News & Rumors: Xbox One (codename Durango)

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dumbo11 said:
As I understand it, Durango/STB is a hell of a lot more than Tivo...
- in theory it should be able to stream the TV to your tablet, whilst you play a game on the TV.
- a popup window or a twitter feed or whatever that appears on your TV, but appears identically in your 1080p AAA game.
- "play a game whilst the console record's the TV you were watching".
- in your 1080p60 game, you get a popup with your tv programme to warn you that it's starting.
- you press install and then select 'tv', the system tells you when it's installed.
- you recieve an email and a warning pops up on the tv 'newemail' - you can select it and the live tv records then resumes afterwards.
- it connects to your PC and informs you when something happens to it.
- skype pops up overlayed, recieving the call pauses the TV (or the game).
- it connects to your phone.
[etc]
(the original leaked design brief covers a bunch of use cases - and, I guess, there's no requirement for only 1 HDMI in, or only 1 HDMI out?)

Having said all of that, and despite being intrigued... I am concerned that tablets might make this 'less relevant' in 2013 than it seemed a few years ago. Also the interface is likely metro, which hasn't been all that popular.
Click to expand...


I would be surprised if Xbox next did not do all the above at launch!!!!!

Hypermedia!!
 
expletive said:
The human ARG.

Aren't dev kits property of Microsoft?
Click to expand...

The current theory is that Alpha kits were built by the devs based on a component list provided by Microsoft. You'd then install custom software and drivers. If he just built an identical machine it would be his to sell. Distribution of the development software is another question.
 
Brad Grenz said:
The current theory is that Alpha kits were built by the devs based on a component list provided by Microsoft. You'd then install custom software and drivers. If he just built an identical machine it would be his to sell. Distribution of the development software is another question.
Click to expand...

Shocked that component list hasn't been leaked, or has it?

Well regardless in 8.5 days + shipping time I assume someone will spill the beans on whats inside. I'm guessing we'll know around Feb 20th. :oops:
 
Brad Grenz said:
The current theory is that Alpha kits were built by the devs based on a component list provided by Microsoft. You'd then install custom software and drivers. If he just built an identical machine it would be his to sell. Distribution of the development software is another question.
Click to expand...
Nope.
 
Squilliam said:
Which is more important for people to perceive graphical improvement, shaders or textures? If you took a screen shot and showed people two options, either a game with heavy textures and medium shaders or medium textures and heavy shading which will they perceive as being better?

Also moving forwards with Intel integrated GPUs, would developers favour improving the textures more than shaders or shaders more than textures in order to better cater to this important audience?
Click to expand...

Using human for example I would definitely put more resources in skin, hair and sweat shaders over a high res texture map any day of the week. A high res normalmap without good shaders is a high res piece of plastic from last gen.
 
Either he received them 2nd hand or there is some specific law or loophole to Australia(where he's located) that says they are his property to sell. He has done this before & Microsoft didn't seem to block his sale then. So why would now be any different?

Tommy McClain
 
a devloper from team xbox talks about durango a little bit.

The most likely rumors/leaks we have atm tell us with very few uncertain terms that Durango's graphics setup is wholly incomparable to Orbis/PC setups. Not because one or the other is dramatically more powerful, but because the former is geared towards a much more sophisticated, targeted approach to rendering and the latter is going for effectively brute force.

It is now clear why the various insiders said what they did about the flops and bandwidth arguments being worthless and about efficiency. The 'special sauce' is the entire design philosophy targeting the removal of highly redundant processing inherent in modern graphics engines in the first place.

Make no mistake, the DME's and eSRAM are most certainly NOT there primarily to alleviate DDR3 bandwidth issues, as we all previously had assumed. DDR3 was NOT chosen just to be cheap, it was chosen more likely because higher bandwidth was simply not needed and to help with the thermodynamics. Think about it like this...

Sony went with a largely off the shelf, simple design for decent power at reasonable costs. MS could have very easily gone with the exact same setup. But they didn't. They evidently looked at the obvious setup and opted to spend more money at higher costs engineering a very elaborate, highly customized architecture that will be challenging to manufacture. Why? None of that helps the OS or even Kinect stuff one bit as far as anyone has been able to tell. So even in purely gaming terms they opted out of the cheap, easy, straight forward approach. They wouldn't spend all that extra money and effort and risk if both their engineers and AMD's didn't feel it was worthwhile.

It's not about one magical piece of hardware to make up the bandwidth of Flops difference as a 'secret sauce'. Their ace in the hole is designing the whole architecture to be 100% catered towards virtualized texturing, robust tiling, virtual geometry, low cost post processing fx, etc.



Zombie, read up on the Durango's display planes via these patents:

http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20120159090
http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20110304713

MS is all but guaranteed to lock down system wide standards for both framerates and pseudo resolution. You will likely get 1080p HUD and foregrounds standard with 30fps locked, also standard. The way they get there is to significantly reduce the processing needed in most modern game engines by allowing dynamic res scaling for the background which can also be blurred via advanced DoF for 'free' (as far as GPU is concerned).
Click to expand...

and this

No. They aren't taking shortcuts, they are implementing methods for system-wide QoS options that otherwise can't exist with any reasonable flexibility. We were all thinking backwards on this. They didn't add this stuff to make up for any disadvantage against Orbis, which was super weak long after they made their design (circa summer 2012 devs apparently were livid about its weakness according to insiders). Their decisions were made long before that. You can't really use brute force to give devs both flexibility and retain system wide standards for fps/res. There has to be a built in method for handling that at the hardware level, which is what the display planes are.

It is no more a shortcut than not having it. The difference is with the display planes you save yourself processing power when ya don't need/want it as you can get DoF and other stuff for free and you don't get stuck with the entire frame at a lower res/clip. Modern games are going to all be using DoF of some sort anyhow, even if it's just in the background artwork. This is a more flexible, vastly more efficient approach that allows for QoS guarantees without significantly altering the actual fidelity of the stuff you are focused on in-game (foreground).

Hell, in theory they could take this to its logical extreme with Kinect 2.0 packed in and possibly even do their foveated rendering stuff (5-6 fold boost in performance). Hmmm...in fact, perhaps their reported performance gains in that study could guide expectations roughly for what these display planes might yield. I wonder how pared back those gains will be compared to that (5-6 fold). Starting to wonder if that foveated rendering stuff might be similar in implementation here. Might have to cross check that paper with the display plane patents tomorrow.
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Hes very knowlegable and always explains stuff in detail.seems like 720 isn't nearly as weak as everyone was thinking.no raytracing chips, but this stuff sounds cool.doesn't the dreamcast do tile based stuff as well? a 5x boost in performance is just awesome! and people were worried druango wouldn't be as powerful as orbis!

source http://forum.teamxbox.com/showthread.php?t=681841&page=107
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Solarus said:
a devloper from team xbox talks about durango a little bit.



and this




Hes very knowlegable and always explains stuff in detail.seems like 720 isn't nearly as weak as everyone was thinking.no raytracing chips, but this stuff sounds cool.doesn't the dreamcast do tile based stuff as well? a 5x boost in performance is just awesome! and people were worried druango wouldn't be as powerful as orbis!
Click to expand...

Can we have a link to the thread?..

EDIT:.

those quotes are from astrograd, he is not a developer.

he originally though the Durango was going to have a raytracing chip, then later on he thought it was going to be a 3 SoC with 3 GPUs and 3 CPU's which included a entire xbox360. I would take what he posts with a pretty big bag of salt.
 
oh i always though he was a developer. hes the oinly reason i even read stuff on team xbox. he seems to be the only person who knows what their talking about when it comes to software. maybe hardware isn't his main area of knowledge. oh well back to more speculation on druango!
 
ramr said:
In the US the cable companies own the boxes. Subscribers only lease them. A HD DVR right now runs about $10/month per room. Much better deals can be had with Satellite service but then you lose your internet.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it's a nice hustle for the cable companies. That has to be like 100% pofit margin after the first 5 montha? They try to do the same in Norway, but you can buy those in the store instead
 
Solarus said:
Hes very knowlegable and always explains stuff in detail.seems like 720 isn't nearly as weak as everyone was thinking.no raytracing chips, but this stuff sounds cool.doesn't the dreamcast do tile based stuff as well? a 5x boost in performance is just awesome! and people were worried druango wouldn't be as powerful as orbis!http://forum.teamxbox.com/showthread.php?t=681841&page=107
Click to expand...
Foveal rendering means eye tracking at the microscopic level. It's not happening (I think it was a $10,000 camera enabling that in MS's labs. Some dev here has explained it if you go searching the forum).

I'm also unconvinced there's anything more to this post than the speculation on this board. I see nothing to say for certain that MS's intention is tile based, virtual geom, virtual textures. That seems the most likely route, but he's stating it as fact.
 
dumbo11 said:
As I understand it, Durango/STB is a hell of a lot more than Tivo...
- in theory it should be able to stream the TV to your tablet, whilst you play a game on the TV.
- a popup window or a twitter feed or whatever that appears on your TV, but appears identically in your 1080p AAA game.
- "play a game whilst the console record's the TV you were watching".
- in your 1080p60 game, you get a popup with your tv programme to warn you that it's starting.
- you press install and then select 'tv', the system tells you when it's installed.
- you recieve an email and a warning pops up on the tv 'newemail' - you can select it and the live tv records then resumes afterwards.
- it connects to your PC and informs you when something happens to it.
- skype pops up overlayed, recieving the call pauses the TV (or the game).
- it connects to your phone.
[etc]
(the original leaked design brief covers a bunch of use cases - and, I guess, there's no requirement for only 1 HDMI in, or only 1 HDMI out?)

Having said all of that, and despite being intrigued... I am concerned that tablets might make this 'less relevant' in 2013 than it seemed a few years ago. Also the interface is likely metro, which hasn't been all that popular.
Click to expand...

Agreed. I think most people are missing the point of Durango. It's going to be a media centre first and a games machine second. That's why it's gaming capabilities don't look so hot compared with Orbis, 1. They won't need to be and 2. The system has been balanced towards it's media capabilities rather than gaming but still needs to be sold at a profit from day 1 since it's capabilities will drive sales to consumers who have little or no intention of ever purchasing a game for it.

Durango has 3 absolutely killer features which if marketed right could make it almost as revolutionary as the iPhone.

1. Always on
2. Voice recognition
3. Kinect

And all this powered by dedicated system resources which will be low power and silent. The potential this brings is staggering, image the marketing potential:

  • Replace your home phone with an always on Skype based high quality video communication system that responds to voice commands ("who's calling" "answer" "ignore") and costs you nothing over your internet subscription regardless of where in the world you'r calling.

  • Minority Report style internet browsing on the TV via voice control and hand gestures

  • Virtual mirror capabilities allowing you to shop online and try out clothes, hairstyles and makeup in real time via Kinect (was originally shown with Cell before PS3 launched but was never realised in the final product)

  • DVR capability that allows you to stream live or recorded programmes to any device in the house over WiFi

  • A blu-ray and music system which is entirely controlled via voice, or if you prefer, via your phone or tablet

  • Oh yeah, it's also a next generation games machine comparable to the most powerful dedicated games machine available on the market (PS4)
 
pjbliverpool said:
Agreed. I think most people are missing the point of Durango. It's going to be a media centre first and a games machine second. That's why it's gaming capabilities don't look so hot compared with Orbis, 1. They won't need to be and 2. The system has been balanced towards it's media capabilities rather than gaming but still needs to be sold at a profit from day 1 since it's capabilities will drive sales to consumers who have little or no intention of ever purchasing a game for it.

Durango has 3 absolutely killer features which if marketed right could make it almost as revolutionary as the iPhone.

1. Always on
2. Voice recognition
3. Kinect

And all this powered by dedicated system resources which will be low power and silent. The potential this brings is staggering, image the marketing potential:

  • Replace your home phone with an always on Skype based high quality video communication system that responds to voice commands ("who's calling" "answer" "ignore") and costs you nothing over your internet subscription regardless of where in the world you'r calling.

  • Minority Report style internet browsing on the TV via voice control and hand gestures

  • Virtual mirror capabilities allowing you to shop online and try out clothes, hairstyles and makeup in real time via Kinect (was originally shown with Cell before PS3 launched but was never realised in the final product)

  • DVR capability that allows you to stream live or recorded programmes to any device in the house over WiFi

  • A blu-ray and music system which is entirely controlled via voice, or if you prefer, via your phone or tablet

  • Oh yeah, it's also a next generation games machine comparable to the most powerful dedicated games machine available on the market (PS4)
Click to expand...
Anything voice related can be done simply with a microphone. Using the Kinect just for that is a waste of hardware. That can be even replicated with the PSEye. Heck voice recognition games existed even on the PS2.
Voice recognition is so easy to replicate that it is not even a real competitive advantage. And quite frankly it isnt necessarily that awesome to begin with
The "always on" is certainly something useful (again not necessarily a unique competitive advantage because I wouldnt be surprised if the PS4 comes with such function to allow seamless streaming to other devices like the Vita) and DVR capability
 
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