Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, mac_h8r1, Nemesis
ronch wrote:I was just watching a YouTube video showing God of War on the PS4 and realized how good it is, not just graphically. Makes me wonder what makes consoles so much more efficient than personal computers. The PS4 is using only AMD Jaguar cores. You can't have that sort of performance from those Jags in a PC even if you slap in a nice GPU. Same with all the other past video game consoles. Look at the PS1 for example. 33MHz, little RAM. You'd probably need a Pentium MMX or something at 150MHz to get that sort of performance in a PC. NES was something like 1.7MHz. When did we get side scrolling games in our PCs?
ronch wrote:When did we get side scrolling games in our PCs?
NovusBogus wrote:But it's not peasant-tier desktop Windows, it's a heavily modified derivative like what you'd get out of Windows Embedded. Totally different animal, like comparing a Yocto Linux image to Debian/CentOS/whatever.
Waco wrote:Coding to a single bare metal design means you can tweak everything to be *perfect* on that one platform and you can take advantage of every low level access point into the hardware that is available. Time consuming, but actually possible on one platform.
synthtel2 wrote:Jaguar's IPC should still be dragging down consoles more than it is in a direct comparison, but the specific-hardware-target thing helps a lot there, and consoles have some more small advantages like not having to go over PCIe to communicate with the GPU.
NES was something like 1.7MHz. When did we get side scrolling games in our PCs?
Usacomp2k3 wrote:synthtel2 wrote:Jaguar's IPC should still be dragging down consoles more than it is in a direct comparison, but the specific-hardware-target thing helps a lot there, and consoles have some more small advantages like not having to go over PCIe to communicate with the GPU.
eDRAM on the xbox helps that out too.
ronch wrote:I was just watching a YouTube video showing God of War on the PS4 and realized how good it is, not just graphically. Makes me wonder what makes consoles so much more efficient than personal computers. The PS4 is using only AMD Jaguar cores. You can't have that sort of performance from those Jags in a PC even if you slap in a nice GPU. Same with all the other past video game consoles. Look at the PS1 for example. 33MHz, little RAM. You'd probably need a Pentium MMX or something at 150MHz to get that sort of performance in a PC. NES was something like 1.7MHz. When did we get side scrolling games in our PCs?
Voldenuit wrote:Efficient? The PS4 was drawing 264W at launch, and even then it was upscaling from 900p a lot of the time.
tipoo wrote:The PS4 most often ran things at 1080p at launch, and even now with demanding titles targeting the Pro more, 1080p is still more common than 900p, even if more of the latter are coming in. The XBO was and is the 900P box, sometimes down to 720p.
Its arguably best looking title and the topic of the OP happens to also be native 1080p even on the base 2013 box.
blargh4 wrote:Out of curiosity, I throttled my 8700k to 800mhz (using Windows 10's power plan settings, though curiously having the "Game Mode" Windows 10 option on seems to override it... always wondered what that did) which puts it roughly in the ballpark of the PS4's 1.6ghz Jaguar cores, going by the Geekbench scores for the Athlon 5150. With my GTX 1080, I'm averaging about 30-40fps in PUBG and 25-50 Monster Hunter World (the only current-gen games I have on my computer right now).
Doesn't seem like it would take any magical efficiency gains to get the PS4 CPU to run those games at 30fps.
defaultluser wrote:Consoles (aside from PS3) have always been about prioritizing GPU power, ram bandwidth and disc storage, while making the rest of the system as cheap to build and develop for as possible. That is why you get compromises like the Dreamcast's Hitachi SH-4 CPU, 360s in-order triple core PPC the Wii-U's triple -core PPC 750, (the same core they used on the Gamecube and Wii) or the PS4's dual-quad core Jaguar.
defaultluser wrote:Consoles (aside from PS3) have always been about prioritizing GPU power, ram bandwidth and disc storage, while making the rest of the system as cheap to build and develop for as possible.
Usacomp2k3 wrote:synthtel2 wrote:Jaguar's IPC should still be dragging down consoles more than it is in a direct comparison, but the specific-hardware-target thing helps a lot there, and consoles have some more small advantages like not having to go over PCIe to communicate with the GPU.
eDRAM on the xbox helps that out too.
Topinio wrote:IIRC reading at the time, and in 2013 or so when people (Mark Cerny) started talking more about it, the NVIDIA GPU was not in the hardware spec until very late in development, it was bolted on in maybe late 2004 or early 2005, and doing so delayed the launch by a year, let Microsoft have that year's sales, and cost Sony its console market lead and maybe 20-100 million unit sales.
Pancake wrote:defaultluser wrote:Consoles (aside from PS3) have always been about prioritizing GPU power, ram bandwidth and disc storage, while making the rest of the system as cheap to build and develop for as possible. That is why you get compromises like the Dreamcast's Hitachi SH-4 CPU, 360s in-order triple core PPC the Wii-U's triple -core PPC 750, (the same core they used on the Gamecube and Wii) or the PS4's dual-quad core Jaguar.
Not sure why you think the SH-4 was a compromise. It was a beautiful, beautiful RISC architecture with gobs of floating point grunt. PPCs - well, not exactly beautiful - but still much more elegant than x86. And then we entered the era where x86 ate everything...