8 ms·

Unreal Engine 4 on OpenPOWER

93 points by amock 10y ago

vvanders 10y ago
Back when I worked on a UE3 title we actually used machines not too far off(basically more RAM) from final specs so that we wouldn't build things that could never be run on a reasonable PC/X360/etc. Giving a developer a machine close to an end users definitely incentivises a focus on fast, performant code. However having faster asset cooking is always a good thing.
- jaegerpicker 10y ago
  Faster build machines should always available to devs. Machines to test on should be the average of the end users.
  - vvanders 10y ago
    Yup, we'd use IncrediBuild to keep build times down to something reasonable. Unless you're working on something very console specific most of your day to day testing happens on PC. Even titles that don't have a PC port will have a PC version of the game since iteration time is so much quicker. Having something close in specs there means you'll see perf issues right up-front as opposed to when QA gets around to testing it the next day.
    - jeremiep 10y ago
      I recently worked on a AAA port where we had roughly 220Ghz worth of processing power hooked on IncrediBuild; a full rebuild still took about 15 minutes! We had to make the engine sit on the PSVita and for that reason did all the development, debugging and testing on that platform. We even debugged a release build most of the time because the debug one wouldn't go above 5fps!
- TrevorJ 10y ago
  Most of the time, you end up running the editor and the game so for many things a faster machine is helpful.
shmerl 10y ago
>OpenPOWER systems allow you to keep your valuable assets and proprietary engine code safe and secure through full owner control What does it mean? It's some form of DRM pitch?
- amock 10y ago
  Yes. It's about not having anything like Intel's ME running code you can't audit or control that has full access to your hardware. It's basically the same pitch as for Libreboot https://libreboot.org/ https://libreboot.org/.
  - shmerl 10y ago
    I.e. it's DRM-free pitch? That's the opposite of what I first took it for.
    - PeCaN 10y ago
      Yes, it's a DRM-free pitch. I suppose “Keep your … proprietary code safe” could seem DRM-related but “full owner control” is an FSF-y anti-DRM catchphrase.
      - cyphar 10y ago
        It's a very odd mix, pitching user freedom with "proprietary engine code" as the example of data that is protected.
    - Karunamon 10y ago
      There's a blurb at the bottom of the Talos machine's page (same page, hit the link on the bottom left) about how they can't divulge certain details of the PCIe system. Plenty of room for backdoors and other shenanigans in there. Which kind of undermines the entire claim...
- cm3 10y ago
  OpenPOWER is really open, including the chip's firmware (https://github.com/open-power https://github.com/open-power), and there's no embedded management chip as found in Intel or AMD CPUs.
EvgeniyZh 10y ago
If you're interested in it - support this pull request: https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/pull/2585 https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/pull/2585
- ivl 10y ago
  If you're getting a 404, it's not because of an error in the URL. You need to sign up here: https://github.com/EpicGames/Signup https://github.com/EpicGames/Signup
  - cyphar 10y ago
    I'm not going to sign up because their marketing pitch for making the engine "free[sic]" doesn't specify if they mean it is actually free software or just gratis + some proprietary source code you get a copy of. Do you know which is the case? My hunch is it's probably the latter because they ask for royalties.
    - bluesilver07 10y ago
      It's free as in beer, and you get to look at the source code. It's not libre software.
      - cyphar 10y ago
        sigh Figured as much.
        stevehawk 10y ago
        ? you expect them to GPL a triple A game engine?
        cyphar 10y ago
        Yes. Why not?
rdtsc 10y ago
Nice. There was an Anandech article here not too long ago showing pretty nice improvement over Intel in some cases: --- All in all, the maximum throughput of one POWER8 core is about 43% faster than a similar Broadwell-based Xeon E5 v4. Considering that using more cores hardly ever results in perfect scaling, a POWER8 CPU should be able to keep up with a Xeon with 40 to 60% more cores. --- http://www.anandtech.com/show/10435/assessing-ibms-power8-part-1/11 http://www.anandtech.com/show/10435/assessing-ibms-power8-pa...
- doikor 10y ago
  Big thing to also take from that article is that the POWER8 uses over 2 times as much power as the Xeon E5 v4. Depending on the use case this can be very important.
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    If single-threaded performance or memory bandwidth is more important to your use case then POWER8 would steamroll a Xeon E5 v4 even factoring in the power usage, I'm actually looking at trying to get a S812LC at work to eval moving one of our very heavy transactional PostgreSQL databases to for this very reason (having to run a seq scan over a 80GB table would benefit heavily from the increased memory bandwidth).
    - gpderetta 10y ago
      As per article linked by the OP, the single threaded performance of the POWER8 is 87% of the Intel CPU at the same clock [1]. The per-core performance is higher thanks to the 8 thread SMT capability of POWER8 (although the sweet spot is normally 4) and its massive 8-way execution. So POWER8 is excellent for heavily threaded applications, but for pure single thread speed, Intel is still king. [1] IIRC POWER8 and Intel CPUs peak at around the same clock speed.
Qantourisc 10y ago
I'm happy to see usable non x86 hardware ! But we still have to solve emulation. I wonder if there is a way to decompile and recompile binaries. In theory it SHOULD be possible to convert what the CPU is asked to do, back to what the program does, and then convert it to another CPU. An implementation like this would have a huge impact on new platform giving them a fighting change, allow competition without vendor lock-in.
- versteegen 10y ago
  Machine code translation is exactly how Intel Atom Android phones support apps containing native ARM code. Intel has a translator from ARM to x86 or x86_64 called Houdini. (I never managed to find any detailed information about it, it's propriety). Even if you're developing an app for Android using the NDK you may not realise that your phone doesn't have an ARM processor. Few people bother to ship x86 binaries, and the fact that works so well is why they still don't even as x86 devices become more common (they're mostly tablets). Compatibility is around 80% of apps [0], and the performance hit is somewhat substantial (e.g. 2x) but doesn't matter for most apps. [0] https://regmedia.co.uk/2014/04/30/watt_compatibility_large.jpg https://regmedia.co.uk/2014/04/30/watt_compatibility_large.j... [1] https://commonsware.com/blog/2013/11/21/libhoudini-what-it-means-for-developers.html https://commonsware.com/blog/2013/11/21/libhoudini-what-it-m...

93 points by amock 10y ago

Back when I worked on a UE3 title we actually used machines not too far off(basically more RAM) from final specs so that we wouldn't build things that could never be run on a reasonable PC/X360/etc. Giving a developer a machine close to an end users definitely incentivises a focus on fast, performant code. However having faster asset cooking is always a good thing.

jaegerpicker 10y ago
Faster build machines should always available to devs. Machines to test on should be the average of the end users.
- vvanders 10y ago
  Yup, we'd use IncrediBuild to keep build times down to something reasonable. Unless you're working on something very console specific most of your day to day testing happens on PC. Even titles that don't have a PC port will have a PC version of the game since iteration time is so much quicker. Having something close in specs there means you'll see perf issues right up-front as opposed to when QA gets around to testing it the next day.
  - jeremiep 10y ago
    I recently worked on a AAA port where we had roughly 220Ghz worth of processing power hooked on IncrediBuild; a full rebuild still took about 15 minutes! We had to make the engine sit on the PSVita and for that reason did all the development, debugging and testing on that platform. We even debugged a release build most of the time because the debug one wouldn't go above 5fps!
TrevorJ 10y ago
Most of the time, you end up running the editor and the game so for many things a faster machine is helpful.

shmerl 10y ago

>OpenPOWER systems allow you to keep your valuable assets and proprietary engine code safe and secure through full owner control What does it mean? It's some form of DRM pitch?

amock 10y ago
Yes. It's about not having anything like Intel's ME running code you can't audit or control that has full access to your hardware. It's basically the same pitch as for Libreboot https://libreboot.org/ https://libreboot.org/.
- shmerl 10y ago
  I.e. it's DRM-free pitch? That's the opposite of what I first took it for.
  - PeCaN 10y ago
    Yes, it's a DRM-free pitch. I suppose “Keep your … proprietary code safe” could seem DRM-related but “full owner control” is an FSF-y anti-DRM catchphrase.
    - cyphar 10y ago
      It's a very odd mix, pitching user freedom with "proprietary engine code" as the example of data that is protected.
  - Karunamon 10y ago
    There's a blurb at the bottom of the Talos machine's page (same page, hit the link on the bottom left) about how they can't divulge certain details of the PCIe system. Plenty of room for backdoors and other shenanigans in there. Which kind of undermines the entire claim...
cm3 10y ago
OpenPOWER is really open, including the chip's firmware (https://github.com/open-power https://github.com/open-power), and there's no embedded management chip as found in Intel or AMD CPUs.

EvgeniyZh 10y ago

If you're interested in it - support this pull request: https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/pull/2585 https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/pull/2585

ivl 10y ago
If you're getting a 404, it's not because of an error in the URL. You need to sign up here: https://github.com/EpicGames/Signup https://github.com/EpicGames/Signup
- cyphar 10y ago
  I'm not going to sign up because their marketing pitch for making the engine "free[sic]" doesn't specify if they mean it is actually free software or just gratis + some proprietary source code you get a copy of. Do you know which is the case? My hunch is it's probably the latter because they ask for royalties.
  - bluesilver07 10y ago
    It's free as in beer, and you get to look at the source code. It's not libre software.
    - cyphar 10y ago
      sigh Figured as much.
      - stevehawk 10y ago
        ? you expect them to GPL a triple A game engine?
        cyphar 10y ago
        Yes. Why not?

rdtsc 10y ago

Nice. There was an Anandech article here not too long ago showing pretty nice improvement over Intel in some cases: --- All in all, the maximum throughput of one POWER8 core is about 43% faster than a similar Broadwell-based Xeon E5 v4. Considering that using more cores hardly ever results in perfect scaling, a POWER8 CPU should be able to keep up with a Xeon with 40 to 60% more cores. --- http://www.anandtech.com/show/10435/assessing-ibms-power8-part-1/11 http://www.anandtech.com/show/10435/assessing-ibms-power8-pa...

doikor 10y ago
Big thing to also take from that article is that the POWER8 uses over 2 times as much power as the Xeon E5 v4. Depending on the use case this can be very important.
- snuxoll 10y ago
  If single-threaded performance or memory bandwidth is more important to your use case then POWER8 would steamroll a Xeon E5 v4 even factoring in the power usage, I'm actually looking at trying to get a S812LC at work to eval moving one of our very heavy transactional PostgreSQL databases to for this very reason (having to run a seq scan over a 80GB table would benefit heavily from the increased memory bandwidth).
  - gpderetta 10y ago
    As per article linked by the OP, the single threaded performance of the POWER8 is 87% of the Intel CPU at the same clock [1]. The per-core performance is higher thanks to the 8 thread SMT capability of POWER8 (although the sweet spot is normally 4) and its massive 8-way execution. So POWER8 is excellent for heavily threaded applications, but for pure single thread speed, Intel is still king. [1] IIRC POWER8 and Intel CPUs peak at around the same clock speed.

Qantourisc 10y ago

I'm happy to see usable non x86 hardware ! But we still have to solve emulation. I wonder if there is a way to decompile and recompile binaries. In theory it SHOULD be possible to convert what the CPU is asked to do, back to what the program does, and then convert it to another CPU. An implementation like this would have a huge impact on new platform giving them a fighting change, allow competition without vendor lock-in.

versteegen 10y ago
Machine code translation is exactly how Intel Atom Android phones support apps containing native ARM code. Intel has a translator from ARM to x86 or x86_64 called Houdini. (I never managed to find any detailed information about it, it's propriety). Even if you're developing an app for Android using the NDK you may not realise that your phone doesn't have an ARM processor. Few people bother to ship x86 binaries, and the fact that works so well is why they still don't even as x86 devices become more common (they're mostly tablets). Compatibility is around 80% of apps [0], and the performance hit is somewhat substantial (e.g. 2x) but doesn't matter for most apps. [0] https://regmedia.co.uk/2014/04/30/watt_compatibility_large.jpg https://regmedia.co.uk/2014/04/30/watt_compatibility_large.j... [1] https://commonsware.com/blog/2013/11/21/libhoudini-what-it-means-for-developers.html https://commonsware.com/blog/2013/11/21/libhoudini-what-it-m...