ethomaz said:
I'm talkiung most about the overhead of the PCs... like drawcalls can be 10 to 100x slower in PCs than console. |
This is generally the part i hate about devs posting vaugly technical things, people that don't much understand them start spouting them as if they fully understand what they're saying - draw calls in most engines are optimized to be kept at a minimum, with engines like UE making use of complex shaders to create what would normally take tens of draw calls and reduce them to a much lower number for performances sake, the 10-100x would be based on the gpu setup, with high end the 10x and low end the 100x, obviously in a closed system with direct gpu-cpu-mem access the speed of this is much higher but ultimately if you're playing with vsync on and capping the output then you're not really missing much in performance.
The real bottleneck here for PC's is not the GPU but the CPU since it's not tied directly to the GPU and has to interact through the pcie interface (in modern setups) as well as several other elements - you can for example put two GTX580's in SLI on a high end i7 processor, and for most games the framerate would be high, add in a third GTX580 in to three way SLI and unless you're running very high resolution to tax the GPU more than the CPU, the cpu actually causes the bottleneck and causes the overall performance of THREE GTX580's to be lower than just TWO.
With that said, as you see the benefit of a cpu-gpu on a die solution does result in much better performance from hardware that wouldn't be as impressive in a bog-standard PC, but at the same time it has it's own limitations, memory, video output and of course the way media is loaded also plays a factor (unless the game offers hdd installs, but even then the new consoles would be better off running higher speed interfaces such as SATA3 and high speed drives, the ones used in the 360 and PS3 originally were quite slow at 5200rpm running over a SATA connection (sata 1, for te record).
Either way as the author speculates, launch titles will be mostly ports of existing engines so won't look anywhere near as good as later games for the platforms.
