Gears of War still running on one core: true or false?

[Kolgar]

Yesterday, someone at NeoGAF claimed to have spoken with two devs at E3 who said the current build of Gears of War was running on only one of 360's three cores. Can anyone confim or deny this information?

The game looks amazing, and it would say a lot about 360's potential if the rumor was true.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost...8&postcount=43

Yes, Mass Effect, is quite possibly the best looking game I've ever seen. You'll all see it soon enough I'm sure

I played the hell out of HS and Resistance at the show. Both looked absolutely fantastic, but Resistence's demo just felt like another boring FPS. HS played very well, but the characters just didn't feel right in the world. Almost looked pasted into it. Still, HS was probably the best looking playable game on the floor. I'm very stoked for it.

Oh, and about Gears of War. Sure the frame rate needs work, but that's about it. The game looks absolutely stunning. Also, don't forget, Gears is still only running on one core (as stated by 2 devs I spoke with at the show). Lets see what happens when it starts hitting on all cylinders

 

[expletive]

Yesterday, someone at NeoGAF claimed to have spoken with two devs at E3 who said the current build of Gears of War was running on only one of 360's three cores. Can anyone confim or deny this information?

The game looks amazing, and it would say a lot about 360's potential if the rumor was true.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost...8&postcount=43

As of GDC Rein commented they hadnt gotten the UE3 multicore code running yet on the PS3 for UT2007, its certainly possible that code hasnt made it over to the 360 either.

 

[Tap In]

As of GDC Rein commented they hadnt gotten the UE3 multicore code running yet on the PS3 for UT2007, its certainly possible that code hasnt made it over to the 360 either.

SOLID 30+fps, here we come.

 

[Acert93]

SOLID 30+fps, here we come.

Or not.

Multi-threading takes a lot of thought before hand, and just spinning stuff off to a second core can have a negative impact if you are not careful. To get good use out of a multi-core CPU you really need to design with that in mind from the get go.

Which is scary because UE3 is being used in a ton of very big titles across the industry (UT2007, Gears of War, Rainbow Six: Vegas, Brothers in Arms: Hells Highway, Mass Effect, Too Human, etc) and if Epic has 2 titles ~6 months from launch still running on a single core... egads!

I almost want to call BS though. Technicalities aside (e.g. "Novodex" physics on a separate core and XACT which runs on a separate core by default), it is hard to imagine that they have not moved rudimentary tasks like texture compression to a separate core.

You wonder what is taking them so long... on the one hand you have a BS excuse for performance issues (which none is needed because multi-threading is hard work) -or- UE3 was not designed with a multi-core architecture in mind... I have a hard time believing Gears or UT2007 are running on 1 core. Maybe the demos they were showing, due to the requirements of getting an E3 build up, were. But if their engines are still running on a single thread... OUCH.

 

[nonamer]

If it's running on one core now, I would think it will always run on one core. This is because only stuff like AI, gamecode, and physics (which I don't think they implement in this game much AFAIK) will have to run on the CPU. The rest is entirely GPU dependent. So there's nothing that I see will demand the other cores.

 

[valioso]

SOLID 30+fps, here we come.

thats always been their goal.

 

[expletive]

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6146458.html

 

[pegisys]

I remeber in an interview with someone said they are still working on the multicore renderer, and when it is complete performance should go up. if it has some truth they could just be talking about the renderer

 

[expletive]

If it's running on one core now, I would think it will always run on one core. This is because only stuff like AI, gamecode, and physics (which I don't think they implement in this game much AFAIK) will have to run on the CPU. The rest is entirely GPU dependent. So there's nothing that I see will demand the other cores.

Without knowing if the game is currently CPU or GPU bound i dont think we can make this assumption just yet.

Also (and somewhat unrelated to your point), sometimes E3 demos are purposefully run on older code to ensure stability at the expense of performance. That said, this code/demo could be quite a few months old.

 

[scooby_dooby]

Without knowing if the game is currently CPU or GPU bound i dont think we can make this assumption just yet.

Also (and somewhat unrelated to your point), sometimes E3 demos are purposefully run on older code to ensure stability at the expense of performance. That said, this code/demo could be quite a few months old.

someone hasn't been watching the E3 backstage videos! The demo was scheduled to be completed 2 weeks prior to E3, they didn't confirm in the video if they hit their deadline, but we know it's ~2 weeks old at the most.

 

[Hardknock]

someone hasn't been watching the E3 backstage videos! The demo was scheduled to be completed 2 weeks prior to E3, they didn't confirm in the video if they hit their deadline, but we know it's ~2 weeks old at the most.

Just because the Demo was completed 2 weeks before E3 doesn't mean it was using the latest code. (or atleast that's what I'm taking from Expletive's post)

 

[!eVo!-X Ant UK]

As of GDC Rein commented they hadnt gotten the UE3 multicore code running yet on the PS3 for UT2007, its certainly possible that code hasnt made it over to the 360 either.

So that means unoptomised and not using the SPE's ps3 was managing 49fps Impressive

 

[blakjedi]

Hopefully they're right although I doubt it... There's way too much going on in those gameplay levels for me to believe its just one core... although PC's do it...*shrug*

Hell if Geometry Wars uses three cores for show and Gears uses one.... thats amazing...

 

[expletive]

someone hasn't been watching the E3 backstage videos! The demo was scheduled to be completed 2 weeks prior to E3, they didn't confirm in the video if they hit their deadline, but we know it's ~2 weeks old at the most.

Guilty as charged i did not watch the backstage videos.

However, readying a demo level right before E3 does not necesserily mean theyre running on the latest and greatest engine code right? They could have created the E3 demo on the single core version of the engine...

So that means unoptomised and not using the SPE's ps3 was managing 49fps Impressive

And here i thought we would make it through a whole thread without someone pointing out the awesomeness of the PS3...

 

[scooby_dooby]

Just because the Demo was completed 2 weeks before E3 doesn't mean it was using the latest code. (or atleast that's what I'm taking from Expletive's post)

well the code might be old(most assuredly is), but the demo isn't, that's what I was clarifying.

 

[pipo]

Since game and engine are two separate things, and a demo can take up to a month to prepare, I'm not sure if they were on the latest version... If they were using one core is something else in my opinion, sounds very unlikely to me.

Mark Rein: Our license program is going really well, but more importantly engine development is going extremely well. We've expanded the team recently and just added another tools developer. Tools are really the cornerstone of Unreal Engine 3 and we're now working on the multi-threaded renderer which is a vast performance improvement over where we've been in the past and an absolute necessity to take advantage of PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. We will probably have that in a very early showable form at GDC and we should deliver to licensees soon thereafter.

Unfortunately, right now the renderer is at the stage where we're making a big change to it, we can't show little pieces of it, it has to all be done and then you have to put the content back in. So we figure sometime after GDC, we're gonna be pretty much done in the production stage. We are obviously continuing work on the other pieces of the engine and it's going well.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=134530

Edit - since I expect Cliffy and the crew to be (one of) the first using it, this could also be the reason for Too Human's 'problems'...

 

[expletive]

Good find. GDC was the 2nd week of March, so its tough to say for sure but definitely possible theyre still on the older engine code.

Hopefully TH was on the older engine code cause that game has big framereate problems (and some others as well).

 

[czekon]

question here:

how can you offload rendering proces on GPU with multiocre CPU? i mean what can you do on CPU to get some fps increase?

 

[ERP]

question here:

how can you offload rendering proces on GPU with multiocre CPU? i mean what can you do on CPU to get some fps increase?

First thing to realise is that it's not uncommon for a graphics engine to take as much time to work out what's visible and submit the polygons to the renderer, as it takes for the GPU to draw them.

A lot depends on the complexity of the visibility task and the data structures involved. If your trying to do some thing like occlusion culling, visibility determination can get very expensive.