Identifying and overcoming performance bottlenecks in modern console hardware

Abstract

The new generation of video game consoles (Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony Playstation 3) provides an unprecedented increase in processing power over its predecessors. However, this increase in computational power comes at the price of complex multi-core CPU that requires games to be optimized for parallel computation and multi-threading. Game subsystems that cannot take advantage of parallel computation effectively would then become a performance bottleneck. The aim of the project is to investigate the general hardware architecture of modern video game consoles (Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony Playstation 3) in order to identify the possible performance bottlenecks that games running on these platforms are most likely to encounter. By identifying the game subsystem that would under-perform in the modern consoles, the performance issues particular to this subsystem can be resolved resulting in a major improvement for the overall performance of the game.