Predict: The Next Generation Console Tech

[erick]

The reason the consoles kept pace well is simply due to resource allocation. If you open task manager, you'll often see hundreds of processes on your windows (or Linux or Mac for that matter) box. The XBox and PS3 tend to have basically one. When these machines are running your game, it's all they're running. There's no memory manager or paging, there's no exception handling, there's no process switching overhead. It's like if every app on your PC had 95% CPU, 480MB dedicated memory (and no paging) and almost all the GPU.

Combine that with developers coding to well-defined, static hardware, and that's why the consoles still look pretty good.

'

Why do these arguments always end at someone saying this?

Compared to my 2006 gaming PC (Core 2 Duo E6300 1,86GHz @ 3,2GHz, 2GB RAM, 8800 GTX 768MB) the PS3 that came out a month prior to my building said system will NEVER equal it in raw power, no matter it has to run Windows XP.

I have 2,77GB of combined RAM and VRAM on it to play with while the 512MB of consoles is only a fraction of this. This is a handicap you cannot optimize away, no matter how hard you try. Streaming textures as a method of saving RAM space is a bad joke, one must really love texture and geometry detail popups to consider it a good method of alleviating the problems.

Saying that consoles still look pretty good comes with its own bag of problems ... Uncharted 2 looks great, no doubt, but is also basically a linear tube for you to be funneled through. Why? Because the RAM issues on consoles are so bad they're interfering with proper level design! If what you want the player to see has to be looking good, then you have a tradeoff to make and it's always the extra level size or "that other route" that gets the axe.

And big, open world games like GTA IV look horrible, and have a depressing LOD. Some guys tested on youtube that you cannot even shoot properly with sniper rifles in GTAIV, because of this.

 

[Squilliam]

'

Why do these arguments always end at someone saying this?

Because it is true and has been repeated many times by many different people whom are drawing from experience in working on both consoles and PCs.

 

[TheD]

I would disagree. Food for thought: The average RAM in 2001 was about 1 Gigabyte, and now, 10 years later, its between 6-8GB, not quite 8 times, about 7. In 1991, your average 286 had 1 Megabyte in it. Ten years later, 2001, the average had increased a thousand-fold. People in 2001 probably were guessing we'd have nearly a Terabyte in 2011... Our ability to use RAM doesn't even come close to keeping up with our ability to make more/smaller RAM. I would be suprised to see more than 32GB average by 2021.

On the main topic, signs and industry analysts point to this gen being less of a huge upgrade than those before it, I would expect 2GB as likely, 4GB a possibility, 8GB probably has a snowballs chance in hell. Same with anything Cell related, I'm sure Sony learned that lesson this time.

No, average RAM in 2001 was around 128MB.

Even in 2006 512MB was good enough for a MacBook.
I have a ton of PC mags from that time.

An average pc consumes around 300 W full load. An high-end pc, today, is around 600 W.
I bet that next-generation console won't go over 150 W, which strongly limits the computational power... what do we need 8 GB for, when even 4 GB may be too much with streaming technology? (That's 4 GB of assets in a single frame, which is about half of today average assets for an entire game!!).

Only systems with two high end GPUs use 600+ Watts, Normal "high end" use closer to 400 Watts under full load.
An average non gaming desktop uses around 150 to 200 Watts.

If MS or Sony make the next gen consoles use very little power by compromising performance no one will buy them!

Without a good amount of processing power they will not be compelling to people, how long do you think that something 2x as powerful as a 360 or PS3 will last in the market with tablets and the like nipping at their heels and PCs leaving them for dead??
And don't look to gimmicks to save them.

Gimmicks have never been a sure fire way to sell hardware (look at the 3DS) and the current consoles have already used up the control gimmicks.

Actually the limit is 2GB per application with a 32bit OS.

Under Windows only.

 

[Heinrich4]

Actually the limit is 2GB per application with a 32bit OS.

You right i was remenber old times about 32bit adress limit 4GB.

It worst ! 2GB only for 32Bit OS limits for game aplications!

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778(v=vs.85).aspx

(Since 2009 my old notebook HP HDX16 have 8GB and win 7 pro 64bit)

 

[Blazkowicz]

'

Why do these arguments always end at someone saying this?

Compared to my 2006 gaming PC (Core 2 Duo E6300 1,86GHz @ 3,2GHz, 2GB RAM, 8800 GTX 768MB) the PS3 that came out a month prior to my building said system will NEVER equal it in raw power, no matter it has to run Windows XP.

yes, those arguments were always odd, because your windows desktop using 1% CPU in the background does not make any fucking difference.

but we got very convincing arguments lately about the issue of API overhead, where you can do maybe 50,000 draw calls on a console without breaking a sweat but on PC you'd better limit yourself to 5,000 (arbitrary numbers). or on how loading a texture in a console is just about playing with your buffers and pointers but the way it runs on PC with a proper API is evil.

it still didn't make much of a difference, as with your great two examples.
I didn't play GTA IV, it looks like they just shouldn't have included sniper rifles in the game. at least I suppose it's not as bad as older versions - you pick up a ice cream truck or garbage truck, then suddenly the streets are flooded with them

 

[jonabbey]

Actually the limit is 2GB per application with a 32bit OS.

That's a Windows limit, not an intrinsic 32bit limit.

 

[jonabbey]

A conversation that Develop magazine has with some Sony folks about the next ten years of PlayStation:

http://www.develop-online.net/features/1400/PlayStation-The-next-ten-years

Ease of development and VR are on the topic list.

 

[function]

Compared to my 2006 gaming PC (Core 2 Duo E6300 1,86GHz @ 3,2GHz, 2GB RAM, 8800 GTX 768MB) the PS3 that came out a month prior to my building said system will NEVER equal it in raw power, no matter it has to run Windows XP.

Your 2006 gaming PC doesn't represent the kind of hardware a console vendor could have put in their PC. And in terms of "raw power", Cell makes your CPU look like a toy. There are multiplatform games where the 360's cpu outperforms yours in a platform vs platform comparison (Lost Planet for one) so you're mistaken in your assertions.

That GPU was huge. Far, far too large and massively too power hungry to go in the PS360. A similar spec gpu to RSX was dead and buried in PC land years ago.

All this has already been gone over in this thread, some of it many, many times.

I have 2,77GB of combined RAM and VRAM on it to play with while the 512MB of consoles is only a fraction of this. This is a handicap you cannot optimize away, no matter how hard you try. Streaming textures as a method of saving RAM space is a bad joke, one must really love texture and geometry detail popups to consider it a good method of alleviating the problems.

You flat out ignored an actual developer telling you about their virtual texturing, and are now even writing off the very idea of streaming data into memory. Consoles have been streaming data since the 1980's. Popup is an implementation issue and occurs on the PC too.

Saying that consoles still look pretty good comes with its own bag of problems ... Uncharted 2 looks great, no doubt, but is also basically a linear tube for you to be funneled through. Why? Because the RAM issues on consoles are so bad they're interfering with proper level design!

How would Uncharted 2 play if it had proper level design? It'd be a free roaming RPG like Oblivion, right? Oh no, wait, Oblivion had popup, that's no good. They should have loaded all of Tamriel into memory at once!

 

[Shifty Geezer]

You flat out ignored an actual developer telling you about their virtual texturing, and are now even writing off the very idea of streaming data into memory. Consoles have been streaming data since the 1980's. Popup is an implementation issue and occurs on the PC too.

To be fair, if the whole game was dumped in RAM it wouldn't be.

How would Uncharted 2 play if it had proper level design? It'd be a free roaming RPG like Oblivion, right? Oh no, wait, Oblivion had popup, that's no good. They should have loaded all of Tamriel into memory at once!

Indeed! We need 1 TB of RAM so the whole game resides there. No streaming latency on those 16k x 16k textures to worry about then!

 

[erick]

When these machines are running your game, it's all they're running. There's no memory manager or paging, there's no exception handling, there's no process switching overhead. It's like if every app on your PC had 95% CPU, 480MB dedicated memory (and no paging) and almost all the GPU.

Oh, and then this.

Any app I like can have 99%+ CPU time and way more than 480MB RAM that nothing else dares touch while I'm busy with it. It's called thread priority. If necessary, a thread with high priority can put almost everything else on hold and kick other stuff out of the RAM into the paging file on the HDD.

And, miraculously, when the app is done, all the other stuff comes off the HDD back into RAM and works quite nicely without interruption or restarting.

The "almost all the GPU" is just plain funny. When I'm running a game, I *know* that this game has 100% of the GPU. No "almost" about it

 

[MarkoIt]

If MS or Sony make the next gen consoles use very little power by compromising performance no one will buy them!

If MS or Sony make the next gen consoles use too much power by compromising the environment no one will buy them!



150 W is the maximum they will go, and even today you could make a console which is considerably faster than Xbox360 and PS3 within that power envelope.


BTW, look at how versatile seems to be the PowerA2 architecture:
http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2011-08-22/ibm_specs_out_blue_gene_q_chip.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/22/ibm_bluegene_q_chip/

18-core, 1.6 Ghz, 55 W, 360 mm^2 and 205 Gigaflops DP at 45nm.

An 8-core design at 32nm seems perfect for next-generation console! 32 threads, tiny and not power hungry.

 

[AlphaWolf]

If MS or Sony make the next gen consoles use too much power by compromising the environment no one will buy them!

Yes, clearly no one has bought a high end PC in years because of the power consumption. Environmentalists have taken over the world, I hear you get shot if you try to buy an SUV as well.

/sarcasm

The extended cycle of ps360 has already done more for the environment than any power target ever will.

 

[archangelmorph]

Yes, clearly no one has bought a high end PC in years because of the power consumption. Environmentalists have taken over the world, I hear you get shot if you try to buy an SUV as well.

/sarcasm

The extended cycle of ps360 has already done more for the environment than any power target ever will.

Power draw has a very real cost associated with it as your requirements for better cooling given such a small form factor increase dramatically...

Power envelope constraints on consoles has little to do with the environment [in real terms] & everything to do with the bottom line...

 

[liolio]

If MS or Sony make the next gen consoles use too much power by compromising the environment no one will buy them!



150 W is the maximum they will go, and even today you could make a console which is considerably faster than Xbox360 and PS3 within that power envelope.


BTW, look at how versatile seems to be the PowerA2 architecture:
http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2011-08-22/ibm_specs_out_blue_gene_q_chip.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/22/ibm_bluegene_q_chip/

18-core, 1.6 Ghz, 55 W, 360 mm^2 and 205 Gigaflops DP at 45nm.

An 8-core design at 32nm seems perfect for next-generation console! 32 threads, tiny and not power hungry.

Good find
I was wondering if Power A2/EN was using some SIMD unit with a negative assumption, I was wrong it looks pretty potent and flexible.
Speaking of MS using a Soc, I was speculating about it yesterday and though that they may fit 6 cores along with 12 SIMD array for the GPU. Actually depending on the silicon budget and power constrains and how well chip is coming out:
6/8 power a2 cores
8/12 SIMD arrays.
Then there is clock speed to play with.

 

[erick]

You know what I find ironic and funny about this A2 information and the thoughts about using it in the next gen console, in the light of the few past pages of discussion?

 

[MarkoIt]

You know what I find ironic and funny about this A2 information and the thoughts about using it in the next gen console, in the light of the few past pages of discussion?

Offcourse, because next-gen console will be used to solve the same kind of tasks: nuclear weapon simulation, weather forecasting, protein folding and so on.

I don't think that anyone here is saying that 8,16 Gb of RAM are completely useless.. eventually they will be used.. the problem is just cost-wise for both the producer of the console and the developer of the game.
And me as user, i rather see more complex shader than higher texture resolution.

 

[erick]

But do you see level design? Maybe with 16GB we could finally get some non-linear open-world-like levels (or whole games) that have good LOD?

Offcourse, because next-gen console will be used to solve the same kind of tasks: nuclear weapon simulation, weather forecasting, protein folding and so on.

Didn't they say that about Cell? And what's worse, wasn't it actually used for applications like that, in PS3 clusters?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

You know what I find ironic and funny about this A2 information and the thoughts about using it in the next gen console, in the light of the few past pages of discussion?

You're equating the needs of a games console with the needs of a supercomputer? "16GB is necessary because it's used in scientific research!" If you're just after big numbers, stay away from console computing.

 

[function]

Oh, and then this.

Any app I like can have 99%+ CPU time and way more than 480MB RAM that nothing else dares touch while I'm busy with it. It's called thread priority. If necessary, a thread with high priority can put almost everything else on hold and kick other stuff out of the RAM into the paging file on the HDD.

A high priority thread still has to deal with Windows. Just because you don't see "Gaem 99% WINDOWS 1%" in task manager doesn't mean your game is doing lots and Windows is taking nothing. The Windows overhead is higher with Vista/7 than it was on XP. Using the pagefile isn't free either, and the hit isn't predictable.

The "almost all the GPU" is just plain funny. When I'm running a game, I *know* that this game has 100% of the GPU. No "almost" about it

The WDDM and API overheads mean no. You might *know* it, but you're still wrong.

 

[erick]

Honestly, with smartphones having 1GB of RAM and 2GB and 4GB just being a matter of near future you'd think that consoles would have to demonstrate a discernible advantage if they're to last. And remember, they will come out 3 years from now... it would be embarrassing if a high end smartphone would have more room for game information than a new console at launch.

Of course RAM isn't everything, processing power is still #1, but after processing power it is the first bottleneck. My point is that halving or worse of the RAM size to save some tiny fraction of the overall cost is a very bad idea.

At least PSP Vita engineers understood this when they fought away the (management's?) idea of cutting RAM size from 512MB to 256MB.

EDIT: fixed sentence structure.