Unreal 'Samaritan' demo requires ten times Xbox 360's processing power
Epic founder Tim Sweeney talks about the power requirements to handle the Unreal Engine 3 "Samaritan" demo, shedding new light on the increased requirements for UE4.
Epic Games vice president Mark Rein recently teased that the company will show off Unreal Engine 4 sometime this year. Whether or not the next generation consoles will even be powerful enough to take full advantage of it, though, is another story entirely.
Speaking at DICE (via Kotaku), Epic Games' Tim Sweeney said that the impressive "Samaritan" demo would require 2.5 teraFLOPs, while the current Xbox 360 can only handle .25. So to handle that in real-time, the next iteration of the Xbox would have to be ten times as powerful as the current generation. That's for a particularly impressive "Unreal 3" demo; the computational power needed for Unreal Engine 4 could vary.
Rumors have placed the next Xbox at six times the 360's processing power, short of the ten-fold increase required for Samaritan. Given Epic's intent on making sure UE4 ready on day one of the next generation, something will have to change. Epic did push Microsoft into raising RAM on the Xbox 360, and has been vocal about memory for the next generation, so the company has proven it can sway hardware decisions.
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replySteve Watts posted a new article, Unreal 'Samaritan' demo requires ten times Xbox 360's processing power.
Epic founder Tim Sweeney talks about the power requirements to handle the Unreal Engine 3 "Samaritan" demo, shedding new light on the increased requirements for UE4.-
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they may have to turn off the beard tech
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That makes sense. A assload of shader work being done there.
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I'm guessing the Engine will get toned down a bit, not too much but definitely not what we saw in the demo, at least not real time.
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Ehh, all the tech shown in the Samaritan demo was added to the UDK within a month or so of the demo. Samaritan demo = UE3.
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Unless they manage to find a way to do it more efficiently in the next engine it won't show up like that on even next gen consoles, not for a long time at least.
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Current estimates are more like 6x but it wouldn't be out of the question.
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2π times
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I remember early on it was said the 360 was 10x faster than Xbox 1. And funny enough later Sony said the PS3 was 30x faster than the PS2. Where at the time the Xbox 1 was 3 times faster than the PS2 or something. So in the end the 360 and PS3 by marketers were basically equal.
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Yeah, the sort of specs they're claiming would be required for this actually aren't so bad in computer hardware terms. I'm not sure how practical it would be for even the next generation of consoles though. I mean, Microsoft and Sony do take a loss when they release a new system, but the question is how much of a loss they're willing to take.
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They demoed it on a then-current gaming PC at GDC 2011, if I recall correctly, and I think that system might have had SLI or Crossfire. If the next-gen consoles are getting taped out now, I imagine them having a midrange low-power 2011-era chipset, maybe 2012. Remember that the 360's video chipset is a variant of the same architecture in the ATI 9800 Pro, and most games are rasterized at something less than 1280 x 720. 1080p at 60 FPS? Maybe next-next-generation.
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The 360's chipset is approximately equal to a Radeon X1850 IIRC, significantly more powerful than the 9800.
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I would wager that if Microsoft doesn't raise their memory, Sony will just to steal the carpet out from under them.
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I'm sure they will, it's incredibly cheap.
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I just don't see the next gen consoles having a crazy amount of power, no doubt they will be a lot faster. I think the original estimate of ~6 times faster is pretty accurate.
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I think it's more like 12. Which would definitely have been possible if they had intended on taking the same size loss per console (and console price) as last time, which they aren't.
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Yes, we can. SLI some Quadros.
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True, but processor performance is closely related to transistor density.
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This used to be the case, but we are starting to hit physical limitations, and its becoming more about many cores and parallelisation.
http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm
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EIPC MEETING
- CliffyB
"Hey Tim, check out our awesome new engine demo!"
- TimS
"That won't run on any consoles, even next gen"
-CliffyB
"But it will run on great on the PC!!"
"Umm, but we don't make PC games anymore Cliffy"
-CliffyB
"Still, people won't know any of that for at least another year and by then we'll get wicked press, and besides, it will get me on TV again!"
Cliffy Runs Out of room shooting UPS man with Nuff gun shouting QUAD DAMAGE!
-TimS
"God, not that I believe in you or anything but why the hell did you let me stop programming!?"
EPIC! MEGA GAMES! "Everything we ripoff is new and original*"
*to 14 year olds -
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