Which higher will be programmed for? Out of two consoles, a $600 powerful one and a $400 weak one, the one that sells most will be targeted by devs. The other machine will get ports. It's basic economics and has always been this way and there's no reason to think devs would change. So assuming the $600 is being outsold 3:1 or worse, are devs realistically going to increase their development budgets 50% to target this machine optimally where it makes a quarter of their sales, or are they going to focus on the best experience on the low end machine and knock out a 'free' high-end port just upping res and framerate?
30 fps with reconstruction, lower overhead, way more optimization by launch, even more for consoles. Less than ultra settings.
I agree, it's just when you hear the mighty 1080 ti getting trivialized in such a way your heart sinks a little. And to think next gen console is around its ballpark performance, we really should pray for top notch console optimization.
If I were in charge of marketing and had an SSD system versus an HDD rival, I'd do a better job than that! SSD is the first system to ever have next-gen storage. Doing away with the magnetic HDD which is based on 1950's technology, our new blazingly fast storage solution, based on the same performance technology as used in everything from supercomputeres to Hollywood graphical workstations to NASA engineering laboratories, allows more information and more game per second than ever before, up to 100x faster than magnetic storage. Devs finally have the room and speed hitherto unreachable to create compelling, living worlds, that learn and grow as you do; worlds where enemies think faster and cities bustle faster and race-tracks speed past faster and intergalactic space can be traversed faster. Only on <Console Brand>!
It's complicated because the causes of failures are so different between the two. My unscientific experience with large arrays in servers is pretty much the same failure rate between ssd and hdd. SSD fail instantly without any corellation. HDD start having a few read errors retries, and then bad blocks being remapped, and it's found very early by the controller, before it actually fails. SSD works perfectly and then out of nowhere it's bricked.
What about the hypothetical scenario where they release two consoles, one for $399 and another more powerful model for $499? Nothing crazy, just a bump in GPU power and maybe HDD storage. While I agree with you, a part of me would still be disappointed if they didn't offer a build targeting a higher budget.
Silicon doesnt scale like that, unfortunately. The bigger it is, the more chips in the wafer will be deffective, so you will have worse yields and each functional chip will cost much more than just double. Twice the budget for the silicon, will actually buy just a couple dozen extra % in performance. And that is ignoring the fact a bigger chip will consume more energy and dissipate more heat, making many other parts of the machine more expensive too.
Well I was thinking we don't know how much they will have to scale back on CUs or clock speeds to reach that $399 price point. So it would be difficult to tell what they can do with an extra $100. Is that not the case?
Biggest room for improvement with the ps4 was clockspeed, and the os eating up so much memory. Better cooling with some ddr3 chucked in there for the Os so the whole 8gb (or perhaps just 2gb ddr3 so 7gb) was available would've been great. Perhaps they could've done that for $449.
