Are console games still closer to metal than PC games?

[justiceiro]

So, guys, looking at the development diary of the atari VCS, and how much closer consoles architecture these days ressemble PC, and how much features the consoles offer in parallel, like voice chat, music app and even streaming, I wonder how much of a advantage is to use console hardware instead of just computer hardware. There are still a big gap? Does console still does anything plainly better than PC because it's a console instead of just a PC? Does PC offer more access to low level operations than once did?

 

[Deleted member 3208]

These days on PC, you just need to install Steam or another launcher and then it handles everything. Steam is better here because it has features like recognizing instantly a DS4 or a Switch Pro Controller, Big Picture Mode, screenshots, free cloud saves, game updates, etc.

Overall, I would say playing on PC is quite easy.

 

[hikarutilmitt]

These days on PC, you just need to install Steam or another launcher and then it handles everything. Steam is better here because it has features like recognizing instantly a DS4 or a Switch Pro Controller, Big Picture Mode, screenshots, free cloud saves, game updates, etc.

Overall, I would say playing on PC is quite easy.

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I think this is more about performance itself rather than ease of use, though that isn't without its own merits.

The thing about the consoles is that even just the OS can be tuned to the specific CPU/architecture and that has gains on its own (even with modern hardware, it all adds up). The VCS approach is exactly what I'd expect, especially from Sony and Nintendo, as they both use FreeBSD as a base for their OS, which means they can compile into the kernel literally only the drivers they know the system needs and then module anything else that needs to be supported. This helps a lot with memory management and more quickly loading what they need on demand. I would assume MS does something similar, but the One is running with a modified Windows stack.

So, to answer OPs question, I imagine the PS4 and Switch are, but it may also depend on the access given to the dev. It's entirely possible there's "generic" API that the 3rd party devs get to use for cross-platform work or other things but closer stuff like 1st and 2nd party devs get specific APIs for the hardware. Sort of like if you were programming a game for Windows to just use Xinput for a controller rather than raw or even DirectInput (or, more recently, DirectX vs Vulkan, though not to the same degree).

 

[whiskas_fanatic]

Yes, I think so. When I see kind of visuals Uncharted 4 or Detroit achieve on standart PS4, it's just plain magic to me.

To elaborate a bit, I think when developers have to optimize their game for one (now two) configuration they have much more time and resourses to put in, instead of testing and optimizing for hundreds configs on PC.

 

[justiceiro]

I think this is more about performance itself rather than ease of use, though that isn't without its own merits.

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Exactly

 

[sbkodama]

First party engines probably still use some custom, but the gap have been reduced a lot with the og xbox and directx then steam and opengl.

 

[molnizzle]

Without question. Some of the visuals I've seen from Sony titles on my slim PS4 practically look a generation ahead of what is possible on comparable PC hardware.

 

[Drelkag]

Consoles are easier to target since the hardware is mostly fixed. In that way you can get a lot more for the specs.

Though, most of the time, a games budget is comparable to how great it looks. There was a lot of money put into games like Uncharted 4. It's not that a PC can't run it, just that very few PC games come close budget wise.

 

[Ghil]

There is still some advantages, especially with first party custom engines, but overall, especially when using general engines like unreal and using the whole stack, it's not as great a performance boost as it once was, but then again, ease of coding has gone through the roof in recent years.

 

[DJ Lushious]

I would assume MS does something similar, but the One is running with a modified Windows stack.

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I'm completely talking out of my ass here, but wouldn't Microsoft have the advantage here, since they have a whole division that created and maintains their operating system? I mean, sure, the Xbox One OS is surely a branch, but I'm thinking logically here.

This is definitely something I'd love to read more about, though; it's all so interesting, even if my feeble mind can't possibly comprehend some of the more advanced ideas behind computer programming at that level.

 

[Aztechnology]

I mean in some fringe cases yes (Horizon, GoW and some other notable FP). But I think overall, it's more just settings and optimizations that would be achievable on a similiarly spec'd PC and extra tweaking.

 

[CopyOfACopy]

I would say console exclusives are, Nintendo and Sony first party games are usually more impressive. And lead platform games should perform better than the ports to other systems

 

[bionic77]

I don't think it's a huge difference but talking out of my ass I am sure they can squeeze a little bit extra.

Consoles don't use custom chips anymore. They are just using cheap PC parts.

It's not like the old days when Rare or other companies could do software magic on the hardware due to an actual understanding of the metal.

 

[Ghil]

I mean in some fringe cases yes (Horizon, GoW and some other notable FP). But I think overall, it's more just settings and optimizations that would be achievable on a similiarly spec'd PC and extra tweaking.

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I don't think it's a huge difference but talking out of my ass I am sure they can squeeze a little bit extra.

Consoles don't use custom chips anymore. They are just using cheap PC parts.

It's not like the old days when Rare or other companies could do software magic on the hardware due to an actual understanding of the metal.

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You have to realise that it's not just the hardware, but the software stack that's running on it. While yes the architecture is now X86, the ps4 is running a custom OS with a barebones kernel that loads only what needs to be loaded (There's not thousands of different parts for drivers to load) and the software that's properly done for that setup will take advantage of both the reduced stack and the limitations which are mostly the same (there's two configs now with the X and Pro models, but still)

 

[Aztechnology]

You have to realise that it's not just the hardware, but the software stack that's running on it. While yes the architecture is now X86, the ps4 is running a custom OS with a barebones kernel that loads only what needs to be loaded (There's not thousands of different parts for drivers to load) and the software that's properly done for that setup will take advantage of both the reduced stack and the limitations which are mostly the same (there's two configs now with the X and Pro models, but still)

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I do realize that, that's why I said there's still cases where it's true. But largely the quality/power divide has shrunk in terms of those optimizations. And it'll likely only continue to shrink over time. It's certainly become less noticeable in recent history.

 

[GameAddict411]

It's been a debate for years now. As a programmer and engineer student, working on making a program work for a specific hardware target will significantly yield better results, and performance. My program will take in account the shortcoming of the hardware, but also leverage it's strength. I imagine this is what game developers do when they develop games for consoles. This is not even taking in consideration the API or tools that the developers have. When it comes to API efficiency I don't know much, but we have read over the years how developers have a very low level access to the hardware. What does that mean? I would imagine something related to using assembly, and also instruction sets with little to no overhead. The thing is I am not sure how feasible this is considering it's very time consuming to do basic stuff this way over C/C++.

 

[bionic77]

You have to realise that it's not just the hardware, but the software stack that's running on it. While yes the architecture is now X86, the ps4 is running a custom OS with a barebones kernel that loads only what needs to be loaded (There's not thousands of different parts for drivers to load) and the software that's properly done for that setup will take advantage of both the reduced stack and the limitations which are mostly the same (there's two configs now with the X and Pro models, but still)

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I am no expert but it seems like the big games are made to run on PC and the consoles and I have not heard or read of anything substantial that first parties have come up by going straight to metal.

Way back in the day they could just write up some crazy shit and have the hardware do things no one thought it was possible to do (like displaying more colors, playing more sounds, AA, etc).

Would love to hear how I am wrong and that some first party companies are still doing crazy shit.

 

[Crayon]

Mmm... Closer to the metal in this sense: You have dev tools for consoles that are helping you figure out exactly, precisely, when each frame is going to spit out. And you can count on every machine out there hitting the same profile like a swiss whatch. That's big. You can go pretty hard in terms of getting everything right up to that limit.

But the console chips aren't turning out more work than the equivalent pc chips. At least not by a significant margin.

 

[Deleted member 17092]

Can you put windows on that Atari VCS?

 

[inner-G]

I don't think so, because most of the technically impressive console games only run at 30fps

Even potato PCs can run stuff at 30fps and 60 is usually the minimum you would want.

 

[Crayon]

Can you put windows on that Atari VCS?

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I'm wondering about OS installing, myself. Despite red flags left and right, I'm still interested in the vcs. But I want it to echo the old Atari home computers, and I would want to be able to put on any linux distro I like. I guess that would make it flat out more valuable, too. If you could repurpose it as a desktop, load steam OS 3, etc.

 

[MegaMix]

I feel another big factor that makes this difficult to judge is that it's relatively rare to find games that push hardware to the very limit as much as before, especially multiplatform games. Lots of PS4 titles can run on the Switch just fine with minor notable graphical downgrades for example.

 

[AfropunkNyc]

Gotta push that power more performance wise also to impress me. Graphics alone ain't impressing me. I need to see 60fps with great graphics.

 

[Dussck]

Console exclusives are developed with the limits in mind. Devs need to pull out all their tricks and learn some more to raise the graphical bar once again. I always wonder if we would have the graphics we know today if PC was the only platform. Since you can always upgrade the hardware so the platform scales and the graphics with it.

 

[Vipu]

Console exclusives are developed with the limits in mind. Devs need to pull out all their tricks and learn some more to raise the graphical bar once again. I always wonder if we would have the graphics we know today if PC was the only platform. Since you can always upgrade the hardware so the platform scales and the graphics with it.

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If PC was the only platform we would have a lot more physics and other cpu intensive things in game, probably minimum fps of 60 too that devs aim for.

 

[Smartlord]

The answer is no. What console exclusives have are a focus on optimizing one single performance target, and a big budget. It's the reason why even Switch exclusives can look very impressive. The Switch, PS4, and One are all using APIs just like what's on PC to draw their graphics. At this point I can't imagine the overhead is much lower on consoles considering they all are running multitasking OS's.

While there may be some great debug tools and dev tools that first party devs have access to, anyone who knows how computers work can tell you that modern chips just can't realistically be engaged with at a "to the metal" implementation. Even the PS3 and 360 killed that notion, it's not as if games were being written in assembly commonly. It's all "low level" languages like C, just as on PC.

 

[collige]

Console exclusives are developed with the limits in mind. Devs need to pull out all their tricks and learn some more to raise the graphical bar once again. I always wonder if we would have the graphics we know today if PC was the only platform. Since you can always upgrade the hardware so the platform scales and the graphics with it.

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If PC was the only platform, it still wouldn't make financial sense to release games that can only run on a fraction of PCs.

 

[Bjones]

It's not about coding to the hardware these days as much as developing for set limits.

But pc has really only been hindered by whatever else is running on your pc more than any abstraction layers. Consoles can still keep a tight grip on the os environment which helps a lot.

 

[Alexandros]

This generation showed that there is no meaningful performance gap between similar hardware on PC and console anymore. Back when this generation's hardware was announced, the estimates on performance proved to be right on the money. In the real world you can expect a console's GPU to perform roughly the same as a PC GPU of similar horsepower.

 

[justiceiro]

Mmm... Closer to the metal in this sense: You have dev tools for consoles that are helping you figure out exactly, precisely, when each frame is going to spit out. And you can count on every machine out there hitting the same profile like a swiss whatch

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As someone working in hardware development, no, this is not exactly true. The variations between same model console are bigger than we believe. Some developer even comented about that in the past.

 

[bruhaha]

Absolutely yes. If console devs didn't use certain tricks such as assuming certain clock speeds or exact amount of memory available or how fast a certain GPU is at rendering a certain shader, you wouldn't have as pretty games on console.

If they coded more generically, you wouldn't have needed patches for Pro and X enhancements and older games should simply run fine with faster CPU and GPU speeds. Instead, you have "Boost Mode" which only ups the GPU speed because increasing CPU speed on older PS4 games would break things and even then certain games break.

 

[ArnoldJRimmer]

The main advantage consoles had was mostly CPU overhead, but thats diminished a lot thanks to modern apis on PC.

 

[senj]

One thing consoles still have going for them currently is the UMA memory setup and the ability of the GPU to read said unified system memory at a ridiculously high rate in cache-incoherent mode. This is as opposed to the Windows-type setup where you have to go through essentially the virtual memory subsystem on WDDM systems to ask for memory allocations that may-or-may-not be allocated on the card, and then spend time copying data into and out of that special region of memory to communicate between the GPU and CPU.

The APIs used to be finer grained/lower level, too, but that's changed with Vulkan and DX12

 

[AshenOne]

As someone working in hardware development, no, this is not exactly true. The variations between same model console are bigger than we believe. Some developer even comented about that in the past.

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I personally think that this is one of the major differences when one's console of the same model gets borked way earlier than another user's, etc. Most likely a silicon lottery of sorts.

 

[bruhaha]

As someone working in hardware development, no, this is not exactly true. The variations between same model console are bigger than we believe. Some developer even comented about that in the past.

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This is kind of moving the goalposts from your original question. The gulf in variation between the worst and the best binned PS4 APUs vs the differences in PC matrix of GPUs from GTX 760 to RTX 2080 and dozens of Intel and AMD cpus is massive.

 

[hikarutilmitt]

As someone working in hardware development, no, this is not exactly true. The variations between same model console are bigger than we believe. Some developer even comented about that in the past.

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This isn't really the same thing, though. Hitting the lottery with the best binned parts is not the same as actual, legitimate hardware variation. Even comparing a bad CPU to a good CPU, they're still of the same make and model and still the target as they are. This isn't the same as requiring to hit, say, an i3 versus a Ryzen 3 1200, or even the variations between the different i-series and Ryzen series. Differing quality of the components versus the components themselves is not something they have to plan for, though it's nice when they try to, because if you don't plan against the oldest model PS4 versus the newest Slim, there's a (slim) chance some users may have issues that others do not even though the rest of the underlying hardware is the same.

 

[Dussck]

If PC was the only platform, it still wouldn't make financial sense to release games that can only run on a fraction of PCs.

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That's the whole thing: it always runs, you just set the shadows to blobs, texture to medium and foliage off. There's barely any need to optimize with that in mind. :)

The truth is different ofcourse, devs will always want to make a prettier game than the one before. Maybe it doesn't change a thing, but it's something I wondered about.

 

[Arulan]

Potentially yes, but in real-world performance no. The introduction of APIs like Vulkan eliminated most of that overhead. Additionally, hardware choices like using an underpowered CPU makes any potential gains meaningless to a buying decision, as even budget builds (at the time of launch) had far better CPU selection.

I still expect to see a lot of people lose their minds with the hype of new console releases, and believe in it all over again.

 

[Dalik]

It's not that hard to make a pretty game with average 15/20fps

 

[Smartlord]

It's not that hard to make a pretty game with average 15/20fps

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This is a pretty good point too. When you are aiming for much lower average framerates you can get more out of your hardware. Most PC gamers just refuse to play games at 30 fps.

 

[impact]

It's not that hard to make a pretty game with average 15/20fps

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Yea, which makes the Horizon Zero Dawns all the more impressive.

Nutty visuals, great HDR and the game feels smooth as hell compared to like a Far Cry 5.

 

[KillLaCam]

Yeah I prefer pc gaming but you can do alot more when you only have to target 1 set of hardware like console exclusives do

 

[Dalik]

This is a pretty good point too. When you are aiming for much lower average framerates you can get more out of your hardware. Most PC gamers just refuse to play games at 30 fps.

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Count me in that category, i dont play games without at least 60fps.

 

[dom]

Of course they are. Just looking at PC should tell you this. Nvidia's GPUs perform far better than AMD's GPUs because of their drivers. When we use a lower level API like Vulkan in DOOM, you see performance increase far more on AMD's side because of how bad their drivers can be.

 

[Ox Code]

The definition of an operating system is an abstraction layer between the applications and the hardware. So if you want to talk about console games and 'coding to the metal' then you'd be going farther back than you'd probably think, and that's not even talking about third party video game engines (or even first party ones for that matter).

Keep in mind that the phrases 'coding to the metal' and 'targeting specific hardware' are not the same thing.

 

[Ultranist]

Didn't the ps3 have some cpu cores and some memory locked for security and staff but on PC you can fully utilize your system minus some overhead on games with denuvo DRM?