Middle Generation Console Upgrade Discussion [Scorpio, 4Pro]

No I don't plan on it at all. I have an xbox one and its not going anywhere. The slim is really nice but my one is silent and running great with two 4 gig externals plugged into it. So there is no need to touch it.

I figure Scorpio will be $400-$500 and that money would go nicely to a new video card next fall to replace my 290.


A lot of people hate the windows store , however if I get the copies free then its a no brainer for me. I was planning on re-core , dragon scale , maybe the pirate game and def gears. The fact that I can get them and play them on either platform and more to the point play them with friends on the xbox one or scorpio is a big deal.

 

Yeah that's what I meant to say; you are still in the xbox ecosystem and that's the bigger longer term game. As long as you're in the ecosystem one way or the other, that's what MS wants.

 

your right. I might also be in for their stick if its a better option for streaming than the steam link .

 

There are 60m + reasons for it. That's the current amount of PS4/xbox ones on the market and the ps4 isn't going anywhere and the xbox one just got a slim edition. So that will only rise .

Scorpio is out next year and I bet it will be a $500 play and the xbox one slim will be $250 by that point. For some $250 more wouldn't be a big deal but for a lot of people it will. I am sure there will be a similar price difference for neo and ps4 maybe slightly smaller.

So devs will continue to push out quality titles on these platforms

You would get more out of them but they would be far behind what pcs would do. By the end of last generation people were just throwing monitors , downsampling and all sorts of things to burn off some pc power. My 290 which is 3 years old was playing xbox 360 ports at eye infinity settings 5760x1080p with everything maxed out .

We are 3 years into this generation and AMD just announced the RX 460 , 470 , 480 which will cost between $100 and $300 and they will all offer more tflops than the xbox one or ps4

And look at what the xbox 360 offered at the end of the xbox's life. The jump between the two was huge.

Why would sony or ms want to sell consoles for $100 or $200 when they can sell new ones at $400 or $500.

Why would EA or Ubisoft or whever want to throw hundreds of people at a project just to get looking a little nicer when they can throw it on a new machine and up the res , up the fsaa , up the filtering , up the texture quality and so on.


That along with VR and 4k gaming is why they are moving on. Its obvious the current consoles weren't powerful enough for that

 

Going to be interesting to see what the hardware changes are for the slim.

 

6TF,320GB memory bandwidth looks like a buffed RX480/GDDR5 setup. I would have expected something different for a product release late 2017.

 

Its most likely the small vega which is a step up from Polaris.

But honestly what did you really expect from a late 2017 product ? The whole system will have to use less than a 150watts under load . The xbox one used 110 and the ps4 used 130 during gaming.

Also everyone and their mother complained about how big the xbox one was , so your going to bet the console wont be bigger than the ps4 .

Your going to get a 8 core cpu (most likely zen) with most likely 16 gigs or more of ram + a hardrive and most likely optical drive all for under $500. What else would you expect ?

 

Well, I really expected them to use a Vega setup fitting their power budget and HBM2 because of the release window.

What's the point to wait until late 2017 for a tuned version of what Sony releases late 2016 or early 2017?

 

Yes, but there were people who can play on PC, can upgrade it every year if they want, can play on middle or low setings, there were people who can buy console and just play on it for years. Now this times is gone. And for such tech geek like me it's no good.

And for more than year there were only cross-gen games and remastered games, only in 2016 those consoes started to show something, and they announce new hardware. I just don't see the point.

hat does't mean we need new console every 3-4 years. You just look at Quake 4 on Xbox 360 which is lunch tite and on Crysis 3 or Metro Last Light on same platform. Difference is just unbeliveble. Or on exclusive games, Gear 1 and Gears 3. And that without hardware change. This is what I like the most about the consoles. I think you understand me.

This is why I think why there wi not be optimisations for Xbox One and Playstation 4 anymore.

 

As expected Microsoft is not clear about the subject of forward compatibility, which will surprise no one. One high exec is saying there will be exclusive Scorpio titles, the other saying there won't be.

 

I don't understand what differences people are expecting from Polaris to Vega? Surely this is analogous to GP104 vs GP102. Same tech/IP, just one is smaller and the other is bigger. But if we already have a salvage level Polaris chip scaled at 6TF (which we do) then why would they need to use a much bigger Vega, presumably clocked much lower? Baring in mind this is a SoC that we're talking about here so die size is presumably a factor too. I guess the argument is based on the assumption that a big slow (clock) Vega will be more power efficient than a small fast Polaris, but I think that's a fairly big assumption to make atm.

 

Well, if you look at AMD's Perf/Watt marketing material it shows close to 2x factor for Vega vs. Polaris. That would need some creative spin to reach without architectural improvements.

 

Not too surprising. Anything VR related will be Scorpio exclusive (until a future Xbox is released) as the XBO just isn't powerful enough to do VR on the partnered hardware. Obviously it'd also appear on PC.

Regards,
SB

 

and now you wont get that as you wont be getting generation breaking console releases any more, in fact the previous revision will still get pushed well after new revision simply due to install base.

for someone like you you may be better off not buying every revision and maybe every other one, which will give you standard generation length, and hardware being pushed

 

Isn't the Fury Nano something like 1.5x the Perf/Watt of the Fury X? On the exact same architecture?

Plus Vega will presumably have the advantage of using HBM over Polaris.

 

For reference using the AMD slide on Polaris, Vega, and Navi roadmap. Polaris is 2.5x the base GPU. Vega is very slightly more than 4.5x the base GPU and very slightly more than 1.8x Polaris. And while Vega will support HBM unlike Polaris, there is no indication whether all variants of Vega will feature HBM. If even one version uses GDDR (similar to 1080/1070 using different memory types) then it'd be questionable use to HBM to tout the power efficiency of the GPU architecture.

Remember that slide was about the architecture and not the graphics card implementation (unlike Fury versus 390 which was a card comparison and not an architecture comparison).

Fury Nano was also significantly more power efficient than Fury X and that certainly wasn't due to HBM but careful binning as well as running it in a lower power state.

Edit - think of it another way. When Sony and Microsoft were planning out PS4 Neo and XBO Scorpio there were no Polaris or Vega chips. There was only a roadmap. Assuming AMD presented Sony and Microsoft with that, they would know that AMD's projections were for 2.5x perf/watt for Polaris in 2016 and 4.5x perf/watt for Vega in 2017.

Sony goes hey, that's fantastic we can have 4.4 TFLOPs (4.5 TFLOPs for the same perf at the same power consumption using 2.5x for Polaris) in roughly the same power envelope as the PS4 and we can potentially have it out by the end of 2016.

Microsoft goes, hey, that's fantastic, we can have a 6 TFLOPs (5.85 TFLOPs for same perf at same power consumption as XBO if using 4.5x for Vega) machine in a slightly higher power envelope and we can potentially have it out by the end of 2017.

It could all just be a coincidence. Hence I'm not saying with any absolute certainty that this is the case.

Only that it would appear that it's more likely that XBO-T is using Vega versus Polaris.

Hell, it's entirely possible that Vega is only slightly different from Polaris, in which case we'll potentially have the Xbox Scorpio at 180-200 watts (higher than X360 launch edition). Ouch! I don't think Microsoft wants to go there, but who knows.

Regards,
SB

 

I know that was just a render of the board, but from the number of memory chips and announced bw, looks like it's gddr5, even not the fastest available.
Why not gddr5x? In 18 months it must be common enought, and a similar bw can be ottained with a slimmer/cheaper bus.

 

Initially I was quite up for the Scorpio but the more I think about it the more I think I may as well just upgrade my PC with the lack of true exclusives. I just wish PC gaming wasn't still a PITB.

 

I don't think that 6tflops on 14nm with console tdp limit is possible. 480x will be around 140W and it's slower and whole x one don't consume 140W.

 

GDDR5X is currently single sourced with only Micron producing it. Getting above 5.5-6.0Gbit ranges, dependant on the device pushes it into a Quad Data Rate mode, which is not as efficient as DDR, which all GDDR5 devices use regardless of the speed.