Xbox One & Playstation 4 CPU Performance Information From Allegorithmic on Texture Generation | Exclusive Interview

CrimsonRayne 15th June 2014 0 Comments

The subject of both the Playstation 4 and Xbox One’s CPU’s has taken a slight backseat compared to chatter regarding their GPU and memory performance. There are likely a few reasons for this, the first is the GPU and memory configurations between the two next generation consoles is a great deal different than their CPU’s. The second reason is in comparison to the performance of their graphics processors, data regarding the performance of their respective CPU’s has been a little thinner on the ground.

Allegorithmic released a benchmark late last year, showing off the texture performance of a CPU compared to a desktop’s I7, and Andy Tudor (a developer behind Project Cars) was also quoted in saying their CPU performance was “quite slow” when compared to that of a higher end desktop CPU.

Allegorithmic’s numbers were a little open to debate however, as to begin with it said “1 CPU” – which could have meant either 1 CPU (as in the entire processor), the a single CPU core, or the performance of an AMD Jaguar Module. Giles Fleury, the Technical Art Director over at Allegorithmic, has reached out to us at RedGamingTech and kindly provided a little clarification on how the results were reached, along how the tests were conducted.

“I know quite well this figure since I designed the algorithm used to get these numbers,” began Giles Fleury, “So maybe I can provide some information.”

“This algorithm is coming from one of our tool: Bitmap To material, it creates a full materiel from a color map (normal map, height map, ambient occlusion, specular, glossiness, height etc). And then compress the obtained image in a dds DXT format. The values you saw in the figure are about how many DXT compressed pixels we can generate per second on various hardware.”

Regarding on if it was the entire CPU, a module (the AMD Jaguar in both systems is two modules, each containing four X86-64 CPU cores) or a single core, Giles provided clarification “However there is a small mistake in the figure, these numbers are not relative to a whole CPU but to a single core. The 14MB.sec vs 12MB.sec vs 26MB.sec was only one one PS4, XB1 and I7 second generation core.”

So using these new figures from Giles over at Allegorithmic, we now know that per CPU core of the Playstation 4 we get 14MB/s and XBox One hits 12 MB/s. For those who’re unfamiliar with the second generation I7. This would mean a Sandy Bridge I7 CPU, so either a Intel I7 2600 or a Intel I7 2700.

Mr Fleury then added, “Also the algorithm is based on shaders computation in texture space (VS screen space) so it can be compared to CPU based shader language operations, with tasks such as image rasterization, image interpolations, per pixel offset, blurs etc.”