News - Developer: "consoles couldn't possibly handle" Star Citizen

[HEXUS]

Elsewhere in space, Xbox One and PS4 ports of Elite: Dangerous may be on the way.

Read more.

[shaithis]

While I can't see myself buying a next gen console anytime soon and PC-exclusives do peek my interest....I find it very odd that a dev would say consoles couldn't handle it.

If 8GB RAM, 8 cores and a DX11 GPU part cannot play it, I doubt many PCs will.....yet he says that it will run on lesser PC specs. I smell something unpleasant.

Won't run or cannot be bothered to get it to run? Either way, for a crowd-funder project, they are missing out on a potentially gigantic revenue stream.

[scaryjim]

Elite: Dangerous on console wouldn't be particularly surprising - they (mostly Ian Bell, as far as I can tell) managed to hack the original Elite onto the NES*, which is a pretty impressive feat. I kept an eye on the kickstarter and some of the videos on there (of them testing early dev code) showed them playing with gamepads, so I'd be surprised if, although they targeted PC first, a console port wasn't in mind fairly early on.


*Ian Bell has said in the past that the NES version was his favourite 8-bit Elite. An emulable version is available on his website, if anyone's interested in googling it up...

[warriorscot]

While I can't see myself buying a next gen console anytime soon and PC-exclusives do peek my interest....I find it very odd that a dev would say consoles couldn't handle it.

If 8GB RAM, 8 cores and a DX11 GPU part cannot play it, I doubt many PCs will.....yet he says that it will run on lesser PC specs. I smell something unpleasant.

Won't run or cannot be bothered to get it to run? Either way, for a crowd-funder project, they are missing out on a potentially gigantic revenue stream.

8Gb shared memory, most new gaming PCs have over 8Gb of system memory and 16Gb has been the low to mid level for a couple of years at least, right now 32Gb isn't unusual and 64Gb is starting to be seen on high end systems. Not to mention dedicated video memory is 2Gb these days and rapidly increasing. To put it in perspective a PC with 16Gb of memory a good i5 faster than in a PS4 with twin GPUs and 2Gb of video memory will get you low settings in SC. That still looks great but it barely runs so a PS4 has no hope as it just doesn't have the processing power and memory to keep up. Not to mention SC is going to capitalise on DX12 and Mantle.

[JGJones]

While I can't see myself buying a next gen console anytime soon and PC-exclusives do peek my interest....I find it very odd that a dev would say consoles couldn't handle it.

If 8GB RAM, 8 cores and a DX11 GPU part cannot play it, I doubt many PCs will.....yet he says that it will run on lesser PC specs. I smell something unpleasant.

Won't run or cannot be bothered to get it to run? Either way, for a crowd-funder project, they are missing out on a potentially gigantic revenue stream.

8GB RAM - it's shared between the GPU and the CPU. CPU get a much smaller amount of memory, but it's *very* fast on the other hand.
8 core - it's a low end AMD CPU at around 1.6GHz. It doesn't even compare to what we can get for desktop's - or even laptops. A mobile i3 would run rings around it. However on the other hand games made for these consoles probably make more efficient use of multiple threads in order to maximise all cores
DX11 GPU - The PS4's GPU is comparable to a AMD HD 7870 (roughly slightly below a Radeon 270X) but apparently even the XBOX One struggles to do a full HD resolution for games?

Console's advantage in hardware is that it's a fixed target, so devs can make specialised code to maximise the hardware to its full potential, but this take time and technology wait for no-one.

I would think that for Star Citizen to not be able to run on console is perhaps down to amount of memory and CPU rather than the GPU. Just a guess really.

[scaryjim]

... Console's advantage in hardware is that it's a fixed target, so devs can make specialised code to maximise the hardware to its full potential ...

... I would think that for Star Citizen to not be able to run on console is perhaps down to amount of memory and CPU rather than the GPU. Just a guess really. ...

more like they can't be bothered to do the first bit - i.e. optimise the game for a known target hardware specification.

Don't believe the hype about how slow the Jaguar core is - sure they don't have a lot of straight line speed, but that only matters for a DX11 game - where one thread handles most of the graphical work and (potentially) slows down the render. 8 jaguar cores at 2GHz (which was the target speed last time I checked) should handily beat most mobile i3s in well threaded loads - look at Athlon 5350 reviews and if you double the score for tests that scale well with threads - cinebench or wprime, for instance - you'll see 8 jaguar cores would be right up there with desktop i3s, let alone mobile ones.

Then, of course, coding closer to the metal in consoles means you can potentially get even more out of both the CPU and GPU - so if you know you're targeting 8 slowish threads, 1280 GCN shaders and 8GB of shared ultra-fast RAM, there's no good reason you can't implement your game within those restrictions. Anytime I here someone say they can't do something with a set of restrictions, I always take it with a health handful of salt...

[Trotar]

The difference is that Elite Dangerous is build with their own in-house engine which is cross platform. Meaning they obviously have in dept knowledge on how to most efficiently use that engine.

SC on the other hand uses Cryengine, which they are modding to work with double precision. I'm sure they are happy when they finaly get that working without having to worry about making it work cross-platform as well.

[TheAnimus]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...arisgesch1.JPG

Shots Fired!

[Ttaskmaster]

'The SC game will take advantage of everything a high-end PC can offer... but it will not be neccesary', is what I got from that.
However, I also keep seeing some pretty high specs bandied about as being the minimum required...

Consoles probably can *run* the game, but don't have enough buttons on the controllers, or something.

You'd have, what... Pitch and Roll on the right stick, with the D-Pad on the left controlling Yaw and accelerate/brake. You will probably want the two right triggers to fire weapons, which leaves you just the two left ones, the four ABYX buttons and perhaps two shoulder buttons for all the other commands, many of which will be needed almost simultaneously.

Unless you're going to get very complicated, or can connect up a keyboard/HOTAS, there simply aren't enough controls on a console for all the game commands.

[anselhelm]

8Gb shared memory, most new gaming PCs have over 8Gb of system memory and 16Gb has been the low to mid level for a couple of years at least, right now 32Gb isn't unusual and 64Gb is starting to be seen on high end systems.

Wait... what?

I'm sorry, but this just isn't true unless you're looking at the very high-end only. The standard for gaming PCs is still 8GB with 16GB being the high level. 32GB is for developers or highest-end PCs only.

I'm not saying that more RAM isn't useful, but I think you've a disproportionate (i.e., high-end) sense of what spec computers most gamers have or would be able to afford if they had the cash.

Other than that, I agree with the rest of your comments about how relatively underpowered the latest gaming consoles are compared to PCs.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

more like they can't be bothered to do the first bit - i.e. optimise the game for a known target hardware specification.

Don't believe the hype about how slow the Jaguar core is - sure they don't have a lot of straight line speed, but that only matters for a DX11 game - where one thread handles most of the graphical work and (potentially) slows down the render. 8 jaguar cores at 2GHz (which was the target speed last time I checked) should handily beat most mobile i3s in well threaded loads - look at Athlon 5350 reviews and if you double the score for tests that scale well with threads - cinebench or wprime, for instance - you'll see 8 jaguar cores would be right up there with desktop i3s, let alone mobile ones.

Then, of course, coding closer to the metal in consoles means you can potentially get even more out of both the CPU and GPU - so if you know you're targeting 8 slowish threads, 1280 GCN shaders and 8GB of shared ultra-fast RAM, there's no good reason you can't implement your game within those restrictions. Anytime I here someone say they can't do something with a set of restrictions, I always take it with a health handful of salt...

The CB score for a quad core Jaguar based SOC is clock for clock similar to a SB Core i3 AFAIK. That means an 8 core would be equivalent to a mobile SB Core i7 at similar clockspeeds.

[Ttaskmaster]

I'm sorry, but this just isn't true unless you're looking at the very high-end only. The standard for gaming PCs is still 8GB with 16GB being the high level. 32GB is for developers or highest-end PCs only.

I don't know if it's even that...

Looking at the stats on Steam, I see that even my rig (which is considered quite poxy and pathetic by the standards of most PC gamers I know) is well above a large percentage of what people on Steam overall are using!!

That said, how many lower-end gamers will be wanting to run SC on their rigs?
Based on several forums, it seems an awful lot of folks are piling on the pounds/dollars/zlotties by the thousands, in order to upgrade just for this one game...

[scaryjim]

... Consoles probably can *run* the game, but don't have enough buttons on the controllers, or something. ...

See my post above re: running original 8 bit elite on a NES. Yes, a NES. 4-way D-pad and two buttons. Anyone who played the original on BBC will know just how mad that sounds, yet they made it work. All it needs is a bit of imagination. As I said, I strongly suspect "consoles couldn't handle our game" actually means "we can't be bothered to make our game work on consoles".

[ZaO]

Consoles are running x86 Cpu's for a start. Star Citizen needs 64bit for the massive universe (according to Chris Roberts). Or have I misunderstood something? I think the Gpu's in the consoles will probably be the thing to hold them back the most. But it's not like they couldn't just make a smaller and less complex version of the game for consoles, if they really wanted. But this is what I like about it. They're putting the pc first. Which is something we don't see much of these days. This game is even gonna be on Linux!

In past interviews, CR did show interest in getting SC on consoles. So I still wouldn't rule it out. But if it happens, it'll probably be at least a year after the full release is out for pc..

[p4ul]

Consoles are running x86 Cpu's for a start. Star Citizen needs 64bit for the massive universe

Both PS4 and XB1 have 8GB of system RAM which is more than the 4GB limit of 32bit. So they must have 64bit in there somewhere!

I think like a few others have said, it's just a case of them not wanting to make the effort to get the game out for other platforms. Because of the very successful backing campaign they have much less to lose by making it exclusive to only one platform.

Also is it possible the game will not be finished for another several years, by which time the PS5 and XB2 would be ready? ;D

[Corky34]

Consoles are running x86 Cpu's for a start.

AFAIK x86 doesn't strictly mean 32bit, it just caught on as a way to describe 32bit.