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Kroah-Hartman: AF_BUS, D-Bus, and the Linux kernelKroah-Hartman: AF_BUS, D-Bus, and the Linux kernelPosted Feb 21, 2013 8:11 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227)In reply to: Kroah-Hartman: AF_BUS, D-Bus, and the Linux kernel by khim Parent article: Kroah-Hartman: AF_BUS, D-Bus, and the Linux kernel
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.
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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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