crytek boss says ps3 and 360 hold back pc

if bet if crytek programmed software renderer quadcore could run crysis on max settings better than best intergrated graphics chip on the market.

yodogpollywog

Why anyone would like to play games/render videos in a integrated graphic chip? Dedicated GPUs are cheap, whereas Intel integrated chips are awful weak. What you are asking for is to demand that games being developed in monoaural audio due stereo or multi-channel surround is more complex...

Well, be reasy to upgrade your system every 2 years once consoles are gone then! :(Kleeyook

I didn't change my main desktop rig in 2.5 years. Is Q6600 with a 275 GTX and 4 GB. It runs smoothly any game on the market at 1690 x 1050, and in fact, recent games as Arrowhead, BC 2 or BO runs faster than older games as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or Crysis. Black Ops runs over 80 fps with AA X16 and AF X8 in may rig.

Any GPU in the market with the power of the 3 years old 8800 GT or better is capable to run any PC game with better settings than the console counterpart. Lately I'm only spending money in PC hardware jumping from good peripherals (Logitech ones) to exceptional ones (Razer Mamba Mouse, Steel Series XL pad, etc.). The fun thing is that I build a new HTPC for my living room with a i7 and a 5870 and I find it totally over the top; there's currently too much power in the hardware to the kind of games available: current PC hardware is overpowered.

Well its a known fact that PC games can do incredibly well in sales. Check out WoW, StarCraft 2, The Sims, TF2, CSS etc... I think the thing that killed PC gaming was the the games were just not good enough. Most talented teams went down the console route to expand their market share and to gain more money and then the PC dominant games such as Unreal Tournament, Quake series the command and conquer etc have fallen away because they were simply not good enough.

Consoles have become better from last gen because of their online support and more features but so has the PC. The cost of PC was and always has still been there and if anything maybe I am right in saying its even cheaper now yet we still find atleast for me no real decent PC exclusives. There are some good ones but they come out buggy as hell i.e. STALKER.

[QUOTE="SPBoss"][QUOTE="yodogpollywog"]

umm u must be new to gaming

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2En3SCxlJM

quake 2 on linux ps3 running only off the cpu software rendering, u cant access the rsx on linux with ps3.

yodogpollywog

you must be new.

because u couldnt even buy graphics card when quake 1 shipped in 1996.

[QUOTE="yodogpollywog"]

[QUOTE="ferret-gamer"] In oher words you have no idea whatsoever what you are talking about so you just will continue to repeat the same stuff that i debunked in the very post you quoted.ferret-gamer

nope i been pc gaming before u were born.

Yet i know more about the topic :D

So lets end this once and for all:

You keep claiming that Software rendering is superior because of a comparison of Unreal. Let me explain exactly why that is no longer a usable reason. The very first GPUs used a Fixed Function Pixel Process Pipeline. Whereas the Software Rendering of the time was not limited to that. But Graphics Chips are no longer limited to FFPP, as they invented something called "Shaders". Perhaps you have heard of them? Graphics processor now had a superior way of programability along with FAR superior Performance, making them the much better choice for rendering.

i can't disagree with that on a tech level but i would add that if the console version outsells the pc version then wouldn't it mean consumer demand is what is holding back pc?

[QUOTE="04dcarraher"]

[QUOTE="yodogpollywog"]

you dont seem to be getting it, unreal tournament 1999 supports software rendering....EPICGAMES CREATED THE SOFTWARE RENDERER.

http://i55.tinypic.com/3324f14.jpg

see in the picture of ut1999 menu software rendering? i circled it for you.

if crytek programmed software renderer built in, it would of performed better than swiftshader 2.0 or 2.0 trying to run crysis in software mode.

yodogpollywog

if bet if crytek programmed software renderer quadcore could run crysis on max settings better than best intergrated graphics chip on the market.

[QUOTE="04dcarraher"]

[QUOTE="yodogpollywog"]If that were true, why do the strongest performance benchmarks from distributed computing projects like Folding@home come from a smaller number of GPU-based clients (which are newer, rawer, and not as well-refined as the CPU-based clients which have been there from the beginning)? [QUOTE="yodogpollywog"]

[QUOTE="fireballonfire"]

[QUOTE="yodogpollywog"]

the mod's here think im trolling.

dude my intel 466 mhz celeron could run unreal tournament 1999 software mode low settings 800x600 higher than 2 fps back in 1999.

me only getting 2 fps using swiftshader on athlon 2.1 ghz dualcore 800x600 low settings in crysis is total bs.

the reason why fps so low because it's not built into crysis, and crytek didnt make the software renderer

yodogpollywog

I'm frankly not sure what you are trying to accomplish here. Intel had an idea with the Larrabee. Much like the cell it was a hybrid CPU/GPU solution meant to replace the GPU with one chip.

That thing had as many as 24 cores running at 2.4 GHz if I remember correctly. The project got canceled and why was that you ask.

It was a power hungry behemoth that couldn't even beat a 7800 gtx in graphic heavy tasks, that's why.

Why do you think Sony baled out the last second replacing one Cell for a 7900 gtx? Because with two Cells the PS3 would have been slapped all over the place by the 360.

of course developers should support highend video card's since there better for gaming than a cpu, but intergrated graphics processor are always weak and software rendering if programmed right might actually runs games better than these igp's.

Yeah lets just have developers focus on the PC that will go over SO well for the gaming industry :roll:Sp4rtan_3

[QUOTE="yodogpollywog"]

[QUOTE="SPBoss"] no im not new to pc gaming i've been doing it for years.. I just haven't looked at outdated technology lol! Quite interesting tech skills for doing that but pretty lame at the same time, if someone wants to play quake they should just get a normal pc lol. Its great for proving a point, maybe one day someone can hack the rsx and run pc games on ps3, now that would be epic! I wonder why sony stopped OS support.. maybe cause of things like this?HuusAsking

you must be new.

because u couldnt even buy graphics card when quake 1 shipped in 1996.

2d display adapter built into motherboard.

3d display adapters werent avalible when quake 1 was released.

If 3d display adapter/video cards were avalible how come quake 1 has no support out of the box?

you must patch quake 1 to support open gl lol.

Well, it's all about marketing...after all, consolehas bigger market for fps games...look at COD numbers, pc cant even have 300k+ players online anytime.

Beside that, lol Blizzard always make games with graphics a generation behind other current pc games, but they always sell 10 times more than others.

[QUOTE="HuusAsking"][QUOTE="yodogpollywog"]

you must be new.

because u couldnt even buy graphics card when quake 1 shipped in 1996.

yodogpollywog

2d display adapter built into motherboard.

3d display adapters werent avalible when quake 1 was released.

So you want to switch game reliance from a certain level of power of the GPU the be entirely dependant on the Mobo and CPU? I don't think I'm even able to be polite about this.

Seriously, you need to go back to arguing which version of Fallout 3 is less ugly.

You have absolutely nothing of value to contribute with.

I only regret that I'm not large enough to ignore you entirely.

[QUOTE="HuusAsking"][QUOTE="yodogpollywog"]

you must be new.

because u couldnt even buy graphics card when quake 1 shipped in 1996.

yodogpollywog

2d display adapter built into motherboard.

3d display adapters werent avalible when quake 1 was released.

If 3d display adapter/video cards were avalible how come quake 1 has no support out of the box?

you must patch quake 1 to support open gl lol.

yodogpollywog

[QUOTE="yodogpollywog"]

If 3d display adapter/video cards were avalible how come quake 1 has no support out of the box?

you must patch quake 1 to support open gl lol.

HuusAsking

i remember when some of the video card's were first released dude, like diamond monster 3d 4 mb friend got one, stuff was new tech alittle after quake 1 release.

Rio Diamond Monster 3D (4 MB) PCI Video Card

Graphic Processor 3dfx Voodoo graphics

http://www.dealtime.com/Sonic-Blue-Diamond-Monster-3D/info

I remember seeing my friends box to the video card that's gotta be his card.

I started gaming on dos, windows 95 didnt exist yet, i remember my friend got a new pc and it came with windows 95 lol i was like WTF is windows 95?

[QUOTE="HuusAsking"][QUOTE="yodogpollywog"]

you must be new.

because u couldnt even buy graphics card when quake 1 shipped in 1996.

yodogpollywog

2d display adapter built into motherboard.

3d display adapters werent avalible when quake 1 was released.

Our family's IBM PS/2 Model 55SX (386SX 16Mhz based) has 2D display adapter built into motherboard, but

1. My 1996 PC includes S3 Trio 64UV card (PCI slot).

2. Our family's 486DX33 PC includes Cirrus Logic card (VL-BUS slot). PS; IBM PS/2 lost against PC clones.

[QUOTE="yodogpollywog"]

[QUOTE="HuusAsking"]Hmm, that's odd, because what was driving the Windows 95 interface then? I distinctly recall a lot of hype over Local Bus video cards (like PCI cards which were eclipsing VESA Local Bus as the Pentiums hit their prime). You needed something to connect the monitor.ronvalencia

2d display adapter built into motherboard.

3d display adapters werent avalible when quake 1 was released.

Our family's IBM PS/2 Model 55SX (386SX 16Mhz based) has 2D display adapter built into motherboard, but

1. My 1996 PC includes S3 Trio 64UV card (PCI slot).

2. Our family's 486DX33 PC includes Cirrus Logic card (VL-BUS slot). PS; IBM PS/2 lost against PC clones.

2d card's existed, 3d didnt.

no im not new to pc gaming i've been doing it for years.. I just haven't looked at outdated technology lol! Quite interesting tech skills for doing that but pretty lame at the same time, if someone wants to play quake they should just get a normal pc lol. Its great for proving a point, maybe one day someone can hack the rsx and run pc games on ps3, now that would be epic! I wonder why sony stopped OS support.. maybe cause of things like this?SPBoss

you must be new.

because u couldnt even buy graphics card when quake 1 shipped in 1996.

On January 22, 1997, id Software released GLQuake. This was designed to use the OpenGL 3D API to access hardware 3D graphics acceleration cards to rasterize the graphics, rather than having the computer's CPU fill in every pixel

[QUOTE="ronvalencia"]

[QUOTE="yodogpollywog"]

2d display adapter built into motherboard.

3d display adapters werent avalible when quake 1 was released.

yodogpollywog

Our family's IBM PS/2 Model 55SX (386SX 16Mhz based) has 2D display adapter built into motherboard, but

1. My 1996 PC includes S3 Trio 64UV card (PCI slot).

2. Our family's 486DX33 PC includes Cirrus Logic card (VL-BUS slot). PS; IBM PS/2 lost against PC clones.

2d card's existed, 3d didnt.

**VLIW CPU based with Z-buffer instructions and fix function 3D features. The importance of X87 FPU's performance influenced Quake 1's frame rates e.g. Pentium's FPU vs Cyrix's FPU

Geometry Engine board from the Reality Engine 2 graphics system in the SGI Onyx

PS; AMD's Radeon HDs also sports VLIW based stream processors. The team that create this board formed a little company called ArtX i.e. GPU for N64, GC, Wii and Radeon 9700 (R300). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArtX

"ArtX paved the way for the development of ATI's R300 graphics processor (Radeon 9700) released in 2002 which formed the basis of ATI's consumer and professional products for three years afterward."

In terms of concept, the SGI processor array board was redesigned as a custom ASIC chip.

AMD includes engineering teams from DEC Alpha EV6 and SGI (via ArtX).

PS; Amiga's F-29 Retaliator 3d game uses Amiga's 2D line functions to accelerated line draws.

first real gaming card was voodoo3dfx.

intel intergrated chipsets dont support direct x as far i know.

so u need to buy a video card since games dont support software rendering anymore.

yodogpollywog

The Quick Reference Guide to Intel® HD Graphics does indeed show that DirectX and Shader Model support is there. The problem is that there is no dedicated video memory for one and that the IGPs may still access the CPU which slows down graphics processing.

you dont seem to be getting it, unreal tournament 1999 supports software rendering....EPICGAMES CREATED THE SOFTWARE RENDERER.yodogpollywog

if crytek programmed software renderer built in, it would of performed better than swiftshader 2.0 or 2.0 trying to run crysis in software mode.yodogpollywog

[QUOTE="yodogpollywog"]you dont seem to be getting it, unreal tournament 1999 supports software rendering....EPICGAMES CREATED THE SOFTWARE RENDERER.c0d1f1ed

if crytek programmed software renderer built in, it would of performed better than swiftshader 2.0 or 2.0 trying to run crysis in software mode.yodogpollywog

swiftshader makers dont know the cryengine as good as crytek....crytek could easily get better framerates in their engine if they created the software renderer.

cpu's can do bump mapping there's way's around everything lol.

swiftshader seems pretty unoptimized dude, i was only hitting 97% cpu usage, but my framerate was 2?

something aint right.

swiftshader is like unreal engine 3 almost, in the fact that's it works on everything, but it's not specifically designed for one application.

it doesnt take advantage of 360's hardware, swiftshader isnt optimized for cryengine running on cpu.

Are you serious? Software rendering through the cpu is a dumb idea in 2010...04dcarraher

...it was fine in the mid 90's or earlier since Pc's didnt have a dedicated gpu's, just video memory and the cpu handled it all.04dcarraher

Todays gpu's are heck alot faster then any cpu that is out.04dcarraher

this is why were seeing a large shift into parallel processing performed by gpu's not cpu's.04dcarraher

I think some developers are being shortsighted by only looking at the sales of a game in the first few months.

I personally just purchased stalker a few days ago, and that's from 2007.

They need to look at pc games as an investment, not a quick cash in.

guys just ignore him, clearly he is just being lazy and wants to hide it. other devs have been able to improve the PC version alot, take Dirt for example, that game is miles ahead of what the PS3 or 360 version could look like. EA has said that Battliefield 3 will be different from the Console versions. he should of stayed on the PC.

didnt read the article but come on, no one is holding anyone back. Devs just dont want to put in extra work, which is why all PC games should be different from the consoles

I beg to differ. There's a greater resemblance between CPU and GPU cores every generation. CPUs get support for wider vector instructions (AVX), the number of cores doubles with every semiconductor process node, and simultaneous multi-threading (Hyper-Threading) hides some of the memory access latency. At the same time GPUs are getting support for generic instructions, they're being equipped with large caches, they can process threads more independently, and (mark my words) they'll soon get speculative execution to lower register pressure and reduce thread latency. This rapid convergence even means that it will soon be a "dumb idea" to have a separate CPU and IGP. The only thing a CPU really lacks today to catch up with the GPU on graphics, is support for gather and scatter instructions. These are the parallel forms of load and store instructions, and are fundamental for fast texture sampling. They would be far more useful than actual dedicated texture sampling hardware because they're useful for a lot more. They would make almost any loop fully parallelisable. They would help accelerate all stages of the graphics pipeline, but are of great value beyond graphics as well. Even GPU designers are considering to ditch the dedicated texture samplers and replacing them with generic gather/scatter units to make it programmable.

They're considering it, but haven't gotten there yet. Even the Larrabee guys decided that "traditional" texture units were still worth it. :P It probably makes sense for a lot of things or if you're really forward-looking, but the fact is that the average GPU workload still mostly your basic bilinear/trilinear texture fetching + filtering. I'm not sure how quickly that will change.

Also in terms of what CPU's are lacking, they're still way behind in raw single precision FP throughput and memory bandwidth. Obviously more cores solves the first problem, but unless we have good programming models to easily take advantage of the throughput it won't matter very much. I'm not at all a CPU expert so I'm not sure how well you could map a traditional massively-threaded GPU shader pipeline to lots and lots of CPU cores (or something like Reyes, for that matter).

Ironically now that CPUs are hundreds of times faster than in the mid 90's, software rendering has become a rarity even though it would be totally adequate for the majority of applications. Note that the most popular games are actually not shooters which require a high end system, but casual games.

Yeah but those casual games run on Flash, and (until recently) Flash was all software rendering. And for anything not using flash and that has even trivial 3D graphics, it's many times simpler and easier to hack together a basic D3D/GL renderer than it is to write a performant software renderer. So I don't see this as particularly weird.

It's all but certain that the GPU will eventually go the way of the dodo. It is slowly but surely losing all its unique features. Just like sound processing went from dedicated hardware to a programmable DSP to a full CPU implementation, graphics processing will be done in software. People who want high end performance will simply buy a 256-core CPU instead of a 32-core CPU.

I can understand why you and so many others are so bullish on this front, but when I hear these sorts of things I always think back to how many times people told me I would be writing ray-tracers by this point instead of using a crusty old D3D/GL rasterization pipeline. :P

He's stating the obvious, whether consolities want to believe it or not. Even with general "dumbing down", alot of it happens simply because the consoles can't handle the game the way the developers want it, then it's the obvious audience and what sells to that audience (in general I'm not saying all are like this).

Espada12

I think some developers are being shortsighted by only looking at the sales of a game in the first few months.

I personally just purchased stalker a few days ago, and that's from 2007.

They need to look at pc games as an investment, not a quick cash in.

topgunmv

Lol then just stick with pc crytek

crysis is boring I'm not proud of this but I got my hands on a free copy and unistalled it within 3 hrs of playing it.

pretty graphics can only hold my attention for so long.

swiftshader is like unreal engine 3 almost, in the fact that's it works on everything, but it's not specifically designed for one application.

it doesnt take advantage of 360's hardware, swiftshader isnt optimized for cryengine running on cpu.

yodogpollywog

I can understand why you and so many others are so bullish on this front, but when I hear these sorts of things I always think back to how many times people told me I would be writing ray-tracers by this point instead of using a crusty old D3D/GL rasterization pipeline. :P

Teufelhuhn

swiftshader makers dont know the cryengine as good as crytek....crytek could easily get better framerates in their engine if they created the software renderer.yodogpollywog

Knowing how the engine works doesn't help drawing a triangle any faster.

They can only take the performance characteristics of a software renderer into account. For instance they can write CPU-friendly shaders, disable redundant operations, and take advantage of extensions. But note that these are application side changes, which would benefit any software renderer equally. If you know of any non-trivial renderer side changes that would significancly improve performance, I'd love to hear about it.

And while SwiftShader build 3383 is much faster than version 2.01 at rendering Crysis, all the improvements are unrelated to CryENGINE. So again with the utmost respect I doubt that the Crytek developers would be able to contribute anything engine-specific to the renderer side that would have an even greater effect than generic optimizations.

swiftshader seems pretty unoptimized dude, i was only hitting 97% cpu usage, but my framerate was 2?yodogpollywog

On my Core i7 920 @ 3.2 GHz, I'm getting an average of 17 FPS for the 64-bit Crysis benchmark, using SwiftShader build 3383. It'sreallyquite playable. And that's for a game that's still considered a graphical marvel.

Given that my CPU can do 102.4 SP GFLOPS, and your Athlon 64 X2 2.1 GHz can only do 16.8 GFLOPS and supports fewer vector instructions, a framerate of 2 sounds about right for your system. There's only so much you can do with that computing budget. CPUs are rapidly catching up on throughput performance, but older generations like that had a very low computing density.

I can understand why you and so many others are so bullish on this front, but when I hear these sorts of things I always think back to how many times people told me I would be writing ray-tracers by this point instead of using a crusty old D3D/GL rasterization pipeline. :PTeufelhuhn

And yet quite a few people are very busy writing ray tracers using CUDA 3 or doing other innovative things with their GPUs. So keeping in mind that all old things are not replaced with the latestnew things overnight, that timeline isn't off by much.

Also, I soundly recall people saying things like "the GeForce 3 will render anything you canthrow at it", and "software renderers will never be able to run something like Oblivion". I'm just saying, things do change very rapidly. In several years computer graphics will again look very different. Whether we'll all be ray tracing or software rendering, or a bit of both, doesn't really change how impressive these advances are. At least to me...

I beg to differ. There's a greater resemblance between CPU and GPU cores every generation. CPUs get support for wider vector instructions (AVX), the number of cores doubles with every semiconductor process node, and simultaneous multi-threading (Hyper-Threading) hides some of the memory access latency. At the same time GPUs are getting support for generic instructions, they're being equipped with large caches, they can process threads more independently, and (mark my words) they'll soon get speculative execution to lower register pressure and reduce thread latency.

c0d1f1ed

AMD Radeon HD 4870 has

- 2.5 megabytes of register storage space.

- 16,000 x 128-bit registers per SM.

- 16,384 threads per chip.

- greater than 1,000 threads per SM.

Each SM has 16 VLIW5 SPs. 16,000 registers isspread across 16 VLIW5 SPs i.e. 1000 x 128bit registers per VLIW5 SP. Your CELL SPE only has 128 x 128bit registers. 16 x 256 bit AVX is no where near RV770's VLIW5 register data storage.

Radeon HD 4870 has 10 SM blocks. Each VLIW5 SP includes 5 scalar stream processors. Math: 16 x 10 x 5 = 800 stream processors. At a given transistor count, normal CPU doesn't have this execution unit count density.

According to AMD's road map, your "mark my words" means nothing. VMX/SSE/SPE floating point transistor count usage is NOT efficient compared to RV770's VLIW5 unit.

Direct competitor against desktop Intel Sandybridge (CGPU) is AMD Llano (CGPU) which includes about 480 stream processors and +500 GFLOPs.