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Ubisoft Claims CPU Specs a Limiting Factor In Assassin's Creed Unity On Consoles
MojoKid (1002251) writes A new interview with Assassin's Creed Unity senior producer Vincent Pontbriand has some gamers seeing red and others crying "told you so," after the developer revealed that the game's 900p framerate and 30 fps target on consoles is a result of weak CPU performance rather than GPU compute. "Technically we're CPU-bound," Pontbriand said. "The GPUs are really powerful, obviously the graphics look pretty good, but it's the CPU that has to process the AI, the number of NPCs we have on screen, all these systems running in parallel. We were quickly bottlenecked by that and it was a bit frustrating, because we thought that this was going to be a tenfold improvement over everything AI-wise..." This has been read by many as a rather damning referendum on the capabilities of AMD's APU that's under the hood of Sony's and Microsoft's new consoles. To some extent, that's justified; the Jaguar CPU inside both the Sony PS4 and Xbox One is a modest chip with a relatively low clock speed. Both consoles may offer eight CPU threads on paper, but games can't access all that headroom. One thread is reserved for the OS and a few more cores will be used for processing the 3D pipeline. Between the two, Ubisoft may have only had 4-5 cores for AI and other calculations — scarcely more than last gen, and the Xbox 360 and PS3 CPUs were clocked much faster than the 1.6 / 1.73GHz frequencies of their replacements.
"We could be running at 100fps if it was just graphics, but because of AI, we're still limited to 30 frames per second."
Uh, have you guys tried running the AI calculations less frequently than graphics redraws? You don't have to keep them in sync, you know.
can we please stop pretending clockspeed has anything to do with performance?
as has been said a million times
CLOCKSPEED IS ONLY FOR MEASURING APPLES WITH APPLES.
different CPU generations are INCOMPARABLE using clock speed.
so for instance a sandy bridge at 2.0 ghz is slower than a haswell at 2.0ghz, even with the same ghz number.
Benchmarking is the only way.
good editing
"scarcely more than last gen, and the Xbox 360 and PS3 CPUs were clocked much faster than the 1.6 / 1.73GHz frequencies of their replacements"
But the IPC is totally different, don't judge a CPU by its GHz :)
I'm sure some console fanboy will come out any time now and still scream that these consoles are more powerful than PC's and all that. Well I guess they are, but only if you count a PC from ~3-4 years ago.
Om, nomnomnom...
Since when is 900p a frame rate? Hello? Editors? *taps mic*
Ubisoft may have only had 4-5 cores for AI and other calculations — scarcely more than last gen, and the Xbox 360 and PS3 CPUs were clocked much faster than the 1.6 / 1.73GHz frequencies of their replacements.
Clock speed is not a good comparison. These processors should process data much faster than those in the Xbox 360 and PS3 despite the clock speed differences.
CPU that has to process the AI, the number of NPCs we have on screen
Maybe you didn't target your game properly.
Many Nintendo games run in 1080p and 60 frames/second on the Wii U which is much less powerful...because Nintendo makes that their target when deciding how much AI and graphics detail to put on the screen at once.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Just saying if consoles aren't powerful enough to make you happy, well there are these new fangled PC things with a shit ton of CPU, RAM, and other goodies and gamers like me who spend way too much money on them to play games. Of course if you keep taking the attitude that we are all pirates, releasing shitty ports and so on don't be surprised if we aren't so interested in your products
http://www.escapistmagazine.co....
Do you mean to imply that chip manufacturers have started to lie on their spec sheets? Really? That's a new one; in the past they've been 100% accurate.
I really hate that Sony dropped their cell processors going from the PS3 to the PS4 in favour of an x86 based system. We didn't see a lot of devices using cell and because of that, a lot of cell super-computer clusters were even made using actual PS3s. Even the prior MIPS processers of the earlier PlayStations are used in computer architecture texts books to this day (albeit overly-simplified versions of MIPS's pipling systems).
I really want to see more architecture options, not less. Intel bought Alpha, killed it, screwed up with their own VLIW attempt with the Itaniums (which use EPIC) and I haven't heard anything about Transmeta in years. Today everything is ARM or x86_64 (with MIPS still seen in some embedded systems, mostly home routers). IBM still produces new POWER systems, but they're limited to a specific server niches.
quad core. Is it better than the PS/4 CPU?
That would explain frame rate, if they couldn't get their physics/AI routines to work fast enough (although they could use interpolation routines to alleviate that), but does not explain the rendering resolution. Do they expect us to believe they had the CPU working on shaders or rasterization? Even post-processing effects would be handled by the GPU.
Twinstiq, game news
Boo fricking hoo. Learn to develop a game with what you have and quit yer bitching.
The best damn video game console ever was 8 bits, ran on a single core (usually), at 1.79 MHz IIRC. Gamers then logged just as many hours saving princesses, shooting aliens, and stacking blocks as what gamers do today. And guess what...they loved it. They fucking ate it up and went back for seconds and thirds. No, it wasn't photo-realistic 3D video with dolby-i-don't-give-a-crap sound and 87 button LCD-screen force feedback controllers. We didn't need it because we could have fun with what we had and didn't worry about frame rates or pixel resolutions or how many cores a OS management thread ran on vs graphics cores vs whatever.
Game designers these days, spoiled rotten little twerps that whine about everything.
TFA just mentions the interview without a clear reference to it. Looking for it I found two other articles that suggest that the 900p resolution and 30fps targets came from other factors. http://www.gamespot.com/articl... says that 30fps is "more cinematic" and 60fps "looked really wierd." http://www.gamespot.com/articl... suggests that some non-graphic computation is going on the GPU, but also has a quote that mentions "technically CPU bound."
What we don't know from these articles is why some or more of the AI computation can't be done in the GPU.
I'd go for reducing overall visual quality rather than the AI quality. Having good AI, and supposedly better gameplay as a result, should be at the top of the priority list. I'd go so far as to reduce the visual quality so much that the framerate is high and the game responsiveness is super smooth.
Why should be believe anything he has to say? He is a known employee of Ubisoft, after all.
Consoles just have to render at 1080, not 1440 or the 4k you can easily pick up for your PC.
*re-reads*
Oh..
For the last couple of gens it's usually been possible to get a PC that 'looked better' - but you ended up paying a whole wedge more for the privilege. This is the first gen of consoles that have come out and I've immediately written off (and I'm reasonably sure could build a better PC for near enough the same money).
PC monitors have got better, and it's never been easier to plug your PC into a TV if you care. My old 360 controller is happily working wirelessly with my PC, despite the rest of the rig going to the charity shop. I'm really a little bemused as to what the point of non-portable consoles is any more.
Even the industry seems a little bemused and is resorting to 'dirty-tricks' - deliberately screwing up the graphics on Watch Dogs, 'consoles as a whole' getting a timed exclusive of GTA etc.
Only console I've any interest in is the WiiU (and even then just for the game exclusives I know will never come to my PC - and for some reason can mentally give Nintendo a pass on this).
I suspect BS, but I'll hear out the argument if there is actual evidence. Sliding down the resolution to 900p from 1080p would mostly save you on GPU, and Graphics memory usages. In a more detailed artilce it was stated that they picked 900p because they didn't want to fight with the differences between the XBone and PS4. The main reason the PS4 keeps getting 1080p and the XBone does not is that the memory for the graphics is so much faster. So if someone actually has the PC version and can so that "AI" is burning every processor at 100% then I'll buy their argument as plausable. Until then the story has changed from day to day, and isn't believable. If the AI has something to do with it then the AI coder has probably deadlocked the system when they use multiple cores, and has been cheating by using only one core.
How do we know that the real issue isn't scripting silliness and otherwise inefficient code design? Not saying this is the case, just pointing out that the possibility is glossed over.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
As someone pointed out a couple weeks ago in a Win8 thread, today's PCs are now so powerful that even Windows can't slow them down. Now that's impressive!
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
They use all the CPU overhead in your PC to run UPlay to make sure the crappy experience is consistent across platforms.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Exactly. This was the first thing I noticed when the specs of these consoles were released. PC gaming back on top for the time being, kind of reminds me of my childhood in the 80's and 90's....
As an embedded architect/programmer, I deal with this all of the time. You have to design for the platform, not what you fantasize about having. Doing the dev work on a dual-4-core-hyperthreaded box with 48 GBytes of memory, then whining that the CPU/GPU/memory space/... isn't enough is just exposing your stupidity. Onbce had a developer build and test a database on his quad-core Apple-thingy, then whine to management that the hardware engineers and materials people had just not done their job, when, even before he was on the project, the product had a 1 GHz single-core PowerPC-derived SoC and 256 MBytes of DRAM (more or less, an Apple G4-equivalent).
In the gaming community we've had to call the big publishers out on their marketing garbage quite a lot lately. Shitty PC ports. Framerate locking. Terrible, buggy releases, low resolutions. (And don't even get me started on cynical euphemisms like "cinematic experience" and other jabs at framerates above 30. I've never wanted to punch something so much)
If there's one thing the new consoles have right is a mind numbing amount of CPU power. Plenty of of modern cores. These things would have been supercomputers a decade a go. What they don't have is extremely fast single threaded performance. But we've known that for years now. Many cores has always been the path forward for consumer electronics. We've even seen it in smart phones and tablets.
Ubisoft's marketing shitcocks are covering for inept programming (Or rather a shit management style that encourages/rewards inept programming) because it's much more difficult to take advantage of many slower cores than one, fast single thread. You aren't going to get fast single threaded performance out of an integrated AMD SoC. (If you want fast single thread, you go Intel. End of story.)
That said, the above excuse is still complete bullshit. It's well known that the chips in the new consoles have GPUs that have the effective computing power of what you'd find in a mid-grade gaming PC from 2010, with the PS4 coming out ahead of the Xbone by a healthy margin. What happens when you try to make a cutting edge pretty 2014 game run 60FPS at 1080p on a four year old graphics card?
Exactly what you think fucking happens! The graphics on the new consoles don't "Look great" they look like garbage because they're rendered at barely-above-720p at pitiful frame rates.
Ubisoft and company: Stop making excuses for your slam-down-your-customer's-throat-marketed AAA console shiftests. Make real ports for the real serious gaming platform, the PC. If your game is so ineptly developed that you can't decouple the framerate and game logic then fire your managers and let the programmers do their jobs.
... i thought they were going to blame it on piracy?
So the real reason we need more graphics and cpu power is not scientific research, business, or a technical application. It's so we can play games?
I wonder if some of the CPU cycles could be dedicated to waiting for GPU to process the actual quantitative functions, making use of the GPU as if it's an additional core.
As someone pointed out a couple weeks ago in a Win8 thread, today's PCs are now so powerful that even Windows can't slow them down. Now that's impressive!
Actually, a better saying is that PCs are so fast these days that even JAVA can't slow them down....
Windows would run just fine on a Pentium computer with a decent amount of RAM. Try running a java applet on it, though, and you may as well go for a long coffee break...
Actually, a better saying is that PCs are so fast these days that even JAVA can't slow them down....
You obviously don't run Eclipse.
> low clock speed ... a few more cores will be used for processing the 3D pipeline ...
Its all about instructions per cycle. 360 could sustain 0.2 on a good day, the CPU in Xbox One can do about 1.0. So it may be half the clock speed but that's more than made up by the 5x throughput per clock. And there are 8 real cores rather than 3 (each with 2 hardware threads).
>
And processing 3D pipeline last gen was free? No, its exactly the same.
> 4-5 cores for AI and other calculations — scarcely more than last gen
Last gen 360 had 3 cores (with 2 HW threads per code which you can ignore as this only gave a 10% or so speed up). Typically 1 core was given up to graphics leaving 2 cores of which the OS took up about 40% of one. So, this gen if you've got 4-5 cores compared to 1.6 and those cores have 2-3x the instruction count per unit time, that's a shit load more power.
This is from someone who knows and is a PC gamer but it annoys me that there's so much disinformation and pure flamebait in the summary.
And interestingly the main thing they mentioned - the AI code - has no real impact on and is not impacted by framerate. The amount of work you need to calculate AI at 30fps/720p is exactly the same as 60fps/1080p.
You obviously don't have a "Godputer" either. A good mid-to-high end i7 with 16Gb of RAM or more will laugh at even Eclipse. I should know, it's my IDE for game porting and I have machines that can't even be slowed down by Eclipse.
Today's JVM runs much better on an old Pentium than the JVM that was released concurrently with said Pentium.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Developer writes fancy pants algorithms which require a lot of CPU power, then blames the CPU for not being able to keep up with his fancy pants algorithms. Why don't you blame the _developer_ for trying to do more than a chip can handle (and possibly for writing poorly optimized code and using poorly optimized frameworks)? You can change software. You cannot change the silicon.
are you saying this gen isn't much better then last gen omg the realty.
You're missing the fact that AI code is typically branch-heavy, which kills pipelining and makes all of what you say about "instructions per clock" moot. In branch-heavy code, a high clock speed is very important. Metrics of "N instructions per clock" only apply to the theoretical best-case of non-branching code.
Exclusively low IPC combined with too many cores to practically use, designed to bring you a sub par experience.
Huh? I'm confused. What is a "900p framerate"?
You want a game machine that's capable of being a full-blown music recording studio? Or a video editing suite? Or can run Matlab, Mathematica and fluid dynamics simulations? That's a PC.
I imagine that a lot of people would prefer to have a Matlab/Mathematica/music/video/whatever machine on a desk and an easy-to-use machine to play major label video games in the living room.
the notion that I would sit in my family's living room with a controller in my hand just became an artifact of childhood.
You know what happens when you settle down and get married? More childhood in your house. If you have three kids, is it cheaper to buy one console and two extra controllers or two extra gaming PCs? That's not even counting games that never come to PC at all, including Red Dead Redemption and almost any game involving a character who has appeared in Super Smash Bros.
To be fair, everyone laughs at Eclipse.
On the one hand, the $800 PC can run a far larger library of games. On the other, fewer of them tend to be in the sort of console-centric genres that cause people to buy one to three extra controllers for their consoles. Nor do JRPGs see wide release on anything but PlayStation platforms.
I should know; I've programmed for that platform. But there are a few kinds of game that can't easily be adapted to it. One is games where you need to see farther away than 4 to 8 player heights. Those typically need a 3D GPU to draw a behind-the-player perspective.
It's well known that the new consoles (XBone and PS4) have, ah, relatively weak CPU capabilities. Even the GPU side is nowhere near cutting edge, but it's the CPU that's notably unambitious. For a console platform that's presumed to have a supported lifespan around 10 years this is surprising.
Therefore Vincent Pontbriand's comments are true. As far as they go.
However it is also true that modern software designers generally and gaming companies particularly tend to neglect software optimization. This comes from things like higher levels of programming language abstraction, use of gaming engines, attempts to create games that port easily to other platforms, and less training for developers on efficient programming techniques. Quite simply programming shops prefer to spend their time and dollars on features rather than performance. Features appear in the marketing materials; performance almost never does. Buying decisions hang on features.
Ultimately the issue is the same as it has always been. It's the programmer's job to live within the hardware and software envelope they have. Even an unspecified minimum platform still has an implied minimum hardware requirement.
My i3 crunches algorithmics nicely,
My AMD not so much.
However, my ATI is supported by linux and performs nicely, Nvidia, not so much.
Data to i3 Gaming to Nvidia, except on linux
Slow software is rarely a hardware issue and I can't imagine this instance will be any different it will not be written with the target hardware in mind but some "Idealistic" hardware. Optimize your software and it will be fine.
... and that's why we we need Windows 10; Windows 9 just isn't enough.
I gave up on this company 10 years ago. (Well, I wish I could). I bought their Chess program to play on a windows XP machine. There was some glitch I worked around where it was tricky to play without you being connected to the internet.
Anyway, in 1983 I bought a chess computer. It had a quirk. It could do an illegal move: if in check it could castle out of check. It would not let you do it. Over time I got to level 6 (according to my bad memory) and could hang in there, and sometimes win.
Guess what illegal move the Ubisoft Chess could do? And, I could get up to level 6 and hang in there. My guess is they bought the 1983 chess computer program, and jazzed it up with some time wasting fancy graphics info.
And this is why I don't even play the last Ubisoft game I will ever buy.
Uplay. Fuck it.
"Many Nintendo games run in 1080p and 60 frames/second on the Wii U" What are these many you speak of? There's 1, Rayman, which BTW isn't even made by Nintendo, which is 1080p/60FPS on all the home consoles. Mario Kart 8 is 720p/59 output at 1080p. WW HD was Bayonetta 2 is 720p and SSB U isn't even out yet so who knows what it'll be. I played the Bayonetta 2 demo today and it looked freakin' awesome regardless.
Something stinks here, the pixel fill of the GPU is not gated by the CPU performance so 900p vs. 1080p cannot be CPU limited. Unless they're contending for memory access then these claims are utterly bogus. Even if that were the bottleneck they would memory bandwidth limited not CPU limited. This is almost certainly a case of the big mouth yapping to the press not having a clue what the heck he's talking about. I guarantee you there are engineers at Ubisoft rolling their eyes reading his bullshit.
Windows would run just fine on a Pentium computer with a decent amount of RAM. Try running a java applet on it, though, and you may as well go for a long coffee break...
Hah. No.
Windows 7+ does a shit-ton of graphic eye candy and multi-threaded background tasks, etc. Without a couple of reasonable (not Pentium) cores and a decent GPU it's unusable. The extra RAM just keeps it from crashing entirely.
Very true - I have no idea why they are not using the GPU more here anyway. Shouldnt they be building more towards utilising the ACE queue and subsequently the GPU to run much of the calculations that the AI would need?
I just feel like it's lazy first gen kind of programming to blame the CPU on everything.
atom does not even come close to the performance of PowerPC-64. "ravyne" your a lieing piece of shit. we know your part of Intel marketing department, and you want to spread fud because Google and Facebook are now switching to OpenPower Servers.
Sony should have stuck with IBM and not choosing a general lowend processor
No, I'm not considering Kaveri a race car, but in comparison to Puma it has a lot more CPU horsepower.
Quantity means nothing for game content.
I don't see what point you're trying to make. My point is that a PC can run effectively all games from the current generation and the previous two. This only increases if you're willing to try virtualization, DOSBox, or similar hackery that hardcore enthusiasts can handle. A PlayStation 4, by contrast, can't run PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, or any Xbox games. And until the eighth console generation, when Nintendo and Sony decided to open up their platforms to home businesses, indie games were pretty much stuck on PC, even those with better production values than SuperTuxKart. Community-made mods are also stuck on PC by and large.
I have two thumbs. What the hell am I going to do with four controllers?
That depends. Do you have a wife? Girlfriend? (Stereotypes exist.)
At my age, there really aren't a lot of people of my age cohort that are still playing computer games.
I don't know how old you are, but last time I checked, ESA said the average gamer was 31. There are likely clubs for that in your home town.
We used skiis, snowshoes and sled dogs ;-) then came snowmobiles
The next big target in AI is surely a neural net that can introspect and formalise the rules it has learnt -- a sort of "Artificial Pedagogue".
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
our team has no idea how to optimize.
Ya ...... it's a catch 22.
Lesser graphics and better AI sadly doesn't sell games.
It would be interesting for someone to release a new console right now with outdated graphics but a highly clocked CPU. BRING IT
Just saying. Every SW performance problem partly this cause (especially these days).
Uplay is stupid, particularly since they make you ahve Steam anyhow, but it uses no appreciable resources. Mere seconds of CPU time per hour of operation. Poor performance on their games is because of poor optimization in the engine, not Uplay.
Also for all that, their games still do look better on the PC. Of course they damn well ought to when you are throwing an order of magnitude more power at it.
You clearly never used Vista, the almighty source of all these Windows-is-shit memes and references.
The PS3 actually had a pretty impressive CPU (for the time), but the PS4 and XB1 have a pretty low-powered CPU that is mainly optimized for running low-priority background tasks. The Wii U CPU is more impressive in terms of gaming performance for the dollar (the Wii U uses low power ARM for background tasks) but it's clock speed seems to be limited by an inadequate power supply and perhaps some thermal issues with heat dissipation.
All these systems work fine for games designed by talented programmers from the ground up. However, when you are talking about AAA ports, the PS4 and its two brothers are just underpowered, locked down PC's that are holding game designers back in many ways. At the end of the day though, a talented designer could still put out an awesome, modern game on a Gamecube or PS2. If the next Assassin's Creed is not as good as it could have been, it is not due to the lack of computing power on the PS4, XB1, and WiiU. It is because the designers put too much work into designing a flashier game rather than one of substance.
If you look at series like 3D Zelda, there has been a steady improvement in the overall quality of the game. It is not because the designers had better hardware to play with (even though they did). It is because the hardware just served as a canvas for the art-style they wanted and rather than focus on making the game look "pretty" or have more fidelity, they focused on continuing to do what they did right with previous games while fixing flaws (like character motivation and whatnot) that had little or nothing to do with the hardware.
If Ubisoft cannot make a good Assassin's Creed game, it is not because of the current generation's major hardware limitations. It is because of the limitations of the game designers and their managers.
Billy has an XBone, Tommy has a PS4. They can't play online together without at least one "having to buy and bring another gaming" console.
They can play offline together. A randomly selected multiplayer console game is far more likely to support offline multiplayer than a randomly selected multiplayer PC game.
Personally, I don't like multiplayer games. I and my friends have real jobs and families, so it's hard to get together as a group, which leaves [pickup groups] or other clan members
You said "families". Do you game with your children? Do your friends' children game with each other? If the market of children were not important, all games would be rated M.
Why are you worried about how much other players are paying for their PCs?
Because there might be more than one player in a single household, and the head of household has to buy each PC. As I understand it, use of PCs for both gaming and non-gaming requires several gaming PCs, but console gaming can be done with one console and several homework-and-Facebook PCs on the other.
You also save money because instead of paying $500 for just an OK PC and $500 for a console ($1000), you can get a pretty top notch gaming PC for like $700-$800, saving hundreds of dollars.
With only one gaming PC in the house, what will player 2 use? On a console, player 2 would use controller 2 ($60).
I was referring specifically to platform fighters, not flat plane fighters. Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Tekken, and the like happen on a flat plane. Platform fighters are more like Power Stone or Smash Bros., where players are expected to use terrain to gain advantage over the opponent.
The console has the DRM, and there's not much that a publisher has to add. If this were about PC games, maybe you might have a point. But it's not. Everything in the summary is about consoles.
This is a really interesting topic, or at least it could be if some nimrod didn't just dismiss all of the interesting bits with "must be DRM because that's the only topic I'm concerned about".
And then instead of learning when your thread went down in flames, and I quote you here, "it makes me wonder if their aren't some astroturfing accounts at work."
Astoturfing is the answer, obviously, not that you are completely off topic?
The jokes about Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh date back more than 10 years before the release of Vista. Besides, I used Vista on a Phenom II with 8GB of ram, and when you throw that kind of hardware at it, the performance was perfectly fine. I also ran it on an older P4 with 2GB of ram, and even then it wasn't horrible.