Do consoles punch above their weight? Analyzing DF data *spawn

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pjbliverpool said:
I wouldn't be at all surprised if that's at the headsets native resolutions. i.e. PC running at 2160x1400 and PS4 running at 1920x1080.
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You're kinda right with this, there was a developer that stated the PSVR should be perform similar to a 970, considering the resolution and framerate difference.

More recent face-offs have definitely shown that the two consoles are punching above their weight at this stage in the generation, so this 60% comment probably has truth in it.

It's worth remembering that digitalfoundry have changed their "console equivalent" GPU spec three times now (260X - 750ti - 960)
 
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ThePissartist said:
More recent face-offs have definitely shown that the two consoles are punching above their weight at this stage in the generation, so this 60% comment probably has truth in it.
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Have they? One or two may have but the general trend seems to be that consoles are punching almost exactly in their weight range compared to PC GPU's. The post you responded to includes the absolute latest example from DF showing exactly that.

It's worth remembering that digitalfoundry have changed their "console equivalent" GPU spec three times now (260X - 750ti - 960)
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It's not a console equivalent PC. It's a budget PC. The GPU used was used because of it's price. They've never tried to claim either a 750Ti or a 260x was equivalent to the PS4 GPU (in fact we know that they are not) and yet they both seem to do a reasonable job of keeping up. I don't think the 260x was ever replaced by the 750Ti, they were both used simultaneously as the same budget equivalents from Nvidia and AMD. It's true they are starting to phase in the 950 now as a replacement for the 750Ti but that's because it's replacing that GPU in that market segment (again, it's about the price of the PC, not it's performance equivalency to consoles). It's not that they are trying to "sneak" extra performance into the face off's on the PC side. It's simply about how a budget/entry level PC compares to console performance.
 
MrFox said:
The 60% in the presentation wasn't exactly about PSVR, it was about consoles vs PC in general. Richard Marks also said this was not his own benchmarks, but a number given by middleware developers. It makes sense for multiplatform middlewares to provide an accurate number.
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It's all well and good them throwing around 60% claims, but without evidence it's pretty meaningless. As far as I'm aware, the only objective source for that evidence that's available to the general public right now are the Digital Foundry performance analysis / face offs. And none of them - literally none as far as I'm aware - show anywhere near a 60% performance increase at equivalent GPU specs - i.e. The PS4 outperforming a Radeon HD 7950 at equivalent settings.

So if we rule out the resolution difference (and I agree there was no mention of it in the video to suggest it was a factor) then the only possibilities that remain IMO are that they are comparing more in CPU/memory terms
rather than GPU terms (where I don't doubt the 60% advantage is correct). Or they are comparing on the basis of an ultra optimised console version vs a very unoptimised PC version, which I don't think is a good basis of comparison, but I can certainly understand why a Sony presentation would use it.
 
ThePissartist said:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-rise-of-the-tomb-raider-pc-face-off

960 actually and that's for the Xbox One on Rise of the Tomb Raider.
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Except they aren't trying to sneak the 960 in as their baseline comparison point in place of the 260/750Ti like you suggested above as they do measure performance on those GPU's first and find them wanting.

Also, I did specifically say
"One or two may have but the general trend seems to be that consoles are punching almost exactly in their weight range compared to PC GPU's." I said that specifically with ROTR in mind. That was the "one" I was referring too, the other was Batman. If we look back over the last 10 or 20 face offs would your conclusion hold?

Truth of the matter; the consoles DO punch above their weight.
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Using a properly representative sample, i.e. not cherry picked DF face offs, but all DF face offs over a given time period, prove this. More importantly, prove that the difference is in the region of 60%. I guarantee it won't be possible.

We have lots of game developer feedback stating so.
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Are they talking about GPU equivalence or total system (CPU and memory) equivalence? And what level of optimisation are they assuming on each platform? What platform do they primarily support? The bottom line is that people can say whatever they want, but the only objective source of which I'm aware of, that specifically measures frame rate at carefully matched settings, says pretty much the opposite.

It might not fit your worldview, but it definitely appears to be the case.
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Yes, I agree that world views and aspirations definitely come into play here. So let's looks at the last 10 face offs and see what the real situation is.
 
ThePissartist said:
Go for it.
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I'm certainly not planning to spend my entire Friday night doing this but having just been through the first few games on the DF Face Off page:

http://www.eurogamer.net/?type=face-off

A lot of them don't include direct performance comparisons but the first one that did is covered below.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-vs-assassins-creed-syndicate-pc

Digital Foundry said:
The Digital Foundry budget PC - featuring a Core i3 4130 with an overclocked GTX 750 Ti - is considerably less powerful on paper than the recommended specs, but gets the same job done at 900p - offering performance improvements over both of the console versions and enough GPU headroom to spare in allowing for HBAO+.
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zed said:
yes sorry I did, you did miss out pointing that the 360 is running at lower quality,
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Your'e referring to the the lower texture settings that are forced by the game on the 360 due to it's much smaller graphics memory vs the PS4 I assume? Tell me, given that the PS4 seems to be performing roughly in line with it's increased theoretical advantage over the R7 360, would you expect a 4GB version of the R7 360 that would be allowed by the game to max out the texture quality seting to lose over a 3rd of it's performance at that maxxed texture setting vs the lower setting? (roughly equating to the 60% performance advantage you think the PS4 should gain as a result of running at a higher quality texture setting).

If so, can you give me an example of another game which shows a similar performance decrease when increasing texture quality settings on a GPU which has sufficient texture memory to deal with that texture setting?
 
I'll never understand why people get so defensive when it comes to there PC's and the power advantage over console. A PC you've spent lots of money on is going to be much more powerful than a console, game made and optimised for a console using the low level api and knowing exactly what hardware you dealing with is always going to give you better performance relative to similar PC hardware. It's just not feasible to spend so much time and man power optimising for certain hardware when it comes to PC.

I also think they were referring to that a 970 would be rendering at a higher resolution and 30 more FPS .
 
pjbliverpool said:
Tell me, given that the PS4 seems to be performing roughly in line with it's increased theoretical advantage over the R7 360
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I'm not an expert, but from quickly looking at the Flops, the PS4 is performing above the theoretical advantage and thats with the higher quality texture settings (yes its prolly not 60% advantage but its sizable)
theoretical advantage

pjbliverpool said:
If so, can you give me an example of another game which shows a similar performance decrease when increasing texture quality settings on a GPU which has sufficient texture memory to deal with that texture setting?
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Its hard to see mainly cause the vast majority of console games run at a capped FPS, 30 or 60fps thus we have no idea how fast they actually are running if they were unlocked (like we can easily do on a PC) so its hard to do an actual comparison, what other PS4 games run unlocked?
We need more data based on unlocked games, who has a list? ( perhaps
the dutch guy name begining with an A IIRC )

OT: when is this messaging system gonna work properly
 
I actually haven't tracked what games run unlocked I think. They usually get patched to be locked anyway.
 
Yeah, forgot to mention that this was getting a little off-topic.
 
zed said:
I'm not an expert, but from quickly looking at the Flops, the PS4 is performing above the theoretical advantage and thats with the higher quality texture settings (yes its prolly not 60% advantage but its sizable)
theoretical advantage
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My previous post included the relative theoretical performance advantage the PS4 holds over the R7 360 in all the key areas. To summarise again:

Pixel Fill Rate:
152%​
Texel Fill Rate:
114%​
Geometry Rate:
76%​
Memory Bandwidth:
148%​
Shader Flops:
114%

So clearly just taking the shader flops advantage is an inappropriate measure. But even if we did, we'd see the PS4 should be performing 14% faster than the R7 360. In the Hitman performance analysis video it's performing roughly between 16-30% faster, generally at the lower end of that scale. So where's the 60%? It's not even close. And that's if we ignore completely the PS4's much larger memory bandwidth and pixel fill rate performance.​

Its hard to see mainly cause the vast majority of console games run at a capped FPS, 30 or 60fps thus we have no idea how fast they actually are running if they were unlocked (like we can easily do on a PC) so its hard to do an actual comparison, what other PS4 games run unlocked?
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It's not really that hard. Yes a locked frame rate doesn't tell us much. But generally, "locked" games do dip below that lock regularly enough for us to draw a comparison to the PC GPU's performance at similar "low performance points". Effectively you are directly comparing minimum frame rates rather than average frame rates.

Additionally, you can compare on the basis of graphics settings. Even if the console maintains a rock solid 30fps, if a PC GPU can maintain the same perfect lock, but also run at higher graphical settings, we can infer it is performing better. It's not as if the console developers would have left those free graphical upgrades on the table if the GPU could handle them.

I think it's fair to say that consoles punch well above their weight in CPU and overall memory terms (although DX12 may re-balance things there) however in GPU terms I see no evidence at all in support of the 60% figure or anything close to it.
 
Feels heavier? More like screams louder.

The higher the fps, the louder it screams.

Btw the zombie game that more brutal than left 4 dead have its frame rate unlocked in ps4. But it have double buffer vsync
 
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