KingJ2002
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Fron Next Generation dot Biz
As one of the technology leaders in the industry, what John Carmack says, people have to listen to. He had a lot to say at the Quakecon keynote regarding the difficulties developers are facing with new console hardware.
There's a handful of guys in our industry who have a ton of influence over the future of technology. Id's John Carmack and Epic's Tim Sweeney are probably the top two. They have direct input on just about every 3D technology that's built today. They're the ones creating the engines that power a good chunk of the bleeding edge games of tomorrow.
For his part at the PS3 tech demos at E3, Sweeney indicated new platforms will pose little challenge for the Unreal Engine. Carmack seems to share more of Gabe Newell's opinion on matters (though perhaps with slightly less vehemence).
On Next Generation Console Power
"If you just take code designed for an x86 thats running on a Pentium or Athlon or something, and you run it on either of the PowerPCs from these new consoles, itll run at about half the speed of a modern state of the art system, and thats because theyre in-order processors, theyre not out-of-order execution or speculative, any of the things that go on in modern high-end PC processors. And while the gigahertz looks really good on there, you have to take it with this kind of divide by two effect going on there."
On Multicore CPUs
" Multiprocessing with the CPUs is much more challenging [to harness than the parallelism provided by graphics cards]. Its one of those things where its been a hot research topic for decades, and youve had lots academic work going on about how you parallelize programs and theres always the talk about how somebodys going to somehow invent a parallelizing compiler thats going to just allow you to take the multi-core processors, compile your code and make it faster, and it just doesnt happen."
"The Xbox 360 has an architecture where youve essentially got three processors and theyre all running from the same memory pool and theyre synchronized and cache coherent and you can just spawn off another thread right in your program and have it go do some work. Now thats kind of the best case and its still really difficult to actually get this to turn into faster performance or even getting more stuff done in a game title."
" Anything that makes the game development process more difficult is not a terribly good thing. The decision that has to be made there is is the performance benefit that you get out of this worth the extra development time?
"Theres sort of this inclination to believe that -- and theres some truth to it and Sony takes this position -- ok its going to be difficult, maybe its going to suck to do this, but the really good game developers, theyre just going to suck it up and make it work. And there is some truth to that, there will be the developers that go ahead and have a miserable time, and do get good performance out of some of these multi-core approaches and CELL is worse than others in some respects here."
"But I do somewhat question whether we might have been better off this generation having an out-of-order main processor, rather than splitting it all up into these multi-processor systems."
" But its not a problem that I actually think is going to have a solution. I think its going to stay hard, I dont think theres going to be a silver bullet for parallel programming. There have been a lot of very smart people, researchers and so on, that have been working this problem for 20 years, and it doesnt really look any more promising than it was before."
On Xbox 360
" the intention is Im probably going to be spending the next six months or so focusing on [Xbox 360] as a primary development platform, where Ill be able to get the graphics technology doing exactly what I want, to the performance that I want, on this platform where I have minimal interface between me and the hardware, and then well go back and make sure that all the PC vendors have their drivers working at least as well as the console platform."
On Console Priority
"In the last couple weeks I actually have started working on an Xbox 360. Most of the upcoming graphics development work will be starting on that initially. Its worth going into the reasons for that decision on there. To be clear, the PC platform will be released at least at the same time if not earlier than any of the consoles but we are putting a good deal more effort towards making sure that the development process goes smoothly onto them."
Fron Next Generation dot Biz
As one of the technology leaders in the industry, what John Carmack says, people have to listen to. He had a lot to say at the Quakecon keynote regarding the difficulties developers are facing with new console hardware.
There's a handful of guys in our industry who have a ton of influence over the future of technology. Id's John Carmack and Epic's Tim Sweeney are probably the top two. They have direct input on just about every 3D technology that's built today. They're the ones creating the engines that power a good chunk of the bleeding edge games of tomorrow.
For his part at the PS3 tech demos at E3, Sweeney indicated new platforms will pose little challenge for the Unreal Engine. Carmack seems to share more of Gabe Newell's opinion on matters (though perhaps with slightly less vehemence).
On Next Generation Console Power
"If you just take code designed for an x86 thats running on a Pentium or Athlon or something, and you run it on either of the PowerPCs from these new consoles, itll run at about half the speed of a modern state of the art system, and thats because theyre in-order processors, theyre not out-of-order execution or speculative, any of the things that go on in modern high-end PC processors. And while the gigahertz looks really good on there, you have to take it with this kind of divide by two effect going on there."
On Multicore CPUs
" Multiprocessing with the CPUs is much more challenging [to harness than the parallelism provided by graphics cards]. Its one of those things where its been a hot research topic for decades, and youve had lots academic work going on about how you parallelize programs and theres always the talk about how somebodys going to somehow invent a parallelizing compiler thats going to just allow you to take the multi-core processors, compile your code and make it faster, and it just doesnt happen."
"The Xbox 360 has an architecture where youve essentially got three processors and theyre all running from the same memory pool and theyre synchronized and cache coherent and you can just spawn off another thread right in your program and have it go do some work. Now thats kind of the best case and its still really difficult to actually get this to turn into faster performance or even getting more stuff done in a game title."
" Anything that makes the game development process more difficult is not a terribly good thing. The decision that has to be made there is is the performance benefit that you get out of this worth the extra development time?
"Theres sort of this inclination to believe that -- and theres some truth to it and Sony takes this position -- ok its going to be difficult, maybe its going to suck to do this, but the really good game developers, theyre just going to suck it up and make it work. And there is some truth to that, there will be the developers that go ahead and have a miserable time, and do get good performance out of some of these multi-core approaches and CELL is worse than others in some respects here."
"But I do somewhat question whether we might have been better off this generation having an out-of-order main processor, rather than splitting it all up into these multi-processor systems."
" But its not a problem that I actually think is going to have a solution. I think its going to stay hard, I dont think theres going to be a silver bullet for parallel programming. There have been a lot of very smart people, researchers and so on, that have been working this problem for 20 years, and it doesnt really look any more promising than it was before."
On Xbox 360
" the intention is Im probably going to be spending the next six months or so focusing on [Xbox 360] as a primary development platform, where Ill be able to get the graphics technology doing exactly what I want, to the performance that I want, on this platform where I have minimal interface between me and the hardware, and then well go back and make sure that all the PC vendors have their drivers working at least as well as the console platform."
On Console Priority
"In the last couple weeks I actually have started working on an Xbox 360. Most of the upcoming graphics development work will be starting on that initially. Its worth going into the reasons for that decision on there. To be clear, the PC platform will be released at least at the same time if not earlier than any of the consoles but we are putting a good deal more effort towards making sure that the development process goes smoothly onto them."
