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Titanfall Dev Claims Xbox One Doesn't Need DX12 To Improve Performance
MojoKid writes: "One of the hot topics in the wake of Titanfall's launch has been whether or not DirectX 12 would make a difference to the game's sometimes jerky framerate and lower-than-expected 792p resolution. According to Titanfall developer Jon Shirling, the new Microsoft API isn't needed to improve the game's performance, and updates coming down the pipe should improve Xbox One play in the near future. This confirms what many expected since DX12 was announced — the API may offer performance improvements in certain scenarios, but DX12 isn't a panacea for the Xbox One's lackluster performance compared to the PS4. It's an API that appears to mostly address scenarios where the CPU isn't able to keep the GPU fed due to draw call bottlenecks."
Titanfall is a splendid game which has its debut on Xbox One, however, the jerky framerate and lower-than-expected 792p resolution mentioned above has caused this exclusive Xbox One game to further lower gamers' opinions on the console. While exclusive games usually promote a console's release, this one fails to do so...
Xbone just sucks compared to the PS4 so it is no wonder the system can't run the game well.
Well can't say I am upset with not having an xbone, if I really wanted this game, then I think PC would be better anyway with a decent video card at least :)
Ok, fair enough, the XBox One is a vast improvement over the XBox 360 in many ways...
But it isn't SO much of an improvement that it is drop dead obvious.
The PS1 to PS2? Clear as day, just compare FF7 to FFX.
The PS2 to PS3? Likewise, clear as day, compare FFX to FF13.
How about before the PS1? SNES? Really, do I have to compare FF2 to FF7? :)
The XBox (original) to XBox 360, night and day...
The XBox One? Meh... it is nice, but it can't even play 1080p games, 10 years after 1080p really started to come out in any numbers.
The PS4 is better, being 50% faster (thanks to 50% more GPU resources), but it isn't THAT much better. Neither console is really "next-gen", that would have been 4K resolution.
Both are "fine", but fine just isn't going to cut it.
"According to Titanfall developer Jon Shirling, the new Microsoft API isn't needed to improve the game's performance, and updates coming down the pipe should improve Xbox One play in the near future. This confirms what many expected since DX12 was announced — the API may offer performance improvements in certain scenarios, but DX12 isn't a panacea for the Xbox One's lackluster performance compared to the PS4." How is the ability of devs to improve their product through convential optimizations a CONFIRMATION that DX12 is no panacea?
Only they're also known targets, and should be able to be easily programmed for, as a result. Performance for 1920x1080 shouldn't be an issue for any title on the hardware available. It boggles the mind at how poor these developers must be if they can't even target known hardware, console-style, and get good performance out of the thing. Average PC game devs don't seem to have any problem doing so on the PC, and that's a moving target. Why would any competent devs have a problem with a fixed target? They've got decent CPUs. They've got decent GPUs. They've got a decent amount of RAM. Yet they found a way to get horrible performance out of it. Send in the firing squad.
The point of Mantle and DX12 is that they bring the kind of APIs to the desktop that have always been available on consoles. Therefore the whole premise that DX12 would somehow improve Xbone games is faulty.
So they are a bit different, hardware wise. A big difference is unified memory. There is only one pool of memory which both the CPU and GPU access. That's makes sense since the CPU and GPU are also on the same silicon, but it is a difference in the way you program. Also in the case of the Xbone they decided to use DDR3 RAM, instead of GDDR5, which is a little slow for graphics operations, but the APU (what AMD calls the CPU/GPU combo chips) has 32MB of high speed embedded RAM on it to try and buffer for that.
Ok so there are some differences. However that aside, why the problem with the target? Visual quality. Basically, a video card can only do so much in a given time period. It only can push so many pixels/texels, only run so many shaders, etc. So any time you add more visual flair, it takes up available power. There's no hard limit, no amount where it stops working, rather you have to choose what kind of performance you want.
For example if I can render a scene with X polygons in 16ms then I can output that at 60fps. However it also means that I can render a scene of 2X polygons in about 33ms, or 30fps.
So FPS is one tradeoff you can make. You don't have to render at 60fps, you can go lower and indeed console games often do 30fps. That means each frame can have more in it, because the hardware has longer to generate it.
Another tradeoff is resolution. Particularly when you are talking texture related things, lowering the output resolution lowers the demand on the hardware and thus allows you to do more.
So it is a tradeoff in what you think looks best. Ya, you can design a game that runs at 1080p60 solid. However it may not look as good overall as a game that runs at 720p30 because that game, despite being lower FPS and rez, has more detail in the scenes. It is a choice you have to make with limited hardware.
On the PC, we often solve it by throwing more hardware at the problem, but you can't do that on a console.
They have really anemic CPUs. The PS4 and Xbox One are each using something pretty similar to the Athlon 5150 (except with 4 modules/8 cores instead of 2 modules/4 cores).
The consoles have two modules, with each module consisting of 4 cores an a shared 2 MiB L2 cache. The Athlon 5150 only has one module.
Mada mada dane.
AMD defines a module as a set of 1 FPU and 2 integer cores. The Athlon 5150 has two modules/four integer cores. The consoles have two of these two module/four integer core things for four modules/eight cores.
You are incorrect. The consoles use Jaguar modules, as opposed to the Bulldozer family, which is what you describe. The Athlon 5150 is also Jaguar BTW.
Mada mada dane.
Optimising an engine like that is a non-trivial exercise, especially with newish hardware. So no, they're not crap developers, they're developers with time and financial constraints who can only achieve so much before release.
The rest of the planet got 576p, sucks to be you at 480p.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
You mean like a finished product?
Dont care about running ps3 games on a ps4, i have a ps3 for that, and its updated to 500gig too. So wth PS+ and the free games, theres loads of games for ps3, ps4 days are early, so patience, its not even been 6 months.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Shouldn't that be prefaced with 'Former' as I'm sure Microsoft has seen to it that this person isn't involved in any more Xbox development for knocking their 'OMG turn it up to 12! rehash of D3D?
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Thing is, and the biggest problem with any new console, is the devs have to literally remake an OS each time. They don't get the luxury of having an OS manage things for them. They get some hardware calls, specs and told to get on with it.
That hasn't been true for the last 2 console generations, in some cases, the last 3 console generations.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
There's another reason that Sycraft-fu's reply didn't mention: the development of those games started before the consoles were out. This means that the targets, while known, were also moving. Specs changed a few times and I'll bet the APIs changed significantly over the course of the past few years. That makes it quite hard to properly implement the graphics engine for the console. This is why, as developers get more familiar with the API and hardware, we see graphics quality keep improving on the same hardware. Compare an early era game of any console with a late era game, you'll see quickly. They're still limited in what they can do, obviously, but whereas early on the limits are largely down to developers' unfamiliarity with the console, later on they're squarely due to the console's hardware. Games developed before the console's hardware/API were even done had to be even more flexible, which generally means not quite as optimal.
They over estimated the cost of GDDR5. You can only lose so much money on your console, and Microsoft has lost massive amounts for 2 generations.
They thought the price of GDDR5 was going to be so high they console would sell for more than people could pay. Remember the $799 3DO? No. There's your answer.
They tried to make up for it by putting 64 megs of high speed on die cache, but again screwed up. The cache was expensive and took up space on the CPU die that Sony used for more Cuda cores.
So yeah, it was a money decision, but it wasn't about profit, it was about making a console people could afford. Both companies guessed, and Microsoft guessed wrong.
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I thought I read here on /. that M$ would not make any version of directx after d11?
Hardware costs money. If you want cheap consoles, you have to trade things off. For example my PC has no problems rendering games like Titanfall at 60fps, even at resolutions beyond 1080 (2560x1600 in my case). So, just put that kind of hardware in a console right? Ya well, my GPU alone costs near double what a current console does, never mind the supporting hardware. It isn't feasible to throw that level of hardware at a console, it just costs too much.
That kind of thing has been tried in the past and it never worked. Remember the Neo-Geo? Had real arcade hardware (back when arcade units had better hardware than home systems) in it, far and above its contemporaries. However with a price equivalent to about $1100 today compared to its competitors which were about $350 in today's dollars it did very poorly.
The console makers had to make tradeoffs, and price was a big concern. Hence the somewhat limited hardware. Basically consoles are for people on a budget. They want something that plays games, but doesn't break the bank. So, the hardware in it has to be scaled accordingly. For those that want performance and are willing to for over more coin, the PC market is happy to oblige.
If you look at the Mantle benchmarks for various games it's pretty clear that it doesn't get you much on half decent systems, and on high end systems you're looking a negligible effect. I would think the same is true of DX12, which does the same basic thing.
For all the complaining about the Xb3 it's not terrible hardware, it's some odd choices compared to the PS4 and it's slow compared to a high end PC. But it's not in an absolute sense bad hardware.
It boggles the mind at how poor these developers must be if they can't even target known hardware, console-style, and get good performance out of the thing.
It boggles the mind why Microsoft put shitty laptop CPU ram in a gaming device.
The devs are trying to find a balance point between visual quality (memory taken) and performance (memory bandwidth) but the 68GB/s memory bandwidth on the XB3 is way too low. IMO the 175 ish on the PS4 is too low too. For 30 FPS remember that only means you can have 2GB of stuff on screen at a time, for 60... well, 1 GB of stuff. (That's not counting AI and Audio).
Yes, sure, the dev's need to make a game for it, but that's really hard to do when basically it's going to be like running the game on very low on the XB2, low on the XB3 and very high on even a mid range PC with a dedicated GPU that isn't terrible.
What is a "finished product" in software development? There are always further optimisations to be made, bugs to be fixed, content to be added.
You're right, total brainfart on my part. I knew they were Jaguars (hence anemic), but I was thinking jags were put together the same way as the Bulldozers. Still--my point was that it's an Athlon 5150 with more cores (same speed, architecture), which really isn't enough to feed modern games at 1080p.
It may not be fine with the bloated APIs (OpenGL and D3D) and unoptimized games on PC but on a console with low level access to the hardware, it's more than enough. The lack of 1080p games on Xbox One (I believe the only non-1080p game on PS4 is BF4) is mostly due to its middling GPU.
Mada mada dane.
So you can't make true 1080p games at all for the Xbox One?
Maybe I'm just old (26, lol) but I remember when games that were designed for static resources on a console worked just fine. You had an N64 and your game ran on an N64 and all N64s were similar. Now they're building Xbox One games like it's a computer except there's nothing you can do to raise the performance. So the console and things like DX11 and 12 are complicated...so what? Make your game run on the damn hardware before releasing it. On my own gaming PC I ALWAYS put gameplay, speed, and high frame rates above prettiness. On the console side, it's one big beauty pageant that results in games that run like crap.
From what I have heard it was not a money decision. It was that of availability. They didn't think enough of it would exist to furnish production of one console let alone two. So they stuck with a more mature technology. So yeah they both guessed, but they were both also playing chicken, and MS flinched. Even today, if BOTH companies used DDR5, are you certain that it would not delay console production?