What Happened To Durango?

[TheChefO]

Well why don't you wait till you have all the details, and hear developers opinion on it before you decide...

That's partly the reason for this thread. Early word from developers was that Durango would win nextgen hands down.

This spec doesn't align with such a prediction ... so did it get specced down, is the leak only for a lower tier sku, or did Sony significantly bump their spec?

 

[Silent_Buddha]

That's partly the reason for this thread. Early word from developers was that Durango would win nextgen hands down.

This spec doesn't align with such a prediction ... so did it get specced down, is the leak only for a lower tier sku, or did Sony significantly bump their spec?

All of the above and none of the above.

In other words, noone other than developers under NDA will have enough information to know. Even Sony and Microsoft are unlikely to know enough information to know whether their competitor has a better or worse console. Well, unless there's some serious corporate espionage going on, which there could be. And, of course, there's always the question of better in what way?

Regards,
SB

 

[Scott_Arm]

That's partly the reason for this thread. Early word from developers was that Durango would win nextgen hands down.

This spec doesn't align with such a prediction ... so did it get specced down, is the leak only for a lower tier sku, or did Sony significantly bump their spec?

Rumoured 2nd-hand word from developers, which may have been totally false, was that ....

 

[SlickShoesRUCrazy]

Well, I listened to What The Tech yesterday and one of the emails asked Paul Thurrot if the xbox durango is sticking to the leak document and he said it was no longer accurate. was not sure which doc, so i tweeted him.

He said the doc with the architectural diagrams which I am guessing means that pdf "leak" with illumni room and glasses. So it was the plan before, but the plans changed.

Also reiterated that there are multiple machines in the pipeline for the xbox brand.

 

[XpiderMX]

We already have PS3s duct taped together for GT5 multi-display so it's not a stupid idea to put an hdmi-in, it's not expensive. That would fit the comment that it's "like a super computer". But on the negative side, it might remain a niche, how many games would support it? Sony could pun that you need two 720 to have the same performance as a single PS4. At twice the price. That's not good publicity.

It looks great as a posibility, even 4k enabled games.

 

[BRiT]

I think you're mistaking "devs" with "fanboys" or "attention whores".

As it stands, we have no solid info on either console. It's too early to judge either without knowing more specs especially their retail price.

 

[AlphaWolf]

If all rumors aligned with reality we would live in a very strange world.

 

[Rangers]

The rumors were false?

Pretty simple answer, really.

Besides that those rumors were never the dominant ones anyway imo.

 

[Brimstone]

Microsoft is out of touch. Just look at Windows8 and the shutdown of pc games like Age of Empires and Flight Simulator. Now Valve is in position to move towards Linux and MS doesn't have heavy counter weights.

Maybe the leaked info is out of date. Valve looks to be the big winner going forward.

 

[Brad Grenz]

If you chain a lot of early rumors about Durango you can tease out a narrative of a system intended to launch last year, saw a manufacturing setback that required AMD to start over and fast track a new design. Any one of those pieces could be apocryphal of course.

I was wondering the other day if the super computer comments may stem from the Durango APU starting life as a GPGPU HPC concept. I think most supercomputers use Xeon or Opteron CPUs and tons of full Tesla or FireGL cards to run GPGPU code these days. Maybe AMD was experimenting with APU designs for that market where perhaps low powered Jaguar cores were enough to keep the GPU fed, and the SRAM scratch pad could have a significant benefit. Put a bunch of them on a blade and a ton on each rack. Could offer a lot of performance density for the power.

 

[dumbo11]

Duck Tape is a brand name of duct tape, chosen because of the similar sound, that has proven very effective as your confusion testifies to. You can use either, depending on whether you want to promote the particular brand or not; although, as with many trademarks, the name has become generalised. eg. People use 'hoover' to mean any vacuum cleaner, and 'biro' to mean any ball-point pen. Non-capitalised 'duck tape' is now just another name for duct tape.

Ah - that would explain things... I guess 'Duck tape' never really took off in the UK so much... so I always thought it was a typo or maybe something entirely different, but never looked it up .

---

Personally, I do think the leakers leaked accurate information "as they saw it". But if they don't understand the exact context/meaning of words, it can become a game of "chinese whispers", especially AFTER it gets leaked onto the internet...
"Within Durango's GPU/CPU is a super-computer-like architectural separation of blah blah"-> "I heard that Durango's GPU/CPU is like a super-computer" -> "Durango is a super-computer!"

 

[Arwin]

Personally, if I were a mod on this forum, I would have locked this thread based on the title alone. These type of threads, though frequently occuring on GAF, are frowned upon even there.

 

[Rangers]

If you chain a lot of early rumors about Durango you can tease out a narrative of a system intended to launch last year, saw a manufacturing setback that required AMD to start over and fast track a new design. Any one of those pieces could be apocryphal of course.

actually there was some rumor, posted on gaf of course i imagine, that originally xbox was scheduled for 2010 and was going to be along the lines of the weak piece of crap in the leaked docs.

it then supposedly got delayed, i forget why, maybe because of kinect, and beefed up to what we have today.

i'm sure that rumors probably not true either, but it seemed appealing.

 

[Scott_Arm]

If you chain a lot of early rumors about Durango you can tease out a narrative of a system intended to launch last year, saw a manufacturing setback that required AMD to start over and fast track a new design. Any one of those pieces could be apocryphal of course.

I was wondering the other day if the super computer comments may stem from the Durango APU starting life as a GPGPU HPC concept. I think most supercomputers use Xeon or Opteron CPUs and tons of full Tesla or FireGL cards to run GPGPU code these days. Maybe AMD was experimenting with APU designs for that market where perhaps low powered Jaguar cores were enough to keep the GPU fed, and the SRAM scratch pad could have a significant benefit. Put a bunch of them on a blade and a ton on each rack. Could offer a lot of performance density for the power.

Or all of that could be 100% wrong.

 

[TheChefO]

Personally, if I were a mod on this forum, I would have locked this thread based on the title alone. These type of threads, though frequently occuring on GAF, are frowned upon even there.

The idea is to get to the bottom of what is going on with Durango.

A) More to the spec/sku lineup than we know

B) The spec was downgraded / PS4 was upgraded

C) The early rumors were way off / Misinterpreted / Intentionally off

 

[AlphaWolf]

D) the current rumors don't have all the information and are still just rumors
E)this thread is stupid because we have no idea

 

[Scott_Arm]

D) the current rumors don't have all the information and are still just rumors
E)this thread is stupid because we have no idea

Yep.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Microsoft is out of touch. Just look at Windows8 and the shutdown of pc games like Age of Empires and Flight Simulator. Now Valve is in position to move towards Linux and MS doesn't have heavy counter weights.

Maybe the leaked info is out of date. Valve looks to be the big winner going forward.

Really? Because I've been an avid fan of AoE since the first game. And AoE Online is better than the previous incarnations in most ways. The only real drawback compared to previous AoE's is fewer civilizations. But since they regularly support the game with additional civilizations, it could eventually surpass it there as well.

I just wish they hadn't dissolved Ensemble as I really liked them. But that doesn't mean that AoE was shutdown. Hell, just the free to play content for AoE Online surpasses the previous incarnations.

Flight Simulator just got to the point where it was more expensive to develop than the amount of revenue returned warranted. It's one of the reasons that we, unfortunately, don't have many simulation games with high budget development (and the Flight Sim series always had one of the highest game development budgets) budgets anymore.

Regards,
SB

 

[(((interference)))]

That's partly the reason for this thread. Early word from developers was that Durango would win nextgen hands down.

This spec doesn't align with such a prediction ... so did it get specced down, is the leak only for a lower tier sku, or did Sony significantly bump their spec?

The IGN survey probably referred to things other than pure specs, like built in Kinect, voice control, illumi room, Smartglas, Windows 8 apps etc.

It's probably going to run multiplat titles a little worse than Orbis (say it's 10-20% less powerful in real world terms) , perhaps like some earlier PS3 multiplats but that's not going to matter to most people as long as you can play the same games as Orbis and with similar visuals.

I think regardless if it's less powerful than Orbis, it might well be more successful given it will have broader appeal than just core gamers - especially if it's priced cheaper or has a subscription system for the hardware.

 

[XpiderMX]

Wait a minute...

The next wave of videogame machines is coming to market at a time when the industry is undergoing a sea change. While videogames used to be limited to dedicated game machines and personal computers, the proliferation of smartphones and other Internet connected devices is opening the floodgates to free or inexpensive games.

Such shifts in consumer behavior and the ageing consoles - the Xbox 360 debuted in 2005 and the PS3 a year later - are weighing on game sales, which have contracted every month since December of 2011. Further, Electronic Arts Inc. said the console industry's packaged goods sales have fallen about a fifth so far this fiscal year.

In a nod to the changes afoot in the industry, Sony is planning to incorporate more social gaming aspects into the new machine, people familiar with the matter said. Also, while hardware improvements were a key focus of past console upgrades, Sony is more focused this time on the changes in how users interact with the machine, these people said.

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