[Beowulf] Comparing PS4 with Xbox 720 next

Vincent Diepeveen diep at xs4all.nl
Wed May 8 09:00:51 PDT 2013


On May 8, 2013, at 4:01 PM, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:

>
> On 5/8/13 6:53 AM, "Geoff Jacobs" <gdjacobs at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 05/08/2013 05:08 AM, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>>> I'd prefer 1 module of 4Ghz. At the CPU there runs a lot of stuff  
>>> for
>>> a game. Important is the script/scenario.
>>> That's all scripts usually or interpreters that figure out what  
>>> to do
>>> next and it's usually completely sequential code.
>>
>> The fact that this is often written in a scripting language, such as
>> Lua, leads me to believe it's not a performance bottleneck.
>>
> Interesting..
>
> Yes.. I can see that the game action (at a high level) is not  
> particularly
> computationally intensive.  After all, you're basically responding to
> keystrokes, and those are probably 10s if not 100s of milliseconds  
> apart.
>

It's more than that. There is entire scripts what is going on on the  
5 TFT screens of the gamerkid in very highres resolution.

You can't have it all in RAM simply.

Say we are flying with our spaceship away from the moon. what happens  
then?

Sure the kid can move the spaceship, then we can go other directions,  
yet there is a whole scenario that's busy playing.
This is a very high level thing. Those parsers are ugly slow and have  
to load all the graphics. Majority of the graphics we already have
cached or ready to use. But not all.

That's where you will see a latency where a high clocked CPU has a  
massive advantage.



> The challenge is in having fast loading of large image databases to  
> pull
> from and render.  The engine, I'm sure, does the texture mapping onto
> surfaces  and it does the 3d geometry calculations.  But something  
> has to
> say "here's the set of polygons/surfaces to render, here's the  
> textures to
> map", and go fetch those.
>
>
>>
>
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