News & Rumors: Xbox One (codename Durango)

[Cyan]

Somebody on neogaf posted what if all the leaks and superdae were part of a Durango ARG

1 day less to go before MS tell us all the details of the console.

We can only guess the number of Petaflops, the GPU, the CPU... but well, we can get close to know the final specs by using some hints, somehow.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

A console, as it may be the new generation, can not reach the Petaflops, a measure that indicates one billion floating-point operations performed in a second by the CPU, normally present in supercomputers.

A gigaflop is already one billion flops, 10^9. A Petaflop is million times more, 10^15.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Building, running and maintaining even a single petaflop's worth of computing costs millions of dollars. To try and do so for a console which is destined to sell in tens of millions of units would bankrupt microsoft in roughly 15 minutes.

...So, NO. I'm sorry.

This is impossible.

If you total the processing power of all the consoles, using some funky PR maths, you get a petaflop of (always online, always connected) gaming processing is better than the teraflop within the individual box. In a persistent world game, I don't think that'd be too far a stretch, although of course pretty misleading. But I think that comment and the others tie in well with the always-on rumours. Durango is likely to be on the net sharing code and processing with other boxes and servers. It'll give a great marketing angle. "Tap into the power of cloud computing, bringing a petaflop of processing power into your living room!" Of course, that petaflop is shared between each thousand consoles contributing to it, so the processing per player is no better than 1 TF each user...

Thinking about it, all those slides seem more relevant to the rumour thread than hardware. I'll make the move...

 

[Brad Grenz]

Based on those pdf slides, MS is abandoning asymmetrical analog sticks in favor of Dual Shock positions! They are also moving the d-pad to the right hand.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Based on those pdf slides, MS is abandoning asymmetrical analog sticks in favor of Dual Shock positions! They are also moving the d-pad to the right hand.

Good spot, although I'd suggest the icon was mirrored if they are making these changes. There's zero sense to moving the D-pad to the other side of the controller to that people have been using for 30 years. That'd be like releasing a computer with a new keyboard (Dvorak) as standard, and confusing the hell out of all your touch-typers.

Given the genericness of the icons, I'm more inclined to think it's just a controller and not specifically the XB720 controller. A search for "controller icons" throws up a few with the d-pad on the 'wrong' side like this.

 

[dagamer]

If you total the processing power of all the consoles, using some funky PR maths, you get a petaflop of (always online, always connected) gaming processing is better than the teraflop within the individual box. In a persistent world game, I don't think that'd be too far a stretch, although of course pretty misleading. But I think that comment and the others tie in well with the always-on rumours. Durango is likely to be on the net sharing code and processing with other boxes and servers. It'll give a great marketing angle. "Tap into the power of cloud computing, bringing a petaflop of processing power into your living room!" Of course, that petaflop is shared between each thousand consoles contributing to it, so the processing per player is no better than 1 TF each user...

Thinking about it, all those slides seem more relevant to the rumour thread than hardware. I'll make the move...

Imagine if games *were* actually always-on and AI even in single player games was based on game analysis of everyone who had played previously? Call the hardness mode *realistic* and craft not hard AI, but smart AI. That would be awesome. It would also probably never happen. Oh well.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

That's been floated as an idea in some other thread. There're are certainly improvements that can be made to many games by having access to a massive networked processing platform, even just recording and replaying other players' actions, but then again it's a lot cheaper and easier to just provide online gaming with real people.

 

[Brad Grenz]

Imagine if games *were* actually always-on and AI even in single player games was based on game analysis of everyone who had played previously? Call the hardness mode *realistic* and craft not hard AI, but smart AI. That would be awesome. It would also probably never happen. Oh well.

Next thing you're gonna be telling me the Durango chipset will be built into appliances so my refrigerator can help "ripen" my gameplay.

 

[fehu]

Why MS or Sony don't build an uber soc, keeping the bad dies for some smart tv or smart something?
So they can go more aggressive on the specs
Not that it's the best tech for a smart something, but at least for some year they don't trash half the chips

 

[AzBat]

Love it, love it, love it, love it to death, it's effin' hilarious to be honest.

Storm clouds are approaching.

These are the codes where it says this, but I cant decipher them tbh.

Try this... http://brainfuck.tk/

Interesting site name eh? LOL

Tommy McClain

 

[AzBat]

Based on those pdf slides, MS is abandoning asymmetrical analog sticks in favor of Dual Shock positions! They are also moving the d-pad to the right hand.

Oh come on, it's clearly just a generic game controller icon found on a clip art site.

Personally I don't know if the slides are real or fake. Just something cool to talk about until the launch.

Tommy McClain

 

[AlphaWolf]

Oh come on, it's clearly just a generic game controller icon found on a clip art site.

Personally I don't know if the slides are real or fake. Just something cool to talk about until the launch.

Tommy McClain

This. MS would have to be completely insane to change the stick locations on the controller to dual suck.

 

[Cjail]

If I am not mistaken Kotaku said that no major change was done to the Xbox controller.

 

[dobwal]

Good spot, although I'd suggest the icon was mirrored if they are making these changes. There's zero sense to moving the D-pad to the other side of the controller to that people have been using for 30 years. That'd be like releasing a computer with a new keyboard (Dvorak) as standard, and confusing the hell out of all your touch-typers.

Given the genericness of the icons, I'm more inclined to think it's just a controller and not specifically the XB720 controller. A search for "controller icons" throws up a few with the d-pad on the 'wrong' side like this.

Yeah I've seen controller icon with the dpad on the wrong side. However, have you ever seen the dpad and button layout slightly shifted or tilted inwards towards the center of the controller? They don't have a straight up/down, left/right orientation and seems like a more ergonomically friendly design.

Probably still fake but someone put some thought into it.

 

[dobwal]

Next thing you're gonna be telling me the Durango chipset will be built into appliances so my refrigerator can help "ripen" my gameplay.

LOL. I don't know about that but MS has at least researched the ideal.


Enhancing game-server AI with distributed client computation
http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/72894/NOSSDAV2007.pdf

In the context of online role-playing games, we evaluate offloading AI computation from game servers to game clients. In this way, the aggregate resources of thousands of participating client machines can enhance game realism in a way that would be prohibitively expensive on a central server. Because offloading can add significant latency to a computation normally executing within a game server’s main loop, we introduce the mechanism of AI partitioning: splitting an AI into a high-frequency but computationally simple component on the server, and a lowfrequency but computationally intensive component offloaded to a client.

 

[Brad Grenz]

Oh come on, it's clearly just a generic game controller icon found on a clip art site.

Personally I don't know if the slides are real or fake. Just something cool to talk about until the launch.

Tommy McClain

I agree it's random clip art. I also think it's completely bogus.

 

[GrimThorne]

If genuine at all, I wouldn't affix any importance to those slides, really. If MS wanted to impart an important message, it would be written in plain text and not hidden in obscure ways. Thus, I'm thinking it's just fake. All fake.

Microsoft most certainly DID engage in a viral campaign for Xbox 360. Several cryptic images and puzzles were all over the place in the month leading up to their 05 preview before that year's E3. There was Hex 168, Origin 360, Ilovebees and Our Colony.

As I recall it was pretty fun working with everyone to try to figure them out.

 

[Grall]

Microsoft most certainly DID engage in a viral campaign for Xbox 360.

...And it was totally obscure and flied over the heads out of sight of 99.9% of their customers (counting low here, probably). It's fallacial to reason that just because MS did the Ilovebees ARG years ago, this must also be legit. Propter hoc, and all that, you know...

It could be legit, but not because of past events.

 

[dagamer]

...And it was totally obscure and flied over the heads out of sight of 99.9% of their customers (counting low here, probably). It's fallacial to reason that just because MS did the Ilovebees ARG years ago, this must also be legit. Propter hoc, and all that, you know...

It could be legit, but not because of past events.

However, it's the 0.01% of their customers that make for a successful system launch, otherwise you get a Wii U that sputters out of the gate. And it's even more important this time around when Microsoft has the PS4 launching in the same year.

 

[Grall]

However, it's the 0.01% of their customers that make for a successful system launch

That's nothing but baseless speculation. Come back when you can back that claim up with some evidence...