PS4, PS2 Mutlithreading and you.

Anyway, first off thanks to the lovely Meurig of DL for bringing this to my attention.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...ross-platform-play-teases-character-transfers

To be fair, several people figured this out on the tech support forum on the main site, months ago. You can see it use multiple cores, and thus threads. But it was always a fair bet just keeping track of all the **** going down was the primary massive thread and even with the extra clock speed, Piledriver cores have a lower IPC (how many instructions you can do per cycle) and so that pans out in the generally 20-30% lower performance and inability to run it properly with shadows.

Its going to be a lot of work, but I'm looking forward to the FX chip actually being the best for PS2.

The reason why things are they way they are, basically comes down to economics, pound for pound coding something like a mutliplayer game to be heavily mutlithreaded, is more far expensive (in terms of resources and time) than less, and I think Sony viewed PS2 as a white elephant and rushed it out to market back in late 2012 (remember sony was having issues generally in its prospects a year ago), so before Sony new the PS4 was likely to sell well out of the gate and what Microsoft were up to. It made no sense to throw money at the project. Now it makes plenty of sense. Be nothing like that on Sexbox6000 and it'll massively increase the PC player base by removing the main barrier to entry its had since day one. Its been a smart investment in 2013, it was not in 2012.

Now it makes lots of sense. I'm sure they'll be running into lots of esoteric (and hugely time consuming) bugs that come from mutlithreading an application, but the rehashing of the engine itself will be a fairly mechanic process. So its probably not that far away now (they wouldn't even be talking about it, indeed admitting the issue if not).

And everyone will benefit, in fact it might finally end the poor performance issues and even make the game actually fit its recommended specifications. Obviously, it will then become one of the programs (like winzip - my favorite game) where 8 cores running at 80% intel speeds are still obviously way better than 4 ivy bridge cores running at their generally higher level of performance.

So there will be a boost for intel chips (even Core 2 duo's I imagine), but you'll really notice it in the '8 core' AMD chips.

The MOAR YOU KNOW!

Faster, please.

I'd rather it was done well.

That being said, I don't think this will be that far away at this point. Generally speak the Dev's are extremely tight lipped about anything thats not 3-4 months away.

3-4 months away, and also things releasing in under a week.

...It's really a bell curve. Kind of like the Cone of Silence.

Except there isn't 8 cores like Intel's because they share so much of the fetch/decode and other stuff. You basically have two integer units but they are gimped by the fact that they have to share resources. Then there's the main problem that both ARM and AMD are falling behind on and the secret to so much of Intel's success, cache latency and branch prediction. A modern Intel CPU is looking several hundred instructions ahead to figure out how to run things optimal. It also has a lot lower cache.

BTW, the PS4 will have eight proper cores divided into two clusters of four and it seems like communication between the two clusters will be expensive. Each individual Jaguar core is weak. Extremely weak in fact. We're talking Intel Atom and some of the faster ARM SoC speeds per core here. So rebuilding this game for that level of performance, where not even all core put together comes close to a newer Intel processor. Based on early benchmarks, the CPU in the new consoles will not even be half as fast as an Intel 2600K.

As I said, I do not envy the programmers.

BTW, the crowd who were screaming for optimization was not right. Rewriting the whole thing is not optimization anymore.

Oh, it's not only economics. Forcing things to be multithreaded comes at a performance price. AMD has made it easier with Jaguar since they integrate some nice features for handling memory that have not been available before. But it's still a complete pain in the ****. So the only reason anyone would even consider forcing this game to run on eight cores is because they have to. It's the only way you can get anything to run on next gen consoles because they are designed around eight weak cores.

Read: Sony explains lack of Planetside 2 PC and PS4 cross-platform play, teases character transfers
Article dated August 5th.

Yet in thouse rare programs that can still exploit AMD's basical module based design. AMD can come out ahead are more weaker cores wins out over less stronger ones, even with what your saying about resource sharing (though thats only particularly bad in bulldozer) and AMD being worse (not non-existent in either cache latency or branch prediction and I doubt how useful the latter is when your not just cranking through hugely complicated algorithms but ones that tracking unpredictable entities). More than anything it comes down to how the software is written than it does one architecture or another being superior. The gap, per core is realistically this all in hand 20-30%. Obviously just shy of a third, not insignificant, but if you have twice as many cores. Which really is the better architecture?

Its a fact of software engineering in the games design world, for the last however many years. That attempting to take a heavily mutlithreaded route has rarely if ever been the approach. I think everyone agree's that's because of the relative difficulty, but greater parallelism is the only way to go now really. Any major jump beyond the ivy bridge architecture just is not happening.

End of the day remeber, im not saying AMD has superior throughput on their cores, they don't. And if everyone had unlimited budgets it be the i7's 4960X all around. They don't and for a lot of people FX's and i5's are the highest end. Problem is this game has historically excluded all but thouse at the highest end because of the immensity of its computational tasks at hand.

I think comparing them to the atom is hyperbolic. Nor has there really been this 'break on through to the over side' of computing compared to the 2600k. I think everyone would be blown away if they could make something in a games console behave like a top end sandy bridge chip.

End of the day, PS4 will probably end up being THE most Cpu demanding game on the console market for the entire generation, where the jaguar will likely come good for most gamers will be in the GPU element of the APU.

and if it makes them go back and make PS2 as efficent and as mutlithreaded as possible. I can only put it down as a win in my books.

Arguably, optimization by definition is a re-write. Semantics really. I want game run betterer.

I argue that is the definition of economics. If actual 6 core ivy bridge i7's were economical the games development world would be realigning themselves around those. They arn't, so its not. That's intels big mistake and its going to continue to bite it in the *** as the high end PC market continues to decline.



I'm also not expecting miracles on my end, nor should anyone, this doesn't mean 60fps come what may, will ever be realistic. However, I'm hoping it allows people with some C2D's and Phenmons to finally get into the 30fps during fights brackets, and i5's Fx's and i7's to reside firmly in the 40fps bracket in giant zerg v. zerg cluster****s. Moves in these directions would Massively increase the accessibility of the game.

We really prefer to refer to this as a spire. Not a cone.

Not so much an employee orientation as an employee indoctrination at SOE? "Welcome to the electronic entertainment industry. Hope you survive the experience!"

bazinga.

Wonder what this will mean for a dual quad core xeon E5462

That's not fair... we offer various flavors of Kool Aid for folks to drink...

Being serious, what is being discussed in this thread is insanely technical and well over the average users head so our focus has been more on promoting Hossin, Nexus, etc... which almost everyone is excited about. You can rest assured that not discussing it doesn't mean there isn't progress. There just isn't much to show yet. Rest assured when we can show it, we will.

Thanks. Just a simple reassurance like that goes a long way to satiate us for awhile.

If you can optimize for AMD users like me, that'll do Rad, that'll do.

Totalbiscuit seems to think the game is more optimized for AMDs.

/facepalm

I'm feeling cynical towards him now.

Multi core optimization has been standard in games for years now. Trying to pawn it off brute force on the i7's was a clutch, but I'm glad they are taking the time and resources to do this properly.


I look at BONIC and it's amazing crunching ability, and wonder if it was possible to utilize OpenCL for a lot of things. GDDR5 is a beast to utilize if you can do it properly. Then you wouldn't have the bottlenecks that CPUs have.

How many threads and pipes do GPU's utilize?
You don't need to hedge for every hardware scenario, but it can be safe to say that anyone running this game is going to at least be DX 9.0c compatible and multicore. Their GPU's are going to have OpenCL, which is supported by both AMD and NVidia. More gaming companies should take advantage of the gains made in GPU data crunching power to utilize large batches of information.

Will it benefit 4 cores of Intel i7 too?

Good thing I read up on this stuff when I built my computer so I could understand it to an extant.

while im not claiming to have a super nice computer i have been enjoying excelent frame rates in every game i played UNTIL i started playing planetside 2. I run AMD and imy rig is just one notch from the reccomendid system (phenom2 x4 instead of x6 ad the 6550 instead of 6570 video card) the "recommended" ps2 rig is not really THAT expensive for a gaming rig less then a grand if you build it yourself but people who have the recommended rig are not getting acceptable performance wich is really sad and people who have probably double the hardware power still are not. as a gamer i should not have to spend more then $1500 on a tower to run your game on ONE monitor (1080p)

Im really looking forward to your optimization because 1 3.5 ghz core is at 100% and the other cores are less then 10% and my game is slowing down

Thank God. FINALLY I can get my money's worth out of this Intel Core2 Quad Q9450.