Microsoft Xbox Reveal Event - May 21, 2013

[Cranky]

Microsoft is not using a 7770 and Sony is not using a 7850.

Plus, let's be honest here a 5750 is perfectly sufficient for 1200P gaming in a pc, much less a 7790 variant in a closed system.

That said, I am quite disappointed that they A: didn't go for the jugular on performance and B: were too conservative on the home server front. I really liked the concept behind those xbox surface / server leaks / fake docs from last summer.

 

[MfA]

I know a casual game when I see one ... core gamers are people who spend significant time playing the non casual ones.

 

[RudeCurve]

I know a casual game when I see one ... core gamers are people who spend significant time playing the non casual ones.

So kinda like trying to define porn?

My favorite game to date is Vanquish...but I also played Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Fragger...so am I a casual gamer or core gamer?

 

[oramay]

...
There's no such thing as a core gamer...that's just a stupid vague label that was made up to try and describe a certain type of gamer. Nobody actually knows what the true definition of core gamer is precisely because it doesn't exist.

There is a somewhat philosophical point about this claim here, but I'm not going to argue about it.

Anyway, I like that xb1 now has its official "special sauce" - "infinite power of the cloud". No need to look inside the box for extras anymore.

 

[MrFox]

Imagine a poll to the currently established gamers base of microsoft, asking them to choose between:

A. Mandatory kinect, must be installed and used for main interface.

B. Kinect is optional, but 50% more GPU power, same price.

They've got A. They wanted B.

 

[RudeCurve]

Right now it might not seem natural but it will once people start using it more because it comes standard. This was a forward thinking move just like the cloud base game augmentation feature. Also as the algorithms improve it will become even more intuitive. Eventually people will just expect it.

 

[expletive]

Imagine a poll to the currently established gamers base of microsoft, asking them to choose between:

A. Mandatory kinect, must be installed and used for main interface.

B. Kinect is optional, but 50% more GPU power, same price.

They've got A. They wanted B.

You're making a BOM equation out of something that was a transistor equation.

 

[MrFox]

You're making a BOM equation out of something that was a transistor equation.

yeah, I'm cheating a bit with several assumptions

 

[Esrever]

Imagine a poll to the currently established gamers base of microsoft, asking them to choose between:

A. Mandatory kinect, must be installed and used for main interface.

B. Kinect is optional, but 50% more GPU power, same price.

They've got A. They wanted B.

choose between a smart phone or a 20% less expensive phone bill?

 

[eastmen]

Imagine a poll to the currently established gamers base of microsoft, asking them to choose between:

A. Mandatory kinect, must be installed and used for main interface.

B. Kinect is optional, but 50% more GPU power, same price.

They've got A. They wanted B.

as a sony fan to choose between

A. mandatory move functionality in all controllers or

B 50% more gpu power same price .


They are silly questions . Aside from that all we really know if ram amount and transitor amount. Clock speeds haven't been discussed yet. MS can still provide better performance than what is expect.

 

[MrFox]

as a sony fan to choose between

A. mandatory move functionality in all controllers or

B 50% more gpu power same price .


They are silly questions . Aside from that all we really know if ram amount and transitor amount. Clock speeds haven't been discussed yet. MS can still provide better performance than what is expect.

Yes, I'm sure Sony fans would equally choose B in a heart beat, if the cost was the same. My choices A and B were based on a sequence of assumptions, don't you want to know what they are before calling the choice silly?

aaaaaand we're back to imaginary hidden power.

 

[Rangers]

I dont really put it as a kinect V more power thing, although in some sense I guess you can frame it that way. For one I'm convinced Kinect is not particularly expensive.

I'm just ashamed that MS wouldn't pony up for, lets just say 4 more CU's which gets you close enough to parity. As I keep saying, what's the incremental cost there? $10? I dont think you would have had to add anything else. Bandwidth would have been fine or good enough, etc etc.

Granted, they would not have known the PS4 specs while making these decisions, but they DID know they were aiming pretty light and should have added a bit of beef. It didn't even have to be like "we want to be the best". It should have been like "we need to make sure we have a little beef".

Hope that's not too versus, not intended.

So yeah, they're like 4 piddly 64 ALU CU's away from a whole nother ball game, and that's just paltry.

 

[wco81]

Well Sony was criticized for spending on Blu ray for ps3 instead of using that money for more CPU, GPU, RAM, etc.

So now the reciprocal criticism about Kinect vs CPU, GPU.

 

[RobertR1]

If MS can actually use cloud computing to greatly enhance gameplay and experience (note: I did NOT say graphics) then they'll simply be in another league.

For MS, the key will be execution of their platform and creating experiences that have simply not been possible before.

 

[scently]

I dont really put it as a kinect V more power thing, although in some sense I guess you can frame it that way. For one I'm convinced Kinect is not particularly expensive.

I'm just ashamed that MS wouldn't pony up for, lets just say 4 more CU's which gets you close enough to parity. As I keep saying, what's the incremental cost there? $10? I dont think you would have had to add anything else. Bandwidth would have been fine or good enough, etc etc.

Granted, they would not have known the PS4 specs while making these decisions, but they DID know they were aiming pretty light and should have added a bit of beef. It didn't even have to be like "we want to be the best". It should have been like "we need to make sure we have a little beef".

Hope that's not too versus, not intended.

So yeah, they're like 4 piddly 64 ALU CU's away from a whole nother ball game, and that's just paltry.

Have you actually considered what those additional CUs would cost in terms of power and cooling. The XO as it is already a large box and a significant part of that is the budget towards cooling. Adding 4 extra CUs would probably mean providing it the bandwidth it will need; how do you suppose the do that? They would they have to either;

1) Find a higher clocked ddr3 RAM to provide the extra bandwidth. That's not possible so the next option would be;

2) To increase the capacity of the eSRAM. This would mean that the APU will be larger and thus require better cooling, ie if you can get working chips, which would in turn mean that you will have a larger console.

3) Ok maybe you clock it higher. Mind you I don't think that its by guesswork that both the ps4 and th XO have their cpu/gpu running at 1.6ghz/800mhz but lets assume they decide to clock it higher, so now its running at 2.0ghz/1.0ghz or whatever. This has the double advantage of giving you more flops and a higher bandwidth to the eSRAM. Now you just have to make sure yields are good at that speed AND you have to provide a better cooling solution as it most definitely will be running hotter.

Now lets say you are able to achieve one of these things right? so what is stopping Sony from doing the same; be it adding the additional CUs or clocking their chip higher. In which case we are back to square one; Sony has a 50% flops advantage.

As far as I am concerned the chip which MS and Sony are using are probably 'cut from the same cloth' so to speak. It just their memory implementation that necessitated the difference we see here and that is because, among other things, MS wanted 8gb in the system and set out to get it early on.

 

[scooby_dooby]

Well Sony was criticized for spending on Blu ray for ps3 instead of using that money for more CPU, GPU, RAM, etc.

So now the reciprocal criticism about Kinect vs CPU, GPU.

Which, in retrospect was a totally valid critisicm. It's a large part of what caused the PS3 to flounder, and probably, directly caused it to lose its #1 spot worldwide, Sony lost focus, they let corporate interests from other divisions convince them they should sell a $600 console that is a year late to market.

And yes, you could argue MS is making a similar mistakes now, and I think you'd be right. It's interesting the decisions that complacency and power breed... The differences here though, are that MS's decisions are not going to vastly increase the BOM of their device, or cause any major delays in production. So they may just sail on without losing their position, at least in the US. We'll see...

Oh, and just for the record, x360 went 8yrs and will go to end of life, just fine, with a DVD drive. Just saying

 

[scooby_dooby]

If MS can actually use cloud computing to greatly enhance gameplay and experience (note: I did NOT say graphics) then they'll simply be in another league.

For MS, the key will be execution of their platform and creating experiences that have simply not been possible before.

Isn't this just a load of horseshit though? Are some magical new servers going to come to market in November that didn't exist 5yrs ago? And how in the world is any of this backend stuff going to ne exclusive to MS? This whole computation in the cloud thing just reeks of trendy buzzwordy garbage... "cloud computing", ya, it's cool, we've been living with it for 20yrs. It only took them a decade to figure out how to sync save files between two different devices...I'm not expecting miracles here.

 

[RenegadeRocks]

And why can't this cloud computing be done on any other machine ? Its nothing locked to XBone's hardware. Even Nintendo can come out and tout this to enliven thier WiiU again, can't it?

Indie devs have spoken and they are not speaking kindly about the Xbone :

http://touch.destructoid.com/destructoid/#!/entry/devs-express-disappointment-with-xbox-one-over-twitter,519d556687443d6c8e539c00/1

 

[RobertR1]

Isn't this just a load of horseshit though? Are some magical new servers going to come to market in November that didn't exist 5yrs ago? And how in the world is any of this backend stuff going to ne exclusive to MS? This whole computation in the cloud thing just reeks of trendy buzzwordy garbage... "cloud computing", ya, it's cool, we've been living with it for 20yrs. It only took them a decade to figure out how to sync save files between two different devices...I'm not expecting miracles here.

Cloud computing is about having data crunched with combined resources and then presenting the result to you.

The success of a cloud service is generally dependent on the application. Is the application written natively to take advantage of distributed computing or is it a single node application made to work in a cloud service model? The native app would clearly have an advantage.

The game would simply send it's data to the service, which would get crunched and output back to the console. This computational load would be moved from the console and in theory can provide a much richer experience than being limited by the hardware specs of the console.

Again, the benefits of cloud computing go hand in hand with how the application is written.

MS had pretty good experience with cloud services such as Azure and Office 365 on the corporate front.

I've also seen applications that were poorly written and offered in a cloud service model that outright suck. Again, it's about execution.

If cloud computing with the xbox is something they threw together at the last min, I don't expect much but if it the entire platform was designed around it, then I actually expect some next level gameplay shit.

If the Gods favor us, bkilian might even comment

 

[BRiT]

<slightly off-topic cloud computing items>

The reason Nintendo won't come out with it now is the requirement on the software infrastructure that they simply do not have the skills or expertise to develop, not to mention the actual costs to develop it. They could rent the services off of other cloud providers but that would still be rather costly.

Sony likely has the skills and expertise to pull it off, but it might still take them a good amount of time to do so. The other question is will they even try it.

Microsoft on the other hand has 5 years of solid real world experience in developing, running, hosting, and managing of cloud services (Azure).