I wouldn't scoff at that. The Windows environment and open spec of PC's don't allow developers to wring out all the juice the way they can on a fixed console platform. Also, both companies are banking on their data transfer optimizations and caches to make a huge difference in performance.
We'll see for ourselves, but it has always taken PC's a little while to catch back up with a newly-released console. TFLOPS and clock speeds don't tell the whole story.
They're not on crack, they just don't understand the idea behind SoC and how it relates to PC. The way the consoles are configured, they are a generation ahead of PCs. The way APUs (what they call SoCs here) are retailed, they're severely lacking. When AMD bought ATI to make APUs, they imagined users buying system RAM and graphics RAM to plug into their motherboard. This would better allow users to scale their machine based on how they use it (gaming versus office work, single monitor versus multimonitor, etc.).
The thing they don't pay attention to is that the PC flag is essentially running inbetween 4k and 8k at levels of detail these consoles never will should 4k ever happen. They're concerned about laptop graphics, mid-range PCs, and the like since that's what their price point converts to (600 dollar console plus TV).
Launch titles on these platforms will look every bit as good as a PC game in 1080p. Second generation games on these platforms will look better than PCs at 1080p. Third generation will look unbelievable for the price, but Titans will barely be able to play modern PC games at this time. Compare Halo 3 to Reach and you'll find vast improvements in the number of assets populating a level, particle count exploded, and model detail went up greatly. Textures even went up in quality slightly since they moved from power of two texture sizes to multiples of power of two sizes. Even then, comparing Halo 3 and Reach to titles that came out along the same time in the PC realm is no contest as the console aged.
Which is exactly why Epic had to drop their expectations for their Unreal Engine 4 demo:
Sure it was running on pre-release Dev Kits, but The Elemental Demo (along with the Samaritan demo) is what Epic demoed to console developers to show what is possible.
For reference, the Samaritan demo (which is approximately equal to the Elemental demo) required about 2.5 teraFLOPs. The PS4 has theoretically just under 2 teraFLOPs.
So yes, the PS4 (which has a larger GPU than the Xbox One... PS4: 18 CUs w/ 1152 shader units vs Xbox: 12 CUs w/ 768 shader units) is less powerful than Samaritan requires under 100% perfect utilization assumption... no amount of optimization can solve that.
Now will titles look better than the Samaritan Demo? Yeah, that's almost a guarantee... but it'll come at the expense it always does: dropping resolution, reducing particle counts, reducing textures, and cheating in other hardish-to-notice ways.
But it's still a cheat, the consoles physically cannot keep up with PCs from 2011 or even what Epic hoped consoles would be capable of. Period.
((For reference, the demo ran on a single 680 which has theoretical performance of about 3.09 teraFLOPs... so there was a litttttle play/optimization room on the PC... but the PS4 and Xbox One theoretically just cannot achieve it. No amount of optimization will allow that; again, it's theoretically not possible without sacrificing one thing to bolster another.))
Also -- VLC's BluRay support works great but they legally cannot provide the key database without paying license fees. There's at least one which "exists somewhere on the internet" that is just plug-and-play though.
Last edited by Phopojijo; May 23rd, 2013 at 04:12 PM.
Yeah, that puts the xbone at roughly half of what would be needed to run those demos.
And I would, >_>, <_<, >_>, love to personally get VLC BR support.
The way I understand it, the consoles will be calculating more meaningful floating point operations than a graphics card on a PC is capable of doing. To reach those theoretical limits, a PC GPU is performing the same small set of calculation on a small set of data over and over again, because it can't move new data into its local caches quickly enough. These new consoles were designed specifically to alleviate that problem and so their theoretical limits are more meaningful numbers than the current PC-equivalent.
I have a 670 that I got less than a year ago. I would love it if that was still at the top of the heap and the PC versions of games were still the best looking. I don't think that's going to be the case, however. And this stuff from EA, where they're seeing actual benchmarks... you can't really argue with that.
Nah, the 2.5 teraFLOPs calculation comes from 40,000 calcs/pixel x 1920 x 1080 pixels/frame x 30 frames/second. That is not possible on a console even with zero overhead.
And yes, you can argue with companies when they talk out their butts -- especially EA. Madden 2006 anyone?
Last edited by Phopojijo; May 23rd, 2013 at 09:27 PM.
Why are you guys even comparing console specs? When did that even become a thing? Console specs were always just a random point of interest that no one every really paid attention to.
These specs are pitiful when compared to PC's.
When EA did :3Originally Posted by Cortexian
If you can build me a better box for $500, then go ahead.
I know that I will be instantly corrected if I am wrong, but the point of the EA article wasnt to try to prove that the hardware in the box is more powerful in terms of clock speeds and such.
Last edited by Bobblehob; May 23rd, 2013 at 11:53 PM.
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