Xbox One (Durango) Technical hardware investigation

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You're no fun. :cry:
A 50% advantage of GPU power, for a game console, is something to talk about and speculate. And we'll be having fun until the real numbers are known.

So is a 100% memory advantage, but most seem to gloss that over. Why is that?
 
I think the big change is profitability. There's no point in trying to win a console war if you just come out breaking even, or losing money. This way, they think they can turn a profit. Microsoft has deep pockets, but they can't keep risking selling consoles at a loss forever. This isn't the Wii U. It'll be noticeably better than current gen, and it may have a lot of other selling points in terms of home entertainment junk. I guess we'll see how it turns out for them. From my point of view, I hope it does really well because I think it's healthy for the industry to have good competition. I don't want to see either of Sony or MS (or Nintendo) completely blow it.
Speaking of Nintendo, maybe they are the ones really kicking themselves. They probably thought both machines would be 2.5+ TFLOPS class machines so why bother. But if they had known Xbox 3 was reachable, they could have just gone with a 1 TFLOPS GPU and faster DDR3 RAM for an extra $30-40 and be really close with next gen. Sure it'll make the Wii U $50 more expensive but it would get those wanting a high end Nintendo machine excited at least and end any comparison with 360/PS3.
 
Going to have to wait and see. I don't see any Xbox 360 compat here and so either Microsoft isn't going to do that at all or this is the Xbox Lite version and we are still waiting.

Maybe this is the Xbox Lite that's coming out in 2013 and the Next Gen Xbox 720 comes out in 2014. These are real specs, but I need to see the finals to really accept it as complete.

This is still not adding up for me. Hey, if I am wrong I will admit it on the forum. I just know that Microsoft is working on multiple things here and either these are the real specs and they are not going to go back compat or there is still misinformation going on.

If these are the real specs then I expect them to put something else in the box besides the $50 Kinect and a regular controller.
 
There is still a lot of marketshare Microsoft can capture from Sony and Nintendo. If these specs are true I fail to see how these hardware specs are going to swoon Sony and Nintendo fans that are entrenched. Obviously the right mix of hardware and software is crucial. MS will have some good software...but I just can't see them blowing away consumers with that alone.

The specs just don't make sense to me after the triumph of the 360. Even the x86 switch is odd.
 
I am saying that it's at at most 3GB. IMO this part is the most subject to change before launch and after launch.

Certainly more subject to change than clocks or other hardware specs.


So maybe 3Gb + 2 Cores is for the first round of games.

Look at how Sony managed to trim down the OS impact over time on PS3.

The deal could be that MS is playing it save now like - Well we are not sure how much power or OS will need but it won't go beyond 3GB RAM and 2 Cores so lets but the barthere fr the moment.

3GB sound like a lot of extra extra running in the background. I have to do alot on my PC to reach that.
 
Well that's just it, if the machines are within ~20% the visual differences will probably be very limited much like the current gen. No one has a clue, but we've got people picking winners already, it's as amusing as it is pathetic.

Uh? we have had years of pixel peeping console "wars" where the difference was less than "20%" and often the difference was so small that no one would really notice, yet we picked a winner every time :)

Are you saying that it didn't matter anyway, did we waste our time? :)
 
From the perspective of many, yes, you probably wasted your time. ;) It's only really relevant for people who either take a really long time to make a decision, or get both consoles ... (or one of them and a PC perhaps)
 
There is still a lot of marketshare Microsoft can capture from Sony and Nintendo.
There is also marketshare to loose. With this specs, a lot of "core gamers"
will either choose Sony(if their console more powerfull) or a medium pc as their next gaming platform. Halo and Gears are not that good...
 
Uh? we have had years of pixel peeping console "wars" where the difference was less than "20%" and often the difference was so small that no one would really notice, yet we picked a winner every time :)

Are you saying that it didn't matter anyway, did we waste our time? :)

As I recall the console that usually won was the one that had a significant deficit in FLOPS. :smile:
 
I can't imagine the HDMI in will be anything more than the Google TV use case of displaying live TV from a cable box.
Not that this wouldn't be a welcome feature. Quite honestly if i could pass my cable box through the Durango in this way and it plays BR movies i would never need to change inputs on my TV.

I have Chumby NeTV device, can take HDMI in(+HDCP) and output composited HDMI(+HDCP) image. What it does is rip hdcp keys, take region of the image, change pixels, output mixed image with hdcp keys. It cannot do transparency as not really decode real pixel buffers but jus enough data to see dimension. Example apps are twitter overlay, send image from Android for display on screen, news ticker at the bottom, etc...

Maybe Microsoft is planning on Xbox SmartTV concept, run DVBTuner or any proprietary tech with hdmi out through Durango. Draw (only opaque?) overlays, see friends notifications, news tickers, read web email etc... Use hdmi CEC controlcodes to change tuner channels. Turning Durango to hdmi video recorder I don't know about it.
 
So "data move engines" are just glorified DMA controllers?

Overall my first impression (of these rumors) is that this is a fairly unsurprising design. It basically follows design patterns from the 360. I would not even be too surprised if they were able to get some level of BC out of it. Though it would almost certainly require recompiled code to be patched in; like Xbox1 to 360 BC.

Performance being ~30% lower than the PS4 would not be surprising to me either. I do see the risk of them losing a good percentage of core gamers to Sony's platform. But that strategy seems inline with what we have been hearing from them and the general trends MS has been following with their Xbox franchise in general.
 
There is also marketshare to loose. With this specs, a lot of "core gamers"
will either choose Sony(if their console more powerfull) or a medium pc as their next gaming platform. Halo and Gears are not that good...

both console are so underspecced that ms can release two apps on marketplace to emulate x3 or ps4
 
So "data move engines" are just glorified DMA controllers?

Overall my first impression (of these rumors) is that this is a fairly unsurprising design. It basically follows design patterns from the 360. I would not even be too surprised if they were able to get some level of BC out of it. Though it would almost certainly require recompiled code to be patched in; like Xbox1 to 360 BC.

Performance being ~30% lower than the PS4 would not be surprising to me either. I do see the risk of them losing a good percentage of core gamers to Sony's platform. But that strategy seems inline with what we have been hearing from them and the general trends MS has been following with their Xbox franchise in general.

I agree. .if this is true..and assuming that no secret sauce turns up...I would be reasonably happy for this...especially over the hd 6670 rumours a year or so back....for an all round device..retailing for £299..could be a good buy.
 
Well, I guess if you look at it from the angle of "I am buying this ... thing ... one way or another so I might as well try to defend my purchase... and also reward the kickbacks on leaks" :LOL: :p

And no, no matter how much you and Proelite argue "fake flops" it doesn't work that way. I have a long history of arguing the importance of architecture and workloads but that is with some architecture to discuss. All you know is it is AMD, GCN, and 12CUs. Orbis is the same except 50% more CUs.

You cannot go and count make believe MS fairy dust to inflate flops -- a flop is a flop. And there is no point pretending the pixie dust does crap until there is some real information on it.

As for the CUs: it would be very wrong to assume they "cut out" CUs for a huge investment into pixie dust. More close to reality: It isn't a couple CUs but it is the GPU across the board and the balance of CUs & TMUs (and probably ROPs, too) that all took a hit down 33%.

MS invested 1/3 less in their GPU than Sony did. Get over it people, MS shifted their budget away from competing with Sony--very likely, based on their own leaked documents, BOM prices and Kinect are the center of the platform, no longer the core gamers who wanted the biggest and best in Xbox1.

As for the knocks against Sony, calling it pretty much a wash of 1.8TF for Orbis and "1.5TF of Durango Pixie Dust" I hope people realize that (a) Orbis has its own pixie dust and (b) Orbis is said to have 192GB/s of bandwidth. A 7850 usually has about 150GB/s so Sony has basically upped the bandwidth to meet the CPU needs while preserving a full GPU bandwidth budget. And unless you think AMD, NV, and Intel are idiots there is something to be said about their long history of balancing CUs, ROPs, and TMUs to bus width/bandwidth.

The cringe worthy part of all of this is Sony seems to have really embraced "multiplatform" development. Orbis is sounding like an easy platform to quickly port to and from the PC. This and Sony's hoard of 1st party devs should allow Orbis to stretch its legs.

Durango? MS's strong suit has usually been not going esoteric. Now they find themselves the odd man out: Sony/PC are very similar and Durango comes trotting along with 2/3 the power and *demands* you bend over backwards to bring up to parity. I guess they still have Bungie ... FASA ... Ensemble ... Carbonated ... Flight ... oh snap, MS has a very limited portfolio of developers working on core AAA games. Hint hint.

What did you expect from a platform that pretty much spits in the face of the most preferred gaming perspective (FPS) and spits in the face of it with Kinect and says "You do not need to be able to move! No controller for you! Or buttons!!"

Snappy comments aside this design seems pretty simple:

Cost saving.

Embedded memory is there to address the cost of high bandwidth (high power, large pad) memory. MS wanted a lot of memory (OS folks, set top box) and it is hard to have:

* A lot of memory
* A lot of bandwidth
* Cheap

So you take 1 and 3 and solve the bandwidth problem on-chop with die space that will scale down. MS's design is cheap (RE: the leaked PDF wanted a BOM around $200 with the SoC at $50) and it opens the door to scaling. Cheap will become cheaper.

A larger, more power hungry GPU that would require better memory (wider bus, more expensive) but also not allow as much memory was not in the cards.

Durango, good or bad (and most people I know think good--but they are not core gamers), is really shooting for a different demographic. The design documents and console design all aim at keeping costs very low to push into being a major player in the set top box market. The savings on console BOM will allow a better Kinect devise and cheaper retail prices AND the huge amount of cheap memory means MS can go crazy with Apps (prediction: XBL will NOT be Free).

And before anyone back peddles about how a 1TF+ console is so awesome compared to 2005 when the Xbox came out--this is 2013. You can get a 2TF/s GPU at retail for $160 after all extra mark up (and it has a PCB, high speed memory, etc). The MS leaked PDF made it clear silicon costs were taking a HUGE cut and the Durango leak, if real, confirms this. Total area in silicon dedicated to core gaming is going to drop over 30%.

My real concern as a gamer is if Sony comes out with a 50% edge in compute Durango will (a) suffer in IQ and (b) suffer in framerate, or both. The 360 regularly owned the PS3 in these areas and as a more core gamer it concerns me. The last thing I want is an entire generation--10 years, ouch--of torn frames, chugginess, and blurry crap.

No thank you.


I know a console with a weaker GPU can beat one with a more powerful one,sony did it with the PS3,but sony had Cell which nothing was quite like it back then and it took time.

MS approach seems cheap,there is no reason to use DDR3 on a next gen console,that if the first indication of cheapen out,today already DRR3 is seen as old and slow vs GDDR5 imagine 3 years down the road,the data movers sound more like patches MS did to fix the cheaply design unit,it may work it may not..

Probably games will now show a big difference,first because MS would start demanding on contract parity,and because already most 3rd party developers don't care about taking advantage of hardware features,is the reason why PS3 ports and multiplatform games had suffer so much,they just want a good enough playable version,with the exception of Epic,Crytec and some other small group of developer who like their games to look the best.

Now sony's team those will push the PS4 to the edge and if there is a 50% difference in GPU i know sony will show it,and this whole 100% efficiency thing is what sony is very know for,the PS3 has been push to the very edge of it graphical power.

I know this company wanted to save money,i can't either blame MS they loss several billions on powerful consoles to end last almost the 2 generations,because now they are basically tied sales wise with the PS3,so maybe they decide it was enough loses it was bound to happen they would not lose money for ever just because people wanted.
 
I'm wrapping my head around those secretive graphics auxiliaries that would make Durango match or exceed anything Orbis comes up with. Are they aimed at helping with GPGPU integration:?:
Eager to know more...


I just don't see it some use the PS3 as example yesterday,but Cell is not just a data mover,Cell is a CPU that could handle some GPU task which offloaded task from the GPU and more than 1 task at the time in many cases.

1 module is say to be sound,another encoders and the last one data movers non of those would actually hell close that gap.

The only thing i can see here is the 720 achieving almost all of its full blown potential been extremely efficient,but that doesn't change the whole 1.2TF performance it just help the 720 get there it would still be outdo by the PS4 by 50% (number in theory as well) and some people believe that this would help the 720 stay close to the PS4 because it would be highly efficient.

There is a big flaw on this theory because for that to happen,the PS4 has to very very inefficient so that its performance drop way under 1.84 TF i just don't see that happening,efficiency is not only hardware based if also depend on your teams,and sony developers have a history of pulling incredible things from its own hardware and pushing the hardware to its very limits..

This is my whole grudge with this theory about efficiency is based all on the PS4 not been very efficient,even when it has hardware extra to handle physics and other stuff,while the 720 helpers have turn out to be not big help at all.
 
I have Chumby NeTV device, can take HDMI in(+HDCP) and output composited HDMI(+HDCP) image. What it does is rip hdcp keys, take region of the image, change pixels, output mixed image with hdcp keys. It cannot do transparency as not really decode real pixel buffers but jus enough data to see dimension. Example apps are twitter overlay, send image from Android for display on screen, news ticker at the bottom, etc...

Maybe Microsoft is planning on Xbox SmartTV concept, run DVBTuner or any proprietary tech with hdmi out through Durango. Draw (only opaque?) overlays, see friends notifications, news tickers, read web email etc... Use hdmi CEC controlcodes to change tuner channels. Turning Durango to hdmi video recorder I don't know about it.

Interesting, I'd never heard of such a device, but it makes sense and then I can certainly imagine the 360 having something like this (thoguh could still be cut at the last minute, kind of like the 2nd HDMI out that was originally touted for the PS3 ;) ).
 
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