Can the PC compete with Next Gen consoles?

[skilzygw]

I know this forum is filled with a lot of experts in various hardware & software. I was looking at the very impressive spec sheets of each console. I was just wondering if for Gaming the PC can compete still? Graphicall, computationally?

I would like to know if the architecture of the PC is ideal for a game system? As far as northbridge/southbridge PCi-Express cards etc...
Can a better gpu always be made for PC in due time or will there come a time when this architecture can go no further?


What do the PC's have to do to compete? Dual AMD, 2 Next Gen GPu's in SLI, Ageia PPU(had to throw it in, I know the ageia talk iritates certain People, X-FI audio SB
would that put next gen hardware wise to shame?
Wy dont PC's get embedded ram etc...

thanks for all the responses. i really enjoy hardware talk. Its ver interesting stuff.

 

[jvd]

sure . In a year the gpus will double the performance (if not more ) than the consoles . THen a year after that will double .

Happens every 5 years a console comes out impressive and after that

 

[Geeforcer]

Look at it this way: Xbox, the most powerful last-gen system, was launched November 2001. 3 months later, February 2002, Nvidia released Geforce 4 TI, which was more powerful then XGPU.

It will take as little as a couple of months for console GPUs to be surpassed by PC chips, and a year or two before their CPUs are surpassed as well.

 

[ANova]

ATI's R520 and nvidia's G70 will be out by the end of this year and will already be on par more or less with the x360 and PS3's GPUs. Then the R600 and G80 will double that performance in another year.

CPU wise the market seems to be stuck in a rut though. Still, it's only a matter of time before we see some significant increases here as well, either in the form of multi core or a new technology.

 

[MasterBaiter]

These new consoles seem a bit more powerful than their earlier brethren. I'm gonna say it will take about a year for pc's to catch up (on the graphical/cpu side). This may be the first time I'm actually attracted to a console! I am under the impression that the new Xbox will also support a keyboard/mouse setup, which is the coup de grâce for me.

 

[London Geezer]

I think Sony are really pushing it with PS3, apart from the processing power which eventually will be surpassed by PCs, the machine has *everything*.
MemoryStick slot, SD slot, CompactFlash slot, 6 USB2 ports, 3 Gigabit Ethernet ports, Wireless LAN out of the box, Bluetooth, BlueRay drive (total compatibility with pretty much every optical disc out there, including SuperAudio CD - but not DVDAudio), HDD, native 1080p resolution. The thing has 2 bloody HDMI ports too! plus SPDIF optical output, video(analog) out.

That is a lot of stuff for one single box sold at a very competitive price and if they can get some GOOD software support for all those features that it's supposed to support, it could become a very good contender to "Media Center" PCs sold now.

 

[karlotta]

well it depends if they release games for the PC. And when they do will they hold up to the porting. So ina real way the PC may never hold up again to a console.

 

[Druga Runda]

well it depends if they release games for the PC. And when they do will they hold up to the porting. So ina real way the PC may never hold up again to a console.

mah even free games for PC will blast anything available for a console in a year or two... PC is just that - customizable, and someone will make money off it...

 

[overclocked_enthusiasm]

sure . In a year the gpus will double the performance (if not more ) than the consoles . THen a year after that will double .

Happens every 5 years a console comes out impressive and after that

Based on the slowdown to Moore's Law that has happened in the CPU business, it is only a matter of time before that happens to the GPU business. We have gone from 133 MHz to 3.5+ GHz in in CPUs but have stalled the past year or two. Why won't this happen to GPUs? I agree we are still doubling every 18 months or so now in GPUs but not CPUs anymore.

It has always been obvious that the graphics quality of PCs are MUCH better than consoles. Based on the recent demos from Xbox 360 and PS3 I am not so sure that case can be made anymore. As CPUs are now largely "fast enough" why won't these newest consoles produce graphics that are "good enough"? IF and I do mean IF I can get graphics as good to the naked eye as my PC from the comfort of the leather couch and 65 " Sony HDTV in my living room...it will be a no-brainer.

While I am sure that some games will be easier/better with a keyboard or mouse, as long as consoles keep pushing the online multiplayer experience and have great grapghics that compare to computers that cost 2-3 times as much, I think he has a point.

 

[karlotta]

then do think we will go bellow 45nm? Well realy? or will it finally be a new way of doing thangs when rendering..... 45 end of the line for the sillycone?

 

[suryad]

I was reading the PS 3 supposedly has 2.18 TFLOPS of processing power. I doubt our top of the line P4s and GPUs combined can barely break the 1 TFLOPS barrier!!! I think PCs have hard work cut out for them!! I ran the Java applet Linpack benchmark and my CPU which is a P4 Prescott @ 3.4 ghz on my laptop can barely hit 220 GFLOPS IIRC.

 

[Joe DeFuria]

Why won't this happen to GPUs?

It won't happen the same way with GPUs. GPUs are inherently parallizable. We're seeing CPUs start to parallelize now, but the economies of scale are pretty bad. (A dual core CPU does not give NEAR 2X performance increase.) Multi-core CPUs is a sort of "last resort" answer to the wall that's being hit. Very simplistically speaking, Traditional general purpose CPUs need "more mHz" for more perfrmance. And the Mhz wall is being hit.

With GPUs...you can just "add more pipes", and you get generally DO get very good scalability in performance. This is why there is even a market for SLI. GPUs can scale by either increasing Mhz OR parallel operation.

There will still be a problem with GPUs though...and that's power consumption....

 

[hoom]

PS 3 supposedly has 2.18 TFLOPS of processing

Those sorts of numbers come from taking the max theoretical number of ops from the whole system added together ie CPU + GPU + audioPU +...

NV said some crazy (for the time) numbers about NV30 along similar basis.

They won't be getting 2TFLOPS in any benchmarks.


I have to say the power of these next gen consoles is certainly tempting.
But until they make games that I would actually want to play eg Rome Total War + Iwar3 & with controllers I want to use ie mouse + keyboard or joystick + keyboard, then it will remain only a temptation.

 

[suryad]

Agreed I would take a keyboard and mouse anyday over a f***ing gamepad!! Since the PS 3 does have BT it is quite possible they could allow game play with a mouse and keyboard...I mean we could prob buy as a peripheral addon to the PS 3 a keyboard just with the relevant keys...if not a full fledged full sized keyboard...I think that would still be cool.

 

[ANova]

I wouldn't be at all surprised if the PS3 will support general USB based keyboards and mice.

 

[Killer-Kris]

I was reading the PS 3 supposedly has 2.18 TFLOPS of processing power. I doubt our top of the line P4s and GPUs combined can barely break the 1 TFLOPS barrier!!! I think PCs have hard work cut out for them!! I ran the Java applet Linpack benchmark and my CPU which is a P4 Prescott @ 3.4 ghz on my laptop can barely hit 220 GFLOPS IIRC.

But don't forget that if you throw even moderately branchy code at the PS3, even Prescott will look like an incredibly good design.

 

[hoom]

Further to the TFLOPS bit: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23293

CPU: Cell Processor PowerPC-base Core @3.2GHz...total floating point performance: 218 GFLOPS...
GPU: RSX @550MHz 1.8 TFLOPS floating point performance...
System Floating Point Performance: 2 TFLOPS

 

[London Geezer]

I was reading the PS 3 supposedly has 2.18 TFLOPS of processing power. I doubt our top of the line P4s and GPUs combined can barely break the 1 TFLOPS barrier!!! I think PCs have hard work cut out for them!! I ran the Java applet Linpack benchmark and my CPU which is a P4 Prescott @ 3.4 ghz on my laptop can barely hit 220 GFLOPS IIRC.

But don't forget that if you throw even moderately branchy code at the PS3, even Prescott will look like an incredibly good design.

Sure? I thought Cell could handle branching fairly well. I don't know, genuine question.

 

[Frank]

The PS3 only has one CPU to manage things, only the things that are easy to parallize have multiple units. You use the CPU for the program flow and overal system management, you offload all the intensive calculations to the other units. And those are reasonably general purpose math units. For a programmer, it is a much cleaner and straightforward model than the 3 cores in the Xbox360. I think it will be much easier to get the PS3 up to speed than the Xbox360.

 

[London Geezer]

The PS3 only has one CPU to manage things, only the things that are easy to parallize have multiple units. You use the CPU for the program flow and overal system management, you offload all the intensive calculations to the other units. And those are reasonably general purpose math units. For a programmer, it is a much cleaner and straightforward model than the 3 cores in the Xbox360. I think it will be much easier to get the PS3 up to speed than the Xbox360.

Heh, just don't post that in the Console Forum or the whole world wide web will collapse.