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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.
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.
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....
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.
Why should be believe anything he has to say? He is a known employee of Ubisoft, after all.
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.
Some engines don't give you much choice. I'd hope modern games aren't still stuck in the single-threaded, hard-clocked world of yesteryear, but you never know.
It's also possible they're using some very slow high-level language for the AI, and/or that no one's ever done an algorithmic optimization pass on the AI code, and they just couldn't keep up with the pipeline of collision events and whatnot that are often tightly coupled with framerate.
I've been amazed in some MMOs how server performance will be totally trashed by some patch to the AI, and completely restored by the next. Poorly thought out AI code can certainly bring a CPU to its knees.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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
Cell -- at least the part of Cell that provided the computational grunt -- was not a CPU. Cell was a single-core, dual-threaded PowerPC core -- the exact same PowerPC core as the three in the Xbox360, save the extended vector instruction set and registers that Microsoft had added to their implementation. That core was basically the Intel Atom of PowerPC architectures. The better part of Cell was the DSP units, which you can basically think of as SIMD (Like SSE) units that are able to run autonomously from a small pool of local memory. The PowerPC's job is to load the Cell units with work (data and code) and coordinate the results -- they work for the CPU, and aren't capable of much on their own.
In the PS4, you don't have cell, but instead you have 4 GPU cores dedicated for compute tasks (they don't have the back end necessary to perform rendering, although they can participate in compute tasks that aid the rendering pipeline.) Like Cell, these cores work for the CPU, have generally the same programming model (load them up with code and data and set them to running), and also have the exact same theoretical throughput as Cell had.
Variety and competition are great, but Cell was nothing special in the sense that what was good and unique about it has been subsumed by GPU compute -- it was ahead of its time, but it hasn't aged nearly as well. Game consoles are a commodity business though, its hard to justify custom or obscure hardware unless its the only way to get the architecture you want, but then you have to teach everyone to use it effectively.
The problem with the PS3's Cell and the PS2's odd set up before it is that they were both a bugger to get good performance from. It took developers years to get the best from them, and it cost a lot of money to do so. Compare that with systems like the Dreamcast and the two XBOX consoles that were relatively easy to get on with and which had excellent looking games from the start.
With this generation both Sony and Microsoft realized that games are now so expensive to produce that anything which reduces that cost will be attractive. Most are cross platform too, so if you make your system hard to work with it's going to suffer from lame ports. The PS3 often had that problem, with its versions being inferior to the PC and 360 ones.
Thus both new systems are basically PCs. Familiar hardware, familiar and fairly easy to work with CPUs, mature tools.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If there's one thing the new consoles have right is a mind numbing amount of CPU power.
Uh, no, they don't. These are low-clocked AMD cores, which have much lower performance than Intel cores at similar clock rates.
They're equivalent to a PC CPU from several years ago. They sure as heck ain't equivalent to a 3GHz, eight-core, sixteen-thread Xeon (or whatever Xeons are up to these days).
It's probably not the AI calculations related to gameplay, but Ubisoft's AI calculations related to their DRM that get highest priority in their games ...
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there