News & Rumors: Xbox One (codename Durango)

[Xenio]

Your made-up math alone leaves a 20-90 dollar per-unit gap in RAM costs.
Are you sure there's not some wiggle room to fit R&D in the production savings across 70 million units?

and where's the logic thinking that microsoft that is a money-burner have to reduce of few dollars the price of the console, making it inferior and *more difficult to develop for*, while sony that have money problems in all its sectors, can burn money in a 18-cu gpu and 8 GB of gddr5?
is the world turned upside-down?

unless the 599 US dollars will repeat

 

[MrFox]

is the world turned upside-down?

Yes. It looks like the roles are reversed this gen. (on the hardware side, at least)

 

[DJ12]

It's simple really, Sony have something to prove.

Microsoft don't.

You need to see the bigger picture. Wii sold for a profit from day one, and sold more than both it's competitors by a fairly big margin with a vastly inferior product. You don't need a business masters to see that business model has suddenly become a very real option for a company that essentially wants to make money, not please angry forum kiddies.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

So we have other speculations.
If my numbers (they are not mine, except the cost of move engines) means nothing, care to prove that durango is focused on price?

No because I don't know the business strategy. It's a possiblity. In a world of a lot of unknowns, the only thing we know about Durango is what the hardware was as of January. If we start from that, it makes a lot more sense that MS were aiming for value over maximum power. Maybe that's not the case and they just screwed up their design? Whatever, surely it makes sense to start with a known and see how the unknowns fit around that, rather than start with an unknown like "MS want a powerful machine" and interpret everything around that ("ergo the rumoured specs are false because the 1.2 TF APU isn't a powerful design").

and for the low-power, it is not a portable console, so who matter if it is a 90-120W machine and what is the useless advantage over a 150-180W machine as could be a far more powerful console?

Of course, but you have no idea what the long term intentions are. Maybe MS have an eye in a $99 set-top box in two years time? We don't know any of that, which means we're in no position to interpret their moves.

 

[Xenio]

It's simple really, Sony have something to prove.

Microsoft don't.

You need to see the bigger picture. Wii sold for a profit from day one, and sold more than both it's competitors by a fairly big margin with a vastly inferior product. You don't need a business masters to see that business model has suddenly become a very real option for a company that essentially wants to make money, not please angry forum kiddies.

both microsoft and sony aim to gain some casuals

ND. thanks to Shifty Geezer for his apreciated answers

 

[3dilettante]

and where's the logic thinking that microsoft that is a money-burner have to reduce of few dollars the price of the console, making it inferior and *more difficult to develop for*, while sony that have money problems in all its sectors, can burn money in a 18-cu gpu and 8 GB of gddr5?
is the world turned upside-down?

Is it $1.4billion more difficult to develop for?
How is it inferior, if the end result does not lead to a significant loss in unit sales and hardware sales?
How many sales are lost per GFLOP of lost peak FP throughput? What about scenarios where eSRAM can lead to higher performance?

Is it so difficult to develop for that developers simply won't make games for it?
Are they complaining about developing for the 360, since the ESRAM is at the very worst "same idea, just better"?


The manufacturers are making certain bets as to the market impact and changes in manufacturability over time, based on their research and market predictions.
Each of them has different strengths when it comes to software and physical implementation of the chip and surrounding hardware.
Sony may have higher confidence in its ability to cost-reduce on a package and PCB level, and may be more pessimistic about silicon node transitions and its ability to sell developers on exotic software models.
Microsoft has had some bad luck with physical implementation, while it has a software advantage and possibly desired synergies with other device types, which Sony may not be counting on.

 

[bkilian]

So we have other speculations.
If my numbers (they are not mine, except the cost of move engines) means nothing, care to prove that durango is focused on price?
and for the low-power, it is not a portable console, so who matter if it is a 90-120W machine and what is the useless advantage over a 150-180W machine as could be a far more powerful console?

I'm not sure what you're trying to work towards. Is your claim that there must be some magical benefit because you can't understand why the choices were made in the way they were made?

Also, you're using the concept of "advantage" wrong. To a console maker, two things are important: Sales Volume, and Unit Cost. Increasing the utility (power, usefulness) of a console increases it's sales volume (how many sell). Decreasing utility decreases unit cost. So 8GB DDR5 increases utility, but also massively increases unit cost. The challenge is to balance the utility and unit costs at the point that satisfies your business plan. Console makers redesign consoles (at a cost of millions of dollars) to save a single dollar unit cost. In Kin, we did things like remove a single 2c LED.

Producing a 90W console over a 180W console will save millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars over the life of the console due to cheaper cooling solutions and smaller console enclosures. If you can do that without reducing the utility too much, you have your advantage.

Remember, the goal of a console maker is not to make the most powerful console. It's to make the cheapest console you can that will still sell to tens of millions of users.

if they reveal 12-16 GB of DDR3, the whole ram+eSRAM will cost more tha 8 GB gddr3, don't you agree?

No.

 

[Xenio]

Is it so difficult to develop for that developers simply won't make games for it?
Are they complaining about developing for the 360, since the ESRAM is at the very worst "same idea, just better"?

(I quote a part of your answer but I've read it all)

for what I know the "inferior version" on common multiplatform games is what backslashed PS3, would be crazy that Microsoft goes to this route, within 11 days we'll know

anyway, esram is here more for virtual texturing, gp gpu computing etc and maybe framebuffer tilling, while edram was here only for framebuffer, I don't think that it's the same idea
if a tiled complex deferred shading engine is the best way to use the eSRAM, it could introduce a lot of problems to developers


edit:

I'm not sure what you're trying to work towards. Is your claim that there must be some magical benefit because you can't understand why the choices were made in the way they were made?

Also, you're using the concept of "advantage" wrong. To a console maker, two things are important: Sales Volume, and Unit Cost. Increasing the utility (power, usefulness) of a console increases it's sales volume (how many sell). Decreasing utility decreases unit cost. So 8GB DDR5 increases utility, but also massively increases unit cost. The challenge is to balance the utility and unit costs at the point that satisfies your business plan. Console makers redesign consoles (at a cost of millions of dollars) to save a single dollar unit cost. In Kin, we did things like remove a single 2c LED.

Producing a 90W console over a 180W console will save millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars over the life of the console due to cheaper cooling solutions and smaller console enclosures. If you can do that without reducing the utility too much, you have your advantage.

Remember, the goal of a console maker is not to make the most powerful console. It's to make the cheapest console you can that will still sell to tens of millions of users.

this, in my eyes, pretty much confirm 1.2 TF and DDR3

 

[3dilettante]

The rumored eSRAM can, at the very least, do most of the things the 360's eDRAM could do, besides the "free" AA, if a developer actively avoids using all its other capabilities.

This is assuming that there aren't a number of things a graphics runtime, developer tools, or middleware can't automate, which is something Microsoft should have a decent idea about these days.

 

[DJ12]

Can it still give "free" AA?

360s eDRAM had far higher bandwidth, just about 100gb/s more.

 

[Xenio]

Can it still give "free" AA?

360s eDRAM had far higher bandwidth, just about 100gb/s more.

I doubt it, 32 MB eSram takes 9 times the space of 10 MB edram, and gives 102 GB/s vs 256 GB/s

 

[3dilettante]

Can it still give "free" AA?

360s eDRAM had far higher bandwidth, just about 100gb/s more.

For a lot of modern games, no.

The bandwidth to the daughter die is 32 GB/s.
The internal bandwidth for the ROPs there is 256GB/s.

The rumored specs for Durango give a more flexible total bandwidth level, and ROP and GPU have their own bandwidth amplification capabilities.

 

[bkilian]

Oh, in addition, I see people continuously refer to this as a "war", where there can be only one winner. I don't see it that way. A console is either successful, or unsuccessful.

In my mind, a successful console is one that has a large enough userbase (or potential userbase, for unlaunched consoles) that game developers cannot easily ignore it. PS3, 360, and Wii were all successful consoles. Wii U - from statements made by EA and others, so far not successful. Will PS4 be successful? Almost certainly. Durango? I hope so, but we don't know enough about it yet to predict. Early indications are good, game developers do not seem to be ignoring it.

Note, you can be a successful console (according to my criteria) and still not be profitable, but that's the trick. It's easy to get millions of people to buy your device, it's much harder to do that and still make a profit.

 

[Xenio]

Oh, in addition, I see people continuously refer to this as a "war", where there can be only one winner. I don't see it that way. A console is either successful, or unsuccessful.

In my mind, a successful console is one that has a large enough userbase (or potential userbase, for unlaunched consoles) that game developers cannot easily ignore it. PS3, 360, and Wii were all successful consoles. Wii U - from statements made by EA and others, so far not successful. Will PS4 be successful? Almost certainly. Durango? I hope so, but we don't know enough about it yet to predict. Early indications are good, game developers do not seem to be ignoring it.

Note, you can be a successful console (according to my criteria) and still not be profitable, but that's the trick. It's easy to get millions of people to buy your device, it's much harder to do that and still make a profit.

Well, I think that you have to extend a bit your idea. A console can be not profitable in hardware, but the royalities on software and the presence in the market are more valuable in my opinion.
And the power of the console is important too.

Take the wii, there's how much, 100 milions out there? more? but the bad hardware make the third party games looks like crap and nobody buy a "COD" or a "BATTLEFIELD" on such inferior hardware.. guess what, third party developers then leaves wii in the dust.
if durango sells 50 milions of consoles and Orbis 100 milions and nobody will buy third party games but only halo, forza and gears, I see black clouds coming in the microsoft'sky


anyway, seem they have implemented inter-generation gaming between Infinity and 360

http://destinyhub.net/content/79-Cross-Gen-compatibility-(somewhat)-confirmed-for-Xbox

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Well, I think that you have to extend a bit your idea. A console can be not profitable in hardware, but the royalities on software and the presence in the market are more valuable in my opinion.
And the power of the console is important too.

Take the wii, there's how much, 100 milions out there? more? but the bad hardware make the third party games looks like crap and nobody buy a "COD" or a "BATTLEFIELD" on such inferior hardware.. guess what, third party developers then leaves wii in the dust.
if durango sells 50 milions of consoles and Orbis 100 milions and nobody will buy third party games but only halo, forza and gears, I see black clouds coming in the microsoft'sky


anyway, seem they have implemented inter-generation gaming between Infinity and 360

http://destinyhub.net/content/79-Cross-Gen-compatibility-(somewhat)-confirmed-for-Xbox

Is that the fault of Nintendo or the fault of 3rd parties?

Nintendo knew very much what their target audience was and how to craft games for it. Hence you have Nintendo first party games selling as much and more than COD during the height of the Wii FAD.

Third parties on the other hand fumbled quite hard in trying to adapt from "hard core" game development to a more casual motion friendly game environment. "Core" games were never going to do well on the Wii, that's not the market audience that generally bought the machine.

Of course, once Nintendo started to run out of ideas on revamping their line of established IP combined with 3rd party developers never being able to come to grips with developing for a casual game that used the wand without being too annoying and thus abandoned the platform... That led to the FAD fading away significantly faster than it should have, or at least faster than I expected. I predicted it would fade, but didn't predict it fading as quickly as it did.

Durango shouldn't have that problem. The Core is still there. Kinect can easily add to it without supplanting it. Controller + Kinect (even something as simple as the popular implementation in ME3, as an example of Kinect enhancing a core controller based title) will be enough for Core game types. Kinect and controller + Kinect will be there for casual and really casual games. Think PopCap style games. More people play those PopCap style games than all of the COD gamers on all platforms combined.

If Microsoft can still maintain core gamers while attracting people away from their 300 USD notebook/desktop computer into playing those games on Durango instead, that's a huge win. As in Windows they get no royalties from it, while on Durango they presumably would.

[edit] Forgot to throw in a bit about the Wii-U that pertains. Nintendo themselves said they screwed up the launch of the Wii-U by not providing compelling games for it as they did with the Wii. Especially with the bundled game. Wii was absolutely brilliant in that the included game had appeal across generations. 10 year olds enjoyed it as much as 60 year olds. Wii-U failed hard on that point and Nintendo, rightfully, points to that as one of the key reasons for slow Wii-U adoption.

Regards,
SB

 

[blakjedi]

Actually, MS claimed the 360 had 1 TFlop of total system performance first. The ginned up 1.8TFlop number for RSX from nVidia was a direct response to that.

In any case, it's a bit silly to try and engage in a spec war you can't win. MS will be better served by being vague since there aren't any head to head advantages to tout.

You can't factually state that.

 

[ERP]

anyway, seem they have implemented inter-generation gaming between Infinity and 360

There is nothing to implement, you just have to not block it, and developers have to support it. One of the issues is patch handling, the developer may not want people playing at different patch levels and it may not be feasible to do day and date patch releases across platforms, but technically that's just book keeping. If both generations use the same online services and infrastructure it would be relatively easy to do.

If we take the specs fro VGLeaks at face value, I really don't think there will be a huge visual disparity between the platforms, I'm more interested in how MS is going to position the product, than I am what's inside the box, I think that has more of a chance to alienate the core gamer than what's inside the box, and I do think that's a mistake.

 

[expletive]

If we take the specs fro VGLeaks at face value, I really don't think there will be a huge visual disparity between the platforms, I'm more interested in how MS is going to position the product, than I am what's inside the box, I think that has more of a chance to alienate the core gamer than what's inside the box, and I do think that's a mistake.

To the core gamer, I don't think there's much difference between 'positioning' and what ends up in the box. What's in the box IS the positioning to the core gamer. The (non-) existence of powerful hardware really only serves the hardcore gamer's needs. For example, I don't believe core gamers would care about an ad campaign that featured families playing Kinect Sports 3, as long as the hardware was powerful and the core games existed on the platform.

I also think it would be a mistake to alienate the core gamer. I believe one of MS' internal marketing mantras last gen was "delight the core", would be ironic (also, surprising) if this gen they alienate them...

EDIT: Here it is:

"[We need] to bring games to more people. You need to start by delighting the core; we built this industry on people who love games," said Microsoft Game Developer Group General Manager Chris Satchell during his opening keynote for Gamefest 2007, a developer-centric two-day event full of panels to help everyone else better understand how to work with Microsoft's hardware, software and community.

http://www.1up.com/news/gamefest-2007-chris-satchell-keynote

 

[Xenio]

There is nothing to implement, you just have to not block it, and developers have to support it. One of the issues is patch handling, the developer may not want people playing at different patch levels and it may not be feasible to do day and date patch releases across platforms, but technically that's just book keeping. If both generations use the same online services and infrastructure it would be relatively easy to do.

there're a lot of thing to be considerated

different resolution/framerate can be an advantage for the Infinity Player over the 360 Player
A sniper aiming with 1080P 4xAA is more efficient than a sniper on 1024x600 upscaled to 720P
A fast action gameplay that requires fast reactions is easier @60fps than a 30fps

and what if the controllers are similar but different? just button position or stick's sensibility can do an HUGE difference


how could it be so easy?

If we take the specs fro VGLeaks at face value, I really don't think there will be a huge visual disparity between the platforms, I'm more interested in how MS is going to position the product, than I am what's inside the box, I think that has more of a chance to alienate the core gamer than what's inside the box, and I do think that's a mistake.

I think that both microsoft and sony will go to take some casual market from nintendo, but the core gamer will choose the more capable machine.
I'm amazed by the glasses, and so on, but if you ask me if I want to play Next gen Battlefield or crysis 4 or Infiltrator (if they do a game from the demo) and so on, @720p on playstation4 or @ 600P on Infinity (the same if a game have 40-45 FPS on PS4 and 30 and sub-30 FPS on Infinity), call me nerd but I will buy PS4 all the times, no matter halo or gears. And trust me, there're milions like me out of there

 

[DJ12]

And there's 10s of millions more waiting for the next easy to play console.

I like move but its not as good a prospect as kinect that actually works properly which I assume the new one will.