Untold Legends Producer claims PS3> $ 3,500 PC

[Shifty Geezer]

From anandtech.com:

Third, when a manufacturer is talking about peak floating point performance
there are a few things that they aren't taking into account. Being able to
process billions of operations per second depends on actually being able to
have that many floating point operations to work on. That means that you
have to have enough bandwidth to keep the FPUs fed, no mispredicted
branches, no cache misses and the right structure of code to make sure that
all of the FPUs can be fed at all times so they can execute at their peak
rates.

Thus for a billion 32 bit SP FP MADDs say, you need 4 GB/s. For 20, you need 80 GB/s, for 200, you need 800 GB/s.

That's pure throughput, one value in, process, one out. Bandwidth is the limiting factor in most intense processing circumstances. The difficulty in creating procesors with massive processing ability is to feed the ALU's with data. Now if you can work on floats from internal storage, perhaps a loop

for(n=0; n<1,000,000,000; n++){
float a=a+0.001
}

You're not accessing the main RAM at all, and are limited to the much faster internal storage. By using large stores and BW optimizing, Cell has much more available BW to the ALU's on average. Thus we can see real-world applications getting 100+ GFlops from Cell without needing 400 GB/s RAM. Other processors don't have the same memory configurations and are limited as a result. We can see this in Mercury's medical imaging. The Cell workstation was something like 50x the speed of their alternative PPC based system. A64 isn't. It's not an order of magnitude faster than the other CPUs out there. You could stick 4 Athlon 64s into the fastest PC going, and it won't manage that medical imaging task as well because they're not configured for high data throughput tasks. They're a processor designed for a different job with different optimizations. This is where the power comparisons are not very useful. But in brute power, whatever x86 processor you stick in a $3500, it's not going to compete with Cell. It was never designed to from the beginning. And that's even if the processors scale 1:1, which they don't. Dual-core A64's aren't 2x the speed of a single A64.

 

[pjbliverpool]

But in brute power, whatever x86 processor you stick in a $3500, it's not going to compete with Cell. It was never designed to from the beginning. And that's even if the processors scale 1:1, which they don't. Dual-core A64's aren't 2x the speed of a single A64.

Compete with Cell in what way though? Medical imaging? Thats of no use in a games machine. 3D rendering? True but a $3500 PC sure doesn't need the CPU to help out with 3d rendering if it already has a pair of X1900XTX's.

So what the CPU in a $3500 PC needs to compete with Cell on is going to be things like Physics, AI, game control etc....

But a $3500 PC could have a PPU in aswell. So could Cell outperform an Athlon FX62 in AI, game control and all the other little CPU game tasks while simultaneously outperforming a PPU in physics?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Compete with Cell in what way though? Medical imaging? Thats of no use in a games machine. 3D rendering? True but a $3500 PC sure doesn't need the CPU to help out with 3d rendering if it already has a pair of X1900XTX's?

If you're taking a broad term 'more powerful' then any and every task (or a select few ). Eg. Perhaps PS3 allows for tens times the number of AI bots as a $3500 PC could ever manage, because the GPU and PPU don't make up for the CPU's shortcomings. Or maybe in tracing volumetric clouds Cell wins.

As the orignal point wasn't qualified in the OP, more powerful could apply to any number of situations, and the blanket statement 'a $3500 is more powerful than a PS3' is as wrong as the blanket statement 'a PS3 is more powerful than a $3500 PC'

It's also worth pointing out that there's been very little clarification of the remark, and the OP could have presented the information much better. The actual statement is that after E3 where people were underwhelmed, SOE have added a lot of postprocessing processes to Cell, '...from a technology standpoint we've made a lot of additions to adding processes to the Cell architecture and we've finally reached a point where our PCs are no longer faster than our PS3s. Our PS3's are trouncing our $3500 PCs in our offices.'

That explains what they're finding, which wasn't ever a statement that PS3 is more powerful (overall) than a $3500 PC. Only in the area they were talking about. And that shows an area where PS3>PC, where there will be some strengths just as there are other weaknesses. Which is invariably the case with any system vs. system comparison and why such topics are best avoided.

On another note, actually reviewing the game, it's still graphically very weak going by the footage shown. I don't know if that's old footage. But next to nothing appears to be normal mapped, the visual FX are very weak, the plants aren't detailed and just two-way billboards mostly. There's plenty of room for improvement and I can only hope for gamers and SOE alike that things are much improved on what's currently being shown.

 

[Guden Oden]

From anandtech.com:

The day anandtech can teach any knowledgeable poster on this board (and yes, that does include myself) ANYTHING new about cell, is the day hell officially froze over. They've goofed enough on this subject to establish that as a fact. They've got a damn big error sitting right in the section you quoted for chrissakes.

Understand, before you continue to bitch with me about this, that anandtech simply isn't an authorative source on the subject of cell (and barely on any highly technological subject for that matter). They ought to stick to stuff they can handle at least relatively well, quake timedemos and such.

First and foremost, a floating point operation can be anything

Cell's flops aren't just ANYTHING tho, so no point even trying to go there. This you quoted in is an irrelevant strawman and doesn't belong in this discussion, period. Now, it may be you just didn't understand it is a strawman, well, fine. Not everybody can know what they're talking about! But if you did, well, let's just say these "tricks" get tiresome real fast.

Neither is yours

Um, well, actually it is. It is pretty established that cell often blows other processors clear out of the water on heavy floating point processing.

and if my rig can run the same game maxed at 1600p with 16xAA at 60fps. Obviously its much more powerful.

Only from the single aspect of drawing frames onto the screen.

I'm sure you wouldn't suggest a PC running Forsaken at 3000*2000 pixels at 500 frames/sec is more powerful than say, a PS2 running Zone of the Enders 2 at 640*480 and 60 frames/sec.

There's a lot more to system power than just drawing graphics on the screen.

Warhawk? Seriously. Warhawk while it looks good is not groundbreaking in anyway.

No, of course it's not groundbreaking, since it's a PS3 game... *cough*

Maybe you can show me the PC game that pioneered a seamless world with hundreds of active units both land and air-based simultaneously, with volumetric raytraced clouds and all kinds of other goodies. Seriously, you name it, I'll concede you have a point.

Anyways, Crysis looks a million times better than any console game annouced shown in a realtime form.

"A million"? As defined how really?

Crysis is another jungle slideshow with nice environments and precious little else. Where's the technical innovation? Nowhere to be seen!

You also seem to be completely hung up about this marvelous CPU thing. Have you forgotten that your cute console has a half arsed GPU?

What does it matter it's got a "half arsed" (your words) GPU when it's only going to run at 720P most of the time, and 60FPS at most? 8 ROPs is well balanced with its memory bandwidth, I might add. You don't seem to have factored in this stuff, but then again, typical PC fanbois often stare themselves blind at paper specs, frames per second and 3dmark scores.

You have squat when it comes to graphical power compared to what a quad-sli rig can do.

And your quad SLI rig - which'll be nowhere near 4x faster a single card in reality - is going to set you back the price of an entire PS3, which just happens to include the most monstrous CPU on this earth at the moment. You know what I'd rather spend my cash on, but maybe you got different priorities, pal...

Further talking about optimization bla bla bla closed box etc, does not change the fact that a Quad-sli rig is more powerful.

If the PC with its oodles of raw power and IN SOME RESPECTS higher on-paper scores (pretty much constrained to fillrate, RAM size and CPU integer performance), doesn't give you a superior gaming experience in any way other than higher screen resolutions, then I'd say the optimization bla bla bla closed box etc means quite a lot in reality.

If somebody made a game optimized for a quad-sli rig, it would look like real life

I'm sure you're jesting, because even offline software renderers don't do real life yet, but assuming what you say is true:

Thing is, nobody's ever gonna make a game like that because there aren't nearly enough owners of quad-SLI systems to warrant the astronomical development costs. Besides, you'd only have a game that LOOKS 'real life', due to the inadequacies of the monolithic PC architecture, there's no way it could ever PLAY like 'real life'. The total system power just isn't there.

PS3 (and Xbox 360 I might add) are much better balanced systems between CPU and GPU, whereas current high-end PCs are very GPU top-heavy with much weaker CPUs supporting them. Consoles stand a considerably better chance of making a 'real-like' gameplay expeirence because due to their closed system nature, devs know what they can aim for, every customer has the same level of performance, and besides, these machines have a much higher baseline processor performance level than any current PC.

Intel and AMD knows most PC users don't need 100+ gflops, so they're not spending the silicon neccessary to realize such performance levels, it would make their chips much too expensive. Instead they spend transistors on making multitasking and office apps and such run smoothly, while you'll never realistically be running a SQL server or doing spreadsheets or such on a PS3 or a 360.

Consoles have GAMING optimized CPUs. PCs have general case optimized CPUs that you can game on.

Wow! Could you be a little more biased please? I wasn't quite feeling it enough there

I just love it when you new guys with your big egos and little red dots come and get all rowdy and stuff... (Yes, that was irony.)

Here's the way things are: just because I don't automatically subscribe to your notion that an expensive PC per definition must be superior to everything else in every respect, doesn't make me biased. I've gamed on PCs and computers in general since 1987, and consoles since '86. There's no point in trying to portray me as biased, so don't even try.

Seriously, go back to the shithole board you came from and go back to trolling with the people who slither in down the muck there, k? Nobody cares about your delirious fanperson rantings, I didn't even bother to read your post. Go away.

 

[pjbliverpool]

If you're taking a broad term 'more powerful' then any and every task (or a select few ). Eg. Perhaps PS3 allows for tens times the number of AI bots as a $3500 PC could ever manage, because the GPU and PPU don't make up for the CPU's shortcomings. Or maybe in tracing volumetric clouds Cell wins.

Rendering and lighting clouds is a likely area where Cell would be more powerful but thats irrellevent for this comparison since the PC has that kind of power in even greater abundance, its just in a different place (the GPU).

Its the power that the PC doesn't have in comparison to the PS3 which is relevent in this comparison so we should be looking at the none graphics related tasks.

AI is one candidate although I thought it was pretty much given that Cell would be much worse than an x86 CPU at this due to its poor branch prediction and lack of out of order. Physics us another obvious example but if we bring the PPU into the mix the question then becomes can the Cell outperform it. But not only that, can it outperform the PPU in physics while outperforming the x86 in all other none graphics related tasks.

As the orignal point wasn't qualified in the OP, more powerful could apply to any number of situations, and the blanket statement 'a $3500 is more powerful than a PS3' is as wrong as the blanket statement 'a PS3 is more powerful than a $3500 PC'

I disagree. There is nothing stopping us from looking at the bigger picture and asking which on balance is the overall more powerful system for running games. I.e. if given a choice between fully utilising one or the other, which do most devs feel they could produce the best results on. I thinkthe answer is quite obviously a PC with $3500 worth of hardware in it.

It's also worth pointing out that there's been very little clarification of the remark, and the OP could have presented the information much better. The actual statement is that after E3 where people were underwhelmed, SOE have added a lot of postprocessing processes to Cell, '...from a technology standpoint we've made a lot of additions to adding processes to the Cell architecture and we've finally reached a point where our PCs are no longer faster than our PS3s. Our PS3's are trouncing our $3500 PCs in our offices.'

That explains what they're finding, which wasn't ever a statement that PS3 is more powerful (overall) than a $3500 PC. Only in the area they were talking about. And that shows an area where PS3>PC, where there will be some strengths just as there are other weaknesses. Which is invariably the case with any system vs. system comparison and why such topics are best avoided.

I don't think it neccesarily is showing an area where the PS3 is greater than a PC. We don't know what those PC's contain but I don't think its unreasonable to assume that they are development PC's containing Quadro's which can cost 2-3k on their own and still not have as much rendering performance as a standard 7800GTX. So just because they are saying the PC's cost $3500 it certainly doesn't mean they are top of the line gaming PC's.

And even if they are, I doubt they are writing an optimised x86 version of their game just so they can run speed comparisons to the PS3. Whatever code they are running on the PC and getting worse results with is no doubt code designed for the cells architecture, not the PC's.

 

[scooby_dooby]

Shifty why are you reaching so hard to try and make these comments sound somewhat reasonable? They're not, it's an absolutely ridiculous statement anyway you cut it.

 

[czekon]

so if PS3> $ 3,500 PC then Crysis is a piece of cake for ps3 i supose

 

[scooby_dooby]

Um, well, actually it is. It is pretty established that cell often blows other processors clear out of the water on heavy floating point processing.

Well established? Without any realword applications, it's suddenly become a well establishd fact? Why don't we wait unti lthis thing is out in the wild before falling for the Sony/IBM sales pitch hook line and sinker no??

Also, what's most relevant is how CELL compares to other CPU's in-game, in real world performance, when the dinky little in-order PowerPC core is trying to run the entire game engine and offload things to the SPU's.

No, of course it's not groundbreaking, since it's a PS3 game... *cough*

No, that would be the crappy textures, horrible animation, bad physics. The game looks good in the air, but is brutal on the ground, and is nowhere near the amazing showcase you seem to be making it out to be.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Crysis is another jungle slideshow with nice environments and precious little else. Where's the technical innovation? Nowhere to be seen!

I think the lighting and shadowing plus detail in that jungle is pretty awesome though. Haven't seen anything on that level before.

Intel and AMD knows most PC users don't need 100+ gflops, so they're not spending the silicon neccessary to realize such performance levels, it would make their chips much too expensive. Instead they spend transistors on making multitasking and office apps and such run smoothly, while you'll never realistically be running a SQL server or doing spreadsheets or such on a PS3 or a 360.

When Tom's Hardware reviewed dual A64's, they actually commented on the fact most functions would be sped up in many user's experience because of the CPU. It's a bit of a dilemma for x86, as unless they can get people using massive float monster software, there's no point to people upgrading their CPUs. Games are pretty much the only mainstream reason I think.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Um, well, actually it is. It is pretty established that cell often blows other processors clear out of the water on heavy floating point processing.

And the relevance of that to a CPU in a gaming machine thats not required to render graphics or handle any physics is what? And the benchmarks to back up these gaming advantages are where?

Only from the single aspect of drawing frames onto the screen.

I'm sure you wouldn't suggest a PC running Forsaken at 3000*2000 pixels at 500 frames/sec is more powerful than say, a PS2 running Zone of the Enders 2 at 640*480 and 60 frames/sec.

There's a lot more to system power than just drawing graphics on the screen.

Yes and there is a lot more to SLI than just allowing you to run games at higher resolution. Im confused as to why your continuing to push that argument since surely your aware that SLI increases the power of every area of the GPU (aside from the Geometry stages). If you need huge pixel shading power to run a game at 720p and 30fps, then SLI can give it to you where a single GPU couldn't. Its obviously not all just about higher resolutions.

No, of course it's not groundbreaking, since it's a PS3 game... *cough*

Maybe you can show me the PC game that pioneered a seamless world with hundreds of active units both land and air-based simultaneously, with volumetric raytraced clouds and all kinds of other goodies. Seriously, you name it, I'll concede you have a point.

Your deliberatly limiting the criteria based on what are primarily gameplay factors rather than technical ones just to make it more difficult to find an equivilent. The bottom line is that Warhawk doesn't look all that amazing and in comparison to PC games that may already be around at the time of its launch, its simply nothing special.

"A million"? As defined how really?

Crysis is another jungle slideshow with nice environments and precious little else. Where's the technical innovation? Nowhere to be seen!

Oh come on! How can you make a statement like that and claim not to be biased? The technical innovation is in graphics which far exceed anything we have ever seens and a level of interaction with the world which appears to also go beyond anything we have ever seen. In terms of specific technical features which the game may or may not implement, we don't even have any information on that. For all you know it could implement features which arn't even possible on the PS3 (in fact its a serious possibility given that the game is supposed to utilise the D3D10 featureset to some extent).

What does it matter it's got a "half arsed" (your words) GPU when it's only going to run at 720P most of the time, and 60FPS at most? 8 ROPs is well balanced with its memory bandwidth, I might add. You don't seem to have factored in this stuff, but then again, typical PC fanbois often stare themselves blind at paper specs, frames per second and 3dmark scores.

Im not sure what the purpose of that paragraph was but just because a console may typically run games at a lower resolution that a high end PC, it doesn't invaidate the fact that the PC needs to be more powerful to run at the higher res in the first place. And a GPU that can run the same games as PS3 today at 1920x200 @ 100fps will be able to run better games than the PS3 3 years later at 720p and 30fps.

And your quad SLI rig - which'll be nowhere near 4x faster a single card in reality - is going to set you back the price of an entire PS3, which just happens to include the most monstrous CPU on this earth at the moment. You know what I'd rather spend my cash on, but maybe you got different priorities, pal...

The discussion is about the relative power of the two systems, not the price. We all know you get a lot more for your money with a console, how could you not? They are sold at a loss while PC's are sold at a profit.

If the PC with its oodles of raw power and IN SOME RESPECTS higher on-paper scores (pretty much constrained to fillrate, RAM size and CPU integer performance)

Your forgetting geometry throughput, texturing fill rate, graphics bandwidth, shader power, physics processing ability (including a PPU). In fact pretty much everything aside from CPU floating point perofrmance which is of questionable need in a system which already has plenty of graphics rendering performance and a dedicated physics unit.

, doesn't give you a superior gaming experience in any way other than higher screen resolutions, then I'd say the optimization bla bla bla closed box etc means quite a lot in reality.

And once again your assuming that all dual GPU's and even a PPU are going to gain you are higher resolution. WHat if your single GPU can only achieve 30fps at 640x480 in a particular future games? Surely the extra power for higher resolutions is of great benefit then, no?

I'm sure you're jesting, because even offline software renderers don't do real life yet, but assuming what you say is true:

Thing is, nobody's ever gonna make a game like that because there aren't nearly enough owners of quad-SLI systems to warrant the astronomical development costs. Besides, you'd only have a game that LOOKS 'real life', due to the inadequacies of the monolithic PC architecture, there's no way it could ever PLAY like 'real life'. The total system power just isn't there.

Why is that relevent to this discussion? That power isn't there in the PS3 either. And your correct, no dev is ever going to cater for the power of a quad sli system when its still high end. But if for example it were possible to get a 6600GT system in quad SLI, you would certainly have games today that would use the combined power of all 4 of those GPU's just to be playable at good settings. Fast foward 4 years and you have the same situation with quad sli's 7900's. So the power will be used for more than just insane resolutions, just not straight away. In that sense its very similar to a console which also wastes a lot of power in its early games.

PS3 (and Xbox 360 I might add) are much better balanced systems between CPU and GPU, whereas current high-end PCs are very GPU top-heavy with much weaker CPUs supporting them.

Thats completely dependant on software, many top games today and many more to come are very much GPU bottlenecked at reasonable settings on a single high end GPU. So I would have to conclude your statement above is incorrect. e.g. your playing Oblivon or GRAW on an FX62 + 7900GTX. Which would result in more framerate, doubling your GPU power or doubling your CPU power?

Intel and AMD knows most PC users don't need 100+ gflops, so they're not spending the silicon neccessary to realize such performance levels, it would make their chips much too expensive. Instead they spend transistors on making multitasking and office apps and such run smoothly, while you'll never realistically be running a SQL server or doing spreadsheets or such on a PS3 or a 360.

The high end desktop CPU market is driven by games performance. Thats why AMD have done so well with the A64 despite its only major advantage over the P4 being gaming. And thats why the P4EE was launched. If adding more floating point power was going to significantly improve agming performance, AMD and Intel would have done it long ago.

Consoles have GAMING optimized CPUs. PCs have general case optimized CPUs that you can game on.

It would seem that Sony and MS have very different idea's on what comprises a "gaming CPU". What makes you think there is such a clear direction you can take to make a "gaming CPU" if both of these companies have taken such different approaches?

I just love it when you new guys with your big egos and little red dots come and get all rowdy and stuff... (Yes, that was irony.)

Here's the way things are: just because I don't automatically subscribe to your notion that an expensive PC per definition must be superior to everything else in every respect, doesn't make me biased. I've gamed on PCs and computers in general since 1987, and consoles since '86. There's no point in trying to portray me as biased, so don't even try.

Seriously, go back to the shithole board you came from and go back to trolling with the people who slither in down the muck there, k? Nobody cares about your delirious fanperson rantings, I didn't even bother to read your post. Go away.

I think that was a little uncalled for, I have actually been here for a while, I just don't post much because whenever I get into a debate like this one with long standing members, I usueally end up getting more bad rep. Maybe thats down to me but I don't think im completely to blame, especially not in this case were I don't doubt you will bad rep me for disagreeing with you.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I disagree. There is nothing stopping us from looking at the bigger picture and asking which on balance is the overall more powerful system for running games.

Well you can if you want, but that's a different topic I think to what this one really was. This one referred to a game developer's comments, presented out of context. There's still an argument for which would play games better, but I think that's very subjective. For one thing you've got people talking about hardware that hasn't shown it's capabilities yet, like PPU or RSX (still an unkown) so you can't compare a PC with PPU to a PS3 with Cell with any sense of grounding. And pure numbers is no indicator either. I'm not going to get involved in such a debate myself.

I don't think it neccesarily is showing an area where the PS3 is greater than a PC.

Not greater than PC, but greater than their PCs. Sorry if I didn't make that clear.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Shifty why are you reaching so hard to try and make these comments sound somewhat reasonable?

I'm not sure what you're talking about. I haven't been trying to justify these comments. I entered this debate to argue against those who take a view expensive PC power > PS3 power without an explanation for what type of power you're measuring. There are and will be situations where Cell has more practical real-world power for a task than an expensive PC (as I've pointed out), and vice versa (as I've already said). I never made that comment about gaming power and never asserted that PS3 has > gaming power (an imeasurable quotient) than expensive PC. If there's any particular point of mine you want to dispute, raise it and I'll better explain if I can.

They're not, it's an absolutely ridiculous statement anyway you cut it.When you say this is a ridiculous statement/

What statement is that exactly? The statement that a PS3 is more powerful than a $3500 PC? That one, the one that the guy never made? Or the fact that when they moved post-processing onto Cell, they were outperforming their own PC rigs? If that's what they found, that's what they found. Maybe you're calling this guy an outright liar, that the PS3 hasn't outperformed any aspect of their development PCs, and he just made it up for PR sakes?

 

[Farid]

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