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Epic Reveals Samaritan Processing Requirements: 10x 360 at 1080p, (4.4x 360 at 720p)

StuBurns

Banned
no, thats a beast that only a $500 card only can provide and is very unrealistic.
Considering Epic almost certainly have the PS480, and are 'hoping' it's ten fold, they probably are.
The gpu lacks the ability to use programmable shaders, since it doesn't have the correct APIs for UE3 Epic will not provide official support.
Thanks. I know they demoed UE3 on PSV, but I don't know of any games on it that uses it, but I wasn't sure about 3DS either way.
 

StudioTan

Hold on, friend! I'd love to share with you some swell news about the Windows 8 Metro UI! Wait, where are you going?
Very true. But if you chop out the hardware barrier it is all gravy on top. I guess the disappointment is that we are still constantly see-sawing on achieving HD quality. And we are looking at 2012 minimum to kick off the initiative.

It is just sort of odd that we are getting 1080p media from all over yet consoles still have trouble meeting the minimum HD standard. And next generation, we are now talking about "finally" achieving that standard while other media are looking at 4K.

It's just natural really. As I said once you get to the point that scientifically there is little benefit in a jump in resolution (unlike 480p to 720p which is very noticeable) and the greater benefit is better IQ then that is the route most developers are going to take. We're talking consoles obviously, which most people play on a TV. If you're sitting at your desk then you want the higher resolutions because you're only 2 feet from your screen.

4k (2160p) is great for really large screens like at the theater but for the home it's overkill unless you're sporting a 130"+ screen or playing on a computer. 4k is fully resolvable on a 27" monitor at 2 feet.
 
This should help any discussion about whether samiritan is possible on the next gen of consoles.

I'm eagerly awaiting StevieP's reply. Me and him have gone back and forth on this for months.

Did anyone ever seriously doubt that next gen consoles would be able to run Samaritian-like graphics? We're talking about Epic, they live from selling their engine. Of course they show tech demos that are realistic for next gen consoles.
Lots of people did.
 

Krilekk

Banned
why do anyone think sony or MS will go for the beast again? MS went for it with xbox and lost a ton of money, sony went for it with PS3 and lost a ton of money, hell even 3do went for it and we saw how that went. after wii you can be successful without the beast! just make a fun system that improves on what we already got.

MS tried it with Xbox and lost 4 billion. They tried it again with Xbox 360 and are now at +2 billion since 2005. Despite the RROD. They'd have earned in excess of 3 billion dollars (as in made up all the initial losses and actually made a profit of 3 billion) without that. For all we know they made even more with 360 because we only get numbers for the whole entertainment division. And those 3 billion include Zune and Bing which both never made money. So having a powerful console that they had to sell at a loss at the beginning worked like a charm for Microsoft.

Not so much for Sony, because they made a bet. If they had kept their market share they'd still be making money. But 360 was too big in the US and big enough in Europe so they're stuck with their initial investments on Cell and Blu-ray drives. PS4 will be built with a 40 % market share in mind, not with 80 %.

And Wii was not a success. Not for third parties anyway. Publishers don't care for the millions that bought a Wii just to play WiiSports. Or WiiFit. Wii owners buy less games than 360 owners or PS3 owners. And if they buy games it's mostly Nintendo games. Having experienced this with Gamecube and with Wii I think all publishers will be very sceptical if they should focus on Wii U or go truly next gen instead.
 
D

Deleted member 22576

Unconfirmed Member
I don't even remember the Samaritan demo looking that good.
 
10x improvement over the 360 (as defined by flops here) isn't a beast of a machine. It's a very upgrade, imo, but not extravagant or unrealistic.

It's really conservative considering the time between generations. I always figured 10x would be the minimum. And his other recent comment about next gen needing to be a big upgrade, not a small one, reinforces that belief. MS should be able to make a console with 10x 360 performance with pack in tablet/motion control and keep it relatively cheap.
 

schuelma

Wastes hours checking old Famitsu software data, but that's why we love him.
And Wii was not a success. Not for third parties anyway. Publishers don't care for the millions that bought a Wii just to play WiiSports. Or WiiFit. Wii owners buy less games than 360 owners or PS3 owners. And if they buy games it's mostly Nintendo games. Having experienced this with Gamecube and with Wii I think all publishers will be very sceptical if they should focus on Wii U or go truly next gen instead.

Let's play the how many generalization and cliches we can fit into one paragraph game!
 

DieH@rd

Banned
CPU's did not evolve much in the past few years but GPUs are, and in that field we can possibly expect ~10x increase in performance.

Also, to hell with the silent consoles. They should limit x720 and ps4 at ~280-300W at launch, and then bring that down to ~100-150 during their long lifetime. :D [slim chances]


POWER! GIVE ME MORE POWER!!!!
 

StuBurns

Banned
Oh yeah, I remember MK was UE3 now you mention it. I guess I don't associate it with the engine in the same way I do all the 'action' style games.

Considering they first made that castle town demo for iPhone, then they made Infinity Blade with the assets, and then they filled that town with people and stuff for the PSV demo, I wonder if we'll see an Infinity Blade 3 or something, with an RPG town to visit.
 

Krilekk

Banned
Epic didn't make that demo...and who said that was in UE3...?

During its new console announcement earlier today, Nintendo showed an impressive clip in which a bird flew around a traditional Japanese scene past cherry blossom and a pond full of koi. Check it out below.

Prior to Nintendo's event, Epic VP Mark Rein hinted that it would be putting in an appearance at the show. Nothing concrete materialised, but it seems that the bird footage may have utilised Unreal Engine.

A post on Rein's Twitter feed following the event stated, "No announcement to make today but let's just way 'Water meet fish'".
 
Xo5Ml.png




Wait... what?

That's Crysis 2 lol
 

GDGF

Soothsayer
The bird demo looks way better than I remember it. Also some devs reported that the wii u has evolved since then correct?

That's the latest word.

And yeah, the bird demo looks fantastic.


A post on Rein's Twitter feed following the event stated, "No announcement to make today but let's just way 'Water meet fish'".

That was just a reference to his early statement about how as soon as Nintendo made a machine that could run their engine, they'd be on it like water on fish.
 

DarkChild

Banned
so are we back to talking about how many Flops the next gen consoles will have?


Ahhh yeah. I'm getting all nostalgic for 2004/05 now.



I hope we get some actually info soon. All these hints and winks and nods from developers is getting crazy.


Also I hope Epic do a better job making keeping the engine as equal as they can across platforms. I know epic and Microsoft or super close best buddies and that will probably continue next gen but it would have been nice if the playstation 3 version of Unreal had some form of Anti Aliasing. its been 6 years.... even the iPad version of Unreal has games with AA. I dont think any ps3 games using the engine ever had any.


Also hopefully UE4 looks like Samaritan. Early UE3 demos looked damn impressive with loads of dynamic lights/shadows/objects but when it finally came to release games most of that stuff demoed was ether not there or paired back considerably. I guess thats just what happens with tech demos.
360 doesn't have AA in UE3 either. It actually has, but its completely broken. They have updated it with FXAA/MLAA. ME3 uses it.
 

EloquentM

aka Mannny
Yeah, I'm pretty sure they undersold Wii U with Ghost Recon Online PC footage because people would freak out and actually want to buy the console if they knew how powerful it truly was. If Wii U was powerful they would've shown the Samaritian demo running on it instead of that flying bird in UE3 that Epic made for their presentation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVKMMYFbVgk

You have no idea what you're talking about.
 

teh_pwn

"Saturated fat causes heart disease as much as Brawndo is what plants crave."
CPU's did not evolve much in the past few years but GPUs are, and in that field we can possibly expect ~10x increase in performance.

Also, to hell with the silent consoles. They should limit x720 and ps4 at ~280-300W at launch, and then bring that down to ~100-150 during their long lifetime. :D [slim chances]


POWER! GIVE ME MORE POWER!!!!

CPUs have gotten like 10x faster.

Intel i7 2600K (Q1 2011): 9.1k
Intel Pentium D 3.6 GHz (Q1 2006): 1k

About 15-20x if you consider 6-core Ivy/Haswell will be out when next gen hits.

Moore's law is still very much alive.


I share your enthusiasm, but what you're wanting will only be available on Steam with a 2011+ PC.
 

DieH@rd

Banned
CPUs have gotten like 10x faster.

Intel i7 2600K (Q1 2011): 9.1k
Intel Pentium D 3.6 GHz (Q1 2006): 1k

About 15-20x if you consider 6-core Ivy/Haswell will be out when next gen hits.

Moore's law is still very much alive.


I share your enthusiasm, but what you're wanting will only be available on Steam with a 2011+ PC.

Can you give us a breakdown of IBM CPU progression from 2006-2012? Both wii-u, x720 and most probably ps4 will use them. Intel will never give any console holder license for their CPU.
 

teh_pwn

"Saturated fat causes heart disease as much as Brawndo is what plants crave."
Can you give us a breakdown of IBM CPU progression from 2006-2012?

I'm not familiar with the non-x86 stuff. I'm sure someone on gaf could. But I'm guessing it's similar. Transistors have gotten smaller, core counts higher, frequencies faster.
 

Nirolak

Mrgrgr
Is UE3 on 3DS?

Unreal Engine 3 does not officially support platforms with Shader Model 2.0.

Now, you can port Unreal Engine games to them, but you have to rework everything so it works with Shader Model 1.1, or in the 3DS' case, Shader Model 1.1 plus fixed function hardware pipelines to approximate some of Shader Model 2.0 functionalities.
 
Unreal Engine 3 does not officially support platforms with Shader Model 2.0.

Now, you can port Unreal Engine games to them, but you have to rework everything so it works with Shader Model 1.1, or in the 3DS' case, Shader Model 1.1 plus fixed function hardware pipelines to approximate some of Shader Model 2.0 functionalities.

3DS is using Shader Model 1.1? oO

That just made RE Revelations even more impressive.
 
MS tried it with Xbox and lost 4 billion. They tried it again with Xbox 360 and are now at +2 billion since 2005. Despite the RROD. They'd have earned in excess of 3 billion dollars (as in made up all the initial losses and actually made a profit of 3 billion) without that. For all we know they made even more with 360 because we only get numbers for the whole entertainment division. And those 3 billion include Zune and Bing which both never made money. So having a powerful console that they had to sell at a loss at the beginning worked like a charm for Microsoft..

I've noticed this pattern of you just making stuff up in post after post. You aren't even in the ballpark with the above numbers.
 

orioto

Good Art™
ok i'm sorry to be "tech is not everything" guy but something is bothering me with those Samaritan talks.. How is the Samaritan demo any legitimate benchmark to judge what power would next gen games need....

I mean,

_It's not in game at all. It's cut as a movie. What i mean is that put those graphics, in a game configuration, where the guy is more far away and use special power and qte against random enemies, the same models, the same shaders... it would probably look good, but maybe not that obviously.

_I really think the progression in graphics during a gen is more due to artists and great tricks than power and resources. By that i mean, ok, this technical demo shows off effects after effects like in some super shader store, and they obviously need lots of resources. But in the same time you'll have lots of coders and artists who will show off other kind of trickery to do similar, different and even better things, for less resources...

_That and this demo doesn't even show off greatly useful things for games, like big environments or dynamic things. It's all about specific shaders for cool specific stuffs.

I hope i'm not to confusing but you get what i mean. I don't see how you can take this demo and say "that's what we need for next gen games".
 

DieH@rd

Banned
after quick browsing

x360 xenon
165 million transistors, 3.2ghz, three cores, 2 threads per core
80-100 gflops [real number unknown]


IBM POWER 7 [released in 2010]
45 nm SOI process, 567 mm2
1.2 billion transistors, 3.0 – 4.25 GHz clock speed, 8 cores with up to 4 threads
33.12 GFLOPS per core, 264.96 GFLOPS for 8 core package [all results are with 4.14ghz]

Obviously those power7 results come with the high wattage and mm^2 price, but some smaller package could be made. In either case, that is not even close to 10x jump.


edit - i7-2600k @ 5ghz http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/373/gflops.png
 

VariantX

Member
If that's true the eye can only see 5m colors no? What's the use of 16m color displays then?


I'm pretty sure hes talking about the number of photoreceptors in the human eye that can detect color, not the total number of colors that the human eye can see.
 

Dennis

Banned
Fellow PC gamers, 720p for consoles is good. Port and increase resolution and IQ on PC in DX11 is way better than ~DX9 ports upscaled from 540p with poorly optimized DX11 features tossed in.

You don't say. 7 year old consoles are not as good as current PCs.

720p is not good. 1080p is good and looks much better on a TV screen.
 

Nirolak

Mrgrgr
3DS is using Shader Model 1.1? oO

That just made RE Revelations even more impressive.

Yep. Things under DMP Maestro are the things that try to replicate Shader Model 2.0 functionality.

aoMZq.png


The PICA200 scales with up to four pipelines and processes from up to four programmable vertex units. The 3D core, using their proprietary graphics technology named MAESTRO-2G, the second generation of the Maestro design, implements custom graphics algorithms as hardware for enabling a set of shading features that include per-vertex sub-surface scattering, bidirectional reflectance distribution function, cook-torrance, polygon subdivision, and soft shadowing. Their image post-processing module, the PICA-FBM frame buffer management, can polish the image with anti-aliasing and a set of other 2D functions and can actually be licensed independently as a core for 2D-only devices. In either case, the PICA-FBM can be extended with a PICA-VG vector graphics module.
 

THE:MILKMAN

Member
I thought all the confusion over how powerful Wii-U is was simply down to which dev was asked and when?

It started last E3 at "a bit more powerful than 360" with early devkits and recently progressed to "more powerful than expected" or "3-5X 360" with final devkits.
 

Nemo

Will Eat Your Children
That's not quite how that works.

So far we don't know the exact number of colors an eye can see, but we know it's in the millions: http://www.cis.rit.edu/mcsl/outreach/faq.php#q11
This has some insight, thanks. The "colors at the same time and specific light/dark scene" thing is nice to know about

I'm pretty sure hes talking about the number of photoreceptors in the human eye that can detect color, not the total number of colors that the human eye can see.
Oh yeah, it does read like that! My bad. 5M receptors seems like a ton tho for just an eye :eek:
 
I thought all the confusion over how powerful Wii-U is was simply down to which dev was asked and when?

It started last E3 at "a bit more powerful than 360" with early devkits and recently progressed to "more powerful than expected" or "3-5X 360" with final devkits.

It's most likely due to the fact that they're simply not allowed to explicitly state the specs, so for the layman they simply compare it to previous hardware. This introduces some subjectivity, since it's not really accurate to try to make 1:1 comparisons between these kinds of architectures ("1 WiiU = 3 Xbox 360s").
 

StudioTan

Hold on, friend! I'd love to share with you some swell news about the Windows 8 Metro UI! Wait, where are you going?
You don't say. 7 year old consoles are not as good as current PCs.

720p is not good. 1080p is good and looks much better on a TV screen.

Not necessarily. Again, we come up against the capabilities of human vision. It depends on the size of the screen and how far you sit from it.
 

Diablos54

Member
what does that even mean?

Wii-U to be as powerful as mainline consoles of the PS2/Gamecube/Xbox era again?
It's means that the Wii U will be the PS2 of next gen, as in, the weakest of the three, but still strong enough to get 3rd party ports from the other systems. Assuming they're not developed on Wii U and then ported up to the other systems.
 

sp3000

Member
Take a look at any 2005 tech demo and you will see we never even reached them.

like so

Those who are expecting next gen games to look like samaritan are fooling themselves.
 
720p Samaritan was always more believable for the next consoles than them being able to run that demo at 1:1 level on next consoles.
 
Take a look at any 2005 tech demo and you will see we never even reached them.

like so

Those who are expecting next gen games to look like samaritan are fooling themselves.

This is not a tech demo made by a GPU manufacturer like the vid you linked, this is UE, an engine that will be all over next-gen games. Epic wouldn't be showing it off like it has if it weren't possible because it would be bad for their business.
 

sp3000

Member
This is not a tech demo made by a GPU manufacturer like the vid you linked, this is UE, an engine that will be all over next-gen games. Epic wouldn't be showing it off like it has if it weren't possible because it would be bad for their business.

This is not UE4, all these features are already in the current build of UDK. Every single thing shown in samaritan you already have access to.

And how would it be bad for business? Every single company hypes up their products in the pre release tech demo. Take a look at the UE3 2004 demo and it looks better than half the stuff released this gen.

The point is that the majority of games next gen will not look similar to this at all.
 
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