(((interference)))
Veteran
Well for me after considering different things the main viewpoint I've settled on is that the gap won't be enough for most, if not all multi-plat devs to justify increasing the budget to take advantage of said gap. The end result would be 3rd party games looking exactly the same regardless of the console leaving 1st party titles to show any potential differences.
Yeah, I think this is true - the differences for MP titles at least, will be relatively small, like Gamecube to PS2 multiplats, or earlier PS3 ports (GTA4, RDR, Skyrim etc) to 360.
Remember also that the Wii U supposedly has 2x or 3x the GFlops of the Xbox 360 and we don't see any difference. Yes, lots of caveats such as 1st gen software, different archs, slower CPU, etc, but just saying theoretical GFlops don't tell the whole story. Given what we know, the PS4 will be stronger, but you might need DF articles to tell the difference again.
Actually, we now very much doubt it has 2x the FLOPS, the GPU is probably closer to 300GF.
latching onto individual figures is not a useful way to understand performance differences.
OK lets say that everything else in the hardware is identical for a second, so you have a 50% performance difference, but only in ALU limited situations.
When I render shadows, I'm ROP (or rathe Z-Fill) limited, if my shaders are texture heavy, the ALU's sit idle and wait on memory, on current PC GPU's if the vertex workload is dominant, for the most part they grossly underutilize the ALU's.
So what percentage of the time do the extra ALU's actually help?
If it's 40% it's a 20% performance difference, if it's 80% it's a 40% difference I would guess it will end up being closer to the first than the second.
If 720 has more ROPs (and enough associated bandwidth) or a larger register pool and can hide more latency, then it gets more of that difference back, because it runs other portions of the frame faster.
Now I'm not suggesting it's "faster" or for that matter "slower", I'm saying it's just one aspect of a design.
Thanks for that great explanation ERP.
Though as Rangers said, more CUs tends to mean you get more of everything else too (unless Sony has gimped their card or MS has improved theirs in these areas)
But I agree that the visible difference is likely to only be 10-20% or so, rather than 50%.
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