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Kroah-Hartman: AF_BUS, D-Bus, and the Linux kernelKroah-Hartman: AF_BUS, D-Bus, and the Linux kernelPosted Feb 20, 2013 17:54 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: Kroah-Hartman: AF_BUS, D-Bus, and the Linux kernel by mmarq Parent article: Kroah-Hartman: AF_BUS, D-Bus, and the Linux kernel
usually those Console guys **program much more to-the-GPGPU-metal** and are able to extract an **order of magnitude (10x) more performance** than in the "PC world" This one phrase says it all: bollocks. If you ever actually go and compare console versions of games and PC versions of the same you'll see that yes, they achive "10x more performance"... by replacing nice textures with tesselation and other niceties with blurry POS. Hardly an achievement worthy talking about. I think I'll side with viro: this is not a slashdot and since effective discussion with you is impossible I'll just use this nice LWN's feature and silence you in my stream. Have a nice day.
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Kroah-Hartman: AF_BUS, D-Bus, and the Linux kernel Posted Feb 20, 2013 22:17 UTC (Wed) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]
hey! the discussions is not me, don't try to make it personal.
I even can agree with some things you say, but everything must be in its proper context, and those are not fixed, they evolve tremendously...
Its not to hurt feelings, to make controversy... but the idea i trowed about forking the Linux Kernel... as exposed... perhaps are not off base.
And i'm not the right person to answer most things, i'm sure the HSA have ppl around here, they could answer erroneous ideas if they are "allowed"... perhaps in another thread...
Kroah-Hartman: AF_BUS, D-Bus, and the Linux kernel Posted Feb 21, 2013 8:11 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]
If you compare equivalent hardware, yes, we do make way more use of the hardware in consoles than PCs. This is entirely because we are targeting a fixed hardware spec, though. PC versions can be better because you're comparing 2013 era PC hardware with 2006 era console hardware, which is why mmarq's argument is flawed even if he has a glimmer of insight in his rambling.
There was some AMD buffoon who clearly only knew consoles claiming that D3D12 would likely do away with most of the API since developers wanted to directly target the hardware. This is obviously impossible in a world with multiple GPU vendors, and even things like AMD replacing its machine code format in its own product line.
Also, we don't _want_ to do this direct hardware coding so much as we _have to_ to make sure the games we put out in 2012 looked better than our competitors' games in 2008 despite using the exact same hardware. We have to push micro-optimizations and tricks to improve performance because the hardware is locked in the stone age.
Consoles can be faster than an equivalent PC because we have no real OS and can micro-optimize in ways that PC/phone developers can't. This is not a good thing, for developers or users. Users want diversity and competition, and developers want easy APIs that make development cheap and efficient. Consoles do neither.
Meanwhile, real PCs can massively outperform consoles because for all the bloat, the hardware is massively more powerful, partly because many companies can compete to make the best hardware and users can and do upgrade at will. So mmarq's argument is just silly. Hardware does bring massive performance improvements, and software trickery is about making the most of limited hardware.
Kroah-Hartman: AF_BUS, D-Bus, and the Linux kernel Posted Feb 21, 2013 9:18 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] The only games which "make way more use of the hardware in consoles" are exclusives like Uncharted where you really can throw away all these HSA discussions and code to bare metal. Most cross-platform games (and very few games are exclusives nowadays) are better in XBox360 because it's hardware is closer to PC and usually you don't need 10x more powerful PC to beat the console game in quality (2x is more then enough) which implies that these "micro-optimizations and tricks" are not all that popular. They are used in some "computationally heavy" places (because otherwise game will just not work on console) but most of the time it's just plain simple reduction in quality (number and size of textures, etc) till you have the required FPS. And of course there are no HSA or "bare metal" access: it's OpenGL or Direct3D on consoles, too.
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