Predict: The Next Generation Console Tech

[Albofighter]

I think a smart move would be to sell the next xbox for cheaper with a 3+ contract on xbox live that way they will make huge sales like cell phone companies do and expand their market share. Sony can probably do the same thing with playstation plus.


...One of the rumours said durango or orbis will get final dev kits in january right? if that's the case then we may here more next month. If not, there's always CES and GDC. E3 at the latest but insider people have said that we will know about one of the new consoles at least before E3. I hope it's xbox because that will give Sony extra pressure to match their hardware power.

 

[Rangers]

Regarding the kotaku article ; the next gen consoles are similar to second best pc of today ! That means that it is similar to gtx 680 since hd 7970 ghz is the most powerful single gpu today. This also answers the questions on why the next gen game demos where using a gtx 680 . Also the 8870 is rumoured to be similar or more powerful than the gtx 680 and also may be used in next gen consoles . Next gen is in good shape !

like i said, i understand 2nd best as perhaps 7950/670 class. 680 and 7970 being top of the class depending on amd or nvidia, and both being roughly equal cards in both cases.

but as others have said, pitcairn is probably just as viable an explanation and perhaps more likely.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Oh, well at least it looks like you had "fun" at MS. One more thing...How long does your NDA last?

Let's put it this way. When bkilian has sadly shuffled off this mortal coil, if his memoirs are released talking about his work at MS, his family and all his descendants will be shipped off to the salt mines and worked to death.

 

[DoctorFouad]

BC is almost expected but when you look at its heritage, there's no reason to expect it. Modern age BC started on the PS2 with PS1 BC. That was possible because the PS1 wasn't bleeding edge hardware by any means. PS2 to PS3 didn't happen because of hardware incompatibilities and the difficulty of software emulation, so they slapped a PS2 inside every PS3. Xbox to 360 only happened because Microsoft has extreme software expertise and their CPU wasn't bleeding edge.

thats not true, ps1 was bleeding edge technology at its time (people tend to forget or dont know that ps1 has been released in japan in september 1994, it was more powerful than any console available in the market and even in many respects consoles released 2 years later a la N64, and if anyone bought a powerful PC in september 1994, he knows he cant run playstation1 graphics with his PC in 1999, so it was quite bleeding edge, the same thing cant be said about the ps3 (november 2006), maybe the xbox360 released in november 2005 is the closest thing to the bleeding edge level of ps1)

PS2 achieved backwards compatibility with ps1 games for a very simple reason : they used tha ps1 CPU/GPU as an I/O chipset for ps2. So basically in every ps2 there is also a ps1. Sony wanted to do the same with ps3 until a solution of software emulation could be engeneered, but couldnt financially, thats why they dropped the Emotion Engine from european PS3s, and later on they dropped EE + GS altogether, keeping ps3 without any backwards compatibility with ps2 games.

 

[Docwiz]

thats not true, ps1 was bleeding edge technology at its time (people tend to forget or dont know that ps1 has been released in japan in september 1994, it was more powerful than any console available in the market and even in many respects consoles released 2 years later a la N64, and if anyone bought a powerful PC in september 1994, he knows he cant run playstation1 graphics with his PC in 1999, so it was quite bleeding edge, the same thing cant be said about the ps3 (november 2006), maybe the xbox360 released in november 2005 is the closest thing to the bleeding edge level of ps1)

This is not really true. Voodoo1 (1996) with a PC was better than the PSX any day of the week and by march 1999 we were emulating the Playstation with Bleem! and other emulators. I know this because I was a beta tester of that program.

Sony up until the PS3 always did their graphics processors in house as far as I know. Voodoo from 3DFX was really a huge breakthrough for graphics at the time. The PSX came out in 1995 in the U.S.A. for example.

 

[Love_In_Rio]

I don´t understand why pastebin is so infrautilized with NDA'ed people... Somebody in the know, go to a cyber and make a pastebin!. We want to know!.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

This is not really true. Voodoo1 (1996) was better than the PSX any day of the week and by march 1999 we were emulating the Playstation with Bleem! and other emulators. I know this because I was a beta tester of that program.

He was talking about the PC bought in 94.

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

This is not really true. Voodoo1 (1996) with a PC was better than the PSX any day of the week and by march 1999 we were emulating the Playstation with Bleem! and other emulators. I know this because I was a beta tester of that program.

Sony up until the PS3 always did their graphics processors in house as far as I know. Voodoo from 3DFX was really a huge breakthrough for graphics at the time. The PSX came out in 1995 in the U.S.A. for example.

Yep. I remember being able to play psx games on my pc. A 350mhz pentium 2, 16mb ram and a 8mb ati 3d rage pro. That system was bought in 1998.

 

[DoctorFouad]

This is not really true. Voodoo1 (1996) with a PC was better than the PSX any day of the week and by march 1999 we were emulating the Playstation with Bleem! and other emulators. I know this because I was a beta tester of that program.

Sony up until the PS3 always did their graphics processors in house as far as I know. Voodoo from 3DFX was really a huge breakthrough for graphics at the time. The PSX came out in 1995 in the U.S.A. for example.

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickrefyr.htm#1994

1994
October 10, 1994
Intel® Pentium® Processor
75 MHz

Good luck emulating ps1 games with that, or even playing the PC version of Tomb Raider 3 in 1999 at whatever resolution you choose with the same 1994 PC.

again thats not valid for ps3, you could buy a bleeding edge PC in november 2006 and still play all ps3 quality graphics till today. the xbox360 is the closest thing to bleeding edge level of ps1 hardware, I doubt that a PC bought in november 2005 could manage Gears of War....

with ps4/xboxnext it will be even worse, you can buy TODAY a PC that will surpass ANYTHING ps4/xbox next could achieve in their next 6+ years lifetime....

the reason for all of this is the increasing costs of bleeding personal computing technology, the market for personal computers has expanded exponentially since the early days of the 90s, there is today a market for Dual 3 billion+ transistors GPUs, that wasent the case in the 90s when even the idea of a dedicated processor for graphics was considered as risky...

 

[pjbliverpool]

The most powerful PC that you can make:

Intel E7 eight core
> 8 gig of DDR3 2133
2xGTX 690

The second:

Intel E7 eight core
> 8 gig of DDR3 2133
2x7990



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpPHre2IU6Y&t=0m17s

I assume that's a joke? A second hand statement of "roughly equivilent to the second most powerful PC available today" could mean a lot of things but what you've listed above certainly isn't one of them, not in this context anyway. I agree with others that it's likely to be Pitcairn which is the second most powerful architecture from AMD at the moment. Going as fine grained as 7970 vs 7950 seems less likely as the term "roughly" was used and since they are already "roughly" as powerful as each other they may as well have just said "roughly" as powerful as the most powerful PC available today. For the same reasons they won't have been talking about 680 vs 670 or 7970 vs 680. They are all too close together. Plus the comparison was more likely to have been made with AMD GPU's in mind anyway given that's what the consoles will be running.

So Pitcairn is quite easily the most obvious target point for that statement and that falls in nicely with all the other rumours we've heard so far.

So nothing particularly new here, just more evidence for what we already suspected.

 

[Docwiz]

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickrefyr.htm#1994

1994
October 10, 1994
Intel® Pentium® Processor
75 MHz

Good luck emulating ps1 games with that, or even playing the PC version of Tomb Raider 3 in 1999 at whatever resolution you choose with the same 1994 PC.

again thats not valid for ps3, you could buy a bleeding edge PC in november 2006 and still play all ps3 quality graphics till today. the xbox360 is the closest thing to bleeding edge level of ps1 hardware, I doubt that a PC bought in november 2005 could manage Gears of War....

with ps4/xboxnext it will be even worse, you can buy TODAY a PC that will surpass ANYTHING ps4/xbox next could achieve in their next 6+ years lifetime....

the reason for all of this is the increasing costs of bleeding personal computing technology, the market for personal computers has expanded exponentially since the early days of the 90s, there is today a market for Dual 3 billion+ transistors GPUs, that wasent the case in the 90s when even the idea of a dedicated processor for graphics was considered as risky...

I got what you are saying now. However, what about ram? The rumored ram on the console (which doesn't need to run a full OS like Windows with all of it's hardware drivers) is around 4-8 gigabytes.

I have a GTX 670 with only 2 Gigabytes of DDR5 ram. So, that is a big deal and also remember that all consoles will have the same hardware, so you can really optimize there as well and what about the blu-ray as standard.

I don't have a blu-ray drive for my computer yet and you can store a lot more than only a double layered DVD and what about control functionality like an improved Kinect.

All of this plays a role... It's not so cut and dry...

 

[DoctorFouad]

I got what you are saying now. However, what about ram? The rumored ram on the console (which doesn't need to run a full OS like Windows with all of it's hardware drivers) is around 4-8 gigabytes.

I have a GTX 670 with only 2 Gigabytes of DDR5 ram. So, that is a big deal and also remember that all consoles will have the same hardware, so you can really optimize there as well and what about the blu-ray as standard.

I don't have a blu-ray drive for my computer yet and you can store a lot more than only a double layered DVD and what about control functionality like an improved Kinect.

All of this plays a role... It's not so cut and dry...

RAM was always the weakest part of consoles (overall theoritical processing power their historical strongest part). Yes you got a GTX 670 with only 2GB of RAM but thats a 200+ GB/s bandwidth, even if next gen consoles are rumored to include between 4 and 8 Gb of RAM it would be with a lot less bandwidth.

All PCs have Hard Disks (and nowadays SSDs) so the argument of blu ray disks for gaming is not valid, with compression + 2-3 dual layer DVDs you can install the game on your SSD PC and achieve better streaming results than any blu ray drive you can ever buy.Add to this digital distribution, which makes physical disks unecessary. For the amount of RAM, my own laptop already got 16Gb of RAM....

concerning optimization for a fixed hardware over time, the word is optimization, but you cant exceed the theoritical capabilities of the hardware, nowaday high end personal computers (dual high end GPUs, 16 Gb of RAM, high speed big 512Gb SSDs...) suprass by a huge amount any theoritical processing power next gen console would provide in fall 2013.

Concerning Kinect and new gameplay peripherals, I totally agree with you, especially the easiness of use of console and easiness of controlling the games, the innovation of input peripherals, that was always the selling point of consoles.

 

[pjbliverpool]

again thats not valid for ps3, you could buy a bleeding edge PC in november 2006 and still play all ps3 quality graphics till today. the xbox360 is the closest thing to bleeding edge level of ps1 hardware, I doubt that a PC bought in november 2005 could manage Gears of War....

A 2005 high end PC would have no problem at all with Gears of War. Your talking about a 7800GTX or X1900 XTX.

I couldn't find any Gears benchmarks with these cards but the link below shows a X2900XT getting 43fps with max details in DX9 (that's higher than the 360's detail settings) at 1680x1050.

http://blog.libertech.net/blogs/lketchum/archive/2008/03/27/nvidia-geforce-8800-gtx-review.aspx

Given the X2900XT wasn't a huge amount faster than the X1900XTX in many cases then that card should easily be able to handle 35fps at 720p.

In fact the only reason that card would handle modern console ports poorly is because the developers make no allowance for its architecture whatsoever in ports so modern games are far more poorly optimised for that card than they are for modern PC architectures. Add to that the lack of driver support and optimisation and the card really doesn't have a hope. In terms of horsepower though it wipes the floor with Xenos and would still be keeping up nicely if it was still supported by developers and in drivers.

 

[DoctorFouad]

A 2005 high end PC would have no problem at all with Gears of War. Your talking about a 7800GTX or X1900 XTX.

I couldn't find any Gears benchmarks with these cards but the link below shows a X2900XT getting 43fps with max details in DX9 (that's higher than the 360's detail settings) at 1680x1050.

Given the X2900XT wasn't a huge amount faster than the X1900XTX in many cases then that card should easily be able to handle 35fps at 720p.

In fact the only reason that card would handle modern console ports poorly is because the developers make no allowance for its architecture whatsoever in ports so modern games are far more poorly optimised for that card than they are for modern PC architectures. Add to that the lack of driver support and optimisation and the card really doesn't have a hope. In terms of horsepower though it wipes the floor with Xenos and would still be keeping up nicely if it was still supported by developers and in drivers.

so you confirm that a november high end 2005 PC can keep up easily with an xbox360 (even when you take the multicore CPU into consideration ?)

 

[pjbliverpool]

I got what you are saying now. However, what about ram? The rumored ram on the console (which doesn't need to run a full OS like Windows with all of it's hardware drivers) is around 4-8 gigabytes.

I have a GTX 670 with only 2 Gigabytes of DDR5 ram. So, that is a big deal and also remember that all consoles will have the same hardware, so you can really optimize there as well and what about the blu-ray as standard.

This is the crux of my question a couple of pages back. Despite having more processing power it seems to me that modern GPU's will have far too little memory to properly compete with the next generation consoles. We may soon see GPU's sporting 4, 6 and 8 GB of memory rather than the current 2 or 3.

I don't have a blu-ray drive for my computer yet and you can store a lot more than only a double layered DVD

This is irrelivant. BLu-Ray is available for PC if games require it and even then it's unlikely to be needed since PC games are installed on HDD's and so can simply come compressed on multiple DVD's.

[quopte]and what about control functionality like an improved Kinect.[/quote]

That's a different argument altogether and nothing to do with graphical capability/power of the system. All the systems have different strengths which play a factor. For example after using 3d vision on the PC I can't image ever going back to console gaming for anything but social games unless the next generation can match it.

 

[Hornet]

A 2005 high end PC would have no problem at all with Gears of War. Your talking about a 7800GTX or X1900 XTX.

Maybe Gears of War is a bad example, but I seriously doubt that a Pentium D with a Readeon X1900 XTX can handle Crysis 2 (even at Xbox 360-equivalent settings). It is impossible to prove, but I guess exclusives like Halo 4 would be impossible to run on such a PC, considering lack of EDRAM (the X1900 XTX only had 49.6 GB/s of bandwidth) and half-decent SIMD units in the CPU.

I couldn't find any Gears benchmarks with these cards but the link below shows a X2900XT getting 43fps with max details in DX9 (that's higher than the 360's detail settings) at 1680x1050.

http://blog.libertech.net/blogs/lketchum/archive/2008/03/27/nvidia-geforce-8800-gtx-review.aspx

Given the X2900XT wasn't a huge amount faster than the X1900XTX in many cases then that card should easily be able to handle 35fps at 720p.

X2900 XT is a completely different architecture and that computer had a Core 2 Quad, several times faster than what was available in 2005.

 

[pjbliverpool]

so you confirm that a november high end 2005 PC can keep up easily with an xbox360 (even when you take the multicore CPU into consideration ?)

If that PC were still catered for in drivers and by developers then yes I'd have thought so. The fact that such old GPU's are no longer catered for though makes such a comparison very difficult. To a lesser extent even dual core CPU's are losing some support. I think there are a few games now that are ported to expect 3 or more hardware threads and if they don't get them, they tank, even on Sandybridge based I3's which smoke Xenon in every other way.

I guess on the CPU side a 2005 PC might struggle in some games since its SIMD capabilities would be far lower than Xenon even though general performance would be higher (I'm thinking of an AthlonX2 here) but GPU wise I don't see why an X1900XTX couldn't keep up with every console port today if it recieved the same level of optimisation that goes into the current R9xx/R1xxx and NV 5xx/6xx architectures. The only sticking point would be vertex shader throughput but RSX copes - albeit with help from Cell, but the X1900XTX has a fair bit more vertex shader throughput than RSX anyway so maybe it would balance out.

 

[Lucid_Dreamer]

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickrefyr.htm#1994

1994
October 10, 1994
Intel® Pentium® Processor
75 MHz

Good luck emulating ps1 games with that, or even playing the PC version of Tomb Raider 3 in 1999 at whatever resolution you choose with the same 1994 PC.

again thats not valid for ps3, you could buy a bleeding edge PC in november 2006 and still play all ps3 quality graphics till today. the xbox360 is the closest thing to bleeding edge level of ps1 hardware, I doubt that a PC bought in november 2005 could manage Gears of War....

with ps4/xboxnext it will be even worse, you can buy TODAY a PC that will surpass ANYTHING ps4/xbox next could achieve in their next 6+ years lifetime....

the reason for all of this is the increasing costs of bleeding personal computing technology, the market for personal computers has expanded exponentially since the early days of the 90s, there is today a market for Dual 3 billion+ transistors GPUs, that wasent the case in the 90s when even the idea of a dedicated processor for graphics was considered as risky...

Battlefield 3 minimum PC specs:

PC MINIMUM System Requirements
• Operating System: Windows 7 or Vista with Service Pack 3
(It will work on 32 or 64-bit Windows 7 and Vista)
• Processor: Intel Core2Duo 2.4 GHz / AMD Athlon X2 2.7 GHz OR Better
• RAM: 2 GB
• Video/Graphics Card: nVidia GeForce 8800 GT / ATI Radeon HD 3870 OR Better

The 8800 GT, codenamed G92, was released on 29 October 2007

 

[pjbliverpool]

Maybe Gears of War is a bad example, but I seriously doubt that a Pentium D with a Readeon X1900 XTX can handle Crysis 2 (even at Xbox 360-equivalent settings). It is impossible to prove, but I guess exclusives like Halo 4 would be impossible to run on such a PC, considering lack of EDRAM (the X1900 XTX only had 49.6 GB/s of bandwidth) and half-decent SIMD units in the CPU.

Edram isn't directly compariable to GPU memory bandwidth like that. The PS3 handles many of the same games as the 360 with a similar amount of badwidth to the X1900XTX which has to be shared between both the GPU and the CPU.

And while your likely correct that the CPU would struggle with Crysis 2 at console settings I don't see why the X1900XTX wouldn't be able to handle them. What is it about that card you think is weaker than Xenos? The link below shows a 9800GT (maybe twice as fast as the X1900XTX) averaging 39 fps at 1650x1080 at console settings. I don't see why 30 fps average wouldn't be possible at sub 720p with a reasonable amount of optimisation.

http://www.techspot.com/review/379-crysis-2-performance/page6.html

X2900 XT is a completely different architecture and that computer had a Core 2 Quad, several times faster than what was available in 2005.

The architecture isn't the question. Speed/performance are and it simply wasn;t that much faster than the X1900XTX. As for the CPU, I was running Gears perfectly fine on a 2.4Ghz COnroe back in the day. That's maybe 30% faster than the top end X2's of 2005 but I certainly had much more than 30% spare performance to lose from a CPU point of view (I had the game locked at 60fps).

 

[anexanhume]

thats not true, ps1 was bleeding edge technology at its time (people tend to forget or dont know that ps1 has been released in japan in september 1994, it was more powerful than any console available in the market and even in many respects consoles released 2 years later a la N64, and if anyone bought a powerful PC in september 1994, he knows he cant run playstation1 graphics with his PC in 1999, so it was quite bleeding edge, the same thing cant be said about the ps3 (november 2006), maybe the xbox360 released in november 2005 is the closest thing to the bleeding edge level of ps1)

PS2 achieved backwards compatibility with ps1 games for a very simple reason : they used tha ps1 CPU/GPU as an I/O chipset for ps2. So basically in every ps2 there is also a ps1. Sony wanted to do the same with ps3 until a solution of software emulation could be engeneered, but couldnt financially, thats why they dropped the Emotion Engine from european PS3s, and later on they dropped EE + GS altogether, keeping ps3 without any backwards compatibility with ps2 games.

This is not really true. Voodoo1 (1996) with a PC was better than the PSX any day of the week and by march 1999 we were emulating the Playstation with Bleem! and other emulators. I know this because I was a beta tester of that program.

Sony up until the PS3 always did their graphics processors in house as far as I know. Voodoo from 3DFX was really a huge breakthrough for graphics at the time. The PSX came out in 1995 in the U.S.A. for example.

He was talking about the PC bought in 94.

2/3 doctors agree the PS1 was bleeding edge. OK

Still, I don't think it has merit to talk about a PC at the time of a console release being able to emulate that console. That's never really been feasible.