Held Back By Old Hardware (Destiny)

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Monday, December 02, 2013, 08:29 (4007 days ago) @ kidtsunami

I'm concerned because gameplay feature parity must be kept between consoles while beefing up visuals (swaying grass/weather in AC4 on PS4/XB1). I'm more interesting in the interesting opportunities we have with beefier CPUs to have better AI and smoother Networking. The AI we'll have in Destiny can run on 360 and PS3. Though is this a good thing? Will this transitional period allow them to get a good feel for the next-generation while having almost guaranteed success launching on 4 different platforms?

I'm not sure how much networking will be affected. The performance of the network itself is usually the huge bottleneck.

As for AI, define "better." If we made the AI literally brilliant, it would be difficult to design levels to actually be fun. What would truly smart AI constitute in a Bungie shooter? Probably spending most of its time hiding, with the occasional massive charge.
Tacky as it is, Halo 1's AI still gets a ton of praise, and Bungie's explaination for how they pulled it off was a fascinating tale of removing behavioral complexity.

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And about the actual capabilities of the new CPUs. In the PS3 and Xbox 360, the CPU's were nearly as large as the GPUs.

Here are die shots of the APUs in the PS4 (left) and XBO (right). Take note that the things labeled "graphic cores" are just the GPU's shaders; there's a ton of stuff around said "graphic cores" that are also parts of the GPU.

The CPUs are tiny. The XBO's CPU:GPU discrepency is substantially smaller than the PS4's, but that's because the XBO's GPU is being devoured by the cartoonishly massive 32MB SRAM pool on the right side of the chip.

Now, for most intents and purposes*, those 8-core Jaguars will very substantially outperform the CPUs in PS360. But Sony and Microsoft didn't exactly shove upclocked i7's into these consoles. What I'm saying is, don't expect crazy miracles from these things.

**'Most intents and purposes' because the last-gen CPUs have a very heavy focus on floating-point computation. The PS3's CELL could actually compete with its GPU for some types of screen-space graphical operations. There's going to be less reason to try such silliness with the CPUs in these new consoles.