Crytek employee says Playstation 5 will win, Xbox Series X has bottlenecks

I suspected as much, the Xbox hypervisor is a fair bit of overhead.

 

Wasn't some of this speculative although with the NDA I guess stating speculative and mixing it with public info might be for the best to avoid any problems and Crytek plus the users LinkedIn credentials and other posts yeah they should be pretty valid.
...Plus the site and source I saw it from went into a bit of console warring (How unexpected! ~) and sifting through that and the more useful bits of info and translations took some reading of all kinds of next-gen speculative and guessing and platform preferences ha ha. - https://www.resetera.com/threads/cr...sole-easier-to-reach-peak-performance.179612/

EDIT: Ah but I guess even that caused some issues and the original tweets were since removed.

Well eventually later this year there will be more info available and in the end the games will decide the more popular and successful platform although the tech differences will be a fun little detail too.

 

One developer says and therefor your expectations are met?

Sounds like bias to me.

Would you agree so quickly if he had said the opposite?

Hypervisor overhead with todays hardware optimizations, especially when you can design it so close to the metal is.. neglibile.

Hence why it's no surprise it wasn't mentioned once in the article.

Before the PS3 was even released Devs also tauted it as the far more powerful machine.

Then most games looked better on the Xbox 360 because it was extremely hard to develop for the PS3.

We will just have to wait and see for actual results.

But I doubt it's hard to develop for either console, x86 is no mystery and the hardware in these things is pretty tame.

The most interesting challenges for developers will be in the new ways to approach asset streaming given the extremely fast storage.

 

"better" and "win" are perhaps not the right words. What he seems to have said is the PS5 is better balanced and easier to code for so it's not going to loose as badly which is a bit different. That said they are consoles, devs always extract the max from them as they are a fixed platform, hence being a bit harder to code for will in the end not matter much.

 

Basically to me this sounds similar to the ps3 situation, where it has all the horsepower in the world but if youre bad at coding or dont want to take the time it will be a worse game (had many examples in this generation wehre the 360 ran games so much better), but if taken the time you can get games like last of us to run.

It is kind of odd they chose two ram pools, unsure if this was due to money or some other bottleneck that xbox had to live up to. But can see it stopping the system rather than one set ram across the whole system. still this generaion seems interesting.

I think playstation might do really well again, console gamers tend to prefer a cheaper option where possible, specially if there is a big difference. Only issue right now is sony havent shown much or well anything really beyond hard ware specs. So be interesting to see if there will be a delay or not as that could shake up who might "win" the generation. Sadly for me, xbox just has very few reasons to even buy, xbox one x is on a sale due to them stopping it now and checked it out games included and they don't have any real exclusives to make me want to buy it. maybe this generation might change that, as Sony won me on that front with amazing games like God of War and horizon zero dawn and spiderman.

 

TeraFLOPS are the new polygon-per-second metric.

Remember how the PS2 had enough polygons to do Toy Story "in realtime?" Then you looked at RE4 on the PS2 vs on the Gamecube.

 

What is the XBOX hypervisor now? i never heard of it.

 

Crytek is a master at producing bottlenecks.

 

All the past Xbox's, since I believe the 360 essentially run a modified Hyper-V with the base OS then a Gaming/Application VM on top of it. They do this for security purposes, essentially sandboxing the base OS, games and applications.

VM's typically have some degree of overhead but modern Hyper-V/hardware it's extremely low if you properly pass everything through.

I'm not sure why Astyanax thinks that's the issue here because the guy doesn't mention that at all. Instead he talks about the Xbox's memory configuration which is split into two distinct speeds. It's kind of similar to Nvidia's 970 - where there is 10GB of high bandwidth (560 GB/s) and 6 gb of slightly slower (336 GB/s). So if you're developing a game that's targeting 4K (aka using lots of memory bandwidth) you need to make sure you're keeping most of the bandwidth intensive operations on that "fast" 10GB partition. I'm sure Microsoft will provide some way to pin things to the 10GB. The 6GB, while slower, is still faster than what was in the previous generation Xbox -- but I guess you can run into performance issues if you don't account for the difference in speed. I'm sure they'll be some kind of OS level heuristics that properly place things on the faster partition first and swap them in and out as necessary. Nvidia did this with the 970 to avoid placing things on the .5GB partition when not necessary.

He also mentions the fact that the clockrates are higher on the PS5.. he's basically saying if you can utilize all the CU's on the Xbox it's going to be faster, but there will be times where other parts of the architecture will be a bottleneck before you can't fill those CUs - in which case the PS5 will deliver better performance because clock speed effects the entire architecture potentially eliminating or alleviating bottlenecks in other stages (outside of the CUs).

I mean it's definitely possible the Hyper-V instance is penalizing performance a bit but again he doesn't bring it up.

 

Man oh man the BS throwing starts. "Popcorn please!!".

I'm buying both consoles like I always do, but after the proverbial dust settles after their launch this go'round....

No day one adopters here anymore....

 

This^^ Developers want something easy and fast to code so they can save time and money. I also agree that the 2 RAM pools seem a bad decision but that´s just my opinion.

 

Ali has probably now lost his job. Microsoft will not take that well.

 

yeah didn't it make the base xbox one a pain due get games running well due to ram issues. you figured that they would have learnt and just kept with a universal memory... sure its easier for coders to go off on too. I know the ps4 pro had two memory but one was for the OS only and rest for games, just odd they didn't pick fast ram all around, or slowed it down a tad and had it all as such.

Still this generation looks interesting, Sony seems to be taking on a route of normal power with impressive sound and immersian with the fast SSD and low load times. Whilst MS seem to be wanting to create a powerhouse, though i cant say in terms of power the differences are that great. Long as we get a god of war 2?6? ill be happy

 

I think he means it has more hurdles to over come than the PS5. Easier to code for in normally the console that does the best out of the gate as the games quality showcase this.

Series X has some extremely weird design choices that just baffle me, but hey I'm no hardware engineer.

But having 2 separate memory pools, different CPU configs (smt on/off), a weaker/slower Nvme SSD. All this just adds up to weird trade offs being made, limitations put into place.

Whereas you look at the PS5 hardware and it seems more balanced, with locked CPU clocks w/smt, unified memory pool, and a super fast nvme SSD that even us PC gamers don't have yet.

Sure you have a few more teraflops in the Series X but that wont make up for the other bottlenecks. This guy from Crytek isn't lying when he says all this stuff, he's just pointing out what everyone else here should be able to see.

With Toy Story having around 6-7million polygons on a single frame than yes technically the PS2 could do Toy Story in real time if it were just the polygons but you also have to factor in lighting, shading, textures, animation, etc, etc.

The PS2 had a max of 66 million polygons and the Gamecube had 12 million max but the Gamecube was different. Its custom IBM PPC codenamed "gekko" could actually perform a lot of graphical tasks it self which some developers used (Nintendo especially) to off set some of the graphic workload to the CPU, things such as particle effects, and some lighting techniques could all be done just as fast on the custom CPU. Leaving the ATi based "flipper" chip to push the polygons and texturing. So when developers added in extra effects on the PS2 that 66 million number comes crashing down, not the mention the Gamecube was clocked near double that of the PS2 294MHz to 485MHz of the Gamcube and it also had more L1 cache and actually used L2 cache which I am sure the PS2 didn't even had an L2 pool.

Gamecube was actually a very powerful machine for its time, and could do some stuff the PS2 couldn't even dream of.

 

Let's say he's right: ultimately, it won't matter. Throughout every generation of consoles, multi-platform games tend to only look as good as the worst-performing system can handle. Exclusive games always look exceptionally good.
In other words, PS5 won't "win" because cross-platform games will look pretty much the same on XSX as well. Games built only for XSX will be able to work around all of the bottleneck nuances, and take advantage of the 12TFLOPS (or close to it).

 

The interview with Ali Salehi has been deleted from twitter and I think that information about the bottlenecks has been denied by DICE staff

 

Well, if he said that from their game engine perspective, it does not apply to anything else.

 

Having different memory pool speeds and the fact that higher clocks can benefit parts of an architecture vs more cores doesn't apply to anything else? I don't know whether these things make the Xbox worse, better, whatever than the PS5, I don't even know if this interview/person is real - but you can't tell me these things only effect Cryengine.

 

How much different is XB1 hypervisor from current Windows 10 implementation? Last time I used MS hypervisor was with an old Intel Lynnfield machine, I got less then 5% performance difference in most of games, usually the delta was near 0%...