A
Air Raid
This Interview comes from Edge Magazine
Q&A: Richard Huddy European developer relations manager, ATI
How do you think your work on the 360 measures up to PS3?
I take a fairly robust view on this. The Xbox 360 GPU is designed to be
a console GPU - that's what we set out to produce when we started the
collaboration with Microsoft; let's build a really powerful, really
flexible kind of general purpose GPU which doesn't have performance
cliffs where if you do certain things suddenly the performance crashes
down by a factor of two or something like that; let's have things
pretty predictable and easy to work with, and let's generate about the
best performance that we can- so we went for things like the unified
shaders and so on. The PS3 has been designed in a quite different way
because of the way the process worked. We sat down with Microsoft and
said: 'This is what we think we can build', and they said: 'Yes, but
what about...?' And they started picking holes in our design, so we
came up with a collaborative design. They didn't put a spec in front of
us and say: 'How much for this?' That definitely wasn't the dialogue -
in fact that would make it more of a monologue; it would be kind of
bidding on prices and so on. Instead what we have is a very
collaborative design.
With the PS3 my understanding of what happened is that they had three
different internal hardware solutions - at one point, for example, as I
understand it there was a proposal to use multiple Cell processors just
to handle the graphics. And towards the end of the process, as the
story goes, they took a look at the three internal tenders and decided
than none of them would actually do; none of them would deliver the
kind of performance and quality that games programmers could use and
would make for a good cost-effective console, so they had to go out and
shop around. And one of the places they shopped was Nvidia, and what
Nvidia did was say: 'Well, you've got this relatively short timeframe,
you've got roughly this kind of budget, I'll tell you what we'll do:
we'll do you a good price on what is essentially the 7800GTX'. So
that's a PC chip, and if you look at the architecture of the two
consoles you can see we've done bizarre things that they haven't. We've
built ten megabytes of dedicated ED RAM which knows how to antialias
and so on, because that's a specific way of addressing a console's
problem. It's bizarre in a PC sense but a special skill for a console
builder. Whereas the PS3 has 256 meg of system memory and 256 meg of
graphics memory it communicates through what is effectively a PCI
express bus. It uses GDDR3 fast memory, it's essentially a PC graphics
design bolted on to a Cell processor and 256 meg of fast system
memory...
You make it sound so unrefined!
[Laughs.] Well, yeah, but the tragedy is that it is unrefined. There's
a lot brute force in there - I'd be the last person to admit it, but
the truth is that the 7800GTX is a pretty powerful piece of hardware,
but it's not very elegant, it hasn't got the kind of: 'Well, how do we
design this to be the best possible console we can build for this
money?' Instead it's been put together at the end of quite a
complicated process. We have two very different design processes. If
Microsoft had come to us and said: 'All right, what are we going to do
about this graphics chip, then? Let's sign the contract and let's go',
but then we'd got two thirds through and they'd said: 'Look, you guys
aren't going to deliver - now what are you going to do?' and then
walked away from us, they would have ended up with a design very much
like the PS3 in some essential characteristics - it would have had to
use bought-in components. And our GPUs instead are custom-designed
components, and that's one of the fundamental reasons why I think Xbox
360 technology is likely to outperform PlayStation 3 technology by a
pretty healthy margin in the long run.
So how about this one: can those E3 PS3 demos be achieved on Xbox 360?
Well, why not take another combative line here? I think it's more
likely that they can be realised on an Xbox 360 than they can be on a
PS3. Those things are movies generated using whatever DCC software the
houses had in mind. The Epic demo was running on a PC, and it was done
using an early 7800 in SLI mode, so that was a high-end PC demo, but
the movies were generated as movies and dressed up as: 'This is what
you can expect from a PS3', but that's probably overstating what the
PS3 can do a little bit. Indeed, it's well beyond what we expect the
PS3 to be able to do. So I guess we'll just have to see what happens..."
Q&A: Richard Huddy European developer relations manager, ATI
How do you think your work on the 360 measures up to PS3?
I take a fairly robust view on this. The Xbox 360 GPU is designed to be
a console GPU - that's what we set out to produce when we started the
collaboration with Microsoft; let's build a really powerful, really
flexible kind of general purpose GPU which doesn't have performance
cliffs where if you do certain things suddenly the performance crashes
down by a factor of two or something like that; let's have things
pretty predictable and easy to work with, and let's generate about the
best performance that we can- so we went for things like the unified
shaders and so on. The PS3 has been designed in a quite different way
because of the way the process worked. We sat down with Microsoft and
said: 'This is what we think we can build', and they said: 'Yes, but
what about...?' And they started picking holes in our design, so we
came up with a collaborative design. They didn't put a spec in front of
us and say: 'How much for this?' That definitely wasn't the dialogue -
in fact that would make it more of a monologue; it would be kind of
bidding on prices and so on. Instead what we have is a very
collaborative design.
With the PS3 my understanding of what happened is that they had three
different internal hardware solutions - at one point, for example, as I
understand it there was a proposal to use multiple Cell processors just
to handle the graphics. And towards the end of the process, as the
story goes, they took a look at the three internal tenders and decided
than none of them would actually do; none of them would deliver the
kind of performance and quality that games programmers could use and
would make for a good cost-effective console, so they had to go out and
shop around. And one of the places they shopped was Nvidia, and what
Nvidia did was say: 'Well, you've got this relatively short timeframe,
you've got roughly this kind of budget, I'll tell you what we'll do:
we'll do you a good price on what is essentially the 7800GTX'. So
that's a PC chip, and if you look at the architecture of the two
consoles you can see we've done bizarre things that they haven't. We've
built ten megabytes of dedicated ED RAM which knows how to antialias
and so on, because that's a specific way of addressing a console's
problem. It's bizarre in a PC sense but a special skill for a console
builder. Whereas the PS3 has 256 meg of system memory and 256 meg of
graphics memory it communicates through what is effectively a PCI
express bus. It uses GDDR3 fast memory, it's essentially a PC graphics
design bolted on to a Cell processor and 256 meg of fast system
memory...
You make it sound so unrefined!
[Laughs.] Well, yeah, but the tragedy is that it is unrefined. There's
a lot brute force in there - I'd be the last person to admit it, but
the truth is that the 7800GTX is a pretty powerful piece of hardware,
but it's not very elegant, it hasn't got the kind of: 'Well, how do we
design this to be the best possible console we can build for this
money?' Instead it's been put together at the end of quite a
complicated process. We have two very different design processes. If
Microsoft had come to us and said: 'All right, what are we going to do
about this graphics chip, then? Let's sign the contract and let's go',
but then we'd got two thirds through and they'd said: 'Look, you guys
aren't going to deliver - now what are you going to do?' and then
walked away from us, they would have ended up with a design very much
like the PS3 in some essential characteristics - it would have had to
use bought-in components. And our GPUs instead are custom-designed
components, and that's one of the fundamental reasons why I think Xbox
360 technology is likely to outperform PlayStation 3 technology by a
pretty healthy margin in the long run.
So how about this one: can those E3 PS3 demos be achieved on Xbox 360?
Well, why not take another combative line here? I think it's more
likely that they can be realised on an Xbox 360 than they can be on a
PS3. Those things are movies generated using whatever DCC software the
houses had in mind. The Epic demo was running on a PC, and it was done
using an early 7800 in SLI mode, so that was a high-end PC demo, but
the movies were generated as movies and dressed up as: 'This is what
you can expect from a PS3', but that's probably overstating what the
PS3 can do a little bit. Indeed, it's well beyond what we expect the
PS3 to be able to do. So I guess we'll just have to see what happens..."