Baseless Next Generation Rumors with no Technical Merits [post E3 2019, pre GDC 2020] [XBSX, PS5]

[BRiT]

I wouldnt put any faith in the verified status having any impact on the truth of their statements, especially when their statements are without specificity.

One of the most accurate sources of information of next-gen doesnt even have a verified tag on their name [single person]. Everything I have seen them say concerning the Xbox Series X has turned out to be correct and their statements were long before any of it has even been posted online or even hinted at. They have their sources and knows how to keep them protected. They also aren't running around trying to create their own cult of followers. This also makes them the best source of NextGen info so far. No, I'm not going to say who they are.

It's quite funny looking back at public discussions where they participated and seeing how a lot of what they said was completely discounted because they didn't try to force it through or claim they had insider information. They let the discussions move along on it's own pace, even if it was obviously wrong, so very wrong.

Now it's up to you to either believe or not believe what I wrote. It's your move.

 

[Shortbread]

That's pretty official...

And more than likely his numbers aren't exact (purposely not exact). He would be breaking all types of NDAs if they were.

 

[goonergaz]

So we're to assume he knows complete details of unreleased architecture and two unreleased semi-customs based (at least partly) on said architecture.
And he was what, some QA game tester? Yes, that sounds plausible

I’m not saying that, I’m just saying it’s wrong to discount him on the way he’s written v1.9. And he doesn’t need to know complete details, just enough to know it’s not the full v2 feature set.

Since when is innovating or coming up with your own technology considered arrogant?

I'm not saying Sony has developed there own Ray Tracing solution but this rhetoric that it's folly to try to do something when there are already incumbents is backwards and stifles innovation.

There would be no Tesla with that mindset.

Wrong choice of words, I just meant why over complicate things like they used to. But as pointed out it doesn’t need to be.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I wouldnt put any faith in the verified status having any impact on the truth of their statements, especially when their statements are without specificity.

that may be, but I think the point is more people being completely mistaken about who these characters are and not really caring to understand, preferring to just dismiss out of hand. "Oh, he's just some QA grunt, what does he know?"

Reality is o'dium is as close a verified insider as we're likely to get, and discrediting his rumours needs better arguments than character assassination.

 

[chris1515]

Sorry I was not knowing he was verified too on era.

 

[chris1515]

that may be, but I think the point is more people being completely mistaken about who these characters are and not really caring to understand, preferring to just dismiss out of hand. "Oh, he's just some QA grunt, what does he know?"

Reality is o'dium is as close a verified insider as we're likely to get, and discrediting his rumours needs better arguments than character assassination.

And this is not because you are QA that you don't know. I think it is insulting for the people working as QA. I just say that only verified GAF people are not trustful imo. The verification process is not what it was before.

 

[chris1515]

I wouldnt put any faith in the verified status having any impact on the truth of their statements, especially when their statements are without specificity.

One of the most accurate sources of information of next-gen doesnt even have a verified tag on their name [single person]. Everything I have seen them say concerning the Xbox Series X has turned out to be correct and their statements were long before any of it has even been posted online or even hinted at. They have their sources and knows how to keep them protected. They also aren't running around trying to create their own cult of followers. This also makes them the best source of NextGen info so far. No, I'm not going to say who they are.

It's quite funny looking back at public discussions where they participated and seeing how a lot of what they said was completely discounted because they didn't try to force it through or claim they had insider information. They let the discussions move along on it's own pace, even if it was obviously wrong, so very wrong.

Now it's up to you to either believe or not believe what I wrote. It's your move.

The specs of Xbox Series X are on Internet since January 2019.

http://www.jeuxvideo.com/news/10065...eux-prochaines-xbox-devoilees-a-l-e3-2019.htm

 

[Globalisateur]

That's pretty official...

And more than likely his numbers aren't exact (purposely not exact). He would be breaking all types of NDAs if they were.

Yes, this is it. A known game developer finally giving us some target specs we (and some journalists) all talk about since E3 2019. He is saying the highest target spec given by Sony, that he heard off, is 11.5 TF.

 

[Scott_Arm]

that may be, but I think the point is more people being completely mistaken about who these characters are and not really caring to understand, preferring to just dismiss out of hand. "Oh, he's just some QA grunt, what does he know?"

Reality is o'dium is as close a verified insider as we're likely to get, and discrediting his rumours needs better arguments than character assassination.

It's on the leaker to prove that their claims are true, not for other people to discredit them. I agree, dismissing the person by misrepresenting who they are is not great, but being a developer also doesn't mean that what they're leaking is necessarily true. I have no real opinion of this person, but none of their information is technical in nature. It's just kind of like, "Xbox gpu is a little bit faster, Sony SSD is a little bit faster, RAM is about the same." All of that might end up being correct, but you could probably settle on that wording or those results with a series of coin flips, or just come to those conclusions from the public statements Sony and Microsoft have made, which is pretty much what most of us have done.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It's on the leaker to prove that their claims are true, not for other people to discredit them.

Yep. But the arguments against should be based in fact and decent argument.

A known dev giving their info is as valid and insightful as an unqualified GitHub leak. Both are some sort of insight into what is going on behind closed doors (assuming the guy isn't flat-out making shit up) and should be considered as blurry, through-the-keyhole limited takes on what might be happening. Out of all the usual baseless rumours, the random Pastebins out there, there are actually a few which a little more basis to them.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I think a large part of this discussion that needs addressing is when someone posts a rumour, it doesn't mean they believe in it, and when they end up arguing in favour of it, it doesn't mean they believe in the rumour outright but they are defending their rumour as having right to be heard and considered instead of chucked in the bin.

 

[AzBat]

Man, maybe it's time I become an insider? I want a bunch of lackeys hanging on my every word. Maybe I can get in contact with some of the people I knew in the gaming business? It's only been over 20 years since I last talked with them. I'm sure they will remember me & would love to put their careers in jeopardy. Anybody reading this & wants to help me become famous then do me a solid & PM me.

Tommy McClain

 

[Metal_Spirit]

The problem is: those listed 'weak spots' are not those of DXR, AMD or NV, they are just general to raytracing.
This makes the assumption 'Sony has super powerful RT' unlikely.

More probable is assuming they have different RT, because they started work on it prior to AMD.

But the outcome could end up like you speculate, e.g. if they had additional HW solution for photon mapping, radiance caching or whatever. But then we would talk about more than just RT. That's far fetched.

Another option would be addition reordering and / or BVH builder HW. This would remain in realm of RT, ImgTec already did it, and DXR would be partially incompatible with that (as is currently). So this could make sense, and it could compensate 2-3 TF less than competition, btw.
Still, it's not that you can not do multiple bounces, or transparency etc. using DXR. The difference would be only in performance, and with this in mind i would phrase my poking differently than he did.
The tweed is just too confusing to give us more than wild speculations.

Sony may have some solutions (not saying it does). Here's some patents on Photon Mapping already discussed in this forum.

https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/photon-mapping.61239/

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Reality is o'dium is as close a verified insider as we're likely to get, and discrediting his rumours needs better arguments than character assassination.

His comments on the dismissal attempts:

As for “many people talking about this without knowing” comment, I would like to think that with all my years in game development, including having stuff in released indie and retail titles (hell, nvidia sent me a 2080ti recently for my work on quake 2 rtx), over multiple engines, with thousands upon thousands of assets created, shaders written and the like, I would kinda qualify as at least knowing a bit about how it all fits together in terms of “the puzzle”. I mean I talk to people close to the heart of these new consoles on a sometimes daily basis (..)

Here we have a verified developer that is publicly known, who has written shaders for real time raytracing on the PC (meaning he's at least somewhat familiar with Vulkan's RTX path) and claims to be close to people who work on the new consoles on a daily basis.

At this point, one can either believe:

1 - He's compulsively lying despite being an identified developer and not an anonymous account who's successfully tricking neogaf's mod team.
2 - He's not lying but he's spelling out info that he doesn't really understand, despite being a developer whose experience ranges from creating assets to writing shaders, worked on a real-time raytracing title and has experience over multiple game engines.
3 - He's telling the truth.

His comments are that the PS5 is 10.5 to 11.5 TFLOPs. It's 11TF plus/minus 500GFLOPs, and those are the target specs being given to the devs he claims he's talking to.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Yep. But the arguments against should be based in fact and decent argument.

A known dev giving their info is as valid and insightful as an unqualified GitHub leak. Both are some sort of insight into what is going on behind closed doors (assuming the guy isn't flat-out making shit up) and should be considered as blurry, through-the-keyhole limited takes on what might be happening. Out of all the usual baseless rumours, the random Pastebins out there, there are actually a few which a little more basis to them.

I'd pretty much weight any official statements or official documents first, and then probably weight some media takes like Digital Foundry a bit behind that. After that you might have some verified people on forums, but it's hard to know how reliable any of them are. Someone could be a developer and not know shit if they're getting information second or third-hand. Overall, I find most of the claims look vague enough that they could be right by accident. So it gets hard to know if they were right because they had good sources, or they were blindfolded and throwing darts at a dart board and some of the darts happened to hit near the bullseye. That's the problem with leakers. Other people may weigh these things differently in their minds, and there's a pretty clear split in here that falls pretty much in line with what brands people prefer. I do dislike the idea that people think rumours have to be dispproved for them not to be true. It works the other way. If someone makes a claim, they have to back it up. No one has to disprove a rumour. No one even has to accept a claim by default, and they probably shouldn't.

 

[AbsoluteBeginner]

The specs of Xbox Series X are on Internet since January 2019.

http://www.jeuxvideo.com/news/10065...eux-prochaines-xbox-devoilees-a-l-e3-2019.htm

But before Jeuxvideo posted this, this was posted on Reddit (along with 8+TF PS5 that was, as per post, delayed for 2020). What if...Ariel was test iGPU for BC and Oberon is real deal with RT/VRS that was not available to Sony when Ariel was tested (we know Ariel was tested in 2018)?

 

[chris1515]

His comments on the dismissal attempts:




Here we have a verified developer that is publicly known, who has written shaders for real time raytracing on the PC (meaning he's at least somewhat familiar with Vulkan's RTX path) and claims to be close to people who work on the new consoles on a daily basis.

At this point, one can either believe:

1 - He's compulsively lying despite being an identified developer and not an anonymous account who's successfully tricking neogaf's mod team.
2 - He's not lying but he's spelling out info that he doesn't really understand, despite being a developer whose experience ranges from creating assets to writing shaders, worked on a real-time raytracing title and has experience over multiple game engines.
3 - He's telling the truth.

His comments are that the PS5 is 10.5 to 11.5 TFLOPs. It's 11TF plus/minus 500GFLOPs, and those are the target specs being given to the devs he claims he's talking to.

Sorry my problem was with the verified process in GAF not o'dium. Knowning he is verified at era. I am ok this is enough for me. He workds in the industry.

 

[chris1515]

But before Jeuxvideo posted this, this was posted on Reddit (along with 8+TF PS5 that was, as per post, delayed for 2020).

I know this. The article is from february 2019 and I am french, the article told the Xbox specs inside the reddit leak are true. They had the information from their own source. And they said only the Xbox part of the reddit leak not the PS5 leak.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Overall, I find most of the claims look vague enough that they could be right by accident.

What would you find to be not vague enough that it could be right by accident?

Looks like there can't be any win here.
- Being too detailed raises red flags because specs can change at the last minute (i.e. an 8% clock uptick on the production model would mean ~+1 TFLOPs at this point), and no one knows the future
- Being vague to the point of naming a 11 TFLOPs figure +/- 4.5% means it's vague enough that it could be "right by accident"

Might as well just say "I don't believe anything that doesn't come from official channels".
Which you can, but I wonder what you'd be doing in this thread if that's the case.

 

[JoeJ]

Sony may have some solutions (not saying it does). Here's some patents on Photon Mapping already discussed in this forum.

https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/photon-mapping.61239/

Yeah, but how likely is it after 3 decades of rasterization only, to make a risky jump towards RT and PM, shaking things up completely?

Sigh. We get a percentage of information here and there, try to speculate this and that. What could make any sense what not...
The NDA guys miss all the fun with speculating, but watching our guessing, doomed to be worng, is probably even more fun.