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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.
You haven't heard anything about Transmeta in years because they ceased operating in 2009. The patent portfolio went to Intellectual Ventures, LLC, and licensed in whole or part to Intel, Nvidia, Sony, Fujitsu, and NEC.
And back in our days when we wanted to play with our friends we had to trudge 15 miles through 10 feet of snow going up hill both ways!
Well... not really. The PS3 was the Cell, which features a PowerPC core to feed the SPEs. It's not helpful to just call it PowerPC.
The Xbox 360's Xenon CPU, on the other hand, was a 'conventional' tri-core PowerPC (6 logical cores).