Are next generation consoles not good enough for Crysis?

[London Geezer]

The xbox was born a low end pc and the 360 a very high end pc.

Now now, let's not get over exited. The 360 was certainly not born a "very high end PC".

People try to dev on the PS3 are, by general option, having a much worse simply due to Sonys inability to get decent tools built.

You are coding on both PS3 and 360 now? Wow i'm impressed.

We have PS3 developers here and the consensus is definitely not that Sony is "unable to get decent tools built". In fact, the consensus is that, although Cell will take some effort to properly utilise (much like the Xenos), the PS3 is rather straightforward to develop for, as the very PC-like architecture of RSX makes things easier.

 

[Rash']

This topic has been done to death before, plus it's a 'PC versus console' debate in disguise which is to be frowned upon.

I think you should re-read the question before making such incinuations. The question is can Crysis be achieved on the next gen consoles. The question is regarding one specific game on PC, which on a technology forum would suggest it deems a technical reponse. I can't be held responsible if unintelligent posters warp the discussion into a flame bait topic.

 

[Rash']

This dicussion is already going here: http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=33117

Nice one. Cheers.

 

[SugarCoat]

And who said that? I have seen ATI refer to its peak raw shader power being slightly above the X1800 and the advantage in bandwidth Xenos has, all stuff derivable from the specs. There are cases where Xenos is slower than an X1800XT, but vice versa. Nothing has really changes.

The "community", surely you remember the GPU power comparisons people were making at the 360s launch, it was directly compared to the X1800XT. Best for best. Simple point being for some reason it keeps getting related, in terms of capability, to what ever is the best ATI GPU, strikes me as strange.

People will treat you that way when you try comparing a flag ship level GPU, like Xenos, with a low end midrange GPU like the X1600

I never compared them gpu to gpu, i only see Xenos as having some strengths and weaknesses of something like the R520 which would stick it pretty close to just under an X1800XT and over an X1600. Unfortunetly theres no better comparison to use. I'm sure a much more accurate comparison can be made, if someone wanted to, to one of the underlings (midrange) of the R600 series once it gets released.

 

[scooby_dooby]

I think you should re-read the question before making such incinuations. The question is can Crysis be achieved on the next gen consoles. The question is regarding one specific game on PC, which on a technology forum would suggest it deems a technical reponse. I can't be held responsible if unintelligent posters warp the discussion into a flame bait topic.

Then the answer is YES. This discussion is already ongoing in another thread, with posts from actual developers.

/thread

 

[lefizz]

Now now, let's not get over exited. The 360 was certainly not born a "very high end PC".

Well a 3.2 triple cored box with something at least as pokey as say a x1900gt hardly cut is as a mid range pc in my book. Ok the in order cores will without veryy heav optimization never be as fast as a intel\amd cpu but then there are 3 core to use. Ok the cache is pretty limited as is main ram but trying to call this a mid end pc really is talking nonsense. In a close enviroment it is easily the match for most hi-end boxes if we just take the 0.05% of people who buy extreme edition\fx62\ \ multi gpu setups out of the equation. Put simply for double the price in the pc space you wouldnt get comparable performance.

Also a pc you buy today will be scraping by on decent games in 2 years time whilst both the 360 and ps3 will be just hitting their stride by then.

phil

 

[MasterDisaster]

The "community", surely you remember the GPU power comparisons people were making at the 360s launch, it was directly compared to the X1800XT. Best for best. Simple point being for some reason it keeps getting related, in terms of capability, to what ever is the best ATI GPU, strikes me as strange.

I jsut remember well the words from ATI in this comparison
"in 720P resolution xenos is powerfull than X1800XT thanks to his shaders, in high res, X1800XT is powerfull thanks to his ROPS, one is made thinking of HD resolutions, another to fit PC gaming"

they recently Add:
"Xenos and X1900XT have very similar experience in real world gaming"

add to this that Xenos in in a closed box and in future we really we'll see this shining

 

[Farid]

I merged the two Crysis threads into this one seeing that they were basically discussing the same issues.

 

[archangelmorph]

I definitely agree on this. From what we could see, I can't see any technique that can't be implemented at a reasonable framerate on PS3 or X360. The memory footprint will depend on the actual game probably. Maybe some textures have to be scaled down if no streaming architecture is in place. Again this is game-specific, but in principle it's absolutely feasible. I can see both consoles delivering a comparable image quality in the near future.

Fran/Fable2

Why are people not listening when proper developers are talking?

I can't see how anyone couldn't think that achieving visuals like those present in crysis couldn't be possible on next-gen console hardware?

from a business perspective, PC developers spend much of ther development time build scalability into their game engines which forces the time spent optimising for any specific hardware configuration to be reduced significantly (i'm sure chief technical directors would be telling their teams to "get it working at a reasonable frame rate & move on").. As a result PC games which look as amazing as crysis fool the general public into believing that those kinds of visuals are achievable on the mid-top end PCs on the market when in actuality there probably being developed on quad SLI, dual-core CPU rigs costing over £2,500.. The rationale for these developers is aim for the top (with visuals unachievable on any machine any consumer would *realistically* own) and once you release the game the *average* hardware in the market would have caught up hopefully..
This kind of rationale is unacceptable in the console space with dedicated console teams working intimately with the hardware, milking it for all its worth.. We can see clearly the performance gains available from dedicated optimisations on fixed hardware when we look at games like Ninja Gaiden, Halo 2, Riddick on the Xbox, Rogue Squadron on the GC, and Gran Tourismo, GoW, Tekken 5 on the PS3..
Even as early as it is, these next gen consoles are beginning to shine visually with games like Cameo, Fight Night round 3 and GRAW on the Xb360 proving that a £280 machine can, after only several months of development (a proportion of which spent getting to know the hardware) time, produce visuals rivalling PC hardware configurations worth almost 3 times the retail price..

I built my Athalon 64 based, 7800GTX rig last summer and already my machine is showing signs of weakness running games like Oblivion, which dare I say looks better on my PC than on the Xb360 but looks much much worse overall (as a game) than some of the non-portware Xbox360 titles currently on the market..

In the end much of the discussion in this thread seems to argue assumptions of hardware capability based on visual fidelity of cross-platform titles..

I say if we are to compare apples and oranges, lets at least compare the best apples agaist the best oranges rather than comparing the best apples against worse apples painted orange..

 

[pjbliverpool]

the Nv2A lacks totally of local memory, but you can try Doom3, Riddick, Halo, Splinter Cell 4, Half Life 2
on a pc with a celeron 700, 64 MB of ram and a ti4600?

@640x480 do you think to obtain 30 fps with vsync on?

again, do you think that ti4600 can run with this performances a game with the visuals of Black?

I really don;t want to continue this debate as it will go no-where and then the thread will be locked. Suffice to say I disagree with the rest but this point in particular I felt had to be addressed.

In talking about the comparitive power of Xenos to R580, we are not considering the rest of the system. Therefore drawing parallels to the original xbox does not include the rest of the system either. Thus you argument about how those games would run on a 700mhz PC has no relevance since its obviously not testing the capabilities of the graphics card.

Supported by a sufficiently powerful system, then yes, I absolutely do believe that the Ti4600 can run at those settings in those games and in fact, do quite a bit better. Furthermore, there are benchmarks on the web which prove that.

Same goes for Black. I have no doubt whatsoever that if a good port of the xbox version was done for the PC that it would run just fine on a Ti4600 at xbox settings or greater.

 

[I.S.T.]

Why are people not listening when proper developers are talking?

I can't see how anyone couldn't think that achieving visuals like those present in crysis couldn't be possible on next-gen console hardware?

from a business perspective, PC developers spend much of ther development time build scalability into their game engines which forces the time spent optimising for any specific hardware configuration to be reduced significantly (i'm sure chief technical directors would be telling their teams to "get it working at a reasonable frame rate & move on").. As a result PC games which look as amazing as crysis fool the general public into believing that those kinds of visuals are achievable on the mid-top end PCs on the market when in actuality there probably being developed on quad SLI, dual-core CPU rigs costing over £2,500.. The rationale for these developers is aim for the top (with visuals unachievable on any machine any consumer would *realistically* own) and once you release the game the *average* hardware in the market would have caught up hopefully..
This kind of rationale is unacceptable in the console space with dedicated console teams working intimately with the hardware, milking it for all its worth.. We can see clearly the performance gains available from dedicated optimisations on fixed hardware when we look at games like Ninja Gaiden, Halo 2, Riddick on the Xbox, Rogue Squadron on the GC, and Gran Tourismo, GoW, Tekken 5 on the PS3..
Even as early as it is, these next gen consoles are beginning to shine visually with games like Cameo, Fight Night round 3 and GRAW on the Xb360 proving that a £280 machine can, after only several months of development (a proportion of which spent getting to know the hardware) time, produce visuals rivalling PC hardware configurations worth almost 3 times the retail price..

I built my Athalon 64 based, 7800GTX rig last summer and already my machine is showing signs of weakness running games like Oblivion, which dare I say looks better on my PC than on the Xb360 but looks much much worse overall (as a game) than some of the non-portware Xbox360 titles currently on the market..

In the end much of the discussion in this thread seems to argue assumptions of hardware capability based on visual fidelity of cross-platform titles..

I say if we are to compare apples and oranges, lets at least compare the best apples agaist the best oranges rather than comparing the best apples against worse apples painted orange..

Edit: nevermind. All of the can'ts and couldn'ts in the first sentence threw me off, and made me tihnk you were statign the opposite of what you were actually saying.

 

[zed]

Well a 3.2 triple cored box with something at least as pokey as say a x1900gt hardly cut is as a mid range pc in my book. Ok the in order cores will without veryy heav optimization never be as fast as a intel\amd cpu but then there are 3 core to use. Ok the cache is pretty limited as is main ram but trying to call this a mid end pc really is talking nonsense

well it sounds good in theory but the reality is different.
simple to find out, grab any/all 360/pc titles limit the pc resolution to a mere 1360 x 768 + benchmark u will find a big performance difference between the two.
true with some titles the difference can be attributed to poor coding, but if its happening with all titles consistently, then statistically its not the coding but the machine

 

[pegisys]

well it sounds good in theory but the reality is different.
simple to find out, grab any/all 360/pc titles limit the pc resolution to a mere 1360 x 768 + benchmark u will find a big performance difference between the two.
true with some titles the difference can be attributed to poor coding, but if its happening with all titles consistently, then statistically its not the coding but the machine

this type of comparision never worked and never will, and I see the 360 or PS3 keeping up with the PC for the next 3 or 4 years without much difference in quality, unless it is some big change in graphics technology

 

[Pausanias]

TBH, it looks (since no actual benchmarks are available) that the console games ported to PC look/run better on an x800xt too. Of course, those games are typically upgraded ports of Ps2 games, but even Most Wanted, Oblivion, and Call of Duty 2 looked better on the PC imo..actually which way were those ported?

Not sure about Most Wanted. But Oblivion was in developement for 3 years, Bestheda was one of the first developers with Xbox 360 Beta kits, and you have to remember both Oblivion and Most Wanted were developed on early Xbox360 kits with 9800s, or X850s, not actual 360 hardware. I personally hate using the beta kit excuse, but these were early titles.

For Call of Duty 2 I think they split up into a console team and a PC team. Aside from bad net code and screen tearing it was a pretty decent title. But of course 360 isn't going to have 16x AF and 8xAA.

 

[Fran]

true with some titles the difference can be attributed to poor coding, but if its happening with all titles consistently, then statistically its not the coding but the machine

You are comparing oranges with apples here. The two machines (let's say the tree machines including a PS3) are substantially different. An engine high level architecture decision for a PC engine is usually not optimal on X360 and I expect it to not be usually optimal on PS3 either. The viceversa is also true. They can't be compared so naively.

I can understand that Crysis engine as it is couldn't be ported to X360 directly due to the architectural differences between the two machines, but I dont think this is the question we are trying to answer here.

We are trying to understand if the same visual quality showed so far can be achieved on next-gen console at reasonable framerate and my answer, based on my experience, is definitely yes.

Fran/Fable2

 

[swaaye]

We are trying to understand if the same visual quality showed so far can be achieved on next-gen console at reasonable framerate and my answer, based on my experience, is definitely yes.

Yes that is basically the fundamental problem here. The PS3 and 360 are very powerful machines that definitely can produce amazing technical quality if they are used properly. The problem is most games seem to be 1) ports from PC architecture 2) an example of how SMP hardware and games is not necessarily a good combo. Obviously both are causing games like the 360 Quake4 and Prey. Games that run like ass and don't look so hot to boot, relative to their PC peers. Doom3-engine has even had SMP-support retrofitted into it but it doesn't seem to do miracles.

You see, back in the day with like Saturn, PSX, SNES, Genesis etc, development budgets were like in the hundreds of thousands of $$ or perhaps a million. But, the titles also sold well under a million units usually. Today we have most big games being in the tens of millions of $$, but a game can potentially sell well a couple million units. The problem is it's sorta a rubber band situation. You can win big and sell millions of units, but that's not very likely cuz the market is just super-saturated today. You have to really, really beat the bell curve to win today. And if one of these $15-20 million games flops, it can take the company with it. And that happens all the time.

So, do u dev for one console specifically and tailor your code for its hardware? Or do you make a cross-platform title and sacrifice visual quality/performance but dramatically boost sales potential? You see, this is why there are so many ports today. Developers can't afford flops cuz of the budget/graphics arms race we're in now (created by us gamers). The huge development costs, saturated market, and hardware complexity are making things very tangled and nasty, and potentially extremely risky.

So, judging consoles by their ports may not be nice and warm/fuzzy, but it sure is accurate today. Most games are cross-platform. These machines are forced primarily to run games that are designed to run on various hardware. Like it or not your modern console will see a lot more non-optimal coding than any previous generation. It's definitely unfortunate, but it's just how it is and will be for the forseeable future. I imagine the succeeding generation of consoles will make things even more expensive.

 

[Cyaneyes]

I really don;t want to continue this debate as it will go no-where and then the thread will be locked. Suffice to say I disagree with the rest but this point in particular I felt had to be addressed.

In talking about the comparitive power of Xenos to R580, we are not considering the rest of the system. Therefore drawing parallels to the original xbox does not include the rest of the system either. Thus you argument about how those games would run on a 700mhz PC has no relevance since its obviously not testing the capabilities of the graphics card.

Supported by a sufficiently powerful system, then yes, I absolutely do believe that the Ti4600 can run at those settings in those games and in fact, do quite a bit better. Furthermore, there are benchmarks on the web which prove that.

Same goes for Black. I have no doubt whatsoever that if a good port of the xbox version was done for the PC that it would run just fine on a Ti4600 at xbox settings or greater.

You are a PC fanguy -didn't realize that fanb*oy is banned here-, aren't you? If you think that holding strong and valuable opinions and not suffering smart ones is a sign of impartiality, let me tell you that it isn't.

Your reasoning in confronting him then was as shallow as it is now in my eyes -this is the first time I read your post-, because, as you put it, you can't handle someone disagreeing with you without any consequences.

Perhaps, in your opinion, moderators seem hard-up about applying the veiled threat of bannings due to perceived Code of Conduct violations, and I should point out that your post is fine, in the technical sense, even if you expand on it. I am sure you will get a free pass.

That being said -I hate to get OT-, I admit it, I am a console man. I don't like all of the preparations and hassle in most PC games, and after reading Fran's post, I agree with him on this matter.
Proving that NG consoles are far superior compared to PCs is a difficult business . I just think they are given the fact consoles are closed hardware. It also raises the question of whether such closed hardware could run top PC games at a decent framerate. Crysis looks great but I can't see nothing a PS3 or XTS coundn't run.

Well, in all fairness, I'd LOVE to see Cryisis running on my X360, but I'd rather prefer a "PC only" Crysis and not some crappy port.
I am not a techie, I just try to learn things from intelligent people, with both similar ideas and counterarguments over here, but, imo, there is an enormous gap between PCs and consoles, that the mathematical probability of getting similar numbers on both is, for ex., a billion to one.

Imo, this is the main point that console games developers like nAo or Fran emphasize. Just imagine a game created from scratch in either PC hardware or closed hardware final kits, with no optimization whatsoever except some minor changes -coding-, and then when the launchtime arrives the question is; What are we going to play?

Then, when comparisons take place most of us will be dissapointed because our numbers will not come out as expected. This terrible contradiction haunts every PC or console gamer, but the discussion will get to an end at next NG consoles launch. Well, as a 100% console gamer I hope next NG consoles = ultimate hardware.

__________________________________________________________________________

"Unlucky in games, lucky in love"

 

[Polygon Crusher]

To Cyaneyes:
Its quite hilarious to se you call him fanb*oy considering he IS right in his statement and there ARE several benchmarks out there as proof of the ti4600 being faster at rendering graphics. And to compare the xbox (700Mhz P3 (cut L2 cache size if memory serves) and 64MB of RAM) against a PC with same memory and similar CPU is also wrong considering that the OS needs RAM and CPU cycles.

Neverthless I hardly believe that Crysis can be done at full fidelity on the next-gen consoles. 512MB to hold all data and streamming cant be enough for a game like this which has to hold much data constant due to draw distance and detail. But then Crytek devs had already said that full fidelity is not possible on the consoles but they will have to downgrade the graphics.

Full fidelity = PC version

Enough.

 

[zed]

You are comparing oranges with apples here. The two machines (let's say the tree machines including a PS3) are substantially different. An engine high level architecture decision for a PC engine is usually not optimal on X360 and I expect it to not be usually optimal on PS3 either. The viceversa is also true. They can't be compared so naively.

statistics my dear fellow (ignoring desrali) if A beats B every single time in say over 10 events, A is most likely better than B, not that A was just 'lucky' 10x in a row.
another major point, which bring in more money for the game companies pc or console games?, consoles as everyone knows. now which platform do publishers care about the most? the one that earns them the most cash.
with game after game after game that gets released on platform A / B, if consistently plaform A outperforms platform B then its due to platform A being better, like i said statistics my dear fellow

 

[see colon]

So, judging consoles by their ports may not be nice and warm/fuzzy, but it sure is accurate today. Most games are cross-platform. These machines are forced primarily to run games that are designed to run on various hardware. Like it or not your modern console will see a lot more non-optimal coding than any previous generation. It's definitely unfortunate, but it's just how it is and will be for the forseeable future. I imagine the succeeding generation of consoles will make things even more expensive.

while i mostly agree with this statement, i think comparing a game ported to multiple hardware platforms with similar technical abilities is a better benchmark of the developer and/or code than it is of the hardware. just because the DooM3 engine has shown lackluster performance on the XB360 doesn't mean the XB360 has weak hardware. it means the DooM3 engine doesn't run well on that platform. it runs pretty well on the PC (assuming you have graphics hardware comparable to XB360), but you only have to look at the history of the engine to see that it might not be the best fit for the XB360. first of all, it was developed for the PC, then ported to the XB360. id's ports are generaly solid, but performance on other platforms (mac, linux) hasn't been as good as the windows release, despite the engine using OpenGL instead of the windows standard D3D. which brings me to the second point. or more of a question i guess. does the XB360 development environment allow for OpenGL, or was the engine re-tooled to work with D3D?

assuming developers had enough time and other resources, i'm sure someone could make an engine for XB360 that would render scenes similar in fasion to the DooM3 engine but with better performace. look at Riddick for xbox. it ran at a smoother framerate and looked comparable to (if not better than) the xbox port of DooM3. DooM3's performance on xbox doesn't mean the hardware was bad, because Riddick showed that the hardware was good. the difference was the developer of Riddick did a good job, while the team that ported DooM3 could have done a better job (given the resources, of cources). it's also important to note that the situation is reverced on the PC. DooM3 tends to perform better than Riddick at similar detail settings, and if you crank riddick all the way up (soft shadows) it's a slideshow no matter what you have under the hood.