of gaming. It doesn't have to be an expensive game, just a *fun* one.
Tell me something: Why do games today *have* to be something I can't let my 5 year old son play? He still plays the old Nintendo games I used to play as a kid. He thinks they're a lot of fun. Yet do you think there's a chance in hell that I'm going to sit him in front of Doom III or an X-Box? No way! Why have we eschewed Gaming Goodness(TM) for violence and call it fun?
Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm getting old.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I just want a lazy-susan thingie on the bottom of my new XBOX360 so I can rotate it the promised 360 degrees...
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
This just in: PC Hardware site blasts consoles while citing anonymous "sources" and blatant factually incorrect claims (for instance, PPE core = Xenon core).
Developers atuned to developing for PCs with their out of order execution and high general-purpose performance port their code quickly to these in-order CPUs that rely on multiple threads for performance, and find that the performance isn't blistering!
It turns out they'll need to make more efficient code, as Xenon/Cell forgo lots of transistors that make horrible code perform better.
Gag me...
And this is news? The console makers have been doing this for years. Remember when the PS2 was announced and we were told of its "Toy Story Quality Graphics Rendering"? Same thing with the infamous "Mode 7" in the Super NES system. Who can forget the So called 16 bit TurboGrafix 16? As I stated above, the console makers have hyped up every system that has ever been released and all have failed to meet the hype that preceeded them...
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
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.
He's likely referring to single-threaded performance, likely from PC developers who ported PC applications to the consoles in a month or two.
In-order cores like Xenon and Cell require a lot more careful optimizations, they don't have the Out Of Order Execution logic on the CPU to dynamically re-order the instructions more optimally.
Slashdot needs emoticons, if just so we can pretend to be shocked.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
Sony was hyping up the Cell so much it was almost guarenteed to suck.
It's almost like the Cell architecture was designed to score the highest possible score on trivial benchmarks (like the ones that give you FLOPS) without worrying about real world performance. Where have we seen this before? Oh yeah, the Emotion Engine (PS2)!
Wasn't Sony saying that we'd be sticking Cell processers in everything because they were going to be so great? I seem to recall talk about personal computers switching over to Cell because it was going to blow regular processors away. In a way, it does (FLOPS), but in practice it's way slower than even processers from last year.
I read the internet for the articles.
We don't know what any system will cost.
I don't know what happens in soviet russia.
CPUs hype YOU! HTH. HAND.
Of course this isn't surprising to any of us slashdotters, we all recall the massive amounts of hype surrounding the PS2 for example. There was everything from "X times as fast as PS1" to "will improve viewing quality on PS1 Cds" etc.
One of the major reasons not to believe the hype is that legally Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft may test their new processors on ANY machine they wish, including an extremely expensive, painstakingly built device in a lab somewhere. Then, after acheiving an astoundingly high speed from it, may publish the info legally, all thats required is that the processor actually produced the speed results in something.
But once the processor makes it into your PS3 or 360 the speed is considerably impaired. What was 3.8 teraflops will decrease to around half a teraflop, perhaps less, simply due to the build quality of the device...its simply nowhere near cost effective to produce something on a mass scale capable of 5 or 10 teraflops yet. Also theres marketing statistic-inflation to take into account too of course.
I think the real problem is each time you push for more improvements, the more complex the architecture gets. The article said that most developers would be using only one of the PS3's processors for most operations. Well, when you're used to designing for one processor, you tend to continue designing for one processor.
Each new feature added to the console requires learning that developers for past consoles, who have been used to the last console, will do slowly, and maybe reluctantly.
What developers really want is the *exact same* architecture, but much faster, more memory, etc. No more processors, no more complex ways of addressing different caches. Just make the thing the same, only faster, and developers would love it. Initially...
However, a year from now, the developers will learn the basics of the new consoles, and want something more. Then they will get into all those features that the new architecture gives them, and be excited to be the first to make a game that has realistic crumbling concrete when the tank slams into a wall, or whatever else they decide to do.
But asking a developer now about how their next gen console devkit performs is premature.
"Scientists don't change their minds, they just die." -- Max Planck
Who's suprised? It's quite obvious that the main advantage for having 3 x 3GHz in the XBox 360 was so that people would think 'OMG it runs at 9GHz!!'. Multi-threading isn't that much of an advantage in games as we've seen from the Athlon X2 and Pentium D benchmarks, and will be even less so when running on a console which is doing fuck-all else. While some games could be written specifically for the Xenon CPU, many would be ported from other platforms, and not be designed to be optimized for multi-core.
Come on, it was MS and Sony in a bullshit competition. It was obvious they were going to be misleading.
Microsoft, Sony Promise Sun, Moon, Failt to Deliver! Film at 11!
We saw this with the Xbox and the PS2, we saw it to an extent with the PSX. This shouldn't surprise anybody at this point.
Really, I've gotten over looking at tech specs and I'm simply waiting to hear about the titles each will have. So far, FFXI for Xbox 360 is vaguely interesting, but I already have the PS2 version (and could probably install it on the PS3 if I really, really wanted to). Beyond that, I'm not sure S-E is even going to be playing the "exclusive title" game any more (after all, XI is canon Final Fantasy and will be appearing on two different consoles now. XII seems locked in for PS2, but beyond that... and let alone any future DQ games...)
PS3 might get my interest if they up-scan the resolution on PSX polygons (like Bleem!), but I doubt they will and I already have hardware to play PSX games at their original resolution.
So far, the only system that has games for it I know I will like is the Revolution, if only for the "download old ROMs" aspect. Especially if Sega gets in on the act as they've been hinting.
We need a 'Duh.' rating.
Wow, every genertoin of consoles, people forget there is no magic inside. The very point of a console is the dedicated nature of the guts, not "hardware from the future." You don't need the fastest processor to provide superior performance. When developers can focus their development efforts on a single, stationary target, they can optimize the engine in ways that are either prohibitively costly or simply not possible when targeting the ludicrously disparate and constantly changing environment of multipurpose PCs.
At the planning stages, the hardware in a console is ahead of the status quo, but by release time, the hardware is merely state of the art at best. Fanbois brag about their chosen console's "superior tech," but more informed folks appreciate the benefits of a stable platform allowing developers to push the limits of the hardware and find untapped potential in otherwise standard hardware. Compare the first games on any console to the last releases to see the great improvements possible through experience.
According to the article, both console's CPUs will be, for real-world applications (and not silly benchmarks) about that speed. Twice as fast as the Xbox.
Interestingly though, the article also says that the two GPUs (which are again nearly the same in performance) will be much better than their predeccesors. The other components will be fairly improved as well, so overall the consoles will be over 2x as fast as Xbox 1. Not as powerful as the manufacturers claim, of course, but still a good improvement over the last generation of consoles.
On the other hand... Now Nintendo's claims that its Revolution will be "only" two or three times more powerful than the Gamecube don't seem so bad. I always root for the underdog, and I like their lack of crazy hype so far.
The article said that most developers would be using only one of the PS3's processors for most operations. Well, when you're used to designing for one processor, you tend to continue designing for one processor.
/.; I forget where I first saw it).
Not really surprising; at any rate, it may be essential to get used to this type of architecture/programming, as The Free Lunch Is Over, if this article is to be believed. (This may have featured in
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
We mentioned before that collision detection is able to be accelerated on the SPEs of Cell, despite being fairly branch heavy. The lack of a branch predictor in the SPEs apparently isn't that big of a deal, since most collision detection branches are basically random and can't be predicted even with the best branch predictor. So not having a branch predictor doesn't hurt, what does hurt however is the very small amount of local memory available to each SPE. In order to access main memory, the SPE places a DMA request on the bus (or the PPE can initiate the DMA request) and waits for it to be fulfilled. From those that have had experience with the PS3 development kits, this access takes far too long to be used in many real world scenarios. It is the small amount of local memory that each SPE has access to that limits the SPEs from being able to work on more than a handful of tasks. While physics acceleration is an important one, there are many more tasks that can't be accelerated by the SPEs because of the memory limitation.,
.. at the risk of being a bit fan-boix, what about throwing Judy arrays at the problem .. ermm .. i mean, put Judy on Cell .. and use a combination of edge-detection and fast count by value ...
.. so please point out my idiocy freely, at will, and as great a length as you can muster..)
well
i mean, its not like vector can't function as simple hash. or am i missing out something important about this 'collision detection business' that can't be parallelized?
(i wouldn't know, incidentally, i don't do 3d/gaming
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
In the article they state "every developer we talked to thought this was the wrong decision." Throughout the article they invoke "developers" to validate their case. Yet they never name them.
Congratulations, we've all fallen victem to the same cruel joke every time some company decides to release a new console, product, etc.
And in the end, none of it matters if the games aren't very good anyhow. Now that we've gotten over the dick measuring contest to see who can spit out the most flops, maybe we can all get back to enjoying the games on our current generation systems, and hoping that we'll see even better games in the future.
I don't mean to sound like a troll, flamer, asshat, or other nasty forum lurker, but does the computational power of a console make or break it? I've got a cell phone that probably has more computational power than an SNES, but Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was a damned good game. Let's step away from our obsession with graphics and the raw-power of the machine and worry about other things.
Here's a few I can think of right now:
1) The Xbox 360 will still be using DVDs. Guess what, we have already managed to fill up a full DVD with some games. Because we're going with HD games now, that'll take up more space (or processor time if we compress it to save space) which we don't have.
2) The Xbox 360 is using 2.4GHhz wireless controllers last I heard. Not a bad concept, but what happens when the battery dies mid-game? What about the cost of batters that add up over time? What happens if I have some other 2.4GHz device such as a phone or wireless router in the near location? I'm not the most knowledgable about wireless communications, but could this cause some interference?
3) Backwards compatability might not be included. Every day I hear a different story. Please, someone tell me it's going to be there for sure. Shouldn't Microsoft be more worried about pissing off the installed customer base that they had to fight to get than trying to get a few more flops out of a processor?
Just my opinion, but let's focus more on the games than the hardware.
To summarize the article, it looks like the Xbox 360 and PS3 will actually be as powerful as the Nintendo Revolution is promised to be (and not 30 times more "powerful" like Sony and MS claimed at E3).
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.
Are you sure you didn't read it backwards? Because they said the next gen console's CPUs are less powerful than the current P4/Athlon offerings. (much less the offerings that'll be there 6 months to a year from now at launch-date)
The GPUs are ahead but they're not going to be much ahead of the top of the line Nvidia/ATI cards at the time of launch, and within a year at most those cards will be inexpensive enough to be "enthusiast mainstream" cards.
So it seems if you would "spend the money" you'd have a faster CPU and an equivilant GPU. Hard to say they're useless to game on.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
That's what really scares me about the current game industry. Everyone's so focused on their pretty graphics that the rest of the games components, like physics, AI, or even gameplay are taking a backseat. They might as well put "produced by Jerry Bruckheimer" on half the shit games that come out..
:P
*P.S. Sorry to any Bruckheimer fans out there...but I couldn't think of a better all flash, no substance Hollywood guy at the moment
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
Since the tests were only on one core, each core running twice as fast as the previous generation should be more than enough.
The XBOX processor was a special one-off by Intel. It's closely based off the Pentium 3 Coppermine core, except with only 128KB of L2 cache (In that respect its like the Coppermine-based Celeron, who's name I forget. However, the processor uses a full 133MHz FSB for some extra kick.) There is no socket, either, with the proc soldered to the motherboard. Must of been interesting getting those 1.4GHz Tualatins soldered on there in those special Super-X Hyper Platinum!! EXTREME modded XBOX's.
The problem with new consoles is usually an entirely new development setup for them. The programmers this time around not only have to deal with a new development kit, but also a new instruction set and trying to figure out large-parallel programming. I pity those poor guys.
Usually, however, things only start to really get interesting towards the end of a consoles lifetime, when the developers have fully mastered the console. Just a recent example is Halo 2 on XBOX and how it compares to Halo 1. This is far more apparent on a more "different" (i.e. less like a PC) console like the PS2.
BTW, this article doesn't surprise me one bit. Sony over-hyped the PS2 to oblivion, and they did the same with the PS3. Simply, there's not enough silicon in there to be a super-computer in a box.
However, take the Anandtech article with a smaller grain of salt, too. I'm not sure which quotes from the article were attributed to final hardware and which were talking about the development kits (we already know that the Powermac xbox devstation is slower... or at least that's what one of the EA guys told me at E3). There was this quote: My guess is same can be said for CPU as well as GPU but that's a hunch.
Besides that, realize that the developers get much, much better at maximizing the hardware over time. When the SNES came out, developers complained that the extra colors and memory were pointles because the cpu was too damn slow (3.5 mhz, right?). 1st wave games had smallish sprites, tons of slowdown when things got busy, and many arcade ports only had a single-player option because 2-player bogged the hardware). Towards the end you had near-perfect ports of streetfighter 2, and full-color, parallax scrolling games with several large sprites like Donkey Kong Country. My hunch is that the 2nd wave games for 360 and ps3 will have similar gains.
It's still a really good article and worth checking out, but I'm not surprised in either direction.
Seems to me like all the games that were first out of the gate for the PS2 and XBOX were designed to wow with graphics. Great visuals, but weak and one-dimensional gaming.
Problem is, it seems to have shifted the whole mentality of game developers. Games seem to look good first, but play good second. On a whim i put away some of my PS2 titles and dug out the old PS1 stalwarts. The original Driver was still a kick in the ass. Breath of Fire III was amazing. FF7 was good, Grandia was good. For kicks i fired up my old K6-II and played older versions of Sim City (2K and 3K), Stronghold, Age of Empires, C&C were all so much more fun. It wasn't nostalgia either.
Paper Mario seemed like a great game too. The graphics were nice and clean, but not overly extravagant. But it was still a great game build up from many simple concepts. Just like the old days.
I hope that the hardware *does* stagnate, and maybe devs will stop writing 500 lines of code to control breast jiggle in the next Dead On Arrival and instead brainstorm some ingenuity into the games instead.
It doesn't have to wow me with graphics. Wow me with fun!
</rant>
do() || do_not();
Not so much because of its average-case power, but because of what happens when you pull out all the stops and optimize some game like crazy for it. Look at the PS2-- really weak machine in a lot of ways, but when someone who knows how to really harness the hardware makes a game for it you periodically get an Ico or Metal Gear Solid 3 or something where the graphics just absolutely blow you away. The Cell looks to have the same tweakability features of the Emotion Engine, only times like a thousand.
:P
I also want a Cell just, like, to play around with. They say Linux is running on this thing? Awesome. I just want to play with the microchip and see what I can get it to do. OK, yeah, I'm something of a compiler junkie. Blah
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
for the lazy:
d =140
http://www.pcper.com.nyud.net:8090/article.php?ai
From the link:
---
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!
---
(end of snip)
" You people do realize that the current PS3 and 360 dev kits are not the finished version of the hardware right?"
You do realize that launch titles will be made with these current devkits?
Games made with devkits for the completed systems won't come out until the first console price drop or so.
Nintendo has been pretty honest in the past as to their actual performance specs... and if what they say about being roughly 2 to 3 times more powerful than the cube is true, that puts them neck and neck with the XBOX360 and PS3.
That along with the ability to download old games makes me, if anything, more excited for Nintendo's new offering than the phony specs for XBOX and PS3 ever did.
now we just have to hope that they don't pull.. well a Nintendo and do something totally freaky with their controller. To be honest, I have high hopes.
While I realize that the gaming industry thinks that games are Hollywood productions, I honestly think fun games require nothing of the sort.
Urgh. Never understood why people thought Hollywood was glamorous or in any way desirable.
But that's beside the point, which is that those in The Industry want it to be like Hollywood, because somehow that's Grown Up. This Shows that The Industry Has Matured. They want their prestigious awards. They want to be Just Like Movie Directors. It all smacks of insecurity.
It also smacks of driving themselves into a bloated hole where they now can't *afford* to take risks because the costs of game development are so high.
There will always be a market for unimaginative, glossy games, and there will always be the bottom line. But to treat this as an ideal is frankly twisted.
Games are *not* (or should not be) like films. Films are not interactive. Games are. Imagine what the film industry would have been like if Directors had been in thrall to still photography.
"High production value" cut-scenes are bullshit. They aren't interactive, and they jar with the style of the rest of the game; but they let bloated-ego software developers Compare Themselves To Hollywood.
If you want to apply production values like that, apply them to the game itself, not to cut-scenes, no matter how well-made.
Instead of playing wannabe Scorsese, those in the industry should be concentrating on the potential of *their* medium; to allow the player more freedom to do what they want to do (the path it would have been interesting to see them go down), to choose new and different styles of gameplay, rather than the same restricted gameplay in progressively better-rendered worlds. Cut scenes, by their very nature, are going to force gameplay through predefined points. It's all so..... old-fashioned.
Anyway, enough... yeah, I'm probably getting old, but this isn't so much about romanticisation of the past. It's criticism of the way that, rather than focusing on the way technology could open up exciting new avenues in gameplay, the Industry has concentrated on turning out (basically) the same old stuff, but with ego-bolstering production values.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I guarantee you that anybody who's seen the latest gear is forbidden to speak thereof. This ain't GNU/Linux kissed by RMS we're talking about.
AnandTech is talking like they've had access to both consoles and have tested extensively when it's all hearsay. You don't say things like "Although both manufacturers royally screwed up their CPUs..." on hearsay. It is extremely unlikely that MS and Sony would both be stupid enough to "royally screw up" on something so important to them. They also imply that IBM is stupid (or evil?) for selling MS and Sony on their inferior product. I find it extremely unlikely that one person over at Anandtech is smarter than Sony, MS, and IBM.
Also, as the article stated, the platforms were designed for extensively multi-threaded games, but no one is writing games that way. So... why are they surprised that it's (supposedly) slow? If I put the bread on top of the toaster it takes a lot longer than if I put it in the slots. That doesn't make my toaster slow, though, it makes me an idiot.
(No body but this.)
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2461
http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/06/28/news_61283 06.html
http://www.tenjou.net/
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.
The controllers can be plugged in if you choose to do so. It's allready been stated. So if you don't want to worry about batteries. Don't. The Xbox 360 will only be partially backwards compatible with certain games (I have no idea which) and is capable of doing this via a built in Xbox emulator.
Labeling Mode 7 "hype" is ridiculous.
One of the biggest limitations ended up being the meager 64MB of memory that the system shipped with.
One of the most important changes with the new consoles is that system memory has been bumped from 64MB on the original Xbox to a whopping 512MB on both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. For the Xbox, that's a factor of 8 increase, and over 12x the total memory present on the PlayStation 2.
One of the biggest limitations was the 64mb of memory - clearly too little. Now, five years later, they've increased that by a factor of 8.
*quickly does sums on fingers*
4.5 years = 18 months x 3
Didn't some guy come up with a rule about this? (My local library was all out of copies of that issue of the magazine)
2^3 = 8
So, five years on, they've managed to about keep pace with historic advancement, being relatively no better than the 64mb that was widely regarded to hamstring the last generation of consoles?
Sure, right now, 512mb sounds great... But then 64mb sounded good five years ago too.
HalfLife2's High Dynamic Range lighting model is expecting to need one to two gigabytes of system RAM to work properly. Sure, PCs run with a clunky OS but it's not that bad. Battlefield 2 needs 512mb minimum and prefers 1gb.
Five years ago, console fanboys dismissed PC gamers when they pointed out 64mb might be nice now but would barely cut it in two years and seriously hamstring the console in 4-5 - the lifecycle of a typical console. They were wrong then.
Now, five years later, all they've done is up that hamstrung amount in accordance with Moore's law and, once again, it seems fine for a console's release and is going to be a major issue well within the system's lifespan.
Just a quick comment on the wirelessness of controllers: DON'T DO IT. I like my wires. They work. ALWAYS. Sure, they are in some ways more convenient: You can't get tripped by them, you can move around more easily, and they allow you to produce golden eggs when you defecate. However, it is a pain in my gold producer to find a lost wireless controller and re battery it. I hate batteries. I just hate them. This may be because of that one time I wired 72v of Latern Cell's to my tongue, but I want all of my electricity to come out of mr Happy Face on the wall. If you can make the console recharge the controllers, AND find them for me, I will love you forever.
www.olin.edu
"If Sony and MS are overhyping their systems then so is Nintendo."
False! I don't know how old you were last console cycle, but Nintendo was very realistic about the Gamecube's abilities before it was released. They said, "it can render 9 million polygons per second under realistic conditions." Cue Sony: "Well ours can render ONE HUNDRED BILLION polygons per second!" and then microsoft: "We can do INFINITY BILLION TO THE INFINITY POWER!!!". So it isn't at all clear to me why the fact that Sony and MS overhype indicates that Nintendo overhypes.
Who cares if the processor is slow or fast. The only bench mark I care about is "Will it play the game that I bought for it?". I don't care if MS or Sony use Quad Optertons, with 1 TB of RAM or a P2 slot 1 333 and CF card.
As long at it plays the game I bought, it will be "fast enough"
Seems like these days, people are more for the look of the game than the thought process required to play it.
Funny, I'd say that's true for Hollywood movies, too...
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
This is a large reason why Apple went to Intel. The lastest Powerpc chips have been sucking up the devs at IBM and they were not working on the G4 and G5. The cell chips are more made for imbedded and set top markets and plain old suck on the desktop. The G4 1.33 is about as fast for normal FPU tasks as the cell. The great graphic capabilities of these processors are not going to be used for 99% of all apps, even things like Photoshop, so the PPC is somewhat of a dead end for the desktop market.
Welcome to the Entropy Bar, may I take your order?
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.
"What developers really want is the *exact same* architecture, but much faster, more memory, etc. No more processors, no more complex ways of addressing different caches. Just make the thing the same, only faster, and developers would love it. Initially..."
While we have yet to see exactly what Ninty has up their sleeves, this sounds like the Revolution. Same API, using IBM CPU's and ATi GPU's again just like last time...as long as they don't do some exotic IBM CPU like the Cell (co-developed by Sony so unlikely) or three pathetic CPU's working together to be okay like the XBox 360, it'll be basicly just a much much faster GameCube.
With wireless, free online play, thousands of downloadable games and game demos, and a new 'revolutionary' controller added, of course.
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
Cell may not be good for Apple, but that doesn't mean it isn't good for the PS3.
It isn't appropriate for Apple because it doesn't have regular Altivec. So that means that code written for older PPCs wouldn't run well on it. It also wouldn't be appropriate because the Cell doesn't have out-of-order execution (retirement) of instructions. That means that instructions must be scheduled in the proper order, taking memory latencies into account. This isn't possible on a Mac, because Macs change all the time. Today's CPU has a 5 clock latency to memory, tomorrows has a 7 clock latency (because CPUs speed up more rapidly than memory does). If that happened, Cell would start to run slowly because the code isn't arranged correctly for the new latencies.
But on a console, all those relationships are fixed when the console is first built. The CPU doesn't get faster over time, they're all the same until the console is retired.
So, don't jump to conclusions here. Cell may not be for Apple, but it looks like a great choice for a console.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
If only you weren't so wrong.
The Revolution is expected to come with two processors. Each of which is a slightly faster variant of the processors in the 360.
As there are only two of them, it will have a slightly lower total theoretical peak CPU performance. On the other hand, fewer processors mean reduced synchronisation overheads and it should also be easier to keep them both operating at full tilt.
Developers will still face the challenge of writing mutli-processor capable code, but as they'll have had a year to get used to it on the other consoles, they should be able to hit the ground running.
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.
Yeah, Hydro Thunder is still pretty common, at least in high end D&B type places.
You have a full size plastic assault rifle in Ghost squad. There's a switch that flips it between fully automatic and burstfire. There's also an action button on the gun to rescue hostages. There are also strategic decisions to make as you go through the levels (such as stay on the first to rescue hostages, go after the terrorists on floor 2, or enter a certain room with a flashbang). Sometimes your gun will turn into a sniper rifle and there will be sniper rounds. Lastly, the game lets you calibrate the gun when you start every game. This is great thinking ahead on the part of the game designers. I can't tell you how many times I've tried to play shooting games when the sights on the guns were very far off because the arcade operator didn't regularly calibrate them.
I never liked time crisis. Not sure why. It just never clicked with me.
This weekend I'm going to hit the Gameworks in Columbus, Ohio. Hopefully some quality arcade gaming will be had =]
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
It's too bad you're making this stuff up. There are various rumors going around (quad core 2.5 GHz X360-type processor, dual processor 1.8 GHz G5's, etc, etc) but there is absolutely NO reliable info on the Revolution's processor. None.
Please provide a link if you're absolutely sure there is. I've been mongering every scrap of information released on the next gen console and I can guarantee Ninty isn't "expected" to have any kind of processor on the Revolution- Nintendo has kept it completely quiet.
So basically while seeing a lot of "this is bullshit" comments, we're not seeing any comments from anybody who really knows or has worked with either of these two platforms. Instead, we're seeing people more willing to believe MS and Sony who have everything to gain from lying about their products vs. a more realistic view of two over-hyped machines by a website who will attract viewers to their article whether they say good things about these two consoles or not. It really will make no differenc to Anandtech. People will come to read their articles because they've earned a readership so they've no real motivation to make stuff up or distort things.
Admit it people, some of you just don't want to hear what they're saying. Had they said that the PS3 does put out 2 teraflops and the XBox 360 only one, then you could have simply continued on with the normal console flame war which has been going on since E3 ie 3 cores vs 7 SPEs, etc. Then of course, there'd be doubters from the other side accusing Anandtech of being on the payroll of MS and Sony.
Look at the motivation people. Think about who's really got cause to BS the console gamers.
I'm sorry but I've found the opening paragraph in the article quite condescending and below what I would expect from anandtech.
;) ).
If his "source" doesn't make use of the 3 cpus (cores) of the Xbox, well, he's just showing he can't code multithreaded or simply that he lacks either the will, the budget or imagination on how to use this extra juice to offload some calculations. I'm sure some other gaming companies won't.
I can see why some are bashing on specific core enhancements such as vector units which aren't boosting overall performance by much (it's still arguable; people at sony wouldn't put these features in if they weren't going to help for something) but bashing against a powerfull CPU that has itself multiplied by 3 fitting in a single die, cmon. Anyone who's doing 3d today and got himself a dual AthlonX2 machine will tell you how much he gained compared to if he would have been using a dual cpu setup (as opposed to dual cpu with dual core). 180% increase clock per clock depending on the type of scene and renderer would be a conservative estimate.
Granted this isn't the same, cinematic 3D and realtime 3D is 2 completely different beasts, but bashing on something because you use only 1/3rd of what's given to you, it's just too easy... it's like someone bashing on an athlonX2 while benchmarking it under windows 98 (singleCPU support).
I agree that marketting overload people with hopes (and lots of border-line BS), but still, grand tourismo 4 TODAY would be awesome on these machines, you'd have extra juice for simualtion, and could actually have higher resolution and antialiasing instead of looking like an "almost cool" game which lacked the juice to live it's full technical miracle.
If the coders of this game (GTA4) are their anonymous source, I'll gladly eat my socks, but I bet you 10$ they've coded something like tetris (I can be condescending too
People with the brains will know how to make good use of this technology, developpers who just code and compile without doing research on new technology don't even diserve this much (anonymous) exposure
my C$0.02
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
The Cell processor doesn't get off the hook just because it only uses a single one of these horribly slow cores; the SPE array ends up being fairly useless in the majority of situations, making it little more than a waste of die space.
This review is retarded. That's as clever as I can word it.
A little background. Let's look at Sony's PlayStation 2. Compare the first generation titles to, say, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas or God of War. Talk to some developers. You'll notice that games got significantly better over the years, and that the hardware was consistently better made use of. This isn't accidental. The Sony Emotion Engine is notoriously hard to program for, and consequently it took some time before developers even had any idea as to what their hardware was really capable of.
Fast forward a few years. The PlayStation 3 is in the works, and it's sporting a Cell processor with a radicically new architecture and 7 SPEs. For some reason this doesn't sound any easier to program for than the PlayStation 2 hardware. And word on the street is that it's not; it's suicidally harder.
So who's still surprised that developers are claiming that the next generation consoles are barely any better than the last? Who still thinks that they actually have enough of a clue to even be able to gauge what the hardware really is or isn't capable of?
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
"It is accurate that at this time we will not support high-definition [on Revolution]," Kaplan told IGN.com.
It's really hard to tell what will happen by the time it's released. The Gamecube is theoretically capable of 720p output, though the games only utilize 480p. Considering the video hardware that is being used, it's safe to assume that the Revolution is at least as capable as the Gamecube It's not going to matter all that much, because we're still going to be stuck with 480p DVD movies for a while. 480p is a form of SDTV. Even if it's not "HD", it's still much higher quality than any analog television. Your comment about the RCA analog television is grossly exaggerated.And let's be honest... All three systems will have hardware that's paractically the same, regardless of these cracked out specs and numbers (ironic isn't it that all three are using what is essentiall a next-gen Gamecube with PowerPC and ATI graphics). What it will really boil down to is the games.
Gamespot recently released an article explaining exactly the opposite.
0 31.html
http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/06/22/news_6128
The anandtech article aparently is talking about the developers kit which (According gamespot) is not as fast as the "final" ps3 (or xbox 360 for that matter).
Who to believe? well at this point, you can believe anything you want. The coin is still in the air. Although considering the actual prototypes shown (not CGI or demos) Im going to take a wild guess and think they are just going to be as twice as poweful as modern consoles not 10 times as hyped.
Go ahead MOD my day!
More opinions here
Just a note on the DVD - xbox is limited to 2GB (around 1/2 of a single layer DVD). Xbox 360 will have access to 2 full layers - so it will have 4x the capacity.
Here's your source!
http://cube.ign.com/articles/522/522559p2.html
Q: Is Revolution "two-to-three times more powerful than GameCube"?
A: USA Today reported this news based on a comment from Nintendo of America's vice president of corporate affairs, Perrin Kaplan. The information was later determined to be false. We do not yet know how much more power Revolution wields over its predecessor.
After reading the article, this is a typical Anadtech 'nothing' article, even the one they did previously on the Cell was horrible, and so full of incorrect 'guesses' that they make themselves look insanely stupid.
C 05/index.html C 05/17.html
0 525/105050/ t ails.html?&L=1&talkid=156 0 425/104149/?ST=english
.. and only 6 SPE's were being used for it.
If they had talked to _anyone_ working on the Cell they would have pointed them to this nice article, which I wish people would read before crapping on about the Cell:
http://www.research.scea.com/research/html/CellGD
This isnt some marketing junk, it actually has some pretty decent info about how the Cell _works_. Unlike what everyone has been saying, the SPE's ARE general purpose processors:
http://www.research.scea.com/research/html/CellGD
I wish people would stop with the "everyone chooses the Xenon because its more general purpose", what a load of. The Xenon has issues.. one being they dont have many pressed yet!!! The Cell _has_ been tested in various forms, as a Linux Server:
http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/2005
As a Linux Workstation:
http://www.linuxtag.org/typo3site/freecongress-de
As a TV mpeg-2 stream decoder:
http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/2005
The last one alone shows just how much data can be operated on
Personally I think Anadtech should stop taking drugs.. and read around a bit.. maybe they might be able to be a bit more thorough with their articles then - youd think google was broken looking at the crap they are putting up.
No. Xbox games today are able to use a full dual-layer DVD (Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance is an example of a game that does this). I am not sure what you are referring to - maybe the amount of space given to a game for a hard drive cache?
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
Oh, hey, no offense taken.
1) The Xbox 360 will still be using DVDs. Guess what, we have already managed to fill up a full DVD with some games. Because we're going with HD games now, that'll take up more space (or processor time if we compress it to save space) which we don't have.
:D
Very, very few Xbox games use a full dual layer DVD today (MGS2 is the only one I can think of, though there are probably more). Better content compression will help, but there are other tricks at a developer's disposal. Procedurely generated content is one that is being pushed by MS. This has potential benefits in creating content faster too, so it's a win-win situation. Any games that really do need more than a DVD are probably lengthy single player adventures, and it's easy enough for them to just go with two discs.
2) The Xbox 360 is using 2.4GHhz wireless controllers last I heard. Not a bad concept, but what happens when the battery dies mid-game? What about the cost of batters that add up over time? What happens if I have some other 2.4GHz device such as a phone or wireless router in the near location? I'm not the most knowledgable about wireless communications, but could this cause some interference?
Then just plug in the special cable for the controller that charges it. It will charge the battery at the same time you are playing, too. It isn't clear yet if this cable (plus special battery) comes with the console or not, but battery problems are being taken care of by MS.
The controllers use some very fancy frequency hopping technology. Interference really shouldn't be a problem.
3) Backwards compatability might not be included. Every day I hear a different story. Please, someone tell me it's going to be there for sure. Shouldn't Microsoft be more worried about pissing off the installed customer base that they had to fight to get than trying to get a few more flops out of a processor?
Backwards compatibility is included. This was confirmed way back at the start of E3. The only question is how complete this compatibility will be at launch. The emulation team is trying to get 100% and they very well could accomplish that, but it isn't clear at launch what standard the emulation will meet. It will play games like Halo 2, for example, but we might have to wait for an update to play something like Panzer Dragoon Orta.
Just my opinion, but let's focus more on the games than the hardware.
Sure, but if you focused on the hardware just a little more maybe you wouldn't have so many silly questions.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
Developers pushed the GC to over 14 million shortly after it was released. (I think it was in one of the star wars games). The numbers that Nintendo was putting out were not only realistic; they were slightly conservative.
Contrast with Sony and MS whose claimed performance numbers for the last 6 years have been pure fantasy and/or hype.
The article didn't make it clear if the developers they talked to had the actual consoles to test on or just emulated dev kit enviroments. If it's just the dev kit enviroment and not an actual development console then their experiences really don't mean much of anything.
:)
The only things this article said that were actually substantial were both obvious.. next gen consoles won't be everything marketing says they'll be and that developers don't like having to learn to write code for a new architecture.
Code ported from, or modeled from, current code bases obviously won't get the most out of parallel cores, SPEs, etc but that really doesn't say much about the real world limits of these systems. Just don't expect developers to slap a copy of Quake X on these consoles and have it run at 10 times the speed it did on the previous consoles.
I am a little disappointed that neither next gen console is supposed to have a dedicated phsyics processor. THAT along with their boost in CPU and GPU power would be radical.
Remember.. a weakness in a market is an opening for competition. Does anyone have the guts to slap a nice AMD-64 CPU in a box, gigabit ethernet, modern Gforce 6800 or better video card, and a phsyics processor, and 4GB of ram in a box and sell it as a console? Do it, and avoid going broke from the costs, and the console market could be yours.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Actually, the gamecubes best looking game is Resident Evil 4, which I would have to say is by far the best looking game on any console. Heck, even after playing HL2 and oggling the Unreal3 Engine, I recently played RE4 again and it STILL looks damn amazing. But yes, the Xbox typically has better graphics than the Gamecube does, but for the most part the difference is very small (and mostly atributed to lazy developers porting games).
It's no wonder that Steve Jobs et. al. decided not to pursue the Cell microprocessor for Apple's future! Most likely, Apple compared it to the G5 and Intel CPUs and found its real-world performance to be significantly lacking.
Indirectly at least, this article basically demonstrates why Apple decided to go Intel.
With three cpus, couldn't the programmer just decide to dedicate one to physics? Or would that require an API that MS doesn't provide?
"PS3 article is pulled for now because Anand is worried about MS tracing his anonymous insider."
(minus page 6 about the GPUs, it got squased in my cache when I tried linking back after it was pulled)
In our last article we had a fairly open-ended discussion about many of the challenges facing both of the recently announced next-generation game consoles. We discussed misconceptions about the Cell processor and its ability to accelerate physics calculations, as well as touched on the GPUs of both platforms. In the end, both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 are much closer competitors than you would think based on first impressions.
The Xbox 360's Xenon CPU features more general purpose cores than the PlayStation 3 (3 vs. 1), however game developers will most likely only be using one of those cores for the majority of their calculations, leveling the playing field considerably.
The Cell processor derives much of its power from its array of 7 SPEs (Synergistic Processing Elements), however as we discovered in our last article, their purpose is far more specialized than we had thought. Speaking with Epic Games' head developer, Tim Sweeney, he provided a much more balanced view of what sorts of tasks could take advantage of the Cell's SPE array.
The GPUs of the next-generation platforms also proved to be quite interesting. In Part I we speculated as to the true nature of NVIDIA's RSX in the PS3, concluding that it's quite likely little more than a higher clocked G70 GPU. We will expand on that discussion a bit more in this article. We also looked at Xenos, the Xbox 360's GPU and characterized it as equivalent to a very flexible 24-pipe R420. Despite the inclusion of the 10MB of embedded DRAM, Xenos and RSX ended up being quite similar in our expectations for performance; and that pretty much summarized all of our findings - the two consoles, although implementing very different architectures, ended up being so very similar.
So we've concluded that the two platforms will probably end up performing very similarly, but there was one very important element excluded from the first article: a comparison to present-day PC architectures. The reason a comparison to PC architectures is important is because it provides an evaluation point to gauge the expected performance of these next-generation consoles. We've heard countless times that these new consoles would offer better gaming performance than anything we've had on the PC, or anything we would have for a matter of years. Now it's time to actually put those claims to the test, and that's exactly what we did.
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.
Learning from Generation X
The original Xbox console marked a very important step in the evolution of gaming consoles - it was the first console that was little more than a Windows PC.
The original Xbox was basically a PC
It featured a 733MHz Pentium III processor with a 128KB L2 cache, paired up with a modified version of NVIDIA's nForce chipset (modified to support Intel's Pentium III bus instead of the Athlon XP it was designed for). The nForce chipset featured an integrated GPU, codenamed the NV2A, offering performance very similar to that of a GeForce3. The system had a 5X PC DVD drive and an 8GB IDE hard drive, and all of the controllers interfaced to the console using USB cables with a proprietary connector.
For the most part, game developers were quite pleased with the original Xbox. It offered them a much more powerful CPU, GPU and overall platform than anything had before. But as time went on, there were definitely limitations that developers ran into with the first Xbox.
One of the biggest limitations
On a purely hardware level, ATI's Xbox 360 GPU (codenamed Xenos) is quite interesting. The part itself is made up of two physically distinct silicon ICs. One IC is the GPU itself, which houses all the shader hardware and most of the processing power. The second IC (which ATI refers to as the "daughter die") is a 10MB block of embedded DRAM (eDRAM) combined with the hardware necessary for z and stencil operations, color and alpha processing, and anti aliasing. This daughter die is connected to the GPU proper via a 32GB/sec interconnect. Data sent over this bus will be compressed, so usable bandwidth will be higher than 32GB/sec. In side the daughter die, between the processing hardware and the eDRAM itself, bandwidth is 256GB/sec.
At this point in time, much of the bandwidth generated by graphics hardware is required to handle color and z data moving to the framebuffer. ATI hopes to eliminate this as a bottleneck by moving this processing and the back framebuffer off the main memory bus. The bus to main memory is 512MB of 128-bit 700MHz GDDR3 (which results in just over 22GB/sec of bandwidth). This is less bandwidth than current desktop graphics cards have available, but by offloading work and bandwidth for color and z to the daughter die, ATI saves themselves a good deal of bandwidth. The 22GB/sec is left for textures and the rest of the system (the Xbox implements a single pool of unified memory).
The GPU essentially acts as the Northbridge for the system, and sits in the middle of everything. From the graphics hardware, there is 10.8GB/sec of bandwidth up and down to the CPU itself. The rest of the system is hooked in with 500MB/sec of bandwidth up and down. The high bandwidth to the CPU is quite useful as the GPU is able to directly read from the L2 cache. In the console world, the CPU and GPU are quite tightly linked and the Xbox 360 stands to continue that tradition.
Weighing in at 332M transistors, the Xbox 360 GPU is quite a powerful part, but its architecture differs from that of current desktop graphics hardware. For years, vertex and pixel shader hardware have been implemented separately, but ATI has sought to combine their functionality in a unified shader architecture.
What's A Unified Shader Architecture?
The GPU in the Xbox 360 uses a different architecture than we are used to seeing. To be sure, vertex and pixel shader programs will run on the part, but not on separate segments of the hardware. Vertex and pixel processing differ in purpose, but there is quite a bit of overlap in the type of hardware needed to do both. The unified shader architecture that ATI chose to use in their Xbox 360 GPU allows them to pack more functionality onto fewer transistors as less hardware needs to be duplicated for use in different parts of the chip and will run both vertex and shader programs on the same hardware.
There are 3 parallel groups of 16 shader units each. Each of the three groups can either operate on vertex or pixel data. Each shader unit is able to perform one 4 wide vector operation and 1 scalar operation per clock cycle. Current ATI hardware is able to perform two 3 wide vector and two scalar operations per cycle in the pixel pipe alone. The vertex pipeline of R420 is 6 wide and can do one vector 4 and one scalar op per cycle. If we look at straight up processing power, this gives R420 the ability to crunch 158 components (30 of which are 32bit and 128 are limited to 24bit precision). The Xbox GPU is able to crunch 240 32bit components in its shader units per clock cycle. Where this is a 51% increase in the number of ops that can be done per cycle (as well as a general increase in precision), we can't expect these 48 piplines to act like 3 sets of R420 pipelines. All things being equal, this increase (when only looking at ops/cycle) would be only as powerful as a 24 piped R420.
What will make or break the difference between something like a 24 piped R420 and the unified shaders of the Xbox GPU is ho
:).
:)
:) 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.
Absolute BS!! I dont believe you can feel a lag in the order of microseconds while gaming on a HDTV console/TV because at 1080p you are displaying 60 frames per second which gives you one frame per 16 miliseconds. 1 milisecond is 1000 microseconds so the only noticeable lag would be such that delays the rendering by over 16 000 microseconds. Thus if a scaler delays the rendering of a frame by a couple of hundred microseconds you will not notice the difference!
"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"
There are some that get their name on the box, like Tim Schafer (Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Monkey Island), however I do get your point.
This is why the actors protest was so badly received by the games developers, because in a Game, the developers get f*ck all credit compared to the movie industry, and starting to push for a bigger emphasis on the actors rather than the developers, would be the wrong end to start at.
While I do recognize that good voice acting is important in some titles, good acting carries a film much more than it carries a game. A crappy game can never be made tolerable by great actors. A crappy film can be made tolerable by great actors.
Emulation isn't the same thing as an 360, neither is a prototype. In the immortal words of Dan Rydell ... that's why they have those seperate words. To distinguish them. This is why all of these debates about how powerful and how fast and my box is bigger than yours are just dumb right now, people.
These consoles aren't finished
So let's all take a deep breath and wait for them to actually release something before actually giving a damn.
Well, I'm with you on a lot of points, but I must say I read/interpreted the parent poster a bit differently. And, there are still some issues in your own post I don't totally agree with.
:-)
"How the **** is GTA or any other video game or movie even slightly representative of "real life"??"
It is not about how representative these are of real life. In fact, one may argue it's just because they AREN'T very represenative of real life, that they are exellent tools to start educating/exposing them, in regard what IS out there, in 'real life'.
It is like the age old activity of reading stories to kids, even when they involve witches and monsters, and are a bit scary. What do fantasy-stories have to do with real life? On itself, very little. But it is a medium that HELPS kids in exploring fears, anxiety, morals, etc. Exactly the same is true for movies and games; it's not about what they actually teach you about real life, it's about dealing with the issues that are raised in them, such as pain, fear, violence, love, sarcifice, heroism, etc.
The best thing to do, as a parent (or whatever) is to guide your kids, not to forbid them from exploring it. And in your example, I think it's preferable they first try to deal with keeping an eletronic pet alive, then a real goldfish, for instance. (Especially from the viewpoint of the goldfish
"All this will occur at an age where I think they are mature enough to understand these things."
This is another problem I have with your post. This is the reason why currently, there are laws in the USA which forbids drinking before age 21. Because OTHER people DEEM it's not 'due time' yet. (see also a former post of mine in this regard). I refute the idea that it is only a matter for the parent to decide when someone is 'old enough' to understand something. First of all, kids understand more things then most people are even willing to imagine or concede. And secondly, it's fully arbitrary and one-sided: a parent can consider any age as his kids being not mature enough, with all the consequences that we have seen in the past (and even now, with tight-assed parents and other bible-belt nutcases). And they may even be convinced they are right in witholding of forbiding it - even though history shows tis rarely helps anything.
I'm of the opinion it's not just a matter of the parents, or grandparents, (or whomever) deciding it; it is foremost the kid itself that indicates when its 'due time'. For instance, if he himself asks questions about poverty, sex, violence, etc THEN it is already time. I think it sucks when parents use the 'I'll tell you in due time'-line: everyone, including a kid, has the right to an honest answer to his question, not a shove-off with a 'you're too young for it' platitude.
A personal example: A nephew of about six years old asked me someday what 'homo(sexual)' meant. I guess he probably heard it in school, or something. so I explained it. I could have said that he was 'not mature' enough to understand it, but I think that's crap: it's for you to explain it in terms that he CAN understand it, then, me thinks. My mother (who's obviously from an older generation, with less tolerance about some issues) thought it wasn't appropriate. I was rather suprised by that attitude, but then again, I don't think there is something inherently immoral about homosexuality neither. I doubt she would have expressed the same reservations if I had explained what an 'atom' was, or even 'heterosexual'.
I, on the other hand, was (and am) of the opinion that, since the kid asked what it was, he was also old enough to get an answer to his question. 'Due time' and 'maturity to understand' are implicitly present the moment the kid starts exploring and/or asking questions about it, and thus shouldn't be used as a way for adults to leave someone in the dark, or the forbid it outright. Even if a subject is to complex (the atom would be), it's your duty to give a truthful answer in a way he can understand, instead of
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
I second that. While Nintento doesn't have a monopoly on game creativity, they do a better job than the game makers for the PS2 and the Xbox.
Pikmin. Super Mario Sunshine. Windwaker. Mario Party. Double Dash. Bomberman Generations. No blood, no guts, but original and more fun than most titles for the PS2 or Xbox IMO (I realize others may disagree).
The two I will be picking up will be the PS3 and the Revolution.