EA Exec: Xbox One and PS4 Are "A Generation Ahead" Of PC

[tardcore]

Great googly moogly! The only more important question than how stupid and out of touch with reality are these people, is just how stupid and out of touch with reality do they think WE are? Saying that their pathetic kissing cousin of the PC based around the exact same technology of the PC is somehow mystically made better than top end, no expense spared, PCs just by being shoved into a cheap plastic box with an Xbox logo is just batshit insane. That's like saying that a Ford Mondeo is equitable to a Bugatti Veyron. Which of course it just fucking isn't.

Now if he had said something like the "Xbone", (gosh I love the patent absurdity of that nickname) could give you more gaming bang for your buck than a PC of equitable cost, I might be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But no he had to jump on the Microsoft insanity band wagon and claim that somehow a cheap PC imitation is somehow better than the cutting edge technology its derived from.

So in short fuck the Xbone, fuck the delusions of Microsoft, and fuck this guy. Until console makers manage to come up with something that compares to the PC as the Tesla Roadster does to petrol powered sports cars, rather than just sucking at the teats of the PC and hoping to somehow magically mutate into something better, my only reaction to their insane claims is hysterical laughter.

 

[The Comfy Chair]

It's a bit more complicated than just heat, really. SoC architecture offers a lot of power savings, which equates to less heat for the same performance. It's also harder to produce, vastly more difficult to design, and as I mentioned, once you put it in something you're pretty much obliged to keep it there. Sure, cooling a SoC that would equal out to a current-gen gaming PC would be a bit of a *****, but it's not impossible.

But two years down the road, it would be another victim of Moore's law, and when you say things like "on-board graphics", you tend to get an entire generation of PC gamers who will treat that machine roughly the same way that they would if it were covered in smallpox. The gaming PC market thrives on selling minimal upgrades at exorbitant prices to people willing to drop hundreds to thousands of dollars to stay on the cutting edge.

Like I said, his statement is debatable in terms of PC design. Advantages/disadvantages either way, but for something like a console, SoC is definitely the way to go. In the medium-run though, it'll probably be the dominant architecture for most PCs as well. Serious gaming machines probably not so much, though there is the question as to whether the chip manufacturers are going to keep producing chips for what might turn out to be a very niche market.

Also, from what I've read it's technically something "similar" to the SoCs that MS/Sony are using. Evidently there are a few proprietary bits involved in these chips, though I strongly doubt that whatever is entailed there is enough to make them significantly more powerful than they theoretically ought to be. Twice the cores in these compared to the chips they're putting out this month from what I recall, but they're still not terribly impressive.

I expect what we'll wind up with with the current generation of consoles are a batch of machines more powerful than a PC of the same price, less powerful than the current gen gaming PCs, and possibly unusually good at a few specific operations.

You know, just like every damned console generation ever.

I pretty much agree with all of this (also there are other factors than heat, but heat is a big one, along with yields if trying to 'attach' a big CPU to a big GPU, since yield rates on high end chips are usually relatively low compared to the lower end). Eventually we will reach the point where gpu's and cpu's are simply 'good enough' for essentially replicating real life graphically and at that point they'll simply end up being placed into an SoC form for the advantages you have stated. It's much like the 'good enough' performance revolution which drives ARM and Intel atom/ AMD Jaguar development. The aim is to get something roughly with the performance of a dual core ivy bridge into an android tablet, at which point, aside from games, the tablet will simply not need more performance for day to day usage. At that point they can double down on power savings.

As for dedicated GPUs, they will be around as long as that 'replicate reality' level of performance has not been reached. I do think, as you've stated, that as APUs get better and better, dedicated graphics cards will be less and less relevant for the majority of PC users beyond the extreme high end. But we are quite a long way from dedicated cards being a niche product compared to the number of 'core gamers' on PC. After all, both AMD and nvidia ship vast quantities of them every year and APUs still tend to languish in performance, although they are getting better. I do expect the next generation of desktop APUs to be very close to the xbone on the GPU side, since current gen desktop ones aren't far off that standard (desktop APUs are already many times faster than the jaguar cores in the consoles anyway). But being as good as the xbone isn't necessarily a selling point for people who'd usually buy upper-mid range PCs when the xbone is currently around 1/4 the performance on the GPU side as the current fastest card.

I will say though, AMD were really on the ball with APUs when they bought ATi for the intention of making them. Even though console design wins aren't the biggest money spinner the fact that all 3 of them are rocking AMD chips is really going to help their bottom line. I'm hoping they can get a bit of a second wind in the desktop space and start closing the gap to Intel in the upper mid range where the i5-3570Ks currently sit.

 

[Floppertje]

First, I seriously doubt that's true. second, even without anything like bribes, this guy kind of has a vested interest in games selling well on the new console generation, so i'm not taking him too seriously. third, every feature of the consoles is made on the pc, so it already exists on a pc before it exists on a console. fourth, even if consoles ARE more powerful, so what? raw power has never been the factor which decided who came out on top of their generation.

 

[ph0b0s123]

So both the new consoles that are taking all their design que's straight from the PC market, will be a generation a head of PC's even though using the same hardware. Hardware from the PC chip marker who repeatably cannot compete with the CPU power of the other PC chip marker Intel. Someone want to explain that logic to me....

Its because ps have a fuck of a lot more overhead then consoles. A console with the exact same specs as a pc will blow it away because of that. There is also the fact that you cant properly optimize pc games because of the wide variety of hardware specs everybody will have but with consoles you know exactly whats in it.

Optimization will get you some improvement, but a 'generation's' worth of improvement. Reality check time...

 

[UltraXan]

I feel like throwing my own two cents into the rant pile.

Firstly, it is physically impossible for a console to be more powerful than the highest end PC you can make. Consoles, like PCs (and phones, and handhelds, and ipods, and virtually every other piece of technology), are still computers, and like computers, they all take food from the same buffet (same selection of parts, some are more expensive than others). With consoles, they always take the same thing, with the next gen ones opting for the more expensive and impressive stuff. PCs, however, are NOT restricted to specifics. They pick any parts they fucking want, so if we ignore price, then there is no way in hell that a console uses parts that aren't already available for PCs unless they're using exclusive, more advanced technology.

TL;DR Mr. EA exec can't brain, he has the dumb.

 

[Little Gray]

Optimization will get you some improvement, but a 'generation's' worth of improvement. Reality check time...

While a generations worth is probably off I am sure it easily has the potential to pass what current pcs can do.

 

[Lightknight]

So before I bought my current machine, I played Skyrim on both a 360 and a minimum spec PC and I gotta say, the experience was much better on the PC. Traditionally, games that have existed on both console and PC have seriously turned down their graphics and nerfed the overall experience on the consoles (unless we are talking bad console to PC ports which are likely just crap games anyhow).

There is certainly a nugget of truth that a dedicated system for gaming has an advantage over similarly spec'ed hardware for general use, but as the consoles have added functionality, that advantage has fallen.

It is true, however, that the new 8 core consoles may have an advantage if games are developed for the architecture in a way to take advantage of it, but I somehow doubt it will overcome even an i7 paired with a 660ti video card let alone the really high end PCs out there.

Make no mistake, I built my pc when Skyrim came out and the beauty that ensued was breath taking. There were mountain ranges I hadn't even been able to see on the PS3 version.

My point was entirely regarding the minimum specs versus what the consoles can play it on. Even if the hardware looks the same, it isn't, not entirely. There are optimizations and bandwidths between components that pcs don't have because components come from different places rather than being part of a giant product line that have custom connections because they know exactly what's going to be there (e.g., you don't optimize a CPU to operate with a specific video card. It has to work with a large range of them. The console benefits becaues they're getting these and the pipelines connecting them custom-made to work together in ways we wouldn't see elsewhere).

The real difficulty is in figuring out exactly how much of an improvement that optimization is. One of the posters above said 15-20% which isn't a number I've seen before and hopefully they'll back that up if they return. In any event, the specs for the ps4 and Xbone are significant improvements over what they are now. So we should see amazing advancements.

 

[Something Amyss]

Dear gaming execs,

Stop saying stupid things.

Sincerely,

the sane.

PS LOL!

 

[The Comfy Chair]

Optimization will get you some improvement, but a 'generation's' worth of improvement. Reality check time...

While a generations worth is probably off I am sure it easily has the potential to pass what current pcs can do.

Not really, current PCs are quite a lot more powerful (an average upper-mid range PC such as an i5-3570K and a gtx670 are 4x and 2x more powerful than the CPU and GPU of the PS4 respectively). if you compare old PC tech roughly equivalent to consoles (8600GT/C2D @ 2GHz) you'll see framerates that are within ~20% when compared to consoles in many games (there are some bad ports here and there, but games like skyrim or unreal engine 3 games follow the pattern).

Optimization isn't some magical thing, you won't double the performance of the PS4 through knowing the hardware, it's usually through optimizing techniques, something which applies to all platforms. This is especially true when, well, the 'optimisation' itself directly applies to existing PC architectures. Every drop of performance squeezed out of a PS4 specifically is a drop of performance squeezed out of every single GCN based AMD card and APU.

So before I bought my current machine, I played Skyrim on both a 360 and a minimum spec PC and I gotta say, the experience was much better on the PC. Traditionally, games that have existed on both console and PC have seriously turned down their graphics and nerfed the overall experience on the consoles (unless we are talking bad console to PC ports which are likely just crap games anyhow).

There is certainly a nugget of truth that a dedicated system for gaming has an advantage over similarly spec'ed hardware for general use, but as the consoles have added functionality, that advantage has fallen.

It is true, however, that the new 8 core consoles may have an advantage if games are developed for the architecture in a way to take advantage of it, but I somehow doubt it will overcome even an i7 paired with a 660ti video card let alone the really high end PCs out there.

Make no mistake, I built my pc when Skyrim came out and the beauty that ensued was breath taking. There were mountain ranges I hadn't even been able to see on the PS3 version.

My point was entirely regarding the minimum specs versus what the consoles can play it on. Even if the hardware looks the same, it isn't, not entirely. There are optimizations and bandwidths between components that pcs don't have because components come from different places rather than being part of a giant product line that have custom connections because they know exactly what's going to be there (e.g., you don't optimize a CPU to operate with a specific video card. It has to work with a large range of them. The console benefits becaues they're getting these and the pipelines connecting them custom-made to work together in ways we wouldn't see elsewhere).

The real difficulty is in figuring out exactly how much of an improvement that optimization is. One of the posters above said 15-20% which isn't a number I've seen before and hopefully they'll back that up if they return. In any event, the specs for the ps4 and Xbone are significant improvements over what they are now. So we should see amazing advancements.

The 15-20% number is based off my own tests with a setup similar to what has been mentioned. That was a 9500M GS and a 2GHz C2D in my case, which match up, roughly, to what's in a 360 on raw performance - it was an old lappy - i do actually still have some youtube videos hanging around from ages ago when i first had it and was all excitable (if you want the links i can message them you, but they're pretty awful seeing as they're from 2009 AND i was a nub at creating videos back then), but they're not all that useful for gauging performance because, well FRAPs noms the CPU.

Some games, like CoD, tend to run a bit worse than consoles at the same settings, some games, like a good number of UE3 games such as mirrors edge, run a bit better. Source games, not entirely unsurprisingly, simply run vastly better on a PC. It's a bit all over the shop, but for the most part when a game isn't simply an obvious bad port, the deficit is around 15-20% at the same settings. I honestly don't know anything from games more recent than skyrim though, since i no longer have it (i gave it to a family member) but it was a nice experiment into the claims of optimization while i did have it.

Now, since i'm not writing on an established tech site (hey, if anyone here runs one, give me some time, and i'll get a nice article written up!), i don't expect you to have to believe me. But i do implore you to have a look yourself if you get a chance so you can verify it yourself, since that's the best evidence you'll get

 

[sneakypenguin]

You do realize that, aside from the incredible bias present in the way it was reported here, he never actually said that the new consoles will be more powerful than current high-end PCs?

Because he didn't.

It's easy to conflate his statement about the new consoles being more powerful than the old consoles with his statement about the system architecture being a generation ahead of current PC architecture. But it's still a mistake to do so.

Whether or not he's correct in the statement he actually made, of course, is... debatable. SoC architecture has some significant advantages, to be sure, but you can't upgrade individual components on that chip, obviously. For single-purpose, mass-produced devices like consoles and tablets though, his statement is incontrovertibly true.

LISTEN TO THIS MAN!^^^

I'm a hardcore PC fan but EA CTO saying .
"These architectures are a generation ahead of the highest end PC on the market and their unique design of the hardware, the underlying operating system and the live service layer create one of the most compelling platforms to reimagine game mechanics." Says nothing about ability of consoles to look better than a PC.

Things can be a generation behind and still be better in the same way that a F50 will smoke a F430 despite being a decade older and lacking the dual clutch transmission and drive by wire stuff.

 

[Raesvelg]

I'm seeing this all over the internet gaming/tech media now, and from what I can tell and to varying degrees the only real story here is a bunch of internet commentators taking an opportunity to mangle this poor guy's statements in order to drum up a storm of nerd rage, and presumably page views as a result.

And they're succeeding.

The vast majority of you are being trolled, and not by EA. Please stop.

 

[The Comfy Chair]

You do realize that, aside from the incredible bias present in the way it was reported here, he never actually said that the new consoles will be more powerful than current high-end PCs?

Because he didn't.

It's easy to conflate his statement about the new consoles being more powerful than the old consoles with his statement about the system architecture being a generation ahead of current PC architecture. But it's still a mistake to do so.

Whether or not he's correct in the statement he actually made, of course, is... debatable. SoC architecture has some significant advantages, to be sure, but you can't upgrade individual components on that chip, obviously. For single-purpose, mass-produced devices like consoles and tablets though, his statement is incontrovertibly true.

LISTEN TO THIS MAN!^^^

I'm a hardcore PC fan but EA CTO saying .
"These architectures are a generation ahead of the highest end PC on the market and their unique design of the hardware, the underlying operating system and the live service layer create one of the most compelling platforms to reimagine game mechanics." Says nothing about ability of consoles to look better than a PC.

Things can be a generation behind and still be better in the same way that a F50 will smoke a F430 despite being a decade older and lacking the dual clutch transmission and drive by wire stuff.

Yeah, it's very obvious escapist are being sensationalist with the title, since the architecture for the CPU in the APUs in the xbone and PS4 don't come out on PC for a couple of months. So they are a 'generation ahead', but in the same was a gtx650 Ti was a generation ahead of the gtx580.

 

[saxxon.de]

Actually, this guy said the architecture is a generation ahead of current PCs. He didn't say anything about performance being better. And since CPU & GPU are integrated in one Chip and they share the exact same (and in case of the PS4 stupidly fast) RAM, so they don't need to transfer data between CPU, GPU and VRAM over the comparably slow PCIe, he's technically right. Even if the PC Gaming Master Race doesn't want to hear it. If you want to make a comparison to the architecture of PS4/XBone & PC, you'd have to compare their performance with something along the lines of Intel Integrated Graphics from something like a Core i7. I suggest you play a current gen game on this setup and report back to this thread how well your PC fared. Mine sucks if I use the Integrated Graphics, I can tell you that.

 

[The Comfy Chair]

Actually, this guy said the architecture is a generation ahead of current PCs. He didn't say anything about performance being better. And since CPU & GPU are integrated in one Chip and they share the exact same RAM, so they don't need to transfer data between CPU, GPU and VRAM over the comparably slow PCIe, he's technically right. Even if the PC Gaming Master Race doesn't want to hear it. If you want to make a comparison to the architecture of PS4/XBone & PC, you'd have to compare their performance with something along the lines of Intel Integrated Graphics from something like a Core i7. I suggest you play a current gen game on this setup and report back to this thread how well your PC fared. Mine sucks if I use the Integrated Graphics, I can tell you that.

Well, PCs do use APUs (in the low and upper-lower ranges) and have for a couple of years, so it's not ahead in that sense. The only generation advantage is that it's using Jaguar CPU cores instead of bobcat. Which is the next evolution of AMDs answer to ARM and Intel Atom. It's a good answer for that market segment, it seems like AMD have a got a real chance of succeeding in the large tablet space if they keep it up

As for the CPU to GPU communication, as far as i'm aware it doesn't actually produce any meaningful bottleneck at this time. PCI-E 3.0 runs at 16GB/s, which is more than enough for CPU to GPU communication. Even the best GPUs in the world hardly breach 8GB/s. Plus it seems that the time it takes for the CPU instructions to reach the GPU isn't a problem for highly demanding scientific computing, so i doubt it's a worry for rendering some sparks on a screen. The main need for high bandwidth is GPU to vRAM communication, which is the exact same kind of interface as an APU (although most GPUs have higher bandwidth than the PS4).

 

[Scott Rothman]

Consoles have been perpetually behind PCs in hardware and architecture. It's why they can charge 300-500 for a console. I'm not sure in what world he is living where better hardware and infrastructure cost less than its competition.

 

[cyvaris]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=FopyRHHlt3M

Really? I mean....really?

Excuse me I think I need to sit down...I can't breath from laughing so hard.

The PC I built two years ago has better specs then the so far revealed Xbone specs....so uhmm yeah. Seems he's talking about a form of integrated chipset which honestly isn't really what I would want to be gaming on anyway.

So I'll just be overhear...enjoying my 16gbs of ram and 4.2ghz PC.

 

[The Comfy Chair]

GDDR5 isn't better than DDR3.
If you were to replace your VRAM with GDDR3 RAM, your Graphics performance would suffer.
If you were to replace your system RAM with DDR5, your system performance would suffer.
DDR3 has a "low" throughput, but also a low latency. This is beneficial for your CPU.
DDR5 has a high throughput, but also a high latency. This is beneficial for your GPU.
It's not that the higher throughput makes up for the higher latency. That's the reason why PCs use DDR3 for your RAM and GDDR5 for your VRAM. Not the price or production. DDR3 is what one might call "CPU-Optimized", while DDR5 is "GPU-Optimized". It's about not compromising CPU performance for GPU performance or vice versa, since you can have both in your system perfectly fine and CPUs and GPUs have different strengths.

There are, of course, calculations you do on your CPU that would benefit from the higher throughput of DDR5 RAM. In such cases it might be worth looking whether you can use things like OpenCL to actually do them on your GPU. You also try to avoid having your GPU calculate stuff that would need a low latency.

Give this person a cookie, for they are right and deserve one.

In the end, DDR3 provides more than enough bandwidth for even the most beastly CPUs in the world. So a move to GDDR5 would only introduce higher latency with no benefit, since there'd be no need for the extra bandwidth.

APUs are good for a many great number of things, but they compromise in other areas. This is one of them.

 

[rembrandtqeinstein]

meh wake me when the gameplay is actually better

so far all I see is the exact same games over and over again with prettier grass and skyboxes

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

GDDR5 isn't better than DDR3.

Dude you obviously don't know anything about this. I just explained you the benefit of having the same GDDR5 memory as both system and GPU memory. More bandwidth, higher speed, lower voltages, no latency issues. There are no downsides.

If you were to replace your VRAM with GDDR3 RAM, your Graphics performance would suffer.

That's because GDDR3 is older than GDDR5. Of course it would suffer.

If you were to replace your system RAM with DDR5, your system performance would suffer.

OK, I see the problem now. You think that GDDR5 and GDDR3 is the same as DDR5 and DDR3, only for graphics. Like I said, you don't know anything about this. DDR5 doesn't even exist. We are only getting DDR4 next year. DDR and GDDR is not the same thing. And the difference is far more than one being optimized for graphics and the other for system memory. This is kind of obvious since the PS4 is actually using GDDR5 as system memory.

DDR3 has a "low" throughput, but also a low latency. This is beneficial for your CPU.
DDR5 has a high throughput, but also a high latency. This is beneficial for your GPU.

I already explained this to you. Latency isn't an issue when your entire system is using the same type of memory. The timings are reduced by eliminating the transfer latency. It's good stuff. Timing makes very little difference in gaming performance anyway. Memory bandwidth however makes a huge difference. And PS4's memory bandwidth is 176Gb/s.

 

[Akexi]

Honestly, that's troll bait if ever I saw it.

Or, as it is known in PR-speak: free publicity.

I think you summed it up perfectly. The assumption made by this EA chimp is staggering to the point of having the PC gaming demographic ready to flame.