You're no fun.
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?
You're no fun.
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.
Well, it's only a 33% disadvantage...You're no fun.
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.
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.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.
i.2 TF... Oh well, I guess I can't complain. Videogame consoles are TOYS after all, not serious high-powered enthusiast PCs.
I now see why bkilian has a low opinion of Charlie. Huge SoC that taped out the end of 2011, my foot. Jaguar core was still being designed.
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.
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.
There is also marketshare to loose. With this specs, a lot of "core gamers"There is still a lot of marketshare Microsoft can capture from Sony and Nintendo.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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"
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.
As I recall the console that usually won was the one that had a significant deficit in FLOPS. :smile:
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 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.