3:04 PM on 08.05.2008
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
In a recent interview with Three Speech, Lead Game Designer for Naughty Dog (Uncharted, Jak and Daxter) Richard Lemarchand said that the studio has only utilized “30 or 40 percent” of the PlayStation 3’s power. The comment was made in reference to how Naughty Dog utilizes a set of developer tools called “Edge” and how the “phenomenally powerful” cell processor works. Basically, Lemarchand feels that Naughty Dog could get more out of the PS3 SPUs in the future as they continue to build on Edge. That’s why we think we’re probably only using 30 or 40 percent of the power of the PS3 right now, and there’s this great, untapped potential. All third-party developers can get the Edge libraries for free and are going to be able to use them in their own ways, to get more and more and more out of the PS3 over the years.
I’m not terribly familiar with developer technological babble, but I do know that Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune looked amazing when released. I still enjoy physics in it. If taken at face value, to know that Naughty Dog could only be utilizing that much power means that we’ll be seeing some amazing things in the future for the PlayStation 3. Let’s just hope the power won’t be wasted on a Crash Bandicoot game. |
|
| |
-icon.gif){kind=icon}
21 comments + 95764 views
Bodes well for Uncharted 2 then.
I thought it was always rare for any system to use anywhere close to all off its processing power.
@Mikey
I think thats something the companys just want the consumer to think. If you always think your console can do more than what they are showing... I would imagine you would hold on and wait for more. If they just put it all out there and said "This is all it can do" people would move on to bigger and better things. I see it as a tactic.
Also, I agree with Robin... if they can push more out of it Uncharted 2 is going to be even more amazing, which is really hard to believe.
People used to say the same thing about the PS2. In fact I think Sony said like 8 years into it's life cycle it was only using 50%. lol, hooray marketing BS.
I heard the 360 only uses 1%. Look at me, I'm marketing!
well great, can I get a 60 to 70 % of my money back until they start using that part of it?
Does this mean that they are going to charge us 60 to 70 percent more for Uncharted 2?
That's bunk, I assure you.
Doesn't Uncharted run at 30 fps? If they had so much power left, why isn't it running at 60?
@glandseck
let's say if they were to use "60-70%" processing power. They wouldnt be able to keep the game at a steady pace of 60fps this early in the stage. to get a game stable enough using that much power would require a bit more time in development before you would see the game running like that, but I think for a game looking as good as uncharted and running 30fps is incredible. I'm sure they probably got it running at 60, but then they probably had to remvoe some stuff to keep it going at a steady 30. it's a give and take. it's much easier to get a beautiful running game at 30 than at 60. especially for a small-medium sized group like naughty dog.
gland, that's not how it works
I dissagree. Claiming a "% of power" pretty much means there are idle cycles not being used, namely 60-70% of em. If they managed to get a steady 30 fps using only 35% of the available cycles, and a frame is drawn every 33.3~ ms, then using 100% of power would yield a frame much quicker than is really needed for 60 fps.
How is that not how it works? Is there some "power % unit" that I'm not aware of and everybody agreed about?
glandseck: It doesn't work like that. It's not like the developers decide to only use 30% or whatever percentage of the power. They use 100%. But as you develop for a particular platform you discover tricks to make your programs go faster. So that 100% becomes less and less as you learn your platform.
It IS harder to get a game running at 60 than 30, that is true. But this game isn't "early in development", it's been long released. When they state that the power of the PS3 is untapped "right now", I'm fairly sure he's speaking about what is currently on the market and not what they have in-studio at the moment.
You want your currently 60 fps game to be stable instead of dropping down to 30? Use tighter LOD. Make sure your particle and FX budget stays in line when it comes to the ms budget. There are plenty of ways to control it, and it seriously isn't as complicated or magical as claimed.
What I'm reading here is that they deliberately wasted cycles. Of course, they wouldn't do that... So why the blatant lie? You can't put a percentage on potential. Want to use the ps3 at its full potential? That gives you a screen filled with flat-shaded triangles and little else. Anything remotely resembling a game will demand a drop in efficiency. As more progress is made in the development of a console, tricks are learn to boost efficiency, but you'll never reach some kind of magical "power percentage used". If you're not doing that, you're doing it wrong.
We've heard boasts like these for ages but at least it's the venerable Naughty Dog that are making such claims which certainly backs them up.
@glandseck
Just because you CAN make it run at a higher frame rate, doesn't mean you SHOULD. Uncharted simply isn't the type of game that requires that sort of speed or pacing.
Agreed; you learn tricks to make things run in a more efficient way, but nothing that will get you near 65% more cycles. That's just messing with the gullible.
@Drak,
Why wouldn't the game benefit from 60 fps? I find it quite the contrary; the animation is beautiful, and cutting your framerate by half suddenly limits how many frames can be used. Think of it like the difference between an animated tv show versus it's movie adaptation. More budget goes into inbetween'ing, the overall movement looks better.
You don't need to have a racing game to benefit from higher framerate.
"I dissagree. Claiming a "% of power" pretty much means there are idle cycles not being used, namely 60-70% of em. If they managed to get a steady 30 fps using only 35% of the available cycles, and a frame is drawn every 33.3~ ms, then using 100% of power would yield a frame much quicker than is really needed for 60 fps."
As someone currently working on a PS3 title, I can tell you: No.
One of the major problems with making games on the PS3 (consoles in general) is that it's basically impossible to use '100% of the processing power,' because it's all over the place. Consoles have massive bottlenecks that have to be gotten through. So Monosylabik wsa quite correct in stating that using the whole thing will give you less frames.
Think of it like a big facility building tanks. They have two conveyer belts doing so, and the finished tanks drive out the (sole) doorway. They could fit more conveyer belts, but then they'll have dozens of tanks trying to get out, and not enough room to actually do so. So they sit there idling (frame rate drop analogy) and wasting power.
I'm familiar with the PS3's architecture (as I am working on a ps3 title as well). I understand where the difficulty is coming from; using multiple processors is a pain in the ass, and I am aware that it's impossible to reach 100% efficiency short of making all of them spew out unshaded triangles (hence my earlier example).
But I don't think it's fair to say that on a practical scale, most games are using the equivalent of 35% of each SPU's potential because of threading issues. Even if it were the case, it's certainly not fair to claim that it's something that developpers will some day reach.
mikeyed: The efficiency of the code in any new system will always improve over time, allowing them to put more of that power toward making the game look and run better.
Well anyway, I often debate the ever-present "power percentage" claims because I feel it's just silly to imply that 60% of cycles are wasted, or that they limited themselves to 90 MB out of each ram blocks, or what have you. It seems it's no different here, and I wouldn't want it any other way ;)
Facts are facts, though:
You have an SPU dedicated to FX and you have free cycles? Up the particle limit.
You have extra ram left after everything is loaded up? Add an extra texture LOD, or better yet, bring down the automatic key reduction epsilon / compression for the animation. Better result, no waste, none of this "35% power" bull.
I don't even understand why Naughty Dog would discredit Uncharted so much. What they did was wonderful and it's inaccurate to say that it wasn't elegantly engineered... Even if they are the ones claiming so.
I'm out!
If that's true:
HOLY FUCKING SHIT!!!
@Blackhat
Thank you for the analogy, very nicely done. What options are available to circumvent these bottlenecks? Because otherwise, I can't see anyone squeezing any more than this alleged 30-40% out of the PS3.
@glandseck and all the rest:
Glandseck may be just right, but what brings down PS3 is RSX, Nvidia's middle finger to Sony. e.g. So you could have cloth simulations on all characters on screen instead of just Nathan Drake if they improved on their physics engine, but they probably wouldn't be able to push more vertex onto the scene, because RSX is quite limiting, and possibly the bottleneck of PS3.
Maybe cell could simulate 100K balls with full physics, but if you can only show the 10K balls to RSX, that untapped 90% potential of Cell means little.
Cock and Balls.
This may be true but bears no relevance to legitimate game development. This video at quakecon with Carmack talks about the ps3 as a development machine in detail. Watch this and decide for yourselves.
[url=http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/20047[/url]
Final note:
@Emrah
Exactly! You can't claim that you're only using 35% of resources when the RSX is fully loaded, which is arguably the most important part of the hardware (well, anyway, for most games)
50% of the time it works every time!
Why does that sound like something a Dragonball Z character would say?
"You arrogant fool! I'm only at 40% of my true power! Give me two more years and I will power-up to at least 70% of my potential! HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-"
I think he's implying that Cell was inefficiently utilized and that the code could be optimized to squeeze 70%-60% more goodness through the ps3. I highly doubt he meant that the ps3 is basically taking a nap whenever you play Uncharted.
Game engine sales pitch alert
I am excited about Uncharted 2, if they can make the game that much bigger and better looking, great. Let's hope that they don't screw up the story.
Dear Naughty Dog,
Get Sony's cock out of your mouth. We don't fucking care that you cream your pants every five seconds over the power of PlayStation 3. If you can do better, then do better. Stop fucking talking about it and fucking do it!
if you remember back to the statement Phil Harrison made: "nobody will ever use 100 percent of its capability".
Well, to ppl who know anything about parallel programming see the irony of that statement is unmistakable.
There's generally understood system of determining performance gain through parallel processing (like the cell); Amdahl's Law. It states that If F is the fraction of a calculation that is sequential, and (1-F) is the fraction that can be parallelised, then the maximum speedup that can be achieved by using P processors is 1/(F+(1-F)/P).
In other words, in games not everything can be split into 6 parts to be processed. Just like you cant take 9 women & have a baby in 1 month. There are things which need to run in a single thread; then there are things which need to run sequentially. There are also added costs from parallisation in the form of time to create/manage/coordinate/combine parallel threads. As well as redundant memory allocating because of each thread needing access to it's own virtual bank.
for example in the matrix_mul demo for Fedora 7 which supports PS3's interpretation of the cell, you can see the theoretical computational rate jump 70-80% with each doubling of cores, but if you take into account the time to manage the paralleisation you can see that the real time to calculate only drops from 322 seconds on a single SPU to 280 on 2, & 260 on 4. 2 is 17% faster than 1; & 4 is only 7% faster than 2.
realistically, if they got even 50% of the code parallelised that's some seriously impressive programming. But saying "only 30 to 40% of the PS3s power"; as if to insinuate that approaching 100% is even remotely feasible is a serious bending of the truth. imho
It takes 80% of the PS3's power to get that dude's shirt tucked in. They just aren't at that level yet.
"Just like you cant take 9 women & have a baby in 1 month."
somehow that cleared EVERYTHING up. seriously.
Bought this game today, damned sexy graphics is all I can say.
So they will be able to make better looking games in the future? Hurray! Let's just hope they don't suck
i seen somewhere that the cell could help out the RSX on its computations is this true?
WOW!
You guys are looking to much into this.
When they say 30-40% of the power.
There not trying to get all tech on us.
They NEVER said 30-40% of the CPU cycles or even the raw tera flops.
When they say 30-40% there talking to the average joe that knows jack shiz about hardware. And mean 30-40% of what they see as possible with the PS3.
I mean when has any new console been MAXED out in ability within the first 2 years?!?!?
NEVER thats when!!!
Look at 1st gen PS2 games then look at the last GOW.
BIG DIFF!
turkcell parça kontör kontör vodafone parça kontör avea parça kontör vodafone parça kontör
parça kontör parca kontür kontör yükle ucuz parça kontör kontör parça kontör bayiliği
turkcell parça kontör kontör vodafone parça kontör avea parça kontör parça kontör bayi
parça kontör kontör yükle ucuz parça kontör kontör parça kontör parça kontör bayi
turkcell parça kontör kontör vodafone parça kontör avea parça kontör vodafone parça kontör
parça kontör parca kontür kontör yükle ucuz parça kontör kontör parça kontör bayi
turkcell parça kontör kontör vodafone parça kontör avea parça kontör vodafone parça kontör
parça kontör kontör yükle ucuz parça kontör kontör parça kontör
parça kontör kontör yükle ucuz parça kontör kontör parça kontör
sohbet muhabbet muhabbet sohpet sesli sohbet chat
parça kontör parça kontör parça kontör parça kontör parça kontör
parça kontör parça kontör parça kontör parça kontör parça kontör
turkcell parça kontör kontör vodafone parça kontör avea parça kontör vodafone parça kontör
parça kontör parca kontür kontör yükle ucuz parça kontör kontör
turkcell parça kontör kontör vodafone parça kontör avea parça kontör vodafone parça kontör
parça kontör parca kontür kontör yükle ucuz parça kontör kontör parça kontör bayiliği
turkcell parça kontör kontör vodafone parça kontör avea parça kontör vodafone parça kontör
parça kontör parca kontür kontör yükle ucuz parça kontör kontör
turkcell parça kontör kontör vodafone parça kontör avea parça kontör vodafone parça kontör
parça kontör parca kontür kontör yükle ucuz parça kontör kontör parça kontör bayiliği
There are certain things in life related to smoking that simply cannot :)
parça kontör
parca kontor
parça kontor
parça kontür
parca kontur
parça kontur
parca kontür
parça kontur yükle
parca kontör yükle
parça kontör bayiliği
parça kontör bayilik
ucuz kontör
kontör
kontor
kontur
kontür
kontör yükle
kontör yukle
kontorbayim
Returning Dtoiders: login now to post a comment
Destructoid is an open discussion community. You don't need to "audition" to post a comment - just Create an avatar now - it's fast and free: PLUS you also get your own gaming blog and begin posting stories and uploading videos in our open community area that may also appear on our home page. Sign up and we'll guide you through it, it's easy and 100% anonymous.