Jukka Larja (roskakori2006.delete@this.gmail.com) on November 2, 2015 9:34 pm wrote:
> nobody (nobody.delete@this.gmail.com) on November 2, 2015 8:19 am wrote:
> > Symmetry (someone.delete@this.somewhere.com) on November 2, 2015 6:56 am wrote:
> > > juanrga (nospam.delete@this.juanrga.com) on November 1, 2015 8:16 am wrote:
> > > > Games? Most people don't game on octo-cores, and many enthusiasts will prefer octo-core
> > > > Skylake. You also seems to omit the DX12 benchmark given to you. Even assuming that Zen
> > > > is 50--60% faster than Piledriver, octo-core Zen was behind quad-core Skylake on the game.
> > >
> > > I'd just like to point out that, baring causal gaming, most
> > > people play on an XBox or Playstation so actually
> > > do play games on octo-cores. Most modern AAA games are written for an octo-core system with PC support
> > > frequently tacked on as an afterthought and now that graphics drivers are moving to multi-threading I think
> > > that 8 cores or 4 SMTed cores will probably be the best gaming configuration going forward.
> >
> > Both consoles currently only have 6 cores used for games
>
> I think Xbox One has had "about seven" cores available since spring, unless
> you want to use Kinect. PS4 should have seven cores available in new SDK,
> but I'm not sure if any games have yet been released that support it.
>
> However, I'm somewhat skeptical about how well even AAA games are utilizing all the cores. Xbox 360 had
> six threads available and PS3 had SPUs. It didn't follow that all AAA games were multi-threaded well.
>
> As for comparisons to PC, even though Jaguar core is great leap forward from Cell and
> Xenon, it's still quite far from Haswell and Skylake. I wouldn't be surprised if a high-clocked,
> dual-core desktop i3 beat consoles even on well-threaded game code. I'd be very, very
> surprised if a quad-core i5 would lose with just about any game code.
>
> -JLarja

On the 360 and PS3 AAA titles used every scrap of every processing resource available. In fact the progress made in visual fidelity over their lifetimes was by and large attributable to hiving off as many GPU functions to the CPU as possible. AAA games in the last few years of that console cycle were very well threaded and exhaustively tuned to the hardware. The threading models were not feasibly transferable to an x86 CPU and so 'basic' versions of ingenious schemes were put in place for the move to the Windows space, hence the poor multicore awareness often displayed in PC versions.

I would myself be very surprised if a big hitting i3 could beat the consoles given how intensely the code is optimized to sidestep Jaguars limitations and work to its strengths. The effort gone to avoid cache misses for example is quite remarkable. With the i5 yeah you have a point but the on-paper capabilities of the console CPU cores are in practice substantially magnified by the software engineering behind their SDKs and games.