Console Optimization

[.Ruby]

When we think of TF(teraflops) we assume this is the total output  of a gpu. However there is more to the fact than just tflops. Carmack mentioned something that you can get twice the output from a console than on PC (I don't remember the exact quote so I may be exaggerating a bit). In regards to Scorpio, could you could achieve 4K 60fps on High-Ultra on 6TF?

[xendrome]

4 minutes ago, .Ruby said:

Carmack mentioned something that you can get twice the output from a console than on PC

1080 Ti alone offers 11.5 tf, so no you can't.

[The_D0lph1n]

The 6 TFLOPS value is the maximum theoretical throughput of the hardware. With perfect optimization, the GPU can perform 6 trillion floating point ops per second. Now what Carmack was talking about was that on PC, due to hardware abstraction layers, there is a lot more overhead, so PCs have a harder time reaching the limits of the hardware. So if you had a 6 TFLOPS GPU on a PC, maybe you could get at most 4 TFLOPS of computation power out of it because of the overhead eating away at your performance. On console, because hardware is fixed and there is less need for hardware abstraction, you can perhaps get 5 TFLOPS or 5.5 TFLOPS from that same GPU. Note that I'm pulling these numbers out of thin air for illustration purposes; I don't know the exact amount of overhead from the different APIs. But there were benchmarks done by AMD a few years back showing how the last-gen consoles (X360 and PS3) could easily handle 30,000 draw calls per frame while PC code using DirectX 11 choked on anything more than 10,000.

 

Regarding 4K and stuff, remember that graphics rendering is a pipeline, and a pipeline is only as fast as its slowest component. Adding more TFLOPS (basically shader power) is meaningless if the bottleneck is memory bandwidth, or rasterizer throughput, or any of the other things in rendering that aren't dependent on computational throughput. The good thing is that Scorpio has much higher memory bandwidth than the Xbox One, so it should be less of a bottleneck. But hitting 4K 60fps is just as much about what you're trying to render.

[.Ruby]

3 minutes ago, xendrome said:

1080 Ti alone offers 11.5 tf, so no you can't.

Is a PC's optimization the same though? There's a lot of inefficiencies in console ports because developer's main sales revenues are on consoles. I bring this up because if devs focused on one video card example 1080TI then you could squeeze out all that performance.

[+Nik Louch Subscriber²]

Just now, .Ruby said:

I bring this up because if devs focused on one video card example 1080TI then you could squeeze out all that performance

IF they wrote directly towards the hardware rather than the abstraction layers that reside between hardware and software.