I understand, but from what rumors are pointing out, Orbis won't have any problems with bandwidth either. It seems like general feel is "Durango will be able to use bandwidth very efficiently and keep GPU fed all the time, while move engines will result in performance gulf being much smaller", while at the same time completely ignoring the fact that Orbis should have no problems keeping GPU fed either.
It seems as though some people try to describe Durango in best possible case (very efficient, dedicated silicon for gfx related tasks, low latency), and Orbis like off shelf PC with worse efficiency and more raw power. I don't think it paints the full picture, but I guess the wackiest we can get from Orbis will be memory bandwidth of 144Gb/sec - 176Gb/sec as I don't see them achieving 192 Gb/sec.
Yes, there's not much to discuss about Orbis as it's fairly straightforward from what we know so far.
There's people pointing out best possible cases for Durango only because there's a flood of people pointing out worst possible cases. Using myself as an example going purely by the numbers the Durango is obviously at a performance disadvantage assuming rumors for Orbis and Durango are correct. There's nothing interesting to talk or speculate about there.
What
is interesting is trying to figure out what the various bits MS has put in to, presumably, ameliorate some of those performance discrepencies and how close they can get to Orbis. Will it outperform Orbis at certain tasks while obviously falling short at others? Will it then be overall similar with regards to frametime and resolution?
Is it going to be a similar situation as PS3/X360 where PS3 was simply atrocious and entirely too slow at certain tasks, but also faster than the X360 at others?
And in many ways it's similar to the PS3 versus X360 discussions on tech. X360 was relatively boring to talk about as it was rather straightfoward. PS3 was the interesting one due to the fact that it was obviously not as good at graphics rendering if you went purely by the numbers. What was interesting was to see how other bits and bobs were used to bring overall performance onto a relatively equal footing.
And since we don't know enough, yet, about Durango. Most of this is purely speculation about what various bits "could" potentially do to help things. It may not work out at all like how people speculate. It may not work out well in general game rendering workloads. Maybe it works better. Perhaps there's more we don't know about.
Noone is saying currently that Durango is going to be better than Orbis. Most that are speculating as to whether the extra bits can help significantly are assuming that even if everything works like MS hopes that it'll just get Durango close enough to Orbis that your average consumer won't be able to tell the difference.
There's already enough people bemoaning the "by the numbers" performance deficit. There's no need to add to that even if we (or I) know that by the numbers, it is at a disadvantage.
In other words, speculating about what could be done to help performance doesn't mean we've ignored the fact that baseline performance is at a serious deficit.
Regards,
SB
