*Sigh* Why does everyone assume that the PC version will better support multithreading just because Planetside 2 is slated for the PS4? They are two different platforms running two different versions of the game which with huge differences in optimization. Don't go around spreading word about there being cake when the cake isn't even on the table yet.
While that used to be the case, it isn't anymore. The PS4 (and XBone) both run on X86 systems, so the code is the same. However, since both consoles are using 8 core AMD Jaguar CPUs, developers are going to have to use as many cores as they can to get the most performance they can. Also Smedley has tweeted that there will be massive multi-threaded improvements for the PC version of PS2 because of the coding being done for the PS4 version of PS2.
because it is true. since amd is also releasing the jaguar core CPUs for their next gen of laptops. and smedly tweeted it too. Thats a big giveaway. also the work that we are doing for Planetside 2 on PS4 is going to yield a faster PC version.. much better at multicore support. — John Smedley (@j_smedley) June 5, 2013 Also, its just the nature of the consoles this generation. Their no longer using special propriatary hardware that has a seperate architecture from PCs. Playstation 3 used Cell and the xbox used a modified processor designed by IBM called Xenon with a Xenos GPU(most closely resembling a amd x1800, but with several modifications that would later be put into future amd cards). These are a far cry from these consoles specs, which are, for the most part, just regular PC specs. a low powered amd APU paired with a decent card most closely resembling a 7970m (aka 7870). They are using PC architecture with PC componants. It should theoretically, make porting games much much easier aswell and we should end up with less Saints row 2s and resident evil 4s.
The x86 architecture is the only thing the PC platform and next gen consoles have in common. Optimizing for console and optimizing for computers are two hugely different beasts. With consoles, you only need to worry about 1 configuration, both in hardware and software, which allows the developers to maximize performance. That's not the case with PCs, which requires maximum compatibility in order for the game to run properly across a massive variety of systems. Also, consoles can easily offload calculations to the GPU that the CPU would otherwise be tasked with thanks to streamlined hardware, which gives the CPU much more headroom. That kind of task cannot happen in a DX9 environment, since the DX9 API does not have direct compute. Furthermore, the target framerate on consoles is 30fps, which is about the same performance level that some of the higher end Phenom II processors can already achieve, let alone the fact that the PS4 version's graphics won't be nearly as high as the PC version, which will give the PS4's CPU even more headroom to calculate the netcode rather than trying to provide additional bandwidth to the GPU. Again, two entirely different beasts.
Oh yeah, I forgot about the draw calls. Like you said, since all consoles share the same hardware (All of the same console, not different ones of course), devs can get away with way more draw calls. I remember seeing an article that mentioned that developers can get away with 10K-15K draw calls per frame on consoles, whereas it was about 5K per frame on PCs. I'm not actually sure whether the extra compatibility given by having the x86 architecture on all the consoles outweighs the draw call complications, but in any case they'll probably have to code it differently. You're wrong about the target frame rate though; that was for last gen consoles. Last I heard, the goal was 60fps @ 720p for the next gen consoles.
I know BF4 is running 60 fps 1080p. I assumed that the target would be either 60 fps or 30 fps 1080p, not 720p.
Both Thief and Killzone have been confirmed to be running at 30fps on the PS4. Killzone has also been confirmed to be running at 1080, and it's been hinted that Thief will also be running at 1080, but nothing official has been mentioned AFAIK. To my knowledge, BF4 is the only next gen console game that has a target resolution of 1080 and target framerate of 60fps. Though considering what EA and Dice claimed about BF3 prior to its launch, I'm not going to hold my breath with BF4.
Yeah... and thats REALLY sigificant. Not just that but x86-64 based on AMD's 4 module/8 core design. Theres about as much diffrent in a a-1000 vs a fx8350 pc as there is both of these and a PS4. Previous consoles were very diffrent beasts from PC's, the PS4 is effectively a 'pc' simply in virtue of adopting this x86-64 architecture. Said architecture is one of the defining markers of the PC market and has been for donkeys years. No, not really because as opposed to a custom build based on processors wildly diffrent from the consumer Pc market, both next gen consoles will just be using APU's from the lower end of the PC consumer market, is whats so significant about the move in console gaming, its been a massive coup for AMD. Also im not sure where your getting this notion of offloading to the GPU from, GPU architecture is fairly diffrent from CPU and either you can perform the calculation efficently on a GPU or not (basically how well dose the task parallelism, gpus are build to render sections of the screen, large tasks that don't break up well can't just be shifted onto them), the work load cannot just be shifted around ad hoc. sorry, but your wrong. The push to get PS2 on PS4 means that it one of the first engines in history thats having economic pressure driving a move to properly mutlithread as many tasks as it can in its engine. Previously there has been next to no impetus to do this as 1) Its hard, realy hard and thus time consuming and expensive. 2) there really has not been the need. Everyone is going to benefit to some extent as currently, the game runs 'sub par' for everyone as its depending on one massive thread running off one of your cores. But people with amd systems with 6 or 8 'cores' should seen an significant boost as the engine will be able to take advantage of resources rarely exploited by games. Namely the over 4-6 cores, largely underutilized at present. It will also, from my own experience likely make the chip hot as hell. So if you have anything bearing the '8xxx' moniker i'd start thinking about descent after market cooling.
Have I not said this same thing in this thread 3 times now? Seriously, this guy sums it up nice. So I reiterate. The next gen consoles are VERY different to PC then what the last gen was.
Still, currently all objects(including players) are stored in a linked list which needs to be iterated through. I believe that causes the bottleneck because especially in certain bases like amp stations the fps drops, If they could separate certain types of objects and place them in different linked lists, they could multithread to iterate through those.
I had the stock cooler for the vishera fx-6300 and it sucked really bad and it was horribly loud so I got this instead http://www.zalman.com/global/product/Product_Read.php?Idx=468 It's VERY quiet and very performant and pretty cheap IMO. If you don't wanna go into liquid cooling, I think this is what you should get.
You're right, there is that potential for improvement. But the same could be said even without a PS4 version. And even if there are improvements to be had due to the PS4, there is no guarantee that the improvements willl be large by any degreee. Do you know what's going to happen if the PS4 version comes out and systems still struggle to pull anything over 45fps in 100+ player battles? The forums are going to explode with infuriated players saying "THE PS4 VERSION IS OUT AND I'M STILL NOT GETTING GOOD FPS! FIX IT! FIX IT! GIMME DX11! GIMME DX11". Well, not really explode, but you know what I mean. Its not fair for anyone, including yourself, to be setting expectations and promising a performance increase based solely on the premise of the PS4, when the PS4 isn't even out yet.
that may be true, but now this is going into what SOEs intentions are and just how much their going to push the PC optimizations due to the PS4. They need to get the game running atleast 30 fps on a 8 core amd CPU, clocked at 1.6 Ghz. That is going to require a huge amount of multithreading and optimizing. The first of the amd laptops with the new jaguar core(quad core at 1.7 Ghz) was around 1/4th the power of a un overclocked i5-3570k. They did doubly the cores on the PS4, but atleast 1, possibly 2 of the PS4 cores are dedicated to background tasks. That is a very weak CPU, and its going to require SOE to make use of every bit of power they have(the unified memory should be interesting). If they get even half of the optimization they need for the PS4 onto the PC version, it will still be considered a "Large" Improvement. I agree though, getting peoples hopes up is not going to help too much if it end up not working. Remember the mythical january patch that was supposed to bring intel atoms to 60 fps? that didnt work. Actually If I remember correctly, GU4 came out and broke the game for about 95% of players. I was 1 of the 5% and was having an epic 15v15v15 fight at the crown, which happened to be pretty much the entire maps population. In that sense, performance went through the roof Hey, if the PS4 optimizations don't give a huge benifit, atleast theirs nothing else in the near future that may get peoples hopes up again. Most will have left by that time.
PS2 is already multithreaded. I typically see my 2500k teetering between 60%-70% usage during large battles. The problem is that PS2 doesn't multithread the way you would expect due to the net code. That is an issue that is inherent with most large scale MMOs. As I said earlier, SOE knows what hardware to code for with the PS4 version. They will focus on maximum performance with the Jaguar, and nothing else. They can get away with that because, again, its a console. They don't need to worry about compatability since there's only one hardware configuration, not countless configurations. Total computational power means nothing if the program is not written to take advantage of the system. Ala, maximum performance (console - streamlined hardware) vs maximum compatibility (PC - countless hardware configs). Even though it uses the same architecture, saying that the PC version will get optimizations just because a game is slated for a system with proprietary hardware is nothing more than speculation. Mind you, it's not unreasonable speculation, but it's still just speculation none the less. True. There's still a lot of time before the PS4 even hits the shelves.
Because SOE specifically said that with the 8-core structure of the Playstation 4, the game can notice significant improvements in performance as optimizations to utilize these additional cores. I'd highly recommend you do a little investigation before you accuse others of not doing enough. Now before you say anything to me about "multi-threading", I'm well aware of how it works. AMD processors with only 4 cores are not going to notice much of any improvement because it's not the "AMD" portion of the Playstation 4 processors that are being optimized. However anyone with an 8 core processor will tell you that this game is hardly using anything of those additional cores. They basically sit idle. The game's ability to offload processing power to those additional cores is NOT something that is "automatic" through multi-threading support. So for the game to run on the Playstation 4, it needs to be able to offload tasks to the additional processing cores. An optimization that will make it to the PC version and make a significant improvement for people running processors with 6 and 8 cores.
I'm just making the statement that the PS4 is not a PC, and that the PS4 version is not the PC version of PS2. Nothing more, nothing less. I'm not accusing anyone of not doing homework. Just merely pointing out the facts.
Been looking at this thread a bit. So, do most games even now not use more than 1 or 2 cores? What is the point of having several cores if thats the case? Does the windows OS properly utilize 6-8 cores? I upgraded from a 3.0 ghz dual core to a 2.6 ghz 6 core, is that in actuallity a downgrade? I would have assumed people would have been creating software games included that could utilize multiple cores since maybe 2004-2005 much less 2013. And isnt the PS4 coming out in like 2-3 months, cant imagine they would put it out at the last minute before xmas people need time to buy it for xmas. Ive been using AMD for 10 years never had any problems with performance and they are alot cheaper than intels. Also ive been a bit more into buying AMD as i used to use Nvidia graphics cards but i had like 3 200-250 dollar cards burn out in 3 years and at that point had enough with Nvidia and bought AMD cards which have never burnt out or had any problems. On top of that i had a Nvidia card that had drivers that caused tons of crashing in Wow which i used to play and i was a main tank so ya that was a problem, had to run teh game in openGL which killed frame rates. Ya i know Nvidia and Intel two differnet companies but still that experience drew me closer to AMD.
Games generally don't use more than 2 cores, and most games don't need to unless there's a large amount of physics or AI. Netcodes, the script that tells the system where every player is and what all those players are doing, have always been a performance hog, and most MMOs work around that via channel systems, which PS2 obviously doesnt have. Games are becoming more and more demanding. More physics are being put in them, and more complex AI systems are being developed. So, in the sense of computer gaming, more cores = better future proofing, as long as the processor's architecture is efficient enough to see the day where heavier multithreading becomes common. The exact same thing happened with the jump from single core to dual core. Also, there's the fact that more cores generally measures up to better performance when doing rendering, encoding, recording, video editing, and the likes. Yes and no. It depends on the CPU you had prior to your upgrade, and the CPU you now have. It's not uncommon for quad cores to be faster than hex/octa cores, especially when they're in the same price range. Software usually evolves on a need to basis, and the 360/PS3 has held back software development to a large degree. Up until now, most games never needed to be multithreaded. In fact, the difference in performance when upgrading a CPU was generally due to simply providing more bandwidth to a high end GPU. A lot of mid/high range processors from Intel that were released in 2008/2009 still hold up fairly well with a lot of current games.
That's just a theory on my side because I'm not working in the industry but I think that a lot of calculations are done server side as well to prevent players from hacking. If the calculations aren't done on the computer you play on, you can't modify these calculations unless you hack the server itself. I just have doubts regarding that as the servers would have to compute tremendous amounts of data and it would be a bit like playing on the cloud except that your computer does the rendering. IDK maybe you can tell me if I'm right or wrong?
