The Next-gen Situation discussion *spawn

[XpiderMX]

Reading AndyH posts:

What I've heard about MS plans mirrors Alberto - they are creating a monster of a console that will make graphics whore GAF weep tears of joy.

I have some hopes...

 

[SKYSONY]

Reading AndyH posts:



I have some hopes...

Well, the leaked specs don´t point that way. I wonder where all this hype comes from.

 

[Proelite]

Well, the leaked specs don´t point that way. I wonder where all this hype comes from.

Let's see the games first shall we before jumping to a conclusion?

 

[Ruskie]

Let's see the games first shall we before jumping to a conclusion?

Games are going to look better, no body is questioning that. The question is, what will competition look like. If there was Nvidia in Durango I wouldn't really care about FLOPs, but being its AMD and its the same core as PS4, than there is no way they are going to match that kind of difference in theoretical performances.

 

[DoctorFouad]

There is nothing particularly amazing about Orbis architecture. As I said, this is something 99% of people from B3D would come up with. Its all about needs and restrictions. Obviously, both MS and Sony have same restrictions, but not the same needs and that will reflect on hardware design.

Yeah it's very basic. If anything Durango is the odd one. Orbis is a video card on a stick (minus whatever this compute stuff is, I suppose).

That doesn't mean it may not be great though. Simple doesn't mean bad. Just as complex was bad for PS3.

There is nothing particularly amazing about Orbis architecture

As I said, this is something 99% of people from B3D would come up with

Yeah it's very basic. If anything Durango is the odd one

Come on guys please ! stop with this apologetic discourse...I remember fighting against other members of the forum regarding what I called "myths" : "microsoft is wealthier than sony, so most probably microsoft would come up with a more powerful hardware", or "4 Gb of GDDR5 is simply impossible for a fall 2013 console, it would be too much expensive", or " a 7850 GPU level for a fall 2013 console is impossible, look at TDP and the cost and the heat and...., but what about these GPUs in laptops ? its impossible for consoles, binning, costs, yields..."...etc

and now suddenly 4 Gb of GDDR5 becomes very basic" ? seriously...

and suddenly people are downplaying the importance of RAM bandwidth ?....whats next ?...

 

[-tkf-]

Any idea just how much stronger we can expect the next gen (with the rumours we have) to be compared to the PS3/XBOX 360. Will it be easy to see the difference or will it be more subtle considering we already got the low hanging fruit with HiDef this round.

 

[dragonelite]

we are talking about rumors, assuming they can be real, if not, all the thread is imagination

But can durango run crysis ?

 

[Blazkowicz]

Crysis 2 and 3 maybe, but to adequately run Crysis 1 (and at 1080p 60fps) we'll have to wait for the gen after that

 

[Xenio]

both companies will spend similar amount of transistors on their console, they will consume similar amount of watts and the only difference will be companies goal, which seems to be very different as it stands.

I agree but maybe you forget how much money Sony and Microsoft wants/can put into the project

 

[Ruskie]

I agree but maybe you forget how much money Sony and Microsoft wants/can put into the project

You can put as much money as you want, but "laws of physics" are still there. You can have 400W console, but that will be a size of fridge and they don't want that.

Sony probably spent the most money on RAM, but I guess R&D was no where near close as it was in PS3 case.

 

[Rangers]

But can durango run crysis ?

360 has a Crysis port, so...

 

[Rangers]

Any idea just how much stronger we can expect the next gen (with the rumours we have) to be compared to the PS3/XBOX 360. Will it be easy to see the difference or will it be more subtle considering we already got the low hanging fruit with HiDef this round.

It'll be easy to see.

Go look at Watch Dogs, Star Wars 1313, and Crysis 3 videos to see what it will look like initially imo. I expect 3-4 years in you'll see better than those.

 

[Xenio]

You can put as much money as you want, but "laws of physics" are still there. You can have 400W console, but that will be a size of fridge and they don't want that.

Sony probably spent the most money on RAM, but I guess R&D was no where near close as it was in PS3 case.

but money means "a lot of advanced R&D" and R&D can change the performances of what you can put it in while mantening the size and TDP of the competitor console, am I right?

some rumors are talking about 3d stacking and W2W for the durango cpu's, correct me if I'm wrong but this alone can reduce TDP with a factor of 75%
this can be done with R&B

 

[kots]

It'll be easy to see.

Go look at Watch Dogs, Star Wars 1313, and Crysis 3 videos to see what it will look like initially imo. I expect 3-4 years in you'll see better than those.

Well , not on both consoles ...

 

[Blazkowicz]

My 1-year old HD7970 offers more than twice the flops (+3Gb GDDR5 @ 264Gb/s) of a console being released ~2 years later. On the CPU side, any modern Intel 4-core/AMD 8-core would be way faster than a Jaguar clocked at ~1.6GHz. Of course gaming PCs are more expensive, a high-end graphics card costs about the same if not more than a modern console..but you got the point.. that kind of tech is nothing new on the PC side. Yes, console-specific customizations will play their role, as always...but this time PCs will have a significant hardware advantage from the start (as opposed to X360's Xenos vs R520/R580 in 2005). It probably wont take long till mid-range PCs and high-end laptops can run multiplatform titles better than any next gen console.

That reasoning works even in the PC space. a 8800GTX still is probably more powerful than an APU or the graphics in most laptops, or what about a GTX 285 etc., or a 4890 (but that latter one fell out of driver support)

In truth not that many people run a 200 watt graphics card. Or sometimes we have a CPU on the edge of usability for games and upgrading it isn't justifiable for everything else we do with the computer.
It's sad but with a computer, I give more a shit about the keyboard and speakers than the CPU these days

Given money, I guess I'd buy the Durango console (slightly less power hungry that the other one) and for the computer a mechanical keyboard, memory/storage, maybe a case (going back to the 90s way of putting a small tower on a desk?, I'm fed up with the spaghetti of cables on the ground)

It's my gut feeling of the day, before I always thought, why get two powerful computers? (a PC and a console), if you can do with just one (a PC).
Now I'm like, I could keep my CPU for eight more years (if I buy a ddr3 mobo for it), down the road I could add a 1TB ssd and a couple 10TB hdd if so be it, and a 4K 24" or 27" display. But it wouldn't be good enough for gaming.. Upgrade treadmill has become meaningless. Desktops have even been running backwards. We've had the cheap mini ITX rigs (using for instance an E-350) and now, the Raspberry Pi

 

[patsu]

A downgrade, yes, imo.

But a WHOLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLEEE lot less silicon, heat, and power draw.

Piledriver/Steamroller never seemed a realistic console CPU. Too power hungry.

Is that why there are additional so-called "secret sauce" compute units to complement the Jaguar CPUs in Orbis ?

As for Microsoft, I suspect they are planning a family of products. So you will see very high end closed box gaming PC for enthusiasts, settop box and tablets for mainstream. All of them share some basic architecture.

It would explain (partly) why Valve enters with Steambox specs. ^_^

If this is the case, then I see the possibility of a multi-console renderer finally coming into play. 8^P

 

[Ketto]

we are talking about rumors, assuming they can be real, if not, all the thread is imagination

You're merely quoting

This image

http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/misterxmedia/21549619/42533/42533_original.jpg

It's from Misterxmedia and it's a hilarious pipedream, this isn't one of those "wish it into reality" type scenarios. The specs are completely ridiculous.

It's not about price, it's about power consumption. Current high-end PC have a lot higher power requirement than 2005 high-end PC

Many people tend to forget this when they try to make analogs to last generation. It's near painful to see people go "well last generation X happened so it will happen this generation as well." They don't understand consoles are still stuck with the same 2005 power and thermal limits, while PC and hardware technology have moved on from such.

True. Back then a 200W console would be comparable to some high-end PCs. Today a single GTX680/HD7970 draws the same.

Indeed.

 

[gongo]

yup exactly, another important factor is that the main RAM this time has a huge bandwidth in consoles (GDDR5) compared to PCs (DDR3), games designed for this specific ps4 feature would have a hard time running on any PC even with 16 Gb of DDR4.

people here are downplaying and underestimating how much of a difference this would make for porting ps4 games to PCs. lets give an example :

a hypothetical naughty dog game called uncharted 4 running at 30 fps and sending 3.5 Gb of data per frame per second to the SOC CPU+GPU to handle (high rez textures, polygons, instructions, shaders, models, animations...whatever) how are you gonna make that run on a 1-2 Gb per frame limited RAM (DDR3-4) on PCs ? it is of course feasible with the help of compression and using the huge amount of main RAM and the very fast GPU RAM of very high end PCs as caches, but it is impossible to do this correctly on a mid-range PC of 2013-2014. And developers wont take the risk creating a game thats possible to run only on very high end PCs.

Thats the kind of situation PC games would face compared to exclusive PS4 games...in short, if the recent rumors of PS4 specifications are true than PS4 exclusive games would do some crazy things impossible to do with commercial PC games for at least the first 1-2 years of the console lifetime. More precisely I am thinking of very high rez textures all over the place (2048*2048) or some very fast complex and detailed gaming scenes running at crazy 60 fps a la Gran Turismo...etc

What? Are you sure...?
I am sure my PC has more grunt than PS4...and my CPU is almost 3 years old quad i7...
Imho...i think PS4 specs are underwhelming....1.6ghz jaguar cores ....mobile gpu with downgraded clockspeed...and only 4GB of ram...GDDR5 or not...that is 8 times increase after 8 years....Xbox to Xbox 360 when from that in half the time...

 

[MrFox]

Sorry but do you assume the current AMD/NV designs are the end of the pipeline? These companies have obviously parallel teams which develop future designs and MS could surely finance AMD to speed up some next generation design team combined with some DX11++ extensions. I can't really see why they shouldn't play by their strengths to get an edge over their competition.

MS cannot tell AMD "here's a lot of money, make your GPUs 4 times better for the same price, invent new stuff".
Anything being developed in parallel would surely be a similar architecture. Look up every single console in the current generation, none of them broke that logic.

 

[XpiderMX]

MS cannot tell AMD "here's a lot of money, make your GPUs 4 times better for the same price, invent new stuff".
Anything being developed in parallel would surely be a similar architecture. Look up every single console in the current generation, none of them broke that logic.

Wasn't Xbox 360 gpu something "new" comparing to 2005 GPUs? How many 2005 GPUs can run BF3, Crysis 3 or The Whitcher 2 as Xbox 360 do?