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[Alx]

"Only" five cores of the six cores available for gaming?

I think "runs at 55-60fps with only five cores at 100 per cent" means "only" 5 cores out of 6 were at 100%, and the 6th wasn't running at max %.
(actually I find it more remarkable that they could parallelize all the tasks efficiently to have 5 cores fully occupied at the same time, but then I'm not much into parallel programming).

 

[jaosobno]

"One benchmark used internally has been a custom build Watch Dogs E3 demo which runs at 55-60fps with only five cores at 100 per cent," we were told.

WTF?

Where did you hear that?

EDIT: nevermind, found it.

 

[Hasney]

I wonder if that's at 720p.

It's in good old fashioned SECAM 50hz

 

[systemfehler]

I think "runs at 55-60fps with only five cores at 100 per cent" means "only" 5 cores out of 6 were at 100%, and the 6th wasn't running at max %.
(actually I find it more remarkable that they could parallelize all the tasks efficiently to have 5 cores fully occupied at the same time, but then I'm not much into parallel programming).

The better news would have been that the game is running at 55-60FPS with 2 cores idling and the other 4 are utilized at around 60%. This news is either bogus or basicly means that Watch Dogs is the upper limit CPU wise because there is not much room to breath. I however believe that someone just doesn't know much about parallel programming and messed up his "insider" information.

 

[SparkTR]

Where did you hear that?

There's a thread about it, apparently all the info in that article is bullshit though.

 

[Reiko]

There's a thread about it, apparently all the info in that article is bullshit though.

Figured.

 

[shinra-bansho]

https://twitter.com/Rob_Crossley_/status/294032819582296064

From the other thread.

The info is nonsense.

Someone here should send another anonymous email with BS info to Pocket Lint and see if they post that as news lol.

 

[Ashes]

Another crappy leak?

Ha ha. Watch this go belly up.

Intel quad core with nvidia shaders core or whatever.

edit: Oh and 4gb ram too... This shit is crazy.

 

[Krabardaf]

let me get this straight..

so, it's a fact Orbis is more powerful than Durango, or it's just wishful thinking?

how much powerful were PS3 suppossed to be than 360 at the start of this gen?

It's not a fact at all, we don't have everything in hand to judge that, and even if we had, it probably wouldn't be easy to tell.

We have a bunch of rumored raw numbers, but we still don't know the entire hardware, and most importantly, RAW numbers doesn't define a console capability.

Please remember :

It looks like both console might have advantages over its competitor, but what seems obvious now is that both console targets the same graphic level. You won't see a graphic disparity comparable to the wii on those platform. So yeah, much much wishful thinking in this thread.

 

[specialguy]

alright this time in the right thread:

How come Microsoft is in the HMC consortium?

probably a lot of reasons, all of which have nothing to do with the next xbox.

 

[specialguy]

There are rumors that PS4 has 50% more processing power and 3x faster RAM (but less of it). But some claim Microsoft can mitigate this difference with some "secret" technology.

to be fair the "3x faster RAM" probably disappears somewhat after you factor in DMA engines and ESRAM quirks.

 

[LukasTaves]

I think "runs at 55-60fps with only five cores at 100 per cent" means "only" 5 cores out of 6 were at 100%, and the 6th wasn't running at max %.
(actually I find it more remarkable that they could parallelize all the tasks efficiently to have 5 cores fully occupied at the same time, but then I'm not much into parallel programming).

That usually would be a bad news, because if you are normally using 100% of something, when you need more of that thing for peak scenarios you'd end up with a nasty drop... But since the point of Durango architecture seems to be utilizing 100% all the time, maybe what it means is that they can throw some tasks to the cpu cores utilizing them when they would be idle, pushing the framerate forward... The end result from a peak demand would still be a drop, but at higher framerates.

That is, assuming there's any truth to that XD

 

[Ashes]

probably a lot of reasons, all of which have nothing to do with the next xbox.

I guess so. Was just speculating.

 

[brain_stew]

Don't expect something drastic like 2 TF or more RAM. The numbers that we are looking at right now are on the optimistic side. The best case scenario for me is IF Sony can hit the 1.843 TF number alongside 192 GB/S RAM with a nonbloated OS.

I'm not expect miracles, but final devkits are supposed to come soon. I'm sure some folks here will pipe in at that time.

The 1.84tf and 192GB/s bandwidth numbers have been targets for a very, very long time now. I knew about them 2 years ago and I'm nobody. The fact that Sony have stood by those 2 key metrics for so long has got top mean they're confident of hitting them. In fact, what has surprised me so much about these recent leaks is how little had changed in over 2 years. 4 Steamroller cores at 3.2ghz became 8 Jaguar cores at 1.6ghz and Sony may have added some specialised hardware but everything else has remained set in stone for a very long time.

Honestly, people should be looking closer to home for the best sources on console specs in future, the major sites move at a glacial pace on these matters.

 

[Ashes]

to be fair the "3x faster RAM" probably disappears somewhat after you factor in DMA engines and ESRAM quirks.

DMA engines? That's what Data Move Engines are? What did they do? move it from the gpu? or just created some more?

I thought it was some fancy FPGA or something my self.

 

[shinra-bansho]

It looks like both console might have advantages over its competitor, but what seems obvious now is that both console targets the same graphic level. You won't see a graphic disparity comparable to the wii on those platform. So yeah, much much wishful thinking in this thread.

I'm not sure there's any reason to believe that two independent hardware manufacturers that don't necessarily have the same aims and goals would necessarily target the same graphical performance.

Although I agree with the latter part, there isn't likely to be much in the way of graphical disparity. And there's plenty of wishful thinking going around from all quarters.

 

[lherre]

I think iherre is supposed to be an actual developer from Latin America. I don't know thuway's background, I think he just knows people in the industry. But he seems more informed and has said things that came true more often than some other people on gaf with supposed "insider connections".

I thought this post from a mod on B3D was very interesting.

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1697311&postcount=422

Spain is not Latin America

 

[shinra-bansho]

ERP elaborated a bit further on what he thinks the DMEs are/do.

The reason it's sort of interesting on a split memory pool design like the one being discussed is both pools have very different characteristics, and one of them is very small. So while you want to process data in one pool, you have to store it in the other. Having a separate unit to do this lets you do it asynchronously.

In a lot of ways I'd imagine managing the ESRAM pool would be like managing EDRAM on the PS2.

What's not clear to me about the design is how those data transfers are queued/if they are queued and what mechanisms exist to synchronize access to the data with the completion of the transfer. It's not a simple thing because GPU's have such long pipelines, ideally you'd want to start transferring data in such a way as it just completes the move as the GPU needs it to minimize the wasted time it spends in the ESRAM.

The "special sauce" that I was told about isn't really very exciting, but it would be useful.
The data move engine AFAICS does nothing to offset the performance difference, but it potentially make the ESRAM easier to use and that can offset the performance difference if it can act as a data source and it's low latency.

Any comment from Spain?

Is he missing something that Arthur Gies has been alluding to?

 

[gaming_noob]

Spain is not Latin America

Ahh the country of Europe. I'd like to visit there one day.

 

[Globox_82]

Spain is not Latin America

That's in Africa if I am correct, near New Zeland or something...

 

[Kill Your Masters]

The better news would have been that the game is running at 55-60FPS with 2 cores idling and the other 4 are utilized at around 60%. This news is either bogus or basicly means that Watch Dogs is the upper limit CPU wise because there is not much room to breath. I however believe that someone just doesn't know much about parallel programming and messed up his "insider" information.

Article also says it's a custom build demo.

But it's probably bs anyway.

 

[lherre]

That's in Africa if I am correct, near New Zeland or something...

More or less yes

 

[Shikoro]

That's in Africa if I am correct, near New Zeland or something...

Holy S wat? Jesus, people are on the roll today... oO

 

[Krabardaf]

I'm not sure there's any reason to believe that two independent hardware manufacturers that don't necessarily have the same aims and goals would necessarily target the same graphical performance.

Sure there is no reason in theory, there is no obligation to be on par in graphic fidelity.
But the leaked hardware is still enough to tell where we're heading. Technology supported is equivalent, same CPU, most likely an overall performance in the same range.

Plus developers are working on high end engines since years, demos have been shown, and that can't be just for PC. MS and Sony both share the need to support those new engines if they don't want to loose a big portion of the market.

I suppose they could have wanted to go the Nintendo way, but i'm guessing they received tons of pressure from developers and publishers, and that they didn't want to loose their established market.

 

[mocolostrocolos]

That's in Africa if I am correct, near New Zeland or something...

Just 100 miles south from the Arctic, actually.

 

[JaggedSac]

That is unfortunate that the performance difference will be fairly large. Looks I will be purchasing both consoles this time around.

 

[Krabardaf]

That is unfortunate that the performance difference will be fairly large. Looks I will be purchasing both consoles this time around.

It won't. People are just overreacting without having all the elements in their hands.
Was the same back in 2005/2006.

 

[eso76]

I have this feeling that thing about Watch Dogs demo might be a huge pile of steaming bullcrap

 

[REMEMBER CITADEL]

I'm not sure there's any reason to believe that two independent hardware manufacturers that don't necessarily have the same aims and goals would necessarily target the same graphical performance.

Both designs have been shepherded by the independent development community, so it's reasonable to assume that they're both aiming for the same ballpark.

 

[JaggedSac]

I have this feeling that thing about Watch Dogs demo might be a huge pile of steaming bullcrap

That whole thing was a steaming pile of crap, X-Surface, not even MS could be that bad at naming something.

 

[Sorc3r3r]

The 1.84tf and 192GB/s bandwidth numbers have been targets for a very, very long time now. I knew about them 2 years ago and I'm nobody. The fact that Sony have stood by those 2 key metrics for so long has got top mean they're confident of hitting them. In fact, what has surprised me so much about these recent leaks is how little had changed in over 2 years. 4 Steamroller cores at 3.2ghz became 8 Jaguar cores at 1.6ghz and Sony may have added some specialised hardware but everything else has remained set in stone for a very long time.

Honestly, people should be looking closer to home for the best sources on console specs in future, the major sites move at a glacial pace on these matters.

So it seems this time there was a good planning of this generation by Sony...
I very curious to see their first party output then,
Come on E3.

 

[moe6142]

all these leaks are now sounding like bs

 

[Mario007]

ERP elaborated a bit further on what he thinks the DMEs are/do.

Any comment from Spain?

Is he missing something that Arthur Gies has been alluding to?

So basically no uber awesome amazing secret sauce, as I suspected. Good to have that cleared up.

 

[Glorified G]

to be fair the "3x faster RAM" probably disappears somewhat after you factor in DMA engines and ESRAM quirks.

"to be fair", this is probably the biggest assumption anyone has taken so far in this thread. (and boy, there were ALOT of assumptions taken)

Unless you're a dev or something.

 

[KageMaru]

I wonder if that's at 720p.

Resolution is fillrate bound so other aspects such as the number of ROPs should matter more than CPU utilization.

The "100%" part also doesn't make sense IMO. Are they talking about efficiency or just overall use of each core? I also don't understand why they wouldn't use all 6 cores. All engines these days should support 6 threads, which would work perfectly with the 6 single threaded jag cores.

These are things I would bring up to my "source" if I had one. Very questionable article IMO.

 

[Plinko]

That is unfortunate that the performance difference will be fairly large. Looks I will be purchasing both consoles this time around.

It will be just like 360/PS3, and does anybody in here actually think 3rd parties would actually put in the extra work to utilize the extra power of one system? I honestly don't.

 

[RoboPlato]

ERP elaborated a bit further on what he thinks the DMEs are/do.

Any comment from Spain?

Is he missing something that Arthur Gies has been alluding to?

This is exactly what I expected. The customizations in Durango will be assists for optimization which will aid in making the number gap smaller but not miraculously. Orbis's compute unit sounds like it's just there to assist the CPU, probably added after dropping Steamroller.

 

[Gemüsepizza]

It will be just like 360/PS3, and does anybody in here actually think 3rd parties would actually put in the extra work to utilize the extra power of one system? I honestly don't.

They wouldn't have too. Those architectures are extremely similar, it would almost automatically run better.

 

[shinobi602]

I have this feeling that thing about Watch Dogs demo might be a huge pile of steaming bullcrap

Why do you say that?

 

[DBT85]

Why do you say that?

Because the rest of the article is being called out as them being trolled?

 

[shinobi602]

Because the rest of the article is being called out as them being trolled?

Oh, what article? I just started reading this last page only.

 

[Eideka]

That said I can't see the Durango/Orbis struggling to run WD at 1080p/30fps.

 

[i-Lo]

The 1.84tf and 192GB/s bandwidth numbers have been targets for a very, very long time now. I knew about them 2 years ago and I'm nobody. The fact that Sony have stood by those 2 key metrics for so long has got top mean they're confident of hitting them. In fact, what has surprised me so much about these recent leaks is how little had changed in over 2 years. 4 Steamroller cores at 3.2ghz became 8 Jaguar cores at 1.6ghz and Sony may have added some specialised hardware but everything else has remained set in stone for a very long time.

Honestly, people should be looking closer to home for the best sources on console specs in future, the major sites move at a glacial pace on these matters.

Let us hope that their tools and the architecture allow for developers to hit very close to peak figures.

Don't expect something drastic like 2 TF or more RAM. The numbers that we are looking at right now are on the optimistic side. The best case scenario for me is IF Sony can hit the 1.843 TF number alongside 192 GB/S RAM with a nonbloated OS.

I'm not expect miracles, but final devkits are supposed to come soon. I'm sure some folks here will pipe in at that time.

The rumour late last year was final dev kit was to be delivered in summer 13. Has that changed?

Also, would anyone else like to guess or know whether MS (who have been ahead of Sony in terms of dev kit and tools) have already provided their final version of dev kits?

 

[iamshadowlark]

It's not a fact at all, we don't have everything in hand to judge that, and even if we had, it probably wouldn't be easy to tell.

We have a bunch of rumored raw numbers, but we still don't know the entire hardware, and most importantly, RAW numbers doesn't define a console capability.

Please remember :


It looks like both console might have advantages over its competitor, but what seems obvious now is that both console targets the same graphic level. You won't see a graphic disparity comparable to the wii on those platform. So yeah, much much wishful thinking in this thread.

There's a difference here.

Those slides were nothing but PR. Or downright lying even. Nobody with any technical knowledge believed them at all. In 05, 2TFLOPs would have been like 2-3x as powerful as the most powerful GPU at the time.

Today, 2TFLops is far from being the best and is highly feasible. I like that guys like ERP take time away from the job and try and explain certain concepts but I don't think people actually understand what he says. They try to make it sound like whatever they wanna hear. Please don't delude yourself to think that a significant raw power advantage won't provide significantly better graphics, especially when the rumored PS4 doesn't look to have any particular bottlenecks.

 

[CrunchinJelly]

Watch Dogs still needs to be restarted three or four times and stuck in dev hell for a few years. After all, it is an Ubisoft game.

 

[mrklaw]

Both designs have been shepherded by the independent development community, so it's reasonable to assume that they're both aiming for the same ballpark.

why would one lead to the other?

If the community says 'give us GTX690 SLI performance and 16GB RAM' and Sony or MS is more willing to push to reach that than the other, devs aren't going to go back and say 'its ok, you don't need to go crazy, dial it down a bit'

 

[James Sawyer Ford]

to be fair the "3x faster RAM" probably disappears somewhat after you factor in DMA engines and ESRAM quirks.

I doubt it magically "disappears".

DMA and ESRAM are used to mitigate the problem associated with having less bandwidth, but ESRAM is incredibly tiny and according to some sources the DMA engines are helpful but not game changing.

 

[DBT85]

Oh, what article? I just started reading this last page only.

Ahh my apologies. The thread for it is here

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=509565

The contents of the article on pocket lint were emailed to them anonymously. Also they were emailed to Kotaku and CVG at least, the latter mocked them on twitter

Pocket Lint Publishes Anonymous Note Sent to Most Media Outlets!!!

, the former just posted

lmao we got this anonymous e-mail too

 

[Can Crusher]

I still hope MS has something in the cards. Next gen needs more excitement, not less.

 

[phosphor112]

https://twitter.com/Rob_Crossley_/status/294032819582296064

From the other thread.

The info is nonsense.

Someone here should send another anonymous email with BS info to Pocket Lint and see if they post that as news lol.

They're jealous they don't have anything to report.