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Comment by winternett | Hacker News Reader

The real excitement will come when it does not require a new $3000 graphics card to run on the home PC I already spent $1500 on...

The price of keeping up with every new enhancement on PC is directly linked to each new engine update, but somehow game releases can be "optimized" for gameplay on ~3 year old consoles... Also why I haven't bought any new PC games since GTA5.

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And that is the super exciting, mind blowing thing about this, this ran on the Xbox Series X/PS5! In fact, it even runs on then Xbox Series S with a small visual downgrade, which is the cheap version with 1/3 the GPU power of the Series X (at 4 tflops, it is perhaps very roughly equivalent to a GTX 1060 from 2016). This is a triumph of software, not hardware. I imagine you should be getting a lot of use still out of your current rig.

> This is a triumph of software, not hardware

Purpose built gaming hardware has significant advantages over a typical PC. Modern consoles have SoC designs with incredible bandwidth between CPU/GPU/RAM that you simply can't have on upgradable form factors.

The closest thing in the general purpose computing world are the M1 family of SoC MacBooks. UMA on the M1 in particular could be harnessed to have physics and graphics geometry in sync with each other without the penalty of bus transport - so things like high-detail deformable environments become much more feasible. But again, even these machines are geared towards general purpose computing, not graphics.

> Modern consoles have SoC designs with incredible bandwidth between CPU/GPU/RAM that you simply can't have on upgradable form factors.

So where's the PC platform with these advantages? I mean, most PC players will replace their whole system instead of upgrade individual components (anecdotal / speaking for myself). Where's the PC-like-a-console?

I guess the Steam Deck will be the one to look out for. But I would also expect gaming laptops to have those advantages.

The PC market has found a local maxima that prevents it from getting there.

You need the CPU, GPU, motherboard, and RAM to be one product shipped by one company, but instead you've got a CPU from Intel, a GPU from AMD/Nvidia, a motherboard from the PC manufacturer, and off the shelf RAM.

"Gamers" want an Intel CPU because of the branding (although this is shifting towards AMD now), they want a particular graphics card because of branding, they may even care about the specific motherboard and/or RAM.

Apple are able to do this console-like integration and performance because their target market don't care enough about each individual component, the Mac is the product and the brand they get behind. PS5 owners aren't buying it because of the brand of CPU.

I don't think it's brand loyalty on the part of end customers, it's just unlikely and difficult for a number of large vendors to coordinate on such a project. You would need motherboard, CPU and GPU designers to take a long bet on a new form factor, while also cutting their bottom line (SoCs require less components and better performance for money)

I think the speed advantage would be one welcomed by the average PC user, and if Intel aren't already colluding to make an answer to M1, they're heading towards extinction

Do you really need that much bandwidth between cpu and gpu? On a pc the the gpu has its own memory and the memory bandwidth of for example a 3070 is greater than the memory bandwidth of Xbox.

Would this demo not run on a pc?

I understand that pc hardware is more expensive but it was also my understanding that performance ceiling is actually much higher than consoles, especially after the next gen of pc hardware comes out after a console release.

It’s hard to tell how much more expensive a pc is because of console manufacturers’ loss leader accounting.

CPU and GPU are good at different tasks, but transferring any amount of data across the PCI bus is pretty expensive, forcing you to use both in a suboptimal way. If you have fast enough data transfer between them then you can do SIMD-like tasks much faster on the GPU, while doing a lot of tasks that naturally involve branching faster on the CPU, using whichever processor is faster and has spare capacity instead of whichever has the data.

This is correct. CPUs are better suited for arbitrary execution (e.g., physics, game logic, networking) whereas the GPU is suited to highly organized data structures and massively parallel computation. Things that require dynamic effects can benefit greatly from reducing dispatch times between GPU/CPU. UMA, as featured on M1 and the PS4, permit almost instantaneous transfer, save for cache coherency issues. The nexus of real time physics solvers and graphics rendering I think is the next step in taking advantage of SoC and UMA

Ok but in practice what can you do on console that you can’t do on pc?

I mean you could run a database or a spreadsheet on a console, but it wouldn't be a good fit. The benefits of a console are the price-to-performance ratio for gaming applications, whereas the trade-offs on PCs are geared toward general purpose computing and browser speed. And as I've explained a few times in other threads, SoC and UMA architectures permit certain types of processing (such as destructible/deformable environments) to become feasibly performant. Ultimately a console process everything as a PC can, and vice versa, it's just consoles are more performance tuned for gaming, and the other has to cater for the lowest common denominator.

One of the advantages of fixed hardware is you can tune for that hardware directly. We used to bake content and design code with specific cache line sizes in mind. If you know you have a fixed memory budget for graphics/sound/etc you can make specific tradeoffs on where you spend that budget. PCs until recently did not have UMA and so you were bound by bus speeds(although this applied to some consoles too but you could exploit it if you knew how, ex: stream audio data from graphics memory and long as you stayed under the total bus bandwidth you got extra memory for the system if you needed it).

> One of the advantages of fixed hardware is you can tune for that hardware directly

With UE5, it's the engine that tunes the rendering quality for the HW available.

I have found I don't update my PC for years but the games just keep looking better. A lot of newer techniques, Raytracing excluded, seem to be much more efficient at making good looking models without much geometry. It's all shaders, decals and image maps. Running a 1080p monitor helped that alot. I recently upgraded to a 1440p, and it has cost me frames no doubt.

> Raytracing excluded

about that - screen space ray tracing has been around a while, and even if you miss little things (no diffusion from lights off screen or behind a shade) the resulting eyecandy is often enough to trick people mind even if it's not physically correct... and three generation older hardware is more than enough to run that.

GPUs are $3000 because of Bitcoin, not Unreal Engine.

The demo runs on consoles.

This is a console demo, not a PC demo (unfortunately or fortunately, however you want to look at it). It runs on the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S which cost 500 USD.

The PS5 is $500 if you can find it, there's been shortages for over a year, the effective price is $900 on Ebay where you can actually get one without waiting.

You can get one off r/hardwareswap for MSRP usually and is delivered within a few days

This is so true, yet so totally besides the point.

I managed to get two, a digital (€400) and a Blu-ray model (€500) a few weeks ago from Carrefour here in [redacted].

It is a bit of a pain having to monitor stock drops but most online stores have a queue system in place as well as purchase limits to try and make life harder for people that buy up every console they have to just put them on eBay at twice the price.

A colleague of my wife managed to get a PS5 in a fnac store a few weeks ago as well. Just went in randomly and asked and they had them in stock. Only a few and they sell out quick so was just luck in that instance but if you put in a little effort you can get one in a week or two (depending on stock allocation of course) without having to pay over the MRSP.

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