Looking for a technical, hypothetical discussion here.
This has to be the busiest looking game I've ever seen, even compared to Crysis.
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?rn=1475790&cl=11031809
The amount of stuff happening on screen makes it evident it is a heavily CPU intensive game, leading one to believe a high end quad core would be needed to get good framerates on a PC. Of course a good graphics card would also be needed to take advantage of the higher resolutions/detail settings as well.
http://ps3.ign.com/dor/objects/748475/killzone-2/videos/killzone_full_speed_ahead.html
It certainly sets the bar higher for what to expect from fps games in the future. The action in it makes everything else seem like merely looking at pictures.
So hypothetically speaking, what kind of PC hardware could run a game like this? Of course graphics would be the easiest thing to process since PC graphics cards are always advancing, but on the CPU side in terms of game code and also bus speeds between hardware components I think they still lag behind the Xbox 360 and PS3, even today.
Here's an excerpt from a write up on PS3 hardware at around the time of its launch-
Head to Head:
Bandwidth Assessment:
If there was a diagram showing PC motherboards compared to the bandwidth diagram of the Playstation 3, you might be shocked to see some of the narrow bandwidths provided in PCs. Not that this is a primary concern for some games, because you’d also notice that the bandwidth on top end graphics cards today are already well beyond the bandwidth that the RSX and Xenos have to video memory. A top end GeForce or Radeon card has around 50GB/s bandwidth between the GPU and its video ram, while the RSX only has 22.4 GB/s (maybe up to 48GB/s if it uses the extra bandwidth it can get). This factors in greatly with the texture detail and levels of filtering displayed on PC games as compared to those in console games. On a PC, higher quality textures and expensive texture filters are used liberally to take advantage of this added bandwidth. Many games enable these features for relatively easy improvements in visual quality according to the end user’s graphics card capabilities.
Given the situation that all textures and frame buffer operations mostly stay in video memory, PCs operate visually superior to that of consoles given the higher end graphics cards. However, given the faster communication between console CPUs and GPUs, consoles are generally in a better position to pick up the slack in processing, and possibly bandwidth. On the Playstation 3, the FlexIO bus offers some processing power to be tapped into from the Cell for vertex and possibly even texture filtering. Additionally, because XDR RAM is connected to the Cell, the RSX can use this bus as added bandwidth for various operations that are feasible. In the best case scenario, simply using XDR RAM to handle half of the video memory bandwidth consumption, would possibly double the bandwidth of the RSX to 48GB/s. However, the situation is likely not as ideal as an added bus given that the flow of memory goes through two memory controllers, and is shared bandwidth with the Cell processor.
Bandwidth in the areas of sound processing, networking, hard drive, and other I/O related devices are very low and typically aren’t bandwidth limited generally on either front.
CPU performance:
CPUs on PCs are general purpose. They are able to handle a wide variety of operations on an acceptable level so long as an application doesn’t demand an obscene amount of a computing resource it doesn’t provide a lot of. The mainstream CPUs are all x86 based and are scalar processors – meaning they execute one operation at a time (on a single pipeline per core) on one piece of data. General purpose CPUs have gotten extremely fast at executing instructions, but this improvement has not matched by the rate of which data can be given to it. Due to this, a large part of die space on a CPU is taken up by hardware aimed to hide memory access times. This added hardware dissipates a lot of heat and lowers the overall efficiency of the CPU to keep it running fast. This hardware is needed in the general purpose computing
domain since random accesses to memory and many different types of operations are frequent due to application switching, and even a single application that has many random variables and functions. This general purpose computing speed is not needed as much for games and the extra hardware and heat generated would not be desirable for games.
Intel/AMD are the primary manufacturers of desktop CPUs today and all have huge amounts of die space allocated to general purpose computing and hiding latency. However, to not be completely outdone by the world of SIMD processing, MMX, 3DNow!, and SSE technologies were added to these general purpose CPUs to improve their 3D gaming and multimedia functions. These SIMD instruction sets and hardware are still behind the single VMX instruction set and hardware included in the Cell’s PPE, and even further behind the SPE and VMX-128 instruction sets as they only have 16 registers as opposed to 32 or 128. SSE only recently supported operations that operate between elements in the same vector register with SSE3, although 3DNow! had this functionality from the start. MMX and 3DNow! also share registers with the x86 floating point registers which means they cannot execute simultaneously with x86 floating point code(x87). Since then, this may have been changed to allow for easy context switching, or offering exclusive registers to avoid the switch between scalar and vector floating point operations.
SSE, MMX, 3DNow! don’t even begin to scratch the power offered on a single SPE on the Cell. Not to mention the Cell has 7 of them in addition to the VMX-128 instruction set. For games processing, Intel/AMD CPUs are vastly outdone, and they will not be catching up this generation or the next. Buying newer and newer CPUs will not increase PC gaming performance drastically, and they won’t be catching up to the Cell for a long time.
Full post here-
http://www.ps3forums.com/showthread.php?t=22858
If anyone has more updated information that detail game code advancements made by Intel CPUs, such as perhaps the Core i7, please post it.
This has to be the busiest looking game I've ever seen, even compared to Crysis.
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?rn=1475790&cl=11031809
The amount of stuff happening on screen makes it evident it is a heavily CPU intensive game, leading one to believe a high end quad core would be needed to get good framerates on a PC. Of course a good graphics card would also be needed to take advantage of the higher resolutions/detail settings as well.
http://ps3.ign.com/dor/objects/748475/killzone-2/videos/killzone_full_speed_ahead.html
It certainly sets the bar higher for what to expect from fps games in the future. The action in it makes everything else seem like merely looking at pictures.
So hypothetically speaking, what kind of PC hardware could run a game like this? Of course graphics would be the easiest thing to process since PC graphics cards are always advancing, but on the CPU side in terms of game code and also bus speeds between hardware components I think they still lag behind the Xbox 360 and PS3, even today.
Here's an excerpt from a write up on PS3 hardware at around the time of its launch-
Head to Head:
Bandwidth Assessment:
If there was a diagram showing PC motherboards compared to the bandwidth diagram of the Playstation 3, you might be shocked to see some of the narrow bandwidths provided in PCs. Not that this is a primary concern for some games, because you’d also notice that the bandwidth on top end graphics cards today are already well beyond the bandwidth that the RSX and Xenos have to video memory. A top end GeForce or Radeon card has around 50GB/s bandwidth between the GPU and its video ram, while the RSX only has 22.4 GB/s (maybe up to 48GB/s if it uses the extra bandwidth it can get). This factors in greatly with the texture detail and levels of filtering displayed on PC games as compared to those in console games. On a PC, higher quality textures and expensive texture filters are used liberally to take advantage of this added bandwidth. Many games enable these features for relatively easy improvements in visual quality according to the end user’s graphics card capabilities.
Given the situation that all textures and frame buffer operations mostly stay in video memory, PCs operate visually superior to that of consoles given the higher end graphics cards. However, given the faster communication between console CPUs and GPUs, consoles are generally in a better position to pick up the slack in processing, and possibly bandwidth. On the Playstation 3, the FlexIO bus offers some processing power to be tapped into from the Cell for vertex and possibly even texture filtering. Additionally, because XDR RAM is connected to the Cell, the RSX can use this bus as added bandwidth for various operations that are feasible. In the best case scenario, simply using XDR RAM to handle half of the video memory bandwidth consumption, would possibly double the bandwidth of the RSX to 48GB/s. However, the situation is likely not as ideal as an added bus given that the flow of memory goes through two memory controllers, and is shared bandwidth with the Cell processor.
Bandwidth in the areas of sound processing, networking, hard drive, and other I/O related devices are very low and typically aren’t bandwidth limited generally on either front.
CPU performance:
CPUs on PCs are general purpose. They are able to handle a wide variety of operations on an acceptable level so long as an application doesn’t demand an obscene amount of a computing resource it doesn’t provide a lot of. The mainstream CPUs are all x86 based and are scalar processors – meaning they execute one operation at a time (on a single pipeline per core) on one piece of data. General purpose CPUs have gotten extremely fast at executing instructions, but this improvement has not matched by the rate of which data can be given to it. Due to this, a large part of die space on a CPU is taken up by hardware aimed to hide memory access times. This added hardware dissipates a lot of heat and lowers the overall efficiency of the CPU to keep it running fast. This hardware is needed in the general purpose computing
domain since random accesses to memory and many different types of operations are frequent due to application switching, and even a single application that has many random variables and functions. This general purpose computing speed is not needed as much for games and the extra hardware and heat generated would not be desirable for games.
Intel/AMD are the primary manufacturers of desktop CPUs today and all have huge amounts of die space allocated to general purpose computing and hiding latency. However, to not be completely outdone by the world of SIMD processing, MMX, 3DNow!, and SSE technologies were added to these general purpose CPUs to improve their 3D gaming and multimedia functions. These SIMD instruction sets and hardware are still behind the single VMX instruction set and hardware included in the Cell’s PPE, and even further behind the SPE and VMX-128 instruction sets as they only have 16 registers as opposed to 32 or 128. SSE only recently supported operations that operate between elements in the same vector register with SSE3, although 3DNow! had this functionality from the start. MMX and 3DNow! also share registers with the x86 floating point registers which means they cannot execute simultaneously with x86 floating point code(x87). Since then, this may have been changed to allow for easy context switching, or offering exclusive registers to avoid the switch between scalar and vector floating point operations.
SSE, MMX, 3DNow! don’t even begin to scratch the power offered on a single SPE on the Cell. Not to mention the Cell has 7 of them in addition to the VMX-128 instruction set. For games processing, Intel/AMD CPUs are vastly outdone, and they will not be catching up this generation or the next. Buying newer and newer CPUs will not increase PC gaming performance drastically, and they won’t be catching up to the Cell for a long time.
Full post here-
http://www.ps3forums.com/showthread.php?t=22858
If anyone has more updated information that detail game code advancements made by Intel CPUs, such as perhaps the Core i7, please post it.
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