The Next-gen Situation discussion *spawn

They're in for a rude awakening (if true) .....

 

To be quite frank, both consoles sound disappointing. If the leaks are legit, I think Orbis should have advantage in every game, but not to the point where Durango won't able to run them. Its just that people had high hopes of Agnis and Unreal 4 after 8 years, but those things won't come to fruition as it stands.

 

It is a bit uninspired if a current laptop will be on par with next gen.

 

Why?

Look at the success of Wii, or Kinect. Performance does not equal sales.

Durango is possibly the best placed of the machines, unlike the Wii this gen (and Wii U next gen), it can get ports of Orbis games (that'll probably look 90% as good as their counterparts), but it also has motion and voice controls for every system out of the box (plus nifty features like Live Wall), smartglass connectivity that lets you use your smartphone/tablet with the system, it's a DVR and media server which can stream to smartphones/tablets, has a full browser, Skype client, and can run Windows 8 apps, all this can be accessed instantaneously when playing full games.

I mean, us power obsessed gamers may not like it, but for the majority of potential customers it sounds like a fine machine.

 

Ah fair enough, I must have misremembered its dx10 min requirement as dx11. Still, by the end of this year dx11 wont be a big deal. Hell, it'll be 4 gpu generations old and on its way to a 5th. Its already the standard for integrated and entry level gpus. We'll probably be thinking about dx12 by the time the new consoles launch.

 

I'm much more optimistic. To me it showed video's of what a similar on paper spec laptop could do.

That they ran at 1080P and 45-60FPS at normal/high/extreme with all the inefficiencies of PC ect......I'm not worried yet.

 

I want a great game machine , not a roku device with worthless motion controls .
If the other guy gives me that , i'm jumping ship in a second .

 

(This was supposed to be posted into the predict thread, but I'll post it here because I need to make the point, and it's just as relevant in this thread)

Ok folks... bkilian is not hinting anything, especially when it comes to comparing two rumored products. I don't know _anything_ about at least one of those products, so how could I be hinting about performance comparisons?

I'm just engaging in the conversation, asking questions, (and when I ask a question, I'm not trying to imply or lead either), and giving opinions based on what we noticed from previous generations. Please don't read any more than that into it. If people keep insisting on doing so, I'll have to reconsider my posting here, which will make me sad, since I enjoy this community. There's a reason I don't post on GAF (Well, two reasons, since they rejected my registration )

 

My quote was more in line "he talked about alot of stuff". Not that you insinuated something or directly confirmed anything about certain console.

 

I thought you left Microsoft recently and are at a new company? Don't let them stop you posting here, you are a very insightful person and an asset to the forum!

 

I am not aware of any single high end card GPU with 6 Gb of GDDR5, top of the line GPUs till this day are GTX 680 which comes standard with only 2 Gb of GDDR5, and AMD 7970 which comes standard with only 3 Gb of GDDR5. If 6 Gb of single GPUs do exist, it is an exotic design impossible to find product on most world markets that is irrelevant to the discussion.

and of course we should only discuss single high end GPU cards, dual or triple or quadruple GPU configurations do exist but are extremist choices by some hardcore gamers that developers arent even mentioning when talking about their recommended configuration for PC games. No developer, even crytek, ever created a game that can run at maximum settings only on those extremist configurations.

The core gaming experience wont be better on PC, it would be worse for at least 1 to 2 years of nextgen consoles release dates (at least compared with PS4 rumored specifications). Unless someone could explain to me how a GTX 680 with 2 Gb of GDDR5 can run games designed to push on screen 3 Gb of high rez textures on PS4. if someone could explain to me how this could happen, I would seriously reconsider my position on the issue. If not, than I would call all of this : blind belief.

I am waiting for the explanation.

 

Or you could buy one from here.

Now you are aware, but you're right in that it's likely not a high volume product.

 

I'm happy for you to challenge anything I've said. Although I can assure you that anything quantifiable can be backed up with sources.

I bolded the important bit. I've never tried to claim that the average or "standard" high end PC would be able to outperform the new generation consoles. My argument is that the overall high end position is stronger this generation than it was last. i.e. the highest end PC's are more powerful by comparison to the consoles than they were last time and that trend carrys on down through the performance spectrum. When the 360 launched the "standard" high end PC GPU would have sported 256MB of memory. Slightely less than 50% of the console. This time - almost a full year before the next gen consoles launch the "standard" high end PC is already loaded with 2 or 3GB. That's 57-86% of the new console and the gap will almost certainly close over the next 10 months now that it's known how much memory the new consoles will carry.

Not true? We DO have PC's today that have more graphics memory than the PS4. This is a fact, please don't make statments like that without doing your research. No, they are not the "standard" but that isn;t the argument. They are however freely available today, almost a year before the PS4 launches. The x1800XT launched 1 month before the 360 with it's 512MB of RAM. How much RAM do you expect high end 780 and 8970 GPU's to carry?

How many GPU's were sporting more than 512 MB of graphics memory 10 months before the 360 launched? Or to be specific, how many were sporting 878MB or more since that's the same ratio that the the 6GB GPU's of today hold over the PS4. Can you imagine a 6800 Ultra era GPU sporting 878MB?

You already know the standard memory sizes for the 8970 and 780GTX? What else can you tell us about these GPU's? Even if you did, your math is off. It's 3.5 GB vs 3GB. You can't include the 512MB that's assigned to the OS. PC video memory does not have this limitation.

But even when we put all that aside, the fact still remains that you're numbers are wrong. There are 4GB 670/680's and 6GB 7970's available today. I don't see this reducing in the next 10 months.

I find it somewhat ridiculous that you're comparing PC memory bandwidth to Xbox 360 memory bandwidth while completely ignoring the edram.

The 360 had 41% of the bandwidth of the highest end PC GPU on the day of it's launch, to its unified memory pool. It also had almost 5x that amount of bandwidth to it's edram. You don;t think that's worth of consideration?

The PS3 compared to that same GPU (7800GTX 512MB) had 88% of it's bandwidth when it launched. Far higher than the 66% that PS4 has compared to current top end GPU's, nevermind whatever will be top end in 10 months when the PS4 actually launches. Sure compared to the 8800GTX that was high end when PS3 launched (albeit late to the party) that percentage is more like 55% but when the next generation GPU's come along it will be very comparable to to the situation when PS3 launched. The difference of course will be that the PC GPU's PS4 will be compared to will be around 6 months old compared to the PS3 which was being compared with an absolutely brand new state of the art PC GPU (they literally launched within a couple of days of each other I believe)

I've not made any claim about average configurations having more memory than the new consoles. My argument is that the highest end single GPU's will be considerably more powerful in relation to the new consoles when they launch than they were when the 360 and PS3 launched. And that relative high position at the top end will carry on down through all the performance segments insofar that wntry and mid range PC's will be closer to the new consoles in performance this generation than they were last generation. Thus the likelyhood of full fat consoles ports to PC is more likely this generation rather than less.

There are a whole host of other reasons to expect more cross platform games on PC at the start of this generation compared to last and for those multi platfrorm games to be graphically comparable to exclusives on the consoles that I won't get into in this post... I think I've abandonded the fiance for long enough already tonight!

 

I wrote a haiku in remembrance of the prediction thread, in which abuses lead to a tragedy.
http://beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=31379

Favorite thread closed?
Oh no, what will I do now!
My life is over.

 

Remember also that the 3.5 GB GDDR5 is the total RAM. What is used as VRAM is much less so it shouldn't be compared to a video card that has all its GDDR5 RAM used for VRAM.

 

I'd like it if Sonly put a 1-2GB of DDR3 on a slow bus just for the OS. Unfortunately that complicates chip and board design so probably isn't going to happen.

 

http://www.sapphiretech.com/presentation/product/?cid=1&gid=3&sgid=1157&lid=1&pid=1483

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/4gb-...z-gddr5-gpu-967mhz-boost-1046mhz-cores-1344-d

http://www.evga.com/Products/Product.aspx?pn=04G-P4-2673-KR

There are plenty of 6GB and 4GB GPU's available today.

More impossible to find than say, a PS4?

Actually, Crytek are just about the only company that did (Crysis). It's beside the point though, no-ones talking about multi-GPU setups here. Just regular old single GPU systems.

How do you know this? There are around 6 single GPU graphics cards available today that offer similar or more horsepower than the PS4. 3 of those have optional memory configurations in excess if what is available with the PS4. By the time the PS4 actually launches you can expect at least a dozen different single GPU graphics cards offering similar or greater horsepower and I'll bet by then there'll be a similar number offering larger memory configurations as well. Do you know how many there were when the 360 launched? One. And that had slightely less memory when you include the edram.

No-one is claiming that mid range PC's are going to match the new generation of consoles when they launch. But PC's WILL be in a much better position than they were last generation. Why are you so resistant to this fact?

How about that 3.5GB having to service the entire memory needs of the console and not just the rendering requirements as is the case with a PC graphics card? A PC splits the memory requirement between two pools. The PS4 fits it all into 1. Completely ignoring 1 pool in the PC is no different to claiming that the PS3 has only 256MB of memory running at 22.4GB/s.

A regular 680 may only have 2GB of memory but a lot of the data that will be filling the 3.5GB in a PS4 will not need to sit in the 680's memory pool. It will sit in the PC's system memory which is clearly more than large enough to accomodate it. The same is true for bandwidth. The PS4 may have the same bandwidth as a 680 (if the rumours are true) but that bandwidth serves the whole system, not just the GPU.

Add in the fact that the 680 has a good double the actual horsepower of the PS4 GPU and I'd expect it to handle the same games with little issue in most situations. And bare in mind that in last generation terms, with regards to timing the 680 would be equivilent to a 6800 Ultra (oh the naming irony!). Imagine if back in 2006 we were talking about the 6800 Ultra sporting the same overall bandwidth and twice the raw computational horsepower of RSX in the PS3...

 

That could be pretty compelling, if they keep the price at $400 max at launch.

 

AlStrong is cheating by posting in a closed thread

Where is the honor
when the rules we must follow
are just pretty lies.

 

I can't say I'm as confident about this as you are. I'm pretty sure a 2GB 680 will run into serious memory issues if it tries to run a game obtimized for Orbis just like any 256MB card would have struggled running for example Gears of War 3. 680 doesn't even really have extra bandwith. A 6GB 7970 should be able to handle everything.