David Kanter (dkanter@realworldtech.com) on 10/1/10 wrote:
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>Ian Ameline (ian.ameline@gmail.com) on 10/1/10 wrote:
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>>David, I'm sorry to tell you that if I have my way, your >law will not hold. :-)
>
>>I work on software that scales with GPU performance >(reasonably well, and getting
>>better) and that is used to create the high resolution >meshes, displacement maps
>>and textures for video games (and film).
>
>>(shameless plug)
>>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIC7e4zBuhM
>>(/shameless plug)
>>
>>(helps to see it in high def -- some of what is going on >is a little too subtle to be seen at 320p)
>>
>>If we are successful, the family of tools we produce will >keep the costs of in-game
>>asset creation from increasing on an exponential curve as >your law posits.
>
>>Textures, displacement maps and meshes are very easy to >down-sample so games can run on more limited hardware.
>>
>>In fact, many assets for both film and games are produced >at much higher resolution
>>than needed because it is expensive to re-do them if it >turns out later that something needs to be more detailed.
>
>I was half joking : ) I certainly hope it doesn't hold. But my point is really
>about the cost (on a project basis) of asset creation. Is the cost of asset creation
>very closely tied to down sampling? I would expect the cost of down sampling to
>a lower resolution asset to be very low next to the cost of creating the original.
>
>Put another way, I think the root of the cost is that once upon a time, your master
>assets were much smaller than they are today. In fact, the master assets may even
>be smaller than some of the down sampled assets today.
>
>>ps. Your comment on IGP exceeding console performance >assume that new consoles
>>won't be coming out. They will, and they almost certainly >be much faster than any contemporaneous IGP.
>
>No, I expect new consoles. I just don't expect them very soon. I think there
>will be a brief period where IGPs will match/exceed consoles.

Sony and MS are relaunching their current consoles with new input accessories. Normally such innovations are tied to a new console launch so that every console user has the same basic setup. I take these relaunches as an indication that Sony and MS are willing to prolong this console generation further.

Nintendo has had relatively good success with the Wii and doesn't have the same financial burdens as launching a new console as MS and Sony

>Heck, I'd guess that SB and Llano will exceed the Wii's low power hardware.

I think you are a bit out of touch with what the console hardware actually provides. The Wii's graphics capabilities are on the level of the [i]original[/i] Radeon. It has no programmable vertex or pixel shaders, just fixed function units. The key difference between the Wii and the Gamecube are clock speed and memory capacity: functionality didn't change. The last couple generations of integrated graphics have been able to surpass the Wii. In fact, recent smart phones are able to provide better graphics in games.

The Xbox 360 has 240 shaders the way AMD counts them on their Radeon cards. Their capabilities are between DX9 and DX10. MS had ATI develop hardware towards an early draft of the DX10 spec but that later changed on the PC side. As such, the Xbox 360 has a few features beyond the DX10 specification like tessellation and is lacking in other areas. Think of the Xbox 360's GPU as roughly a Radeon 2600 in terms of performance. The innovative feature on the Xbox 360's isn't its shaders but the usage of eDRAM for storing the frame and z-buffers. The 16 ROPs are on the same die as the eDRAM. The on-die bandwidth is great enough to allow 'free AA'. If it wasn't for the relatively strong AA performance of the Xbox 360's GPU, integrated graphics would be roughly on par already. SB and Llano will likely surpass it.

The PS3 is a bit of a different beast. It's GPU is stuck between a Geforce 7600 and 7800 in terms of performance. Shader configuration is similar to the Geforce 7800 but its RO and memory configuration mimics the Geforce 7600. SB and Llano integrated graphics should have no problem surpassing just the PS3's GPU. The catch with the PS3 is Cell which clouds the comparisons. On its own, Cell is able to provide a higher polygon throughput than the PS3's own GPU. Cell also gets handed some post processing work that'd normally be done on the GPU in some games. I still think that SB and Llano will be able to surpass what can be with Cell and the PS3's GPU working together on pure graphics.

The real barrier on the PC isn't hardware but rather the software stack. Developers on both consoles and PC get to work with similar API's on both platforms. The difference is that the console API's are thin as they only have to be designed to run on one set of hardware. PC frameworks are a bit fatter and have numerous additional services running in the background that eat up performance. So while integrated solutions have caught up to console hardware, they are still handicapped by the PC software ecosystem.