Post Xbox One Two Scorpio, what should Sony do next? *spawn* (oh, and Nintendo?)

Truest words spoken about online gaming.

 

Not sure I agree with that. What I do think it happening is that households are now home to multiple consoles. The 20-40 year olds are buying consoles for themselves as we as for their kids. We are beginning to see consoles being purchased for bedrooms as well as the living space.

Price will be a factor for every consumer, but there will be some that want to bigger and better. One thing that will make the difference is that kids won't have home computers for gaming. Households in general are having less and less PCs in them. Tablets have made sure to that. So the only way to get a proper gaming experience is through home consoles.

The price of the Scorpio will be a huge deciding factor on who buys it. It most certainly will come in at the $399 minimum, but could be anywhere up to $599 as they are pitching it as the most powerful home console. Are Microsoft willing to lose money on each Scorpio, normally yes they would, but seeing it seems they will be losing money on each XBox One S they sell, they may need to break even with the Scorpio.

What Microsoft will need to do though is make sure that consumers want their new machine. It needs to look great and show how great and powerful it is. To do that, they will need to show how much more powerful it is. So they will need to show specific titles for teh Scorpio, and that will alienate normal XBox One users. It's a testing time for MS.

 

that's the benefits of options. Especially with ms bringing exclusives to the pc also.
going to be a console for everyone both mainstream and high end, and pc's as well.

 

"Mutual assured destruction" policy, It´s how America and Russia ended up with thousand nuclear weapons

 

I agree and think Scorpio is reasonably last minute. There have been reports of the Neo from March, even the specs were banded around from April onwards, so I'm sure MS were looking at their next console, but maybe stepped it up after hearing these reports.

I'm not sure why MS is only targetting 6tf to be honest considering we are 18 months away from the release window. Reports suggest that the Neo is using tech that can achieve figures in this range now.

I still believe that Sony will release the Neo before Xmas this year, so it will be on the market a good 12 months before Scorpio. The killer punch from Sony, would be if they could push the consoles performance up to a similar level as the Scorpio. It doesn't need to be exactly the same, but if it's in the ball park and plays all the PS4 games but in better fidelity then people will latch onto that. The selling point for Sony is that they have mandated that all games from September need to be built primarily for the PS4 and have extra features for the Neo. Sony are selling the Neo as a higher/better quality PS4. They will both play the same games, but the Neo version will look better.

Meanwhile, on the XBox side, they are releasing the new One S model, which looks great and is cheap considering it comes with a 4K BR drive. But why should you buy it? You can't play 4K games on the One S. And if you're in the market for an Xbox, then why shell out $299 now when in 12-18 months time it will be phased out for the 4.5x as powerful Scorpio? Then if you decide to wait for the Scorpio, you may find you that all you get is 4K versions of the same game for the One S? Could be in a limbo for the next 18 months. Meanwhile you could get a better performing 3rd version of the game on the PS4 or an even better version on the Neo....and if you want to stay with XBox for the MS exclusives.......why not a PC.

The next few years are going to be some time.

 

ARM's method purposefully designs the big and little cores to have identical ISA support, which Zen and Jaguar do not. A program that happens to switch to a core that cannot support its binaries will run the risk of crashing itself or possibly the machine.

There's also shared support for a consistent memory hierarchy and cache structure, which AMD is touting as being "new" for Zen.
There could be some similarities with Jaguar's organization, given the apparent 4-core clusters, but hopefully Zen has moved on from the consoles' not particularly impressive implementation of multiple modules.

Details are a bit light in terms of Zen's organization and architecture, but the chances are very good that it will be much more effective than Jaguar. Jaguar is showing its age, and was less than totally successful in implementation for elements like turbo and power management. Zen's refinements might allow it to scale more effectively, and it should be backwards compatible with Jaguar. Jaguar might save some area, unless the hardware hacked to link it back up with Zen takes up a chunk of the saved space.


One point about replacing Jaguar with Zen is that there is software that will need to know the difference, which is the OS.
How adaptable Sony's OS group is to revamping its infrastructure for a changed CPU and uncore is unclear. Even an OS company like Microsoft had platform maturation that was slow, although that was set back by a rather drastic reversal on some important platform elements. A conservative design decision would be to keep firmware as consistent as a particular platform holder's abilities require for the given time frame.

Developing software for a CPU can happen prior to it physically existing, but I would assume it is a large help. Since this isn't a new console generation, I am also not sure there is going to be tolerance for Neo or Scorpio regressing in terms of stability and features from the current PS4 and Xbox One.

If we are assuming Neo is to come out late 2016 or early 2017, and Zen has only recently been sampled, that might be too close.
In that regard Scorpio might have more time to develop, particularly with Microsoft's more deep expertise on these kinds of transitions.

A side question is how firmware updates on-disc would be handled if there were a CPU split. Game discs might need to allocate more room for the necessary updates to two different OS revisions.

 

At a guess, I'd say that the extra design work and complexity of "big LITTLE" is only worth it where the power considerations are critical. On a console drawing high tens (or higher) Watts, saving relatively tiny amounts of power while upping complexity and having two types of CPU core to optimise for probably isn't worth it - at least for the main CPUs. Arm cores do tend to pop up in various places for some purposes.

 

I guess this "Sony will increase Neo's TFLOPs" talk isn't going to go away until the machine is released. It's like the XBox One pre-release all over again, except it's Sony's turn. War, war never changes.

Anyway, one thing that I think people are overlooking is that the XBox S plays Blu-Ray UHD at $299. Assuming Neo has the same capabilities, I think Sony will want to put out this sooner than later, unless they have their own S model with Blu-Ray UHD in the works. Granted, the UHD market is small right now, but A/V crowd is vocal and the S seems to be a steal at this price for UHD. If MS pushes this, it could be a big selling point.

 

It'll be interesting to see how the whole 4K angle plays out as the Euros, the Olympics and the run up to Christmas are used to push 4k sets.

I don't really care about 4K given the tv sizes I go for and where I sit (would like a 4K monitor tho), but HDR has certainly got me interested if it's even remotely close to delivering on the hype ...

 

1080p was worth it in the living room, 4k (IMHO) is diminishing returns - you'd need 20-20 vision and be sitting fairly close to a big screen to notice the difference.

 

I'd like to see a better break-down of these stats - I mean, it's all very well saying 26% of gamers are under 18 but how much is that as a percentage of game time? likewise the over 50s at 27% (etc).

 

Yield & volume.

 

4K in of itself isn't that much of a difference due to current TV sizes (although monitors in which you sit closer are a different story), but the real difference is HDR in the Ultra HD Premium spec. I haven't seen a UHDP TV but all the reports I've read says it's a game changer in picture quality. And you need UHD Blu-Ray to take advantage.

The A/V crowd leads the charge here rather than the gaming community so it will be interesting to see how MS plays this up. The PS3 was considered the best Blu-Ray player out there for its time and Sony certainly sold systems because of that.

 

Bigger tvs are also becoming cheaper. I got a 48 inch Toshiba for $150. We got my future in laws a 4k Vizio 60 inch for $1k . When my parents bought their 1080p Samsung 4 years ago it was 3 grand. I expect 70 inch 4ks to hit $1k soon

 

Spot on, the thing is that even if your seating distance doesn´t warrant a 4k tv, HDR certified TV have better panels, better colour reproduction, contrast, etc etc

 

You definitely can appreciate the difference of a 4K picture for TV and movies with good 4K source material - everything is slightly better defined. I think there is a belief that for the difference to be noticeable you have to be able to discern the individual pixels but with TV you can see the difference, but it's nowhere near as stand out as going from SD to HD except for things like snow, sand, wood grain and grass which really do pop. I guess it's fine-grained detail which instead of being a mass of colour reflects the actual detail. Again, the source material is important.

And as I found out recently, going for 1080p upto 1440p for gaming is quite a noticeable difference in terms of diminished jaggies but 1440p to 2160p (full 4K/UHD) is almost zero for me. I know now why, maybe textures?

But my TV is 50", on a larger set I imagine the dynamic will be different. I didn't set out to buy a 4K TV, I just set out to buy a bigger TV. It just happened to be the size I wanted Sony did a 50" model in.

 

I think 4K and HDR will have more impact on video programming than games, at least for a few more years.

Euros are going on now so I don't know if any of the European broadcasters are broadcasting in 4K. I know there were some test 4K broadcasts for the 2014 WC.

Who knows about the Olympics though.

The next WC should have 4K. Some shows, like Better Call Saul, are producing 4K masters so people will be able to view them in the future on 4K Netflix and probably UHD Blu-Rays.

 

Based on memory bandwidth, games are pushing PS4 memory bandwidth, which is why you see lack of AF in games, heavy alpha effects lowering framerates in Fallout 4 Harbor (to be fair Fallout 4 pushes cpu memory bandwidth like no other next gen game which causes serious memory contention on both consoles), lots of low res textures, low detail on mipmaps, use of Shaders + 1k textures instead of high res 4k textures to save on memory bandwidth, Sony's own graphs showing gpu memory bandwidth contention, observing how downclocking memory impacts southern island card (7870), reading studies on memory contention on a variety of AMD APUs, mathematics, etc.

Neo only increases memory bandwidth ~24%, delta compression at best offers up to 40% bandwidth savings in optimal synthetic conditions. Pretty much every game is pushing up against the bounds of the unified GDDR5 real world capabilities. These games brought over to the Neo are going to be either bandwidth bound, and thats even before examining the cpu or gpu bound.

 

I think the main problem is the CPU on PS4 like it will be on Neo. I have read both Sucker punch and somehow Naughty dog implying thet lack of CPU resources. None of those Sony big exclusives have any problem with AF or low resolution textures since the beginning with 16xAF on TLOUR at 60fps, KillzoneSF 4x to 16x, or Infamous usual 8xAF to Bloodborne usual 16xAF, The witcher 3, UC4 or the games we saw at E3 this year. All those game being one the most impressing looking games this gen. I have never heard of any devs complaining about some bandwidth bottleneck or contention problem on PS4 when we definitely heard complaints about the CPU, since the very start of the gen (in Sucker punch slides about Infamous SS).

I think that this bandwidth memory contention problem is way overblown, it may be a problem on paper like GDDR5 alleged latency was, but I think it was mainly because of Sony's honesty to share internal documents with real average numbers and not one best case scenario . But in reality all Sony AAA exclusives display generous amount of high resolution textures and AF. If a very few multiplat devs (like maybe ten or so?) didn't activate the specific PS4 procedure to enable the normal amount of AF for each textures, because they were used to do it like it's done using directX tools, well it's not the hardware's fault.