Xbox 360 & PlayStation 3 - Examples of Poor CPU Performance

[Bacardi151]

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2461&p=1

long but good read(interesting anyways)

blurb:
"And that's what we have here today, with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Both consoles are marketed to be much more powerful than they actually are, and from talking to numerous game developers it seems that the real world performance of these platforms isn't anywhere near what it was supposed to be. " It looks like significant advancements in game physics won't happen on consoles for another 4 or 5 years, although it may happen with PC games much before that.

It's not all bad news however; the good news is that both GPUs are quite possibly the most promising part of the new consoles. With the performance that we have seen from NVIDIA's G70, we have very high expectations for the 360 and PS3. The ability to finally run at HD resolutions in all games will bring a much needed element to console gaming."

[Brian_OS]

Re: Xbox 360 & PlayStation 3 - Examples of Poor CPU Performance

Hi Eddie.. you gonna buy both ?

[Bacardi151]

Re: Xbox 360 & PlayStation 3 - Examples of Poor CPU Performance

LOL. I think this will be the generation where i just wait. There are so many games in this generation which i still havent played, that i am just wondering if its worth picking these up until at least a year or 2 have passed.

Nothing to do with performance, etc. Just simply this generation's games will be dirt cheap. So why not take advantage. I dont need the best looking and most cutting edge games, but that might have a bit to do with the generation of gamers i grew up with. I still play nes games to this day.

I guess we'll see

[Flawless]

Re: Xbox 360 & PlayStation 3 - Examples of Poor CPU Performance

I read this early, and the author seems to be going in this with a PC mindset. Still it's a pretty interesting article.

Comments from somebody that works for IBM.

Anand is out to lunch on a lot of this. His previous article was pretty sketchy, but this one is pretty much overboard with inaccuracies and random leaps to conclusions.

For one, he bases a lot of his discussions on the fact that the PPE is "identical" to a Xenon core, which is far from the truth. In fact, internally the Xenon team and the Cell team were not allowed to communicate with eachother for legal reasons. The cores were developed by different teams, they just happened to have made the same design decisions for a couple fundamental aspects (like SMT and in-order execution).

He gets so much fundamental basic things wrong that I'm shocked it was published, usually Anand is very knowledgable.
Floating point multiplies are also not "1/3" as fast as on Xenon, I've no idea where he got that from. It sounds like some developer told him that and he took it as verbatim truth.

What I think is going on here is Anand talked to some (curiously anonymous) developers who took their code designed for more PC-like processors (like the G5/PowerPC 970) and ran it on Xenon/Cell and was amazed that it didn't perform that well.

Xenon and Cell are in-order processors. The order of the instructions is very important, because the processor doesn't dynamically re-order them on Xenon/Cell, unlike the PC processors. A straight port will give you sub-par performance, easily.

Once they learn more about the chip, and how to program for it, the performance will be much, much higher.

This article is from a PC-centric website likely talking to PC-centric developers who don't have much experience with in-order cores. It's pretty worthless.

From what I can tell, he's basing the assumption on a single-threaded game: so 1 thread on 1 core only being twice as fast as a P3 733 w/ 128KB L2 cache.

Even that's very low, from my experience. If the instructions aren't ordered optimally, that figure sounds correct though..

You can read more comments from developers and programmers here

[Brian_OS]

Re: Xbox 360 & PlayStation 3 - Examples of Poor CPU Performance

" I dont need the best looking and most cutting edge games,"


Unfortunately I do , so I will be buying both - Next year would be the best year to go back to E3.. They should have some sweet games to play for both on the floor by then...

[Bacardi151]

Re: Xbox 360 & PlayStation 3 - Examples of Poor CPU Performance

Yeah i agree he does have his PC-spectacles on, still an interesting read.

" I dont need the best looking and most cutting edge games,"


Unfortunately I do , so I will be buying both - Next year would be the best year to go back to E3.. They should have some sweet games to play for both on the floor by then...

I was actually thinking of not going to e3 next year. Feeling a bit burnt out over it. Again, its a wait and see. If things are looking so good that you'd be a fool not to jump on the bandwagon, then i will take another look at the systems.

[Flawless]

Re: Xbox 360 & PlayStation 3 - Examples of Poor CPU Performance

These comments from Ubisoft, Visual Concepts, Monolith, and a few others make you wonder exactly what developers did Anand talk too. I hope it wasn't the same no names from the GDC rant.

Dave Hasle (Monolith): The CPU is about 5 times faster, and there are 3 of them, each with a dedicated custom vector unit and two simultaneous threads. There's 8 times as much memory with 3.5 times the bandwidth. We get significantly more capability than exists on either current gen consoles or home PCs, but it will take some care and feeding to nurse that power out. The GPU has 12 times as many shader pipes, each with so much flexibility they're not even really comparable to the previous hardware. With multiple shader pipes, we can do a vast number of overlays and effects in a scene as to, again, border on photo-realistic. Yes, it's really a generational leap.

http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=1&cId=3140492

[Kashanova]

Re: Xbox 360 & PlayStation 3 - Examples of Poor CPU Performance

3 processors at 3.2 is a big step from 700+mhz(what ever it was) so for them to say poor cpu is like toronto raptors picking villanueva. mind boggling

[Flawless]

Re: Xbox 360 & PlayStation 3 - Examples of Poor CPU Performance



The article has been pulled....

[Bacardi151]

Re: Xbox 360 & PlayStation 3 - Examples of Poor CPU Performance

The article has been pulled....

now that is comedy. maybe he got way too much hate mail and decided to pull the plug

[fishepa]

Re: Xbox 360 & PlayStation 3 - Examples of Poor CPU Performance

LOL. I think this will be the generation where i just wait. There are so many games in this generation which i still havent played, that i am just wondering if its worth picking these up until at least a year or 2 have passed.

Nothing to do with performance, etc. Just simply this generation's games will be dirt cheap. So why not take advantage. I dont need the best looking and most cutting edge games, but that might have a bit to do with the generation of gamers i grew up with. I still play nes games to this day.

I guess we'll see

You will give in....I guarantee it...

[hdaniel1]

Re: Xbox 360 & PlayStation 3 - Examples of Poor CPU Performance

You will give in....I guarantee it...

No way, Eddie is old school.

BK on the other hand.......no will power..............

[Flawless]

Re: Xbox 360 & PlayStation 3 - Examples of Poor CPU Performance

now that is comedy. maybe he got way too much hate mail and decided to pull the plug

The excuse is..."PS3 article is pulled for now because Anand is worried about MS tracing his anonymous insider."

http://www.anandtech.com/talkarticle.aspx?i=2458

[Flawless]

Re: Xbox 360 & PlayStation 3 - Examples of Poor CPU Performance

Arstechnica's response to the Anandtech article.

"The Xbox 360 and the PS3: late bloomers or complete failures."

The entire article

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050629-5054.html

At another point in the article, Anand claims that the Xbox 360's CPU will deliver only about twice the performance of the original Xbox's 733MHz Intel CPU. Can things really be this bad?

I hate to dive into this topic with the intent of taking up for either console maker, because I have a general rule against taking any kind of firm stand on the performance of unreleased hardware. This is rule is doubly in effect for exotic hardware like the two consoles in question, where history isn't a very good guide to performance specifics.

All that having been said, I do have some comments on the views expressed in the article, based on my own off-the-record feedback from game developers and on my own analysis of the two consoles.

The developer frustration expressed in the article is in large part a result of the fact that the free ride is over for the software industry. In the good old days before we hit the power wall, the vast majority of performance improvements came from improvements on the hardware side. Furthermore, the two hardware improvements that coders could count on with each generation of CPUs were more clockspeed and more cache. Clockspeed and cache sizes increases have literally carried the industry along for the past two decades. Sure, software optimization matters at the level of the individual platform-—optimized code clearly runs faster than unoptimized code on any given processor. But looking at the big picture, clockspeed and cache size increases have been the real macro-level software performance drivers. The software industry could always count on those two factors to furnish steady improvements in application performance.

But like I said above, that free ride is over, and now it's time to face the multithreaded, multicore music. In the new world, a world of which both the Xenon and the Cell are a part, programmers have a whole lot more work to do, in terms of both splitting their applications up into threads and of optimizing those individual threads. The fact that they haven't yet been able to figure out how to make applications that they learned how to write on the old hardware work on the new hardware is completely unsurprising. The old hardware had a theoretical performance peak and lots of hardware aimed at helping applications reach that peak; the new hardware has a higher theoretical performance peak, and little to no hardware aimed at helping applications reach that peak. So developers have a longer distance to go, and they have less help in getting there. It certainly makes for a vexing combination, but it's way too early to say that it's the end of the world.

[tripwire]

Re: Xbox 360 & PlayStation 3 - Examples of Poor CPU Performance

Hannibal's comment about the free ride being over is bang on. This time around, the hardware has surpassed the software, and the developers will be playing catch-up. No one said Multithreading would be easy, so the early reports of devs groaning doesn't surprise me at all.