Baseless Next Generation Rumors with no Technical Merits [pre E3 2019] *spawn*

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A tablet/mobile device and a console?
Hmm.

Not exactly the same as the rumours of a low cost console and a premium one. But still reasonable if you segment that way. Yea this type of segmentation would work.

I don't know about tablet or mobile device but if they decide to finally let you boot Windows on the Xboxes and they could get it in at a good price a Lockhart based laptop would make a lot of sense for a lot of people.
 
A tablet/mobile device and a console?
Hmm.

Not exactly the same as the rumours of a low cost console and a premium one. But still reasonable if you segment that way. Yea this type of segmentation would work.
I would buy that lockhart in a beat if it was a mobile device, and if Sony didn't have any competition for it.

OTOH that would need to make lockhart a lot more expensive, maybe more expensive than anaconda.
Otherwise it wouldn't even make sense for Microsoft to start releasing games and services on the Switch, for example.
 
Your talking about the long term process.
There's many situations where you would just recompile and benchmark it to see how it performs, before starting on the actual work.

Can think of many times devs have said that in articles, but not something I'd be able to find now.

This does not mean I give any credence to this so called leak, opinion, whatever it is.
Just saying compiling and benchmarking isn't unusual or crazy in and of itself.

Yes, but an actual dev would at least have mentioned something about what were the biggest bottlenecks, or what was the new arch aurprisingly better at, or/and at least hinted at potential paths for future work. This "leak" did nothing of that because it's author is so removed from actual development he can't even imagine a made up fantasy properly.
 
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They do run stress tests, alright. But those are not representative of final performance, because a lot of optimisation and reengineering happens between first dipping your toes into a machine and releasing your first game on it.
Last of Us remaster, for example, was still running at 30fps until a couple months before it actually went gold.
No actual developer would say "we ported our code and it runs at 4k60 with dips" because that's not how a dev thinks. Thats how a consumer sees it from digital foundry. A dev does their test to find new bottlenecks and potential strenghths to lean on.
He said he made a similar test to spiderman's. Ok, was it with an actual game's data? Was it a naive port of the game, or did they refactor how the data was packed? Did they remove duplicates, changed layout, block sizes, experiment with different compression methods? Because that's the kind of thing an actual dev would be doing and those are the info he would be interested about and exited to convey in a hypothetical leak. Yet, no information about that on this leak, but a handwavy "30% performance increase until highest res restures are enabled" which betrays a completely consumer-like perspective on that stuff.

Seriously? If you get a new devkit you fool around with it to get early impressions. You're talking about optimising and deeper evaluation. I'm not really sure why you would expect to see more from such potential leaks. It's not as if this some DF report:)
 
I think two different performing consoles for Xbox is a bad idea overall, unless the lower performing console (Lockhart) is actually also the streaming console. It could play all Xbox One games at the same level as Xbox One X, and it could natively play Xbox Scarlett games at lower resolutions and framerates than Anaconda, but without compromising the graphical complexity, lighting, physics, etc. But then it can also use xCloud to stream Scarlett games at the same resolution/framrate as Anaconda, if you internet connection is good enough. Whatever it takes so that Lockhart does not limit developers ambition for next-gen.

Otherwise, if Xbox Scarlett family is made up of Anaconda (high-end premium), Lockhart (mid-range) and some cheap xCloud-reliant device, developers would have to limit their ambitions to what Lockhart can do, while Anaconda just brute forces everything to native 4K and better framerates. That could mean that PS5 is essentially the most powerful base console again, even if Anaconda is 25-40% more powerful and Lockhart is much less powerful than PS5.

So the only way I would view Lockhart and a 2 console strategy from Microsoft in a positive light, is if Lockhart is the streaming console that also plays next-gen games natively at lower resolution/framerate.
 
Seriously? If you get a new devkit you fool around with it to get early impressions. You're talking about optimising and deeper evaluation. I'm not really sure why you would expect to see more from such potential leaks. It's not as if this some DF report:)

A more believable first impression for me would be he saying he tried rendering many thousand instances of stanford dragon's model until it drops down from 60 fps, or batch downloading a bunch of assets over and over. Porting a modern game engine to the new machine, as it would take to recreate something like the spiderman demo, is not a first impression kind of task, it's a month's worth of work by multiple engineers. But all a wet dreaming fan boy knows of games comes from clicking through comparison screenshot galeries in DF and changing settings on PC games, and that "leak" reads to me exactly like what I'd expect such a person would erroneously think dev fidling with a dev kit looks like.
 
Do we even know there will be two skus or is it a rumor everyone just accepted?
 
Do we even know there will be two skus or is it a rumor everyone just accepted?
a rumor largely accepted but within reason since Phil used the word consoles instead of console and because he hasn't back tracked on whether that was a mistake or intended communication.
but even if it was intended, plans can change. It's been 1 full year since E3 2018, they are entitled to drop things they previously announced if the device isn't out. Ie, like how they dropped VR from the conversation for X1X.
 
Cost aside, if XB is using standard PCI 4.0 storage at 6GB/s Vs Sony's custom 10GB/s is it going to make that much difference to next gen games?
 
Cost aside, if XB is using standard PCI 4.0 storage at 6GB/s Vs Sony's custom 10GB/s is it going to make that much difference to next gen games?

Not much, but what if they're using two channel PCIe 3.0 nVME drives at 2GB/s? There's still room for a major difference.
 
That seems oddly specific.

A number of the Scarlet "rumors" that have been floating around this year have specified "1GB nvme" or "2GB nvme" SSD drives. I just think it's plausible SSD speed wasn't a point of emphasis for MS the way it appears to be for Sony. It's easy to believe they would have thought any SSD would be a sufficiently large upgrade over mechanical drives.
 
Right ... Microsoft which minimized the vibrations and fine-tuned the HDD performance in the Xbox One X to get as fast a speed as possible will totally just say fuck it and use tech from 2010 with only in a 2-lane configuration.
 
I don't think rubber grommets are the incredibly innovation they want you to believe they are.

And yet that is a level above and beyond what Sony used on the 4Pro.

The point is: Microsoft isn't going to completely drop off their level of improvements.
 
And my point remains that they could have easily thought a 20X improvement was going to be seen as surprisingly good. It hasn't been that long since conventional wisdom was that we weren't getting SSDs at all, let alone highly customized, high performance versions. Rumors that stated "2GB/s nvme SSD" were dismissed as unrealistic on that point alone earlier this year.
 
I agree with bgroovy. Prior to Sony's 'moar speed' publicity, we all thought any SSD would do as it's such a huge improvement and only considered costs and capacity, not speed, when discussing them. Why would any console company going from 5.25" laptop HDDs to several GB/s low seek-rate SSD feel it wasn't fast enough? If MS and Sony had both gone with a cost-effect 20x speed-up, none of us would bat an eye-lid. It only sounds 'weak' because Sony has decided to prioritise it. Unless the fanboys turn frickin' load-times into next-gen's 'flops', it shouldn't be an issue of contention. A choice between 2 TB NVMe 2 versus 1 TB NVMe 4, hypothetically speaking, may see the larger, slower option picked, with good reason and without that being a dumb move. Of course if NVMe 4 is faster and cheaper and MS went with NVMe 2, that would be a dumb move. ;)

We should just look at MS's options in terms of costs and benefits to hit on the best long-term value, as that's most likely the choice they'll go with. What's the price difference between the latest and older techs?
 
a rumor largely accepted but within reason since Phil used the word consoles instead of console and because he hasn't back tracked on whether that was a mistake or intended communication.
If I said I plan to eat many dinners, would you assume I'm eating them all at the same time? ;)

He could have meant he anticipated multiple Xbox over the long-term. He is a terrible communicator, you're never quite sure what he's said and he never wants to clarify comments.

Why would any console company going from 5.25" laptop HDDs to several GB/s low seek-rate SSD feel it wasn't fast enough?

If you want to virtually eliminate loading times then you need to do more than shove an SSD in there. Whatever Sony put into PS5, you can still get faster throughput from a RAID SSD setup in a PC and no amount of money can eliminate loading times on PC. I honestly do not what what the hell GTA V is doing during it's mega load and using mods, the game simply can not generate the world fast enough it you move even half as fast as the camera appears to move in Sony's Spider-man footage on nextgen PlayStation.

For Sony this was clearly a priority but Microsoft don't need to match it, they just need to heavily reduce load times on the next Xbox. Load times on some current gen console games are absolutely awful.
 
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