Hrm, GOW was running on a PC with SLIed 6800 Ultras??

[ben6]

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1820463,00.asp

Microsoft is in a weird place right now. It's got "most" of a system. All the games running at the show were on alpha dev kits, which consist of a PowerMac G5 (dual-processor) with a 256MB Radeon X850 card. That's significantly less powerful than the final hardware. So some games looked better than others, but none of them looked like they will on the real hardware. Kameo was brilliant, despite the hardware limitations--chalk that up to the power of great art. Epic's Gears of War looked awesome as well, but I asked Cliff Bleszinski what it was running on, and he admitted it was a PC with two GeForce 6800s in SLI.

 

[ralexand]

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1820463,00.asp

Microsoft is in a weird place right now. It's got "most" of a system. All the games running at the show were on alpha dev kits, which consist of a PowerMac G5 (dual-processor) with a 256MB Radeon X850 card. That's significantly less powerful than the final hardware. So some games looked better than others, but none of them looked like they will on the real hardware. Kameo was brilliant, despite the hardware limitations--chalk that up to the power of great art. Epic's Gears of War looked awesome as well, but I asked Cliff Bleszinski what it was running on, and he admitted it was a PC with two GeForce 6800s in SLI.

It still wasn't running very smooth.

 

[lip2lip]

Moving from 256 ram to 10 should make a significant improvement.
Although, I do almost want to buy a mac now.

 

[rusty]

Moving from 256 ram to 10 should make a significant improvement.

eh!?

anyway, it wouldn't suprise me if that was the case. i believe epic stated that they thought they were at about 80% visually of what they could acheive - that doesn't fit too well with the assertions of 360 dev kits only providing 30% power.

either way i would expect the xenos to be a slightly more capable gpu than a pair of sli'd 6800's and it is certainly a very different architecture and as such the game code is likely not in the slightest bit optimised to run on the 6800's (possible explanation for the frame rate issues?)

 

[mckmas8808]

i believe epic stated that they thought they were at about 80% visually of what they could acheive - that doesn't fit too well with the assertions of 360 dev kits only providing 30% power.

You know whats real BS? Nobody on f'ing Earth says anything about Microsoft flipping sides on this issue. And by the way Peter Moore said that GoW was running at 80% graphically.

 

[jvd]

so he said it was running 80% graphicly you know how many times a dev has said they gotten all the power out of the ps2 and then a few months later a game comes out that looks even better ?

 

[Qroach]

I think he meant 80% of teh current hardware they had. Not the final hardware.


mckmas8808, why are you complaining about peter moore exactly?

 

[ralexand]

i believe epic stated that they thought they were at about 80% visually of what they could acheive - that doesn't fit too well with the assertions of 360 dev kits only providing 30% power.

You know whats real BS? Nobody on f'ing Earth says anything about Microsoft flipping sides on this issue. And by the way Peter Moore said that GoW was running at 80% graphically.

Chill out, this isn't that type of forum.

 

[Acert93]

i believe epic stated that they thought they were at about 80% visually of what they could acheive - that doesn't fit too well with the assertions of 360 dev kits only providing 30% power.

You know whats real BS? Nobody on f'ing Earth says anything about Microsoft flipping sides on this issue. And by the way Peter Moore said that GoW was running at 80% graphically.

Well, that could mean a lot of things. Does he mean 80% if the graphical features? 80% of the graphical performance? 80% of the max (I think we can throw that out since they do not even have final HW and have yet to code to the metal).

If he means 80% of the featureset, that is not too bad considering it is running on 6800U SLI cards that have SM 3.0. I think this is probably what was intended considering 1. it needs MUCH more than a 20% bump in framerate and 2. it is the UE3. The platform is pretty portable and quite a bit of the supported featureset is built into the engine. Whereas other devs are making games and engines at the same time.

If he means the game has another 20% to go in graphic IQ then It would be just as shocking if they meant framerate (I assume there is a LOT of tweaking to do... e.g. PDZ is said to be content complete and the last 5 months are going to be spent on polish).

I guess the real question is where is the quote in context and what did the speaker intend. Seeing the rants... without... oh well...

 

[pc999]

It is better put thinghs this way:

How many times a dev had got 80% of the power from a radical new tech

 

[Jon Brittan]

Personally I think Acert is right here, 80% graphically is something different to 80% of graphical performance.

Being at 80% graphically and also at ~30% of final performance are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

 

[hey69]

but a dual G5 is almost as powerfull as a 3core x360 cpu
the only maindifference will be the GFX part of the dev hardware.
so 30% for the devkit is stretching it a bit i think

 

[Dave Baumann]

The current "actual Xenon devkit hardware" (i.e. not the G5 stuff, but not quite final hardware) is said to be running at about 80% of the performance of the final system, so if and 80% figure is being thrown around then this is what I shuld imagine people are talking about.

 

[Jabjabs]

Although, I do almost want to buy a mac now.

Do it, Spotlight rocks in OSX 10.4.

 

[pjbliverpool]

but a dual G5 is almost as powerfull as a 3core x360 cpu
the only maindifference will be the GFX part of the dev hardware.
so 30% for the devkit is stretching it a bit i think

I would have thought a dual G5 would be more powerful than the 360 core, at least in some areas.

The G5 is an OoO 5 issue core while I think the X360 is and in order 2 issue core. The G5 also has over 50% more L2 cache per core.

 

[ralexand]

but a dual G5 is almost as powerfull as a 3core x360 cpu
the only maindifference will be the GFX part of the dev hardware.
so 30% for the devkit is stretching it a bit i think

I would have thought a dual G5 would be more powerful than the 360 core, at least in some areas.

The G5 is an OoO 5 issue core while I think the X360 is and in order 2 issue core. The G5 also has over 50% more L2 cache per core.

You're ignoring the difference in clock speed.

 

[X-AleX]

A dual G5 isn't nearly as powerful as the final 360 core.


Also, the game was running onto the alpha kit, this is f*ckin' bullshit.

 

[aaaaa00]

Dual G5 will win in some ways, lose in some ways, and lose very badly in some ways. (Same with dual G5 vs CELL.)

It all depends on what you're trying to accomplish.

 

[pjbliverpool]

A dual G5 isn't nearly as powerful as the final 360 core.


Also, the game was running onto the alpha kit, this is f*ckin' bullshit.

Ahhhh, would you mind posting a link to the benchmarks?

 

[rusty]

A dual G5 isn't nearly as powerful as the final 360 core.


Also, the game was running onto the alpha kit, this is f*ckin' bullshit.

mate, take it easy... there's no need to swear about it :?