Ease of porting current gen to last gen - "The Crew"

[Shifty Geezer]

An article on Eurogamer says "The Crew" is only going to come to XB360 of last gen because it's a close match to the design of current-gen consoles and an easy port.

"The Crew is originally built for the new generation of consoles so when we made the decision to port it to the previous generation of consoles, we decided to focus solely on the platform closest to the new-gen's technical infrastructure, which is the Xbox 360," a Ubisoft spokesperson told Eurogamer.

I'm not seeing that myself as all last-gen consoles seem reasonably distant. Obviously PS3 is nowt but aggro, but Wii U has similarities itself.

In particular in the comments, I've raised the issue of CPU and have some disagreements, so I want to ask the experts here what they think. I'm not convinced porting from Jaguar to Xenon is going to be trivial, certainly not a recompile and code will run quickly. In a scale of difficulty to 10, I placed PS3 at 10 and XB360 at 8, although that's probably too high for 360. What are B3D's collective thoughts on down-porting from PS4/XB1 to PS360 + Wii U?

 

[Deleted member 86764]

I guess the 360 has as many CPU threads as Xbox One and PS4 have available logical processors, even if the architecture is different. And all three are based off AMD GPUs?

That's all that immediately came to my mind on reading the article.

 

[pjbliverpool]

An article on Eurogamer says "The Crew" is only going to come to XB360 of last gen because it's a close match to the design of current-gen consoles and an easy port.



I'm not seeing that myself as all last-gen consoles seem reasonably distant. Obviously PS3 is nowt but aggro, but Wii U has similarities itself.

In particular in the comments, I've raised the issue of CPU and have some disagreements, so I want to ask the experts here what they think. I'm not convinced porting from Jaguar to Xenon is going to be trivial, certainly not a recompile and code will run quickly. In a scale of difficulty to 10, I placed PS3 at 10 and XB360 at 8, although that's probably too high for 360. What are B3D's collective thoughts on down-porting from PS4/XB1 to PS360 + Wii U?

I'm, not convinced the vector math point you responded to is correct anyway. In terms of peak theoretical vector performance I believe Xenon is actually behind the XBO CPU (and equal to the PS4 CPU) assuming 6 cores available for both. And in terms of efficiency I can only assume the Jaguar would be more capable of getting near it's peak than Xenon.

Would be interesting to hear the experts take on that though.

 

[loekf]

I'm, not convinced the vector math point you responded to is correct anyway. In terms of peak theoretical vector performance I believe Xenon is actually behind the XBO CPU (and equal to the PS4 CPU) assuming 6 cores available for both. And in terms of efficiency I can only assume the Jaguar would be more capable of getting near it's peak than Xenon.

Would be interesting to hear the experts take on that though.

Sounds like lazy devs to me. XB360 can do 6 threads on 3 cores, so likely developers wrote their engine as having 6 threads. Ok, with 6 cores available on Jaguar that's easy. Also add the Radeon architecture.

I call this lazy, because some developers these days go for the many small tasks (threads) approach launched from a main worker/dispatcher thread running on one of the cores. This main worker then spawns smaller threads, which are then scheduled across the other available cores. This makes things much more scalable. See e.g. Naughty Dog.

 

[TomRL]

Sounds like lazy devs to me.

Stop right there.

 

[orangpelupa]

sounds like business decission mixed with technical decission.

wii u have too small market share to worth the effort (time and money). PS3 is too different (cell).

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Can people pleased stick to the topic of how hard it is to port to last gen on a technical level? How much, if any, CPU performance deficit is there? How hard is it to extract the CPU performance? Is porting PC DX code going to be easy for XB360? That sort of thing.

 

[milk]

we decided to focus solely on the platform closest to the new-gen's technical infrastructure, which is the Xbox 360

I think it has much more to do with on-line infrastructure than anything else.

 

[taisui]

unified memory, maybe?

 

[Inuhanyou]

Its well established that the 360 is easier to handle multiplatform wise. And when you have 4 relatively straightforward environments in the ps4, xb1 and 360, why bother with pS3?

 

[Goodtwin]

Its well established that the 360 is easier to handle multiplatform wise. And when you have 4 relatively straightforward environments in the ps4, xb1 and 360, why bother with pS3?

Exactly, the 360 was always the easiest platform to develop for, so the fact that it was chosen as the console to receive a next gen port is purely based on profit per dollar spent. They can spend far less porting to 360 than they can with the PS3 or Wii U. Both PS3 and Wii U are proven to produce better peak results than the 360, however, that doesn't mean it requires the same level of work to produce said results. PS3 requires a ton of knowledge on the Cell processor, and the Wii U brings memory management as well as a lack CPU flops processing power as a hurdle for developers. Basically, with the advanced tools available to developers, a 360 port may very well be a simple downscale while PS3 and Wii U may require a ton of re written code. Little to no additional cost for the 360 port, extensive cost for the PS3 and Wii U. This is a business decision ladies and gentlemen.

 

[AzBat]

I guess the 360 has as many CPU threads as Xbox One and PS4 have available logical processors, even if the architecture is different. And all three are based off AMD GPUs?

That's all that immediately came to my mind on reading the article.

That & an unified memory architecture.

Tommy McClain