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I think games that use take advantage of high parallelism would do better on the 8 core devices. We just don't see much of that kind of game in the mobile marke

by TwoBit 12y ago

I think games that use take advantage of high parallelism would do better on the 8 core devices. We just don't see much of that kind of game in the mobile market.

TylerE 12y ago
We don't see that on the _desktop_ market.
- zanny 12y ago
  We also don't see many 8 core chips on the desktop market. Chicken and egg problem. Very few people have the incentive or funds to get either the hyperthreaded i7s (which don't really have 4 cores), the 8 core Xeons or the 8 core AMD high end parts.
  - TylerE 12y ago
    Very few games can even use two threads to full capacity.
mikeash 12y ago
Aren't games of all stripes typically GPU bound rather than CPU bound these days, if they're complicated enough to be limited by the hardware at all? If so, dedicating more area to GPU cores would be better for them.
- ZoF 12y ago
  Depends on the game really; but generally yeah, the GPU will be the bottleneck. Games with a large number of calculations will be CPU bound though; StarCraft 2 is a good example of that.
vardump 12y ago
Because both CPU and GPU are generally on the same bus in mobile devices, maybe you could use those extra CPU cores as fragment/pixel shaders, if memory and cache architecture doesn't prevent it. On PCs that is not feasible, because of bandwidth and latency issues over PCIe. On mobile SoCs, who knows, maybe it'd work. Just like in current PS3 titles, that offload shading from GPU to SPUs.
- Narishma 12y ago
  PS3 games don't offload fragment shading to the SPUs, that would be too slow and leave the pixel shading hardware on the GPU idle. Remember that the PS3 has separate vertex and pixel shaders. What they usually offload is post-processing, mostly for anti-aliasing.
  - vardump 12y ago
    I was talking about a technique where deferred rendering, GPU is used in modern PS3 games to render surface normals, material index, Z-buffer, texture color, etc. in a buffer. Typically 128 bits per pixel. This buffer is then DMA transferred to SPUs, where final lighting and fragment shading is performed. Final step is to transfer 32-bit RGB data back to GPU's frame buffer for displaying. Here's a link about one implementation: http://www.slideshare.net/DICEStudio/spubased-deferred-shading-in-battlefield-3-for-playstation-3 http://www.slideshare.net/DICEStudio/spubased-deferred-shadi...

by TwoBit 12y ago

I think games that use take advantage of high parallelism would do better on the 8 core devices. We just don't see much of that kind of game in the mobile market.

TylerE 12y ago

We don't see that on the _desktop_ market.

zanny 12y ago
We also don't see many 8 core chips on the desktop market. Chicken and egg problem. Very few people have the incentive or funds to get either the hyperthreaded i7s (which don't really have 4 cores), the 8 core Xeons or the 8 core AMD high end parts.
- TylerE 12y ago
  Very few games can even use two threads to full capacity.

mikeash 12y ago

Aren't games of all stripes typically GPU bound rather than CPU bound these days, if they're complicated enough to be limited by the hardware at all? If so, dedicating more area to GPU cores would be better for them.

ZoF 12y ago
Depends on the game really; but generally yeah, the GPU will be the bottleneck. Games with a large number of calculations will be CPU bound though; StarCraft 2 is a good example of that.

vardump 12y ago

Because both CPU and GPU are generally on the same bus in mobile devices, maybe you could use those extra CPU cores as fragment/pixel shaders, if memory and cache architecture doesn't prevent it. On PCs that is not feasible, because of bandwidth and latency issues over PCIe. On mobile SoCs, who knows, maybe it'd work. Just like in current PS3 titles, that offload shading from GPU to SPUs.

Narishma 12y ago
PS3 games don't offload fragment shading to the SPUs, that would be too slow and leave the pixel shading hardware on the GPU idle. Remember that the PS3 has separate vertex and pixel shaders. What they usually offload is post-processing, mostly for anti-aliasing.
- vardump 12y ago
  I was talking about a technique where deferred rendering, GPU is used in modern PS3 games to render surface normals, material index, Z-buffer, texture color, etc. in a buffer. Typically 128 bits per pixel. This buffer is then DMA transferred to SPUs, where final lighting and fragment shading is performed. Final step is to transfer 32-bit RGB data back to GPU's frame buffer for displaying. Here's a link about one implementation: http://www.slideshare.net/DICEStudio/spubased-deferred-shading-in-battlefield-3-for-playstation-3 http://www.slideshare.net/DICEStudio/spubased-deferred-shadi...