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Ramadear on 13 June 2014
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torok said:
Ramadear said:
 

Thats not what I'm saying. I'm saying with respect to game performance weak cpus become a bottleneck. I can't recommend anyone who has lets say a Phenom II 955 to get a modern gpu such as a 280x as a upgrade. I would tell them that while their performance will be hindered since the 955 can't adequately feed the 280x. This is factual!

The good thing about Mantle and perhaps DX12 is that this is no longer the issue. Its quite expensive to have to buy a new motherboard, ram and gpu just to be up to date. With Mantle you would just have to buy a Amd gpu. So money that would be spent on a mb and cpu could be put towards a good gpu. That is a good deal and opens up the door for many more end users to enjoy respectable performance in games. The only problem at this time is Mantle is AMD exclusive.

With your example on the PS4 architecture, I don't think its that simple. In the system can still be cpu limited. I'd say the only game that is available at this time that is cpu intensive is FF14 and in comparison to PC it struggles to maintain high fps. But for the hardware PS4 is using, its doing a good job delievering the goods. If a PC with dx used the same hardware it would peform signifcantly worse than its PS4 counter part. With Mantle it would probably be able to push out similar numbers as found on consoles.

If you feel you got a grasp on the ps4 hardware, then you should know about the x1 hardware. They are virtually the same save for the fact that M$ choose ddr3 for memory. Everyone should already know what that does to the gpu peformance.


Of course, if I would get a GPU like that I would really think about a new CPU. The reason to keep it is that high-end CPUs (when I bought the 955 the only AMD CPU above it was the 965, but that's just a 955 with a 0.2 GHz overclock using the same stock cooler and I would never pay for something I could do myself) hold their own nicely over the years. An overclock would probably give me some more time with this CPU. Of course, it isn't a new CPU now and after 5 years it would surelly deserve a rest.

About Mantle, I agree with that: AMD exclusivity is a problem. I think that if DX12 delivers a close, good enough, result compared to it, it will become the norm and Mantle will have problems. Good news anyway since it is avaiable for any combinations of CPU + GPU vendor.

PS4 can be CPU limited, of course. I was only saying that the GPU won't suffer with problems related to CPU capacity to feed it. AI, Physics and any other CPU oriented task will need to be careful. Games like FF14 probably suffer from bad optimization and last gen oriented development. With PS4 and X1 we will start to see more "next gen thinking" applied to development and PC games will take advantage form this new techs too, so it's gain-gain for everyone.

About X1, I totally agree. DDR3 really is a bottleneck (I used to have a GT240 with DDR2 memory, but I really don't like to remeber this dark times). Both are AMD APUs with an unified memory pool but with a EDRAM cache on X1 to compensate the lack of bandwidth from the DDR3 memory. Of course, the EDRAM bandwidth is just a little better than the GDDR5, so it isn't doing much of a magic, but it definitively helps.


I feel what you are saying here. Yea I agree that the "next gen thinking" will be a benefit to everyone. Consoles in terms of architecture are closer to PC than ever. Imo, the biggest benefit will come from multi threading. Right now, many PC games do not utilize more than two cores. But I foresee this changing in the next several years, since both x1 and ps4 have a 8 core machine. Developers will have to begin to utilize all cores available in order to get the most out of the cpu. 

You can already see that next gen thinking being applied in a game like Planetside 2. Before it performed awful awful on AMD FXs cpus. But since the game is also being ported to the PS4 the development team had to revamp the engine to take advantage of multi core architecture like the FX series. The results are staggering to say at least, going from 40fps to 70fps average is pretty amazing. But this would not have happened if the PS4 did not exist. So there definitely exists a synergy between consoles and the pc world. 

Also, a bit off topic. I want to apoligize for the remark about you not building a pc since 2001. I was being sarcastic but still, I'm not trying to be offensive to anyone.