How exactly was crysis not able to run on consoles?

Submitted by skirtskirtouttie t3_zzbk03 in gaming

I understand this is probably a niche topic and most people who know anything about this are probably at least 25. i was barely in elementary school at the time of crysis' release so i didnt know anything about pc gaming back then.

I started researching the tech inside the xbox 360 and ps3. I understand the whole problem with cell processors inside the ps3 but the xbox 360 and ps3 were running some of the best of the best gpus from the mid 2000s (ps3 was kind of a modified 7800 gtx and 360 is like a modified ati X1900 from radeon).

Yet, crysis was released in 2007 and was proclaimed not to run well on consoles at the time. did desktop gpus develop that quickly or something?

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SepticKnave39 t1_j2anv25 wrote

Consoles have always been and still are equivalent to a low - mid range PC

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skirtskirtouttie OP t1_j2aoabm wrote

How do you know?

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SepticKnave39 t1_j2arqvs wrote

How do I know? Because I was there? Why do you think people buy PC's over consoles? Because they have always and will always out perform them. Consoles are the budget options, not the best option.

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Felix_the_Fossa t1_j2aovty wrote

If they weren't there would be no point in having a 30fps (now 60) FPS cap with medium graphics. If you look at how a game runs on PC vs. console it's very clear that PC will always have the potential to function better. Another thing to think about is that consoles use the same hardware for years and developers have to make sure games can run on 8 year old hardware until new consoles come out, where on PC once a part gets outdated you can just replace each individual part as you need.

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MajesticPenisMan t1_j2aph5j wrote

When crysis released there wasn’t a consumer PC you could buy that could play it on max settings. It was way ahead of its time and that’s why it turned into a benchmark. Hardware was playing catch up to Crysis, not the other way around.

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MacaronMiserable t1_j2at2av wrote

It didn't run on most PC either...

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skirtskirtouttie OP t1_j2atacb wrote

that's fair. i heard gpus couldn't render the game fast enough at max settings

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Xerazal t1_j2apg6f wrote

Biggest issue with crysis was it's CPU utilization. The engine was designed for high IPC processors because at the time, crytek assumed that fast individual cores would be the thing instead of us packing more cores into CPUs. It really didn't utilize more than 4 concurrent threads, and even then it seemed to hit 2 threads harder than anything else.

The remastered port didn't really fix this either. It's still very CPU limited, utilizing no more than 4 threads, even if you have 16 physical cores.

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skirtskirtouttie OP t1_j2aqqa5 wrote

ah ok yeah this was more along the lines of an answer i was looking for. I was looking for a hopefully more technical answer.

I assume then that the cpus in the xbox 360 and ps3 (powerpc and cell) didnt have a very high instructions per cycle back then? again i was too young to really experience that era, but the clock speeds in both seemed pretty decent

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Xerazal t1_j2bhuub wrote

Clock speed doesn't equal IPC. That's why a Pentium for processor clocked at 4ghz it's outperformed by a modern day i3 processor like 2.8 gigahertz.

The Xbox 360 is definitely more of a single threaded CPU. It's got three physical cores, each handling one thread. The PS3's so architecture is a bit different, having a single very fast core, but seven smaller synergistic processing units that are meant to run threat asymmetrically. Issue is, it's a pain in the ass to develop for.

I do genuinely think that the PS3 and the 360 could have run crysis better than they did, But it probably would required an entire engine rewrite from the ground up to better utilize multithreaded processing. It's pretty evident even today that crysis remastered shows that despite all the optimization they've done, they still haven't changed up the way that their engine handles CPU utilization. It's not a very multi-threaded engine, still hammering only a few select cores at a time rather than spreading the workload across as many cores as it possibly can.

I don't blame them for that either, it would take a lot of work to do.

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skirtskirtouttie OP t1_j2bmrz9 wrote

> Issue is, it's a pain in the ass to develop for

Agreed,that definetely does sound like a pain in the ass. I've never heard of anything like the ps3's cpu setup. Also as you've said trying to reprogram a game engine to run on such core setups sounds like hell.

> Clock speed doesn't equal IPC

I knew that part. I just recalled a simplistic theoretical equation for calculating cpu time where IPC*Clock speed*Instruction count=cpu time, So i made a crude estimate that ipc must be low. I didn't take into account any software optimizations or how the crytek engine was designed.

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AhabSnake85 t1_j2b7a2n wrote

That depends on the gamer. If you want exclusives you get consoles. Consoles cut out the bloatware of the pc operating system, and then the console gpus are usually modified. While pc gamers usually just use raw horsepower without trying to maximise and use the full potential of the gpu/cpu set up. Where as devs on consoles try to max out and learn how to squeeze out more from the gpu and cpu, on top of making software enhancements to further gaining grounds.

Giving time, it's amazing what you can achieve with low to mid end specs of a console vs hign end on pc.

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