| Mr Puggsly said: I understand that, but in practice developers have done great things with these Jaguar CPUs. Frankly, developers seem to struggle with GPU bottleneck more often which is why dynamic resolution has become so common. |
It can be CPU bottlenecks that hit the dynamic resolution as well, especially when the CPU cannot keep up with the number of draw calls.
Whether the CPU or GPU is the bottleneck will obviously vary depending on game engine, resolution, framerate targets, what is displayed on scene and other aspects... And will constantly switch between the two.
| Mr Puggsly said: The minor performance drops in Just Cause 4 is likely optimization issues or bottleneck on the GPU. I mean the PS4 version is essentially running the same CPU with a stable 30 fps. Either way, that's an open world game with AAA visuals and has heavy use of physics. That's the exact experience people seem to feel the Jaguar CPUs can't do well. |
The Playstation 4 Pro version is scaled back from the Xbox One X version...
But without proper profiling of the game and it's engine, it's difficult to say with any quantifiable certainty as to whether the CPU or GPU is the main culprit, I wouldn't be surprised if it's both.
But the fact is, some CPU-loads have been removed/reduced from the jump between Just Cause 3 and Just Cause 4... And the developer also made their physics engine more heavily threaded to take advantage of the Jaguar core counts.
With that said, the game does suffer from some technical limitations, such as short draw distances on shadowing and objects that will pop-in frequently.
| Mr Puggsly said: Even if they're among the worst processors AMD had at the moment, they've demonstrated to be more capable than they're given credit for. I'm sure developers have to work harder to squeeze the most out of those CPUs, but that's generally how it goes for making console games. |
I am not saying they are incapable... I am saying they are terrible relative to other hardware.
Comparing Jaguar against say... The Cell or Xenon it's advantages become abundantly clear... But once you start comparing it to any modern x86 CPU, heck even ARM CPU's, it really does look antiquated.
Next gen will be interesting... We could be looking at a 5-10x fold increase in CPU capability, which is larger than the CPU jump between 7th and 8th gens.
| Mr Puggsly said: A lot of games also had frame rate issues in the 7th gen, the 6th gen, the 5th gen... so what's your point? Its not necessarily just a CPU issue. Again, dynamic resolution is common because the issue isn't just CPU. |
To be fair, 5th and 6th gens had terrible CPU's as well.
The Original Xbox probably got the most right during the 6th gen on the CPU side of the equation... But it's Pentium 3/Celeron hybrid chip @ 733Mhz paled in comparison to AMD's Athlon XP 1900+ or Pentium 4 1.8ghz chips that were available at the time.
| Mr Puggsly said: Well looking at the technically demanding Switch games, the primary issue seems to be lack of GPU power. The Switch can run modern games fairly well but its often times at sub HD resolutions with reduced graphics. Therefore I argue the Switch actually has a bigger power imbalance than X1 and PS4. |
Agreed. The Switch's lack of GPU power is a massive hindrance, but not only that... It's DRAM bandwidth isn't helping matters either.
I will still argue that the Switch is a more balanced machine overall, it's GPU capabilities isn't orders-of-magnitude greater than it's CPU. - That doesn't mean it doesn't need more GPU though.
| Mr Puggsly said:
Hence, if the next Switch could only have a CPU or GPU upgrade, its the GPU upgrade would actually create a more dramatic boost to presentation and performance. |
Lack of DRAM bandwidth will hinder fillrate and thus resolution though. - With today's compression and culling technology... Around 50GB/s of memory bandwidth is probably what you would ideally want to try and target in a Switch revision to hit higher resolutions with a step up in fidelity.
It's not always about GPU brute force, otherwise AMD's GPU's would always win. :P
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
