Engines for Multi-platform development !

[2real4tv]

ID let Vicarious Visions handle the Xbox port of DOOM 3

That company is in my home town .

 

[TheWretched]

Clearly, there's nothing in the PC space on 90nm that's matching the 360, and have you seen how badly the GeForce 7 has aged? Both the 360 and PS3 f**k the 7900 GTX up both sides of it's large ducted heatsink!

Clearly there is... G80 easily destroys both XeGPU and RSX in terms of performance.

 

[function]

Clearly there is... G80 easily destroys both XeGPU and RSX in terms of performance.

Damn, I'd forgotten that the original 8800 was 90nm.

It was a freaking huge chip, some 50% (or more) bigger than the console GPUs, and drawing vastly more power. Nvidia shows an 8800 gtx as drawing 123.6 W in 3DMark 06, and a 7900 GTX as drawing 82.3 W. RSX would presumably draw much less than the 7900 GTX and be closer to the 7900 GT.

So yeah, I'll revise my comment to "there's nothing of even remotely the same size or power consumption on 90nm".

The point remains that Carmack is looking pretty much on the ball (as usual).

 

[(((interference)))]

Doesn't the 360 have a modified form of Direct X and developers can't address the hardware directly (ie code to the metal) like they can on PS3? I recall a DF article about that, apparently was to make backwards compatibility trivial on the next xbox.

Is that a significant drawback to 360 titles, ie. could we see a 5/10/25% performance improvement if there was no API in between developers and the hardware ?

 

[forumaccount]

Doesn't the 360 have a modified form of Direct X

Yes.

and developers can't address the hardware directly (ie code to the metal) like they can on PS3?

Sort of.

to make backwards compatibility trivial on the next xbox.

No.

Is that a significant drawback to 360 titles

No.

could we see a 5/10/25% performance improvement if there was no API in between developers and the hardware ?

Maybe there are some slight gains, but does it matter? It's a builtin cost, it's not something that gets sprung on everyone when they only have 2 weeks left in their project. If your frame is running at 33.4ms instead of 33.3ms you're the one to blame, not Microsoft.

 

[swym]

Doesn't the 360 have a modified form of Direct X and developers can't address the hardware directly (ie code to the metal) like they can on PS3?

It doesn't matter if you can access the hardware directly or not because direct access just means that you will have to create your own API (Theoretically you might get a small boost - assuming you actually have the skills to get better performance than what the DirectX developers achieved, and that you actually have the resources to spend on this).

The big benefit from developing to a closed platform (any console VS PC) doesn't come from the fact that you can code down to the metal, but from the fact that you know what the metal actually is: You have the exact same memory pool on every machine so spend time kindly asking the OS for more, you know what the graphics card is capable of so you can tweak performance and you don't need to compensate for any overhead, and since you are dealing with a single resolution (or two in some rare cases) so you can target your art to look good on this resolution and this resolution only.