What's Up With The Desktop?

[alexander]

So since noone is biting on the software threads, lets talk a little hardware.

 

I believe that there exists a problem, i believe that something or someone is shielding hardware away from programmers and as a result we see poor performance out of otherwise superior systems. Case and point, lets talk games, how come is it that the same game looks better on my console (i have a PS3, we can talk xbox 360 as well) then it does on my desktop?

 

Technicallity of this:

 

Specs:

PS3:

256MB GDDR3 RAM (~25.6 GB/s)

256MB VRAM

3.2GHz PPC core + 7 3.2GHZ SPEs (total performance 230.4 GFLOPS)

GPU specs kind of unknown, somewhere around a GTX7800

 

eggs box 360:

512MB GDDR3 RAM (shared with video) (@700MHz ~22GB/s)

3.2GHZ 3 PPC cores Hyperthreaded (total performance 96GFLOPS)

10MB eDRAM (~256GB/s)

64 Shader processor ATI Xenos GPU

 

PC:

9GB GDDR3 RAM @ 1066MHz (~25.6GB/s)

1.5GB GDDR5 VRAM

3.2GHz 4 core hyperthreaded CPU (total performance 102.4GFLOPS)

512 Shader processors (580GTX)

 

So from what we can see, sheer cpu crunching power goes to the PS3, ok fine, whatever, but Graphics, graphics performance goes to the PC, and it is 8 times more powerful in that respect to the PS3 and the Xbox, more if you account for concurrency of operations. With that in mind, where, where does that performance go if my PS3 and 360 kill it in any gaming performance test? I'll tell you where the ticks are lost, between the OS and DX10/11 or OpenGL, that's where. We are running over the drivers that translate framework instructions into GPU code, framework for itself translates your instructions into its set of code, and as a result my games look worse on my PC which by all marks should outperform the 360 and even the PS3 in terms or graphics, and yet i am left on par or behind...?

 

Anyways, lets talk CUDA or OpenCL or any other suggestions i am open to. Lets try to unravel why superior is inferior here :)

[Boerseun]

Good question.

 

Also, I suppose it's important to know which games you're talking about. Most games nowadays are written primarily for consoles, and being a PC-fanboy, I don't much care for it. Consoles are so... so... dare I say it, EIGHTIES... (Yes, I know, you can surf the web on them nowadays, you can watch movies on them, you can even get them to iron your clothes if you opt for the more expensive models. But I don't care. I'm committed to PC, okay? Okay?)

 

...but be that as it may, most games are primarily written for consoles, with the PC version of that game being a pretty nasty port, having been done as an afterthought to keep idiots like me happy. And then you end up with a PC game that requires you to go out and buy a console controller, because they are so lazy that they don't even map the controls to keyboard. True story.

 

And I fear in doing so, they don't panelbeat the code to optimum PC processor usage. If they're too lazy to map the controls to keyboard, what are the chances that they will panelbeat the code into shape? Lazy buggers, all.

 

There are also cases of games having been written by the Big Boyz that don't see more than one processor core. Microshaft's Flight Simulator X is a case in point. It simply doesn't see more than one core. You have to download something like a 500Mb patch (yes - half a bloody game) in order for it to do so. I think plenty code oversights like this happens on simple, mindless, cash-grabbing ports, where an awesome game is ported for the sake of the dollar, and end up running on a single core because nobody bothered to do proper testing. And proper testing is NOT being done, as is perfectly clear in the keyboard-mapping stupidity I've mentioned above. If a normal keyboard doesn't have enough buttons for a console port to map to, then you know that they didn't bothered with it, at all.

 

(I actually think they do it intentionally to piss off enough PC users to finally give up playing ports and finally join the console revolution. Ecchh...)

 

So - yes. It's all about the money. Console games are much, much more expensive than PC games. The manufacturing costs stay the same, a disc is a disc, after all. How they justify it, is anybody's guess. So they want to suck more moolah out of you, the poor consumer, so they generate ports of inferior quality that might be blind to multiple cores so that its performance is intentionally below par on a PC so that you finally get tired of bashing your head against the wall and go out and buy their New! Improved! console model.

 

I am convinced of it. Open up the processor monitor of your choice and see how many of your cores are engaged in doing what the game wants them to do.

 

There are games written expressly for PC's, in other words, the PC and all its bells and whistles were kept in mind when writing the code, and they run beautifully. Then the console boyz are stuck with the ports. And those games run just fine.

 

So, in essence, I think its just all about the money. Isn't it always?

 

Bastards.

[alexander]

So, in essence, I think its just all about the money. Isn't it always?

 

I dont necessarily disagree, but i think you went a little harsh on the developers, i mean the end devs want to write good, fast code, problem is that on the pc, they simply dont have a singular platform to do it, and writing the same code for different platforms that just differs in instruction sets or capabilities of a particular graphics card, is just ridiculous, wouldn't you say? I mean look at Carmack, not a guy who cares much about cost benefit, someone who just wants to code, ID Tech5 has taken him what 2-3 years to write now, and he is still not completely finished, and he is writing it on 3 platforms, xbox, ps3 and pc (opengl), i mean imagine if he had to write it for ATI and Nvidia, and within those subsets between the different architectures there-in, he would spend 10 years only on working out the PC version, and getting all the testing hardware and stuff...

 

Also i agree and i disagree on the price, thing is games are leaps and bounds beyond what they used to be, where there werent a lot of script writers and various artists working on pc games maybe 12 years ago, now they are the primary people that work on it, i mean you are talking games that used to fit on a CD, now, with the amount of content and art they put in the games, they span multiple DVDs and use new formats, you cant say that a game is too expensive without taking that into consideration, and also money is worth less, for $20 in 2000 you could fill your gas tank and still have some money for a slurpee and maybe even some chips, fast forward, and for 20 dollars i can get enough gas to get me to and from work for a couple of days (i do live 35 miles away, but still), now 50-60 is almost enough to fill my tank and maybe get me a slurpee, you know, money just istn worth what it used to, and you cant discount inflation which is what averaging about 2.987%/year for the past 10 years...

 

I dont disagree, but i also dont fully agree Mr. B, one thing i know for sure, its nice to see you ^_^