Epic's "Samaritan" UE3 Demo Required 2.5 terraFLOPS

[A Bad Day]

[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]To be fair, the Xbox 360 and PS3 weren't that bad for their time. The Wii wasn't intended for good graphics to begin with, just as something to play around on. I think of the Wii as more of a toy than the other consoles. Not that I don't use it, but I use it more for Netflix than gaming.The problem as I see it is that the consoles should have either been upgraded or replaced a year or two ago.[/citation]

It's not the consoles that I'm upset about, it's their refresh cycle. 10 years refresh cycles for consumer hardware is mind-blowing.

Imagine if Apple or Alienware did it, no matter how pretty their computers look, there's no way even their most powerful computers can match other manufacturers' lowest end laptops. If AMD or Nivida did it, Intels' IGPs would put their best GPUs of early 2000s in shame.

 

[alextheblue]

[citation][nom]gokanis[/nom]Less cheating, really, are you on crack?[/citation]Actually, coming primarily from a PC gaming background, I'd have to agree with him. Not counting MMOs, I'd say that with most online PC games (especially those relying heavily on dedicated servers provided by others) it's easier to cheat and somewhat harder to be caught. The difference isn't night and day, of course. But I'd say that for the most part my experience on XBL has been better than my PC online experience, with regards to cheating.

To this day I can't mention cheating without thinking of Counter-Strike multiple midair headshots while jumping off a rooftop.

 

[blazorthon]

Consoles are dead of course there will be a few new ones over the next few years, they started designing them a few years ago. that was before the tablet market started kicking their collective arses in sales.
my brothers kids play a leappad with gameboy style cartridges that can connect to the PC via usb or to the TV via hmdi mini.
iPads already have wireless, do the math.
all that needs to happen is a 14"+ screen and some dpad & stylus like the gameboy advance with the functionality of an iPad and horse power of Amd's bulldozer series with wireless connectivity and gaming will have gone mostly mobile.
either your console evolves into a mobile hand held or it dies out as the next generation is already being programmed for the hand held mobile direction things are gravitating toward.
there is one console generation release left before they HAVE to become mobile or go extinct.
that writing has been on the walls for years.
it is my sincerest hope that UE4 marks the death of non mobile consoles once and for all and brings elite gaming back to the PC while relegating everything less to mobile pc gaming devices.

Why would consoles need to go mobile? I don't know about you, but I would hate the reduction in performance from going stationary to mobile. Going mobile would increase price for performance substantially and no consumer wants that. You also mention AMD's bulldozer... Bulldozer performs worse than Intel's old Core 2 architecture and doesn't use any less power. I don't think you can get any more of an opposite of a modern mobile CPU than the Bulldozer architecture.

Why should consoles die? You seem pretty set on seeing them gone. I know I don't play a whole lot of games when I'm out of the house. I'm quite sure that tablets today don't even have the CPU performance of the PS3's Cell processor, but they're graphics may have caught up. Besides, do you really think that a tablet can replace a console? Sorry, but touch screens do not work so well for FPS games and the like. Considering that those kinds of games are probably the most played console games I have to wonder if it's even possible for your solution to work.

It's not the consoles that I'm upset about, it's their refresh cycle. 10 years refresh cycles for consumer hardware is mind-blowing.

Imagine if Apple or Alienware did it, no matter how pretty their computers look, there's no way even their most powerful computers can match other manufacturers' lowest end laptops. If AMD or Nivida did it, Intels' IGPs would put their best GPUs of early 2000s in shame.

Now that I can understand completely... I think consoles should have replacements every 4 or 5 years at the latest. I think a 3 or 4 year refresh cycle would do nicely.

 

[alextheblue]

[citation][nom]XZaapryca[/nom]June 2010? What about November 2005? Other than color, case style, and connectivity options, it's still the same box since 2005.[/citation]Well, no, the guts are vastly improved in terms of power consumption, heat, and in turn reliability and noise level have improved. However if what you mean to say is that they are the same architecture and run at the same clocks, with the same level of performance, than yes. They are not physically the same, but they are functionally the same in terms of gaming performance.

Personally I expect the Xbox 720 to have something a bit faster than a 6670, but I doubt it will be as powerful as the 7800 series. Maybe a 7600/7700? With fast enough memory, it should be decent.

 

[alextheblue]

[citation][nom]f-14[/nom]either your console evolves into a mobile hand held or it dies out as the next generation is already being programmed for the hand held mobile direction things are gravitating toward.there is one console generation release left before they HAVE to become mobile or go extinct.that writing has been on the walls for years.it is my sincerest hope that UE4 marks the death of non mobile consoles once and for all and brings elite gaming back to the PC while relegating everything less to mobile pc gaming devices.[/citation]Be careful what you wish for. If mobile gaming actually kills non-mobile consoles, don't think for a moment that traditional PC gaming will emerge completely unscathed, either.

 

[blazorthon]

Well, no, the guts are vastly improved in terms of power consumption, heat, and in turn reliability and noise level have improved. However if what you mean to say is that they are the same architecture and run at the same clocks, with the same level of performance, than yes. They are not physically the same, but they are functionally the same in terms of gaming performance.

Personally I expect the Xbox 720 to have something a bit faster than a 6670, but I doubt it will be as powerful as the 7800 series. Maybe a 7600/7700? With fast enough memory, it should be decent.

7700 maybe, but 7600 is a rebrand of 6600 which is a rebrand of 5600. Otherwise I'll agree with you. The main differences between an old Xbox and a new one or an old PS3 and a new one are die shrinks and integration of once individual components into fewer packages to save on power and costs. They are functionally identical to the parts in the older consoles and have the same performance.

 

[Guest]

Simple thing is that noone wants to spend money on a new rig and sit at a computer table, i have a good pc yet i find myself having a better experience playing xbox slouching on the couch relaxing. Graphics are not what makes a game. Diablo 3 for instance, they need to get games right first before you are bothered to much about the graphics. I love eye candy but if its a boring game it gets old fast.

 

[palladin9479]

Simple thing is that noone wants to spend money on a new rig and sit at a computer table, i have a good pc yet i find myself having a better experience playing xbox slouching on the couch relaxing. Graphics are not what makes a game. Diablo 3 for instance, they need to get games right first before you are bothered to much about the graphics. I love eye candy but if its a boring game it gets old fast.

This is why consoles are currently so successful. As a HW platform they suck but the environment you enjoy them in more then makes up for it.

This is why I'm thinking about creating a home entertainment PC that is twinked out for high end gaming on my large LCD HDTV (Xcanvas).

 

[SmileyTPB1]

This article really should end the debate over whether or not PCs are better than consoles. It should also end the debate that consoles are holding back, and dumbing down the gaming industry.

I like to imagine a return to a gaming industry where the best most awesome and incredible games are exclusive to the PC. Where the technology envelope is constantly being pushed and the gamer is constantly amazed by what the next big game is.

 

[clonazepam]

Kids today are being raised in a completely different environment than someone like myself in his 30s. At 2-3 yrs old, they get an old cell phone as a toy to role-play with along with their dolls and other toys. At 6, as they are beginning to read, they'd rather reach for a tablet than a real book. My kid's 6, and when I told her I was building her a PC, her first thoughts of were a tablet or laptop device. The desktop concept was completely foreign and bewildering to her.

"Dad, you mean I can't take it anywhere? I just sits there forever?"

I think the above is pretty typical these days for children. If their parents dont own it themselves, they still see it all over television, and other people around them using them in their daily lives.

I think thats what a previous poster was getting at as far as everything moving toward mobile. Nobody wants to be stationary anymore for very long. Being stuck in a single room of the house for computing almost sounds like a punishment these days.

Consoles really do push forward in certain areas like compression with as little impact on quality as possible. Perhaps new and better techniques for upscaling from 480p/720p up to 1080p will continue to improve so you can have less muscle and still achieve something notable with that combo of advanced compression, upscaling algorithms, and 1080p displays.

Anyway, as far as the engine and demos go, Samaritan was pretty impressive. If we take that small piece of what the Samaritan demo was, and scale that up to a full-blown AAA gaming title, what's the minimum amount of storage space that will be required to house it all?

 

[blazorthon]

Kids today are being raised in a completely different environment than someone like myself in his 30s. At 2-3 yrs old, they get an old cell phone as a toy to role-play with along with their dolls and other toys. At 6, as they are beginning to read, they'd rather reach for a tablet than a real book. My kid's 6, and when I told her I was building her a PC, her first thoughts of were a tablet or laptop device. The desktop concept was completely foreign and bewildering to her.

"Dad, you mean I can't take it anywhere? I just sits there forever?"

I think the above is pretty typical these days for children. If their parents dont own it themselves, they still see it all over television, and other people around them using them in their daily lives.

I think thats what a previous poster was getting at as far as everything moving toward mobile. Nobody wants to be stationary anymore for very long. Being stuck in a single room of the house for computing almost sounds like a punishment these days.

Consoles really do push forward in certain areas like compression with as little impact on quality as possible. Perhaps new and better techniques for upscaling from 480p/720p up to 1080p will continue to improve so you can have less muscle and still achieve something notable with that combo of advanced compression, upscaling algorithms, and 1080p displays.

Anyway, as far as the engine and demos go, Samaritan was pretty impressive. If we take that small piece of what the Samaritan demo was, and scale that up to a full-blown AAA gaming title, what's the minimum amount of storage space that will be required to house it all?

Up-scaling a display resolution doesn't produce a good enough picture and it won't work well with AA or other effects. We wouldn't get a much better, if at all better picture than current consoles offer if we tried that. A next generation console should have a picture quality at least as good as a mid-range gaming PC, mid-range being Radeon 6800 performance and CPU performance that can keep up. Of course, I'm not sure if we will get such performance (probably not, I think we will gwet skimped on there).

The best games now need a Radeon 6950 or GTX 560 Ti just to play 1080p games at maxed out settings. I wouldn't expect consoles to need quite as much power because they are generally more optimized and stream-lined with their software, they should be able to give a similar picture with performance similar to a Radeon 6850 or 6870.

 

[gaia]

The interesting thing I found about this, how it states that consoles will need to be so much more powerful, what does that say about the PC's, since a PC can not emulate a console such a Xbox 360 as it's resources are not enough, what PC will I need to run this? A minature server consisting of 5000W PSU with 10 GFX running 5GB RAM each?
This is getting a bit too ridiculous and not effective, the difference these "upgrades in engines" do is small, not ONE game has lived up to it's potential where it's in game graphics are the same as it's trailer, until such time is a waste of money to achieve if you need to upgrade.

 

[blazorthon]

The interesting thing I found about this, how it states that consoles will need to be so much more powerful, what does that say about the PC's, since a PC can not emulate a console such a Xbox 360 as it's resources are not enough, what PC will I need to run this? A minature server consisting of 5000W PSU with 10 GFX running 5GB RAM each?
This is getting a bit too ridiculous and not effective, the difference these "upgrades in engines" do is small, not ONE game has lived up to it's potential where it's in game graphics are the same as it's trailer, until such time is a waste of money to achieve if you need to upgrade.

The emulators need much more resources than the actual hardware they emulate because there is a huge performance hit when you emulate, especially when you're emulating a system that wasn't built with emulation in mind and is very different from the host (ie the PC) hardware. The PCs actually have far more performance than the consoles, but emulation knocks off most of the advantage because it's very inefficient. The Xbox 360 is about as powerful as a computer about as old as it is, maybe a little older because consoles aren't very powerful even when they're made.

According to Epic, this new engine wants 2.5TFLOPS of GPU performance... The Radeon 6970 has 2.7TFLOPs, so it may be able to handle it. The Radeon 7970 has almost 3.8, something like 3.79TFLOPs if I remember correctly.

 

[gaia]

[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]The emulators need much more resources than the actual hardware they emulate because there is a huge performance hit when you emulate, especially when you're emulating a system that wasn't built with emulation in mind and is very different from the host (ie the PC) hardware. The PCs actually have far more performance than the consoles, but emulation knocks off most of the advantage because it's very inefficient. The Xbox 360 is about as powerful as a computer about as old as it is, maybe a little older because consoles aren't very powerful even when they're made.According to Epic, this new engine wants 2.5TFLOPS of GPU performance... The Radeon 6970 has 2.7TFLOPs, so it may be able to handle it. The Radeon 7970 has almost 3.8, something like 3.79TFLOPs if I remember correctly.[/citation]

That's exactly it how can such a powerful machine, the TOP TOP of the range PC can't hand a emulation when it's specs are far more superior than a console, that is a bit stupid if you ask me, but hey if I'm gonna play games non stop I'll just grab a console, those countless PC upgrade costs could be put to a much better use, and just play on a console since you don't have to upgrade it every few months.

 

[gaia]

It's kind of impractical when you think about it, a PC can run this, but a console wont be able to, don't see the logic, since a PC can't emulate the console but can't run this where the console can not run this unless a massive revamped with a new console has been done, as I said, my main point is that this is pointless if they are doing this for the graphics then I will gladly go thru the effort IF they can have the same graphics in game as they have in the trailers, which face it, it's not gonna happen very soon, yes I know it's a cinematic, but if you're pushing so far, you can try and push to have cinematic graphics from a trailer full time in game too.

 

[blazorthon]

That's exactly it how can such a powerful machine, the TOP TOP of the range PC can't hand a emulation when it's specs are far more superior than a console, that is a bit stupid if you ask me, but hey if I'm gonna play games non stop I'll just grab a console, those countless PC upgrade costs could be put to a much better use, and just play on a console since you don't have to upgrade it every few months.

I don't think you understand emulation. This is how it's always been, not just with consoles and PCs either. If you tried emulating a PC game on a console it wouldn't be able to run at all. Besides that, emulators are very complex pieces of software. I have no doubt that a high budget system could in fact have enough performance to emulate an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3, but the software might not be working right now.

Emulation needs to take software written for a certain architecture and try to play it on another architecture, it won't work. Emulation takes that software and makes all sort's of changes in real time to make it work... That takes a lot of processing power, even if you're not emulating a different architecture, let alone emulation of a different architecture.

Even taking a Windows machine running on an x86 CPU like AMD's and Intel's CPUs and running another windows or other X86 operating system in a virtual machine takes a pretty good sized performance hit, emulation is even worse. You can do some mild research into this if you want, but don't go thinking that emulation is easy. It really isn't, especially since pretty much all machines are made without emulation and similar concepts in mind.

Besides that, PCs don't need an upgrade every few months unless you are intentionally getting the bare minimum to play what you want to play. For example, the several years old Radeon 4870X2 and GTX 295 are still high end cards today, rivaling the GTX 480, GTX 570, and Radeon 6970 in performance. If you buy two Radeon 6950 2GBs now for $440 or so, it should last you at least another year and a half or two. Yes consoles last longer, but their picture quality doesn't improve either. PC games can constantly improve in quality, but console games can't get any better until the next generation of consoles.

Consoles actually hold back PC gaming because it's easier to port a console game instead of re-writing it and remaking textures, etc. to let it use a PC's hardware to the fullest.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]xianma[/nom]- As mentioned before, graphics are downgraded and everything is stripped down so it can run on a console[/citation]

Yes, that has been stated before and is no less true now. Consoles can't handle PC engines so we either downgrade them or build the engine for the console and then don't tweak it to use more powerful PC hardware well before porting it over. Granted, it's a lot of work to fix a game up to much higher picture quality, but that's no excuse for giving me a game that is designed to be able to run at maxed out settings on a computer from five or six years ago.

At least we have some games that truly need serious hardware to run at the maximum quality right now.

 

[palladin9479]

It's kind of impractical when you think about it, a PC can run this, but a console wont be able to, don't see the logic, since a PC can't emulate the console but can't run this where the console can not run this unless a massive revamped with a new console has been done, as I said, my main point is that this is pointless if they are doing this for the graphics then I will gladly go thru the effort IF they can have the same graphics in game as they have in the trailers, which face it, it's not gonna happen very soon, yes I know it's a cinematic, but if you're pushing so far, you can try and push to have cinematic graphics from a trailer full time in game too.

That's not how emulators nor software works in general. Emulators emulate a different HW platform that what your running on, this means most of the HW acceleration of the target platform is lost and all must instead by done in software. If the two platforms share the same uArch then much of that performance can be recouped (original xbox vs PC).

Now software ports are not emulations. They write the code for one target platform (console) then afterwards use a porting tool to rewrite part of their code for another platform (x86 PC). The difficulty of porting is based on the source language used and the amount of hand optimizations that were written. This is why PC gamers are pissed that games are written for consoles, the games are being optimized and designed with a console's limited HW in mind. After their finished their just ported over to PC with little hand optimization or upgrading done, thus the PC gamers get a sub-quality program that wasn't even originally written to run on PC (Crysis II vs Crysis I). The performance sucks and the engine is inefficient until the developer has time to optimize it later via patch's (if they even do this). The GPU companies (NVidia / ATI) try to overcome this a bit by optimizing their drivers for these games.

Crysis II on PC is running x86 code, it's not emulating the IBM Cell or PPC.

 

[blazorthon]

That's not how emulators nor software works in general. Emulators emulate a different HW platform that what your running on, this means most of the HW acceleration of the target platform is lost and all must instead by done in software. If the two platforms share the same uArch then much of that performance can be recouped (original xbox vs PC).

Now software ports are not emulations. They write the code for one target platform (console) then afterwards use a porting tool to rewrite part of their code for another platform (x86 PC). The difficulty of porting is based on the source language used and the amount of hand optimizations that were written. This is why PC gamers are pissed that games are written for consoles, the games are being optimized and designed with a console's limited HW in mind. After their finished their just ported over to PC with little hand optimization or upgrading done, thus the PC gamers get a sub-quality program that wasn't even originally written to run on PC (Crysis II vs Crysis I). The performance sucks and the engine is inefficient until the developer has time to optimize it later via patch's (if they even do this). The GPU companies (NVidia / ATI) try to overcome this a bit by optimizing their drivers for these games.

Crysis II on PC is running x86 code, it's not emulating the IBM Cell or PPC.

Well said, +1

 

[lkashl]

[citation][nom]master9716[/nom]UHH Those graphics cant compare to the Frostbite Engine so why do they act like if it was a huge deal? . They should be ashamed that this is the best they could come up with . I was hoping they gave Frostbite some competition but they dont[/citation]

I like how Frostbite 2 is such an over-glorified engine, realistically the only thing that FB2 does better than its competitors is volumetric effects and even then many argue that they are excessive and actually impede visual quality. Cryengine 3 is in the majority of instances superior to FB2.

The fact that UE3 is ~6 years old, multiplatformed and yet can produce visuals comparative to an engine engineered specifically for PC before consoles and that was released less than a year ago clearly attests to UE3's quality. Not to mention a fairer comparison would be to UE4 which is apparently capable of far superior graphics to the Samaritan demo.

 

[Soulmachiklamo]

Console gaming has the advantage that every game you buy is fully playable on your platform.
One of the disadvantages though is that you cannot enjoy the maximum potential of a game/game engine. Even if you don't upgrade your computer, you can still overpower console graphics. If u wish to upgrade anyways, it just gets better.

Conclusion: PC Gaming offers the best graphics and a better feel of control (less simplified controls) while console gaming is more family friendly and guarantees playability when u buy a game. They're both different, but in my opinion PC gaming wins 😀