Squilliam on 29 August 2010
| disolitude said: Also Slimebeast... Metro 2033 maxed out, on DX 11 at 1080p, with Physx on and 3D vision on, at 60 fps... Next gen consoles will be VERY lucky to come close to that level of performance. You need a GTX480 SLI and I7 to achieve this today...which is 2000 dollars worth of gear. |
The biggest factors in that costing are various inefficiencies.
- According to Carmack you need 1/3rd the performance to run at 30FPS over 60FPS at the same image quality. Most consoles will be forced to run 3D content at 1280/720 @60FPS due to HDMI 1.4 limitations.
- PhysX itself is very inefficient. Wake me up when they even start to use the SIMD instructions on modern X86 processors.
- A large proportion of that cost is a beefy power supply, case, cooling fans of which a console needs none.
- A large proportion of the retail cost are the retail / component margins, especially in relation to higher end parts. For instance Nvidia takes >40% margins and the card maker takes >20% margins and the retailer takes >20% margins. Thats how your $50 GPU ends up costing $150 before other costs are factored in.
- Given the improvements in technology / software and the efficiency of a closed system. You pretty much double the effectiveness of any component installed in a console.
The next generation consoles don't need that level of performance to exceed that level of image quality.
In any case, IMO probably the worst thing which happened for PC-gaming was the allowance of cards to draw > 150W of power. It would have probably been better had GPUs themselves been limited to the 75W PCI-E limit for the overall PC-gaming market, not the whims of the high end enthusiasts.
Tease.
