Draw calls and the future of PC gaming ports

spirits247

spirits247

spirits247

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The next gen consoles will be arriving soon and although our graphics cards and CPUs are more powerful than the APU like solutions in consoles, I have read about the "draw calls" limitation on PC's.

Apparently, PCs are CPU limited on draw calls compared to consoles due to the nature of the API's it has to run - by a massive amount. For example, a PC may manage a max of typically 2-5k draw calls, when a current console can hit 10-20k. The shear power of our PC's mean this isn't an issue with current consoles as they are limited by their GPU, CPU and RAM meaning the draw call diffference doesn't come into play.

The next consoles however are going to 8 threaded and have a massive increase in texture memory. That means they can hit a huge number of draw calls in comparison to a PC, and is another reason why they don't need anywhere near as powerful CPU in order to render the same scene as a PC.

So are we going to be CPU and texture limited for console ports? Or have we got some big improvements for draw call limitations just around the corner (or indeed optimization in directx multithreaded driver support)? Or am I missing something (I'm no expert, which is why I'm asking here). :)
 
On consoles, you can draw maybe 10,000 or 20,000 chunks of geometry in a frame, and you can do that at 30-60fps. On a PC, you can't typically draw more than 2-3,000 without getting into trouble with performance, and that's quite surprising - the PC can actually show you only a tenth of the performance if you need a separate batch for each draw call
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But it's still very hard to throw tremendous variety into a PC game. If you want each of your draw calls to be a bit different, then you can't get over about 2-3,000 draw calls typically - and certainly a maximum amount of 5,000. Games developers definitely have a need for that. Console games often use 10-20,000 draw calls per frame, and that's an easier way to let the artist's vision shine through.'
Click to expand...
 
That's the downside of such APIs as DirectX. Consoles (the PS3/4, probably the Wii/U) don't have this problem as they can be coded direct-to-metal.
 
The downside of having a major console manufacturer and game publisher also making the same API a competing platform relies upon?
 
Nvidia and Microsoft could care less about pc gaming which is why both companies decided to stop being part of the "pc gaming alliance" that never did **** all to promote pc gaming anyway....


The only 2 devs actually still part of the pc gaming alliance is surprising as well....
Capcom (loves to give us shoddy ports)
Epic games (couldnt give a toss about pc gaming and does their best to tell us how crap pc's are all the time)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_Gaming_Alliance

I believe AMD are only a contributing member now as well
 
It is a non issue. Graphics cards that launched at the same time as the 360 outperform it in multiplatform games.

Same will be true of this generation.
 
yup total non issue and very old article

pc gtx 680 top, ps4 bottom

ue4.jpg
 
whats with all the gloss and shine on the ps4 screenshot?

It looks like a game from when pixelshader cards first came out and everything had shiny applied to it :S
 
Its not uncommon for dedicated devices like that to be able to manage a higher throughput of draw calls than an equivalent PC. But if your actually running into the limits you are probably not producing very optimal code or using sloppy coding practises, theres various techniques including batching and single surface systems, texture atlas and so on that massively reduce the number of draw calls your code requires.
 
Wow that looks awesome on the PC. Doubt we will see real games that look like that for a while..
 
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