NGGP: NextGen Garbage Pile (aka: No one reads the topics or stays on topic) *spawn*

@Albofighter
Already addressed your year old comment with my above link. But like other people said on this board, power isn't that important anymore. And I agree with your last paragraph.

Let's be frank. Durango fans are worried it's going to be less powerful than PS4. Why does that matter so much to you guys? Just get PS4 or stick to PC. There's no use in trying to hope and will some inanimate object to increase in strength.

 

I am not married to any one console so I don't really have a horse in the race (I jump from NES-SNES-N64/PS-GCN-360 with PC gaming the primary until 360) but based on the specs for the PS4 (which are nice, and I will post about that later) and the leaked Durango stuff I don't see a reason for MS fans to be upset. I am not buying the line that in modern techniques Durango is exceptionally faster than AMD's standard GPUs (was told the ESRAM really makes virtual texturing a LOT faster) but some oddities aside it looks like the CPUs are minimally a wash (and maybe an advantage to MS) so it comes down to GPUs and they are looking to be the same family. If PS4 games target 1080p30 Durango games can be 864p30. Sorry folks most people won't notice that (when you begin to factor in the # of HD sets used for gaming, and then the # with sub-1080p and then look at the wild fire Wii sales you see that a few pixels isn't going to be a deal breaker). I think it will matter to some core gamers, but just as important will be the cost to play online and most importantly exclusives and "features." If one console comes in $100 cheaper, and MS may, and has a feature rich devise that appeals to more than core gamers they could be huge. As for the BOM arguement 8GB GDDR5 is very, very expensive (and then there is board complexity, cooling, factoring in cost reduction, etc). ESRAM may also have had a cost but it seems to have come at the cost of 6 CUs so it comes down to the GDDR5 and the extra cooling Sony is going to need. Sony could cut some corners by ditching the PSEye so MS has to eat the Kinect cost but the margins are still favorable to MS.

MS better hope they have figured out how to make Kinect work with core games without being laggy, slow, or obtrusive, really have Killer apps with Kinect 2 and not be laggy, and that they have a great interface with a LOT of great apps in the Background (Skype, background DVR, etc) and the voice/gesture control is integrated and intuitive and prompt all the time--and come out swinging on a good price with an appealing form factor.

 

hmm thanks for the explanation Strange. If it is the way you said it then it does make it harder for durango to change other then raise clock speeds. Unless people believe the crazy talk from misterxteam or w/e that there is an app block + hardware block or something to that effect where we only know the specs for one of the blocks, and there's actually a 3+tf beast. Very unlikely.

@Bagel

If the recent durango devkit is a beta kit, is that also true for orbis? I believe the beta kit for orbis comes out in the summer so if that's true then it makes durango's upgrade even less likely.

Durango might still have a better cpu though which can help the gpu. Plus all the talk of low latency esram being huge for compute might take off the burden from gpu so it can render more. There's still a lot more info we need from both consoles on specs and efficiencies before we claim orbis king. Very exciting

 

You have no idea where that hat has been! He used to work for MS!

 

It'll definitely have a lot of money in it.

Anyways one more idea for potential upgrade.

Change the HDD controller to Sata 3.

 

Both should be considered beta kits now. And Durango beta kit was out in Dec. And then final kits for both later on in the year.

While we're all busy sloshing around in the 1.2-1.8TF teraflop kiddie pool, any minor bumps in that area, really, don't, matter anymore. It just doesn't make a damn difference. I only have praise for 8gb unified GDDR5.

 

Yep, any upgrades at this point won't be able to close the gap in a major way.

 

We will see
If this comment from lherre is true then durango would still be a beast. The Graphic Card in the alpha kit was 2tf or so right?

 

I am guessing it needed to be to emulate the performance of API performance gains, GCN2, Esram, and DMEs.

 

Oh, but you were so confident in the past concerning Durango performance. At least you stopped pestering me about cheesecake

 

Everything I've seen about Durango suggests its GCN and not GCN2, newest stuff I've seen is from the conf though and that was a while ago, but I doubt they would make such a drastic change and no one would leak it.

 

Actually, the latest rumor going around is that MS leaked false info to bkilian while he was an employee in order to trick Sony into releasing an underpowered console.

 

People also tend to forget that CPUs are rather latency sensitive so even if the same, jaguar on DDR3 would perform a bit better than the same unit on GDDR5.

Oh, and clock speeds definitely can change. Cooling solution is absolutely the easiest thing they can re-engineer out of the entire console considering they haven't settled on what the console design even is yet.

They may have even chosen a very flexible development path, considering MS seemed rather uncomfortable with CELL last outing. They may have opted towards engineering a few GPU samples with different CU counts just in case they needed to change their final spec last second... Sure it could be upwards of a hundred more million in R&D (likely less if all they have played with is the memory controller) but the cost of being competitive is worth the sunk cost

I'd say the only things likely set in stone is CPU design, the SoC, ESram and ram type/quantity.

 

The problem is we still don't know the final frequencies for the PS4 CPU/GPU, and I'm pretty sure we won't know for Durango either, even after the April event. I think we could see a difference though, that extra 4GB must have added a fair amount of heat and wattage to the design, which may leave Sony less room to play with than MS.

P.S. A bit late, but thanks for answering my question, Brad.

 

What everyone knows the final specs for Durango... God where have you been man. Its set in stone from year old specs that we got, nothing about Durango will ever change. Get with the program !

 

This is only true in the United States. In Europe and definitely in Japan, everything is reversed. The PS3 is more successful than the 360 in those areas, despite coming out a year later and $100+ more expensive. Quite a feat actually.

When you look at it, Microsoft really has fewer exclusives from their first party studios and they tend to all be shooters. Perhaps that's super awesome for the US market, but I think having the game variety of Uncharted, The Last of Us, God of War, and LittleBigPlanet is better.

 

The memory wattage is mostly determined by speed, voltage and interface width, not capacity. Sony even dropped the speed from 192 to 176. So there's no negative impact I think.

 

Instead of using 6Gbps speeds (192GB/256pins)= they're using 5.5Gbps speeds (176GBs/32pins). 5.5 Gbps chips from hynix requires less voltage than the 6Gbps ones.

 

Well… you probably not really looking at MS/Sony exclusives… Sony got exclusives shooters like MS…
MS: Halo, Gears…
Sony: Killzone, Resistance, Mag…
Shooters is the target for US and European market…
And US and EU is the bigs markets to catch for both.

For variety MS got Viva Pinata, Banjoo, Alan Wake, Kinect stuff, etc… To have no interest in exclusives of a console, not tell there no exclusives on this console…

 

Viva Piñata is a casual game and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is such a separate game from the previous two that its an insult to group them together.

You really didn't disprove my point though. Sony had far more exclusives, particularly from Japanese developers.

With both the 720 and PS4 being so similar, 3rd party games will likely be on both platforms, which leaves 1st party games, systems services, and the ecosystem as a whole as major differentiators. Sony wins the first (far more 1st party dev studios), has a strong showing with the second (social sharing of gameplay), and really only needs to flesh out interactions with the PSVita, smartphones and tablets to have a truly compelling offering. Microsoft has to do the same, but the onus is on them.