News & Rumors: Xbox One (codename Durango)

[astrograd]

Welcome to the forums. Thank you for signing up and sharing your thoughts while keeping the discussion on topic. Hopefully we'll be able to piece together this puzzle without too many insanities happening.

Thanks. :smile:

I think the comments I made at TXB (quoted here earlier) pull in as much as I am aware of in a coherent manner that makes sense. Lots of ppl on various forums (and even some in the press) seem to be focused on the individual pieces of the puzzle instead of looking at the wider picture and what it may mean.

How big of a difference would something like a graphics architecture built ground up for TBDR make in terms of things like badwidth/flops considerations? Anyone have any guesses/estimates there? I know Shifty noted that with some optimism earlier.

Has anyone looked deeper into the display plane patent(s)? They were also in the TXB post of mine that was quoted here. I'd especially like folks here to look at those patents and cross reference them with the MSR research article on foveated rendering as they are pretty much the exact same idea, with the latter being a much more ambitious implementation of the former. The foveated rendering payoff is 5-6 fold in performance and 15 fold in pixel shading iirc. I wonder if we can get an idea of how this might compare to the display planes in Durango. Hopefully tomorrow VGLeaks puts out the info for those. In terms of graphics those seem to be the only major thing remaining.

 

[astrograd]

If they aimed at holiday season 2012 they would have dev kits in early 2011, which they didn't have. That post is most likely aimed at Wii U, not PS4/Durango.

Also, their September 2010 roadmap was very clearly looking at a 2013 release. So it would be strange for them to go with 2013 that September onward...then a year into 3rd party dev cycles turn around and tell them all they just had a full year shaved off of their launch software production.

Delays are one thing...but cutting the remaining time to finish launch software down from 2 yrs to 1 would be crazy.

 

[bitsandbytes]

If they aimed at holiday season 2012 they would have dev kits in early 2011, which they didn't have. That post is most likely aimed at Wii U, not PS4/Durango.

Wii U turned out to have a IBM CPU again so in hindsight we know it wasn't that. And if you believe VGleaks, Sony had dev kits out in June/July 2011 and therefore assume Durango was around the same time.

 

[SlickShoesRUCrazy]

I believe in a multi-SKU strategy from a consumers point of view but what are you going to pull out to make the box $100-200 cheaper? The trouble with building a set-top-box SKU is what happens if someone wants to upgrade to the real thing? Should they actually have to put down $399 to be able to play 720 games? That's idiotic.

What I see happening is a $299 SKU with 120GB drive, $399 SKU with 500GB drive (aka the one to get) and a $99 version of the $299 SKU with a $15 monthly fee for 2 years and includes Live. Any actual gamer already has Live so it doesn't make sense to pay for it again plus they are far more likely to want the high end SKU. Makes perfect sense.

you aren't going to pull out anything.

You start with a base and add things for the enthusiast sku.

So let's say if the specs we have right now are legitimate. What if what we have been seeing is actually the "set-top" media center approach with light gaming capabilities. By light gaming capabilities, I mean the difference between games on a medium spec'd pc and a high end pc. Games run on both of them, just games look/run better on the high end model.

The enthusiast sku will have the same base as the media center sku, but, it will have added hardware so that games look/run better(and I mean by looks would be a significant bump in iq, textures, draw distance, etc). Whether it be an extra full soc, or simply an extra gpu.

And while I am by no means a tech expert, not even close. I would think this would be possible. I've seen many people say that it's a bad idea to fragment the market, but everybody says that Microsoft has awesome dev tools. I would think they would be able to make it work with just two different performance levels, unlike the idea of a modular design with multiple mods you can pull out/add.

Again, I am no tech expert. I simply believe this scenario would be feasible.

 

[Ruskie]

Wii U turned out to have a IBM CPU again so in hindsight we know it wasn't that. And if you believe VGleaks, Sony had dev kits out in June/July 2011 and therefore assume Durango was around the same time.

Who says that poster works for AMD in the first place? He never said in which company he works in.

 

[kagemaru]

Who says that poster works for AMD in the first place? He never said in which company he works in.

I believe that was revealed in other posts.

 

[Osamar]

I imagine some people at Microsoft in front of the "megahert Wall" in the world of consoles. And like Intel they take the route of "hiperthreading", in the sense of maximun usage. They thought that brute force do not pay off at costs and wattage. I hope most of the speculations are true, so we have a new aproach. Even if I am a Pc gamer.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

• 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.

Just be aware there is a monetary cost (albeit low, 2.99 to 4.99 for unlimited monthly or useage based credit) associated with making a call to a landline or cell phone. It's one of the profit generators for Skype. The advertising subsidized free stuff is limited to internet to internet calls.

Hence, why MS is keen to include it on as many devices as possible to drive adoption into it being a ubiquitous service. And why they'd love to have it available on Orbis.

Regards,
SB

 

[pjbliverpool]

Just be aware there is a monetary cost (albeit low, 2.99 to 4.99 for unlimited monthly or useage based credit) associated with making a call to a landline or cell phone. It's one of the profit generators for Skype. The advertising subsidized free stuff is limited to internet to internet calls.

Hence, why MS is keen to include it on as many devices as possible to drive adoption into it being a ubiquitous service. And why they'd love to have it available on Orbis.

Regards,
SB

Yeah good point, I was working from the assumption of Skype to Skype calls but of course not everyone has skype and so it couldn't full replace your home phone.

 

[ERP]

I put $10 on my Skype account 2 years ago, I use it to phone home when on business trips, I think I'm down to ~$3 left.
Now I'm not a heavy phone user, but that seems like a pretty good deal.

 

[french toast]

Hi, since ppl here are evidently speaking on my behalf I opted to go ahead and sign up since I read these forums a lot anyhow.

1) I never thought nor claimed there would be an RT chip in Durango. I DID argue in support of the idea it was possible to do real time RT (even better actually, path tracing!) and that real time RT chips most certainly exist in the real world and had no shortage of details/evidential support in those arguments.

2) I've no idea where you got the 2nd thing there. I never said any of that.

3) I'm not a dev, nor do I have any any insider access to anything, nor have I ever presented myself in a way to suggest otherwise. I'm just collecting the various pieces of this puzzle just like the rest of you guys here (who do a fantastic job btw).

Welcome this faveated tech..sounds interesting. .and if im honest too good to be true...any info I can read? Thanks

 

[Jubei]

you aren't going to pull out anything.

You start with a base and add things for the enthusiast sku.

So let's say if the specs we have right now are legitimate. What if what we have been seeing is actually the "set-top" media center approach with light gaming capabilities. By light gaming capabilities, I mean the difference games on a medium spec'd pc and a high end pc. Games run on both of them, just games look/run better on the high end model.

The enthusiast sku will have the same base as the media center sku, but, it will have added hardware so that games look/run better(and I mean by looks would be a significant bump in iq, textures, draw distance, etc). Whether it be an extra full soc, or simply an extra gpu.

And while I am by no means a tech expert, not even close. I would think this would be possible. I've seen many people say that it's a bad idea to fragment the market, but everybody says that Microsoft has awesome dev tools. I would think they would be able to make it work with just two different performance levels, unlike the idea of a modular design with multiple mods you can pull out/add.

Again, I am no tech expert. I simply believe this scenario would be feasible.

1,2 teraflop GPU would be way overkill for a set top box

 

[SlickShoesRUCrazy]

1,2 teraflop GPU would be way overkill for a set top box

miss the part where it would still play games?

 

[Brimstone]

1.2 Tflops sounds like Larrabee.

 

[astrograd]

Welcome this faveated tech..sounds interesting. .and if im honest too good to be true...any info I can read? Thanks

Sure. http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/176610/foveated_final15.pdf

The basic idea is use an eye tracking camera device to track/calculate where your eyes are looking on the screen and render the circular "foveated region" surrounding that point on the screen at high res/fps/polygons/etc. Then surrounding that region with another layer that is at lower res/fps/polygons/etc. Then they iterate on that once more in a 3rd layer, likewise at lower fidelity than the 2nd layer. They then blend everything together smoothly. This all happens on the fly as your eye moves around the screen. So you only are rendering the stuff your eyes are actually focused on at high fidelity while everything else is gradually lower fidelity.

The human eye naturally does this anyhow, so the novel concept here is that computer games and whatnot are wasting resources by rendering an entire frame at high fidelity when viewers can't ever focus on anything more than small regions of it at a time anyhow. I won't post more on this since tehre is likely already a topic for it somewhere and by itself it's not rumored to be part of Durango's setup as it stands.

Anyhow...

I only noted it since it sounds eerily similar in concept to the idea of using display planes in Durango to layer 3 planes on top of one another to allow their fidelity to dynamically be adjusted by the game engine in order to keep the res, fps, etc of the target display plane at full fidelity (so they can offer QoS guarantees...aka "1080p, 30fps or 60fps locked gaming is standard for all Durango games"). That'd be a helluva bullet point to beat their chest over, even if the background planes actually render at dynamic res/fps/etc. So it'd be *only* slightly misleading depending on the implementation.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I put $10 on my Skype account 2 years ago, I use it to phone home when on business trips, I think I'm down to ~$3 left.
Now I'm not a heavy phone user, but that seems like a pretty good deal.

Yup, if I made a lot of phone calls, it'd be cheaper to make calls through Skype over wifi on my cell phone than it would be to actually call on the phone itself.

5 USD per month for 100 minutes (5 cents per minute) or 2.3 cents per minute on Skype (per minute credit) or 2.99 USD a month for unlimited within the US/Canada (more if you need to call overseas).

Regards,
SB

 

[Xovek]

Hey, there.

I´m new in this place, and I´d like to say this forum likes me because the amount of data from I´m learning about this gaming world is so big.

Said that, want to say I´m totally agree with the theory about durango is a set-up box. Maybe a set up box way too strong whose hardware puts it in a new category.

As asgrad said in the xboxteam forums, the durango´s hardware seems to be made in order to eliminate redundancies and go straight forward in some sensitive points that affects the performance of games.

By the way, I´m not expert in these topics, but I like to learn.

 

[ramr]

#5. MS Originally planned Durango to be released in 2012 as a Multimedia+Gaming console so it was spec'd using late 2011 technology.

2012 OR 2014 always made vastly more sense than 2013. Going by Yukon, 2013 was always the target. If the current specs are the full story, then MS made a huge mistake by not launching last November with Durango. The timing has always been one of the most confusing aspects of this whole thing. 2011 >> 2012 > 2014 >>>>>>>>>>>>>2013 in terms of optimal time to launch. 2013 is literally worst possible launch year in several generations so i have trouble understanding what is behind this timing.

 

[Jubei]

miss the part where it would still play games?

So? Why would they add a fairly competitive gpu for a low end sku? Why would they go through the trouble of adding ESRAM wich is a sign of trying to make it more competitive rather than them aiming for low end performance. They have gone over budget if their goal was to design a low end SKU, and im going to assume Microsoft engineers arent stupid

Ockhams razor: Durango is Microsofts answer to core gaming and the upcoming threat from Apple/Google in the living room. Its a flexible console designed to be competitive in both areas

 

[ramr]

Far more likely than your first option IMO is that MS simply wanted a machine that could be sold at a profit from day 1 and incorporated sufficient hardware to make it the dominant media and casual gaming machine. This has necessarily come at the expense of high end gaming performance but Microsofts gamble is that as long as the high end gaming performance is "good enough" - which it appears to be - then the system will capture the market through its vast array of other functions. I think it's a damn good gamble.

Actually no that is not more likely as it doesn't fit the fact pattern. To meet your goal, its seems unlikely that they would have chosen to go the Durango route.