Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2019]

[AbsoluteBeginner]

Acutally, I hadn't thought about that. Maybe there was more ample supply of cutdown 5700s. The early production runs of 5700s may have had more issues with defective blocks than the ability to overclocked. What do you do with 5700s that can maintain stability at higher clocks but have defective blocks?

These are pre-launch dev kits. Given how Sony and MS tends to treat dev kits (there is a reason you can't readily buy dev kits online in volume), these may be short lived dev kits that get swapped out as soon as newer versions are available. Its could of been the case of where AMD didn't want to limit the availability of its best chips to the gaming market to accommodate throw away dev kits.

Some early Durango dev kits had high end 7 series nvidia cards in them. Who actually knows why? The only AMD cards that will give you something close to 500 GBs of bandwidth are high end Vegas and Navi 10. There are other metrics other than Tflops that manufacturers have to contend with when producing dev kits.

Trying to parse out relevant information for early hardware kits is like trying to read tea leaves.

Who had early chips? Devs? Maybe internal or trusted devs who are part of the verification/validation process but regular third party devs probably not. If you are in the middle of verification and validation of hardware, you are not providing the same hardware to devs for development purposes.

Obviously we are not privy to such information, but from everything gathered, late 2018 dev kits that were sent and housed inside "big silver tower" would probably be in line with rumors saying big Vega was inside. Hard to imagine these being 5700 cards when they were not on market for next 8 months.

I think Oberon from repo leak cannot be 5700/5700XT. Not only are dates not fitting, it says right there Oberon is SOC and tab which concerns GPU part is named "iGPU" - pointing to actualy GPU inside SOC, not discrete part.

 

[Betanumerical]

Obviously we are not privy to such information, but from everything gathered, late 2018 dev kits that were sent and housed inside "big silver tower" would probably be in line with rumors saying big Vega was inside. Hard to imagine these being 5700 cards when they were not on market for next 8 months.

I think Oberon from repo leak cannot be 5700/5700XT. Not only are dates not fitting, it says right there Oberon is SOC and tab which concerns GPU part is named "iGPU" - pointing to actualy GPU inside SOC, not discrete part.

If its 100% a SoC, why does it have a DMA test case for local memory to system memory with real bandwidth results?. I am not saying its not a SoC, Im just saying that there wouldn't be any results for that if it was a SoC with unified memory.

 

[Rootax]

SoC doesn't mean you don't have to talk to the main memory... I don't know what you're expecting ?

 

[Cyan]

Oookay, now I'm really considering to sell my PS4 pro and psvr to save for PS5 or Xbox series x, whichever gonna have better VR.

PC -if you want VR, Xbox One X isnt meant for VR-. Either way, had I to buy a console, I'd get Lockhart to play some isolated games. The more I know about the next generation the more I know my next hardware is going to be a 144Hz WQHD (1440p) monitor.

Now that I have a 1080 and I can get those framerates at 1440p, 4k is not important. I am myopic and I value the health of my eyesight a lot. People's eyes love high refresh rates.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

PC -if you want VR, Xbox One X isnt meant for VR.

Series X, not One X.

 

[Nesh]

Expect MS to hit the best price with one version of the XBOX and the best performance with the other living Sony unable to market the PS5 as either the best price or the best performance.
I have hopes that Sony may surprise us with another announcement like they did with the memory "upgrade" for the PS4 but I highly doubt it.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

"Best (lowest) price" is immaterial if the product isn't right. eg. Tesla having a $400,000 car option and a $4,000 car option, where the $4,000 car option is so useless no-one would want it. In that case, any other manufacturer can put a $10000, $20000, $30000 car and have a decent market.

There's no way anyone can hazard a realistic guess as to what the interest will be like for these consoles without knowing everything about specs and prices. We could be looking at anything from MS cornering both ends of the industry with a competitively priced, competitively performing low-end console (slightly less power than PS5, far lower price) and a highly desirable upper end leaving Sony offering nothing in particular, to MS having a low-end that's underpowered and a high-end that's overpriced and only PS5 offering a price/performance balance that suits the mainstream buyers.

Until we know prices, there's no point comparing performance and speculating on how well the consoles will do.

 

[Nesh]

True but I didnt say anything about how well they will do. I only referred to the expected strategy. As a company that tries to design and market the product appropriately, it is likely they will try to hit the right price-performance relation on both sides of the value proposition.

 

[iroboto]

True but I didnt say anything about how well they will do. I only referred to the expected strategy. As a company that tries to design and market the product appropriately, it is likely they will try to hit the right price-performance relation on both sides of the value proposition.

no official account of a second console yet. So I don't think Sony will need to worry about it until there is something actually officially announced.
I get the strategy of causing a sandwich, but a lot of people like to choose the middle of pack as well. Not the strongest, not the weakest, best priced etc.
I don't see it as taking away a lot from Sony, and even so I don't believe MS is giong to have a second console anytime soon, certainly not going to have one for launch imo.

 

[dobwal]

Obviously we are not privy to such information, but from everything gathered, late 2018 dev kits that were sent and housed inside "big silver tower" would probably be in line with rumors saying big Vega was inside. Hard to imagine these being 5700 cards when they were not on market for next 8 months.

I think Oberon from repo leak cannot be 5700/5700XT. Not only are dates not fitting, it says right there Oberon is SOC and tab which concerns GPU part is named "iGPU" - pointing to actualy GPU inside SOC, not discrete part.

My bad. I didn't realize you pull that info from that dump. If you believe that dump is real then I can see how you expect 36 CU at 2 GHz.

However, I still have problems because I don't know what phase of testing this data represents. Is this after burn-in testing or just some sort of functional test that happens before burn-in is performed?

 

[orangpelupa]

PC -if you want VR, Xbox One X isnt meant for VR-. Either way, had I to buy a console, I'd get Lockhart to play some isolated games. The more I know about the next generation the more I know my next hardware is going to be a 144Hz WQHD (1440p) monitor.

Now that I have a 1080 and I can get those framerates at 1440p, 4k is not important. I am myopic and I value the health of my eyesight a lot. People's eyes love high refresh rates.

already got a PC. its still missing nice VR games. most PC VR games i've tried also felt not polished enough (compared to PSVR exclusives made by sony's developers like london heist full version or whatever it was called, rush of blood, etc)

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Until we know prices, there's no point comparing performance and speculating on how well the consoles will do.

True although there is a considerable body of evidence that can be looked back upon. From the ColecoVision to NeoGeo to PC Engine/Turbo-Grafix-16 to 3DO to PlayStation 3 to Xbox One. Every one was more expensive relative to the competition and they all sold badly at their higher price. I can't recall a single instance of an expensive console, regardless of tech or USP (XBO/Kinect) selling well.

 

[eloic]

True although there is a considerable body of evidence that can be looked back upon. From the ColecoVision to NeoGeo to PC Engine/Turbo-Grafix-16 to 3DO to PlayStation 3 to Xbox One. Every one was more expensive relative to the competition and they all sold badly at their higher price. I can't recall a single instance of an expensive console, regardless of tech or USP (XBO/Kinect) selling well.

Wasn't the PS2 quite expensive back then, IIRC?

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Wasn't the PS2 quite expensive back then, IIRC?

At launch yes; especially compared to the previous generation and the Dreamcast which has a staggered 1998/1999 worldwide release. Or if you compare it to the GameCube which came later. But not if you factor in the Xbox, which went pursued the higher-cost-higher-specifications model. Microsoft have the most success with an affordable console and the least amount of success with more expensive consoles. The same for Sony.

I see a pattern emerging here in terms of tens of millions of sales over consoles lifetimes at relative price-points.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Xbox pricing was very high in Europe. £300 at launch ($420?) versus $300 in US and a £200 PS2. Six weeks later and no sales, MS slashed the price by a third.

 

[RDGoodla]

If its 100% a SoC, why does it have a DMA test case for local memory to system memory with real bandwidth results?. I am not saying its not a SoC, Im just saying that there wouldn't be any results for that if it was a SoC with unified memory.

I haven’t noticed that. How much bandwidth in DMA test?

PS4 pro has split memory 8GB GDDR5 and 1GB DDR. Does it seem SONY uses split memory again with more DDR4?

 

[DuckThor Evil]

Xbox pricing was very high in Europe. £300 at launch ($420?) versus $300 in US and a £200 PS2. Six weeks later and no sales, MS slashed the price by a third.

Wow, the Pound was quite strong at that time... Xbox was 500€ in Finland and I got it on day 1. No lines at the shop, but firing up Halo on my 52" projection TV and pretty good 5.1 dolby digital setup was something else back then

 

[dobwal]

True although there is a considerable body of evidence that can be looked back upon. From the ColecoVision to NeoGeo to PC Engine/Turbo-Grafix-16 to 3DO to PlayStation 3 to Xbox One. Every one was more expensive relative to the competition and they all sold badly at their higher price. I can't recall a single instance of an expensive console, regardless of tech or USP (XBO/Kinect) selling well.

The $199 Dreamcast with a year head start versus a $299 PS2.

The PS1 launched at $299 but its sales were relatively sluggish at the start, so I don’t know how well it did in terms of normalizing that price point.

Regardless, at the very least you have to come in with or quickly build some significant mindshare to be priced higher than your competition.

 

[cheapchips]

The $199 Dreamcast with a year head start versus a $299 PS2.

The PS1 launched at $299 but its sales were relatively sluggish at the start, so I don’t know how well it did in terms of normalizing that price point.

Regardless, at the very least you have to come in with or quickly build some significant mindshare to be priced higher than your competition.

That extra $100 on PS2 was worth it for many people as their first DVD player. Stand alone players were only starting hit $100 towards the end of 2000 and they were much worse players than PS2.

 

[see colon]

I love Dreamcast but I don't know if it ever captured the public mindset of being "next generation" like PS2 did. Sony's marketing department did a great job hyping up the specs of PS2 pre launch, and it didn't help that most of the Dreamcast library is ports of PS1 and N64 games, and many of its exclusives are 2d fighters that don't look technically impressive to the polygon counting crowd.