Xbox Thought Experiment

[vjPiedPiper]

1st question: What do you think MS could have packed in the box for an extra $100, with the goal of having the box still be no bigger than the PS5 if possible?

2nd question: If this extra hardware meant that all these 30 fps UE5 games coming soon were 60 fps instead or the 60 fps ones had full RT as well, would consumers care enough that MS might have gained lots of market share from this move?

1. Slightly more memory, and enough to give a "flat memory space" ie. such that it is all accessed at the same high speed.
maybe the XSX gets 20Gb total, ans the XSS gets 16?
Perhaps also a slight increase on the SSD, maybe so it has 1TB and 512Gb usable space, instead of 1 /512 total.
Given the constraints of the boxes i doubt they could have gone for much with higher CPU/GPU power.
MAYBE? and thats a big maybe is another 4 CU's? either by going for perfect dies, or having a 60CU die, and using 56?

2. Nope. at the time the hardware was shipped, 2x the RT performance was miles off - especially on an AMD architecture.
Doubling the RT perf of the XSX with that generation of hardware requires basically 2x - or more hardware, cis some of the RT stuff is still CPU dependent.


The console market is tricky you want games to run best on your hardware, but if your hardware is too far advanced then devs just get it too good enough and dont spend the extra effort to get 10% more on a platform where it runs fine on 60fps already.

Honestly imho, and hindsight the best here, MS would have been best use of the theoretical $100M to create a second ATG ( Advanced Technology Group )
and send the ATG round to studio to help add polish and performance to their games.

They already have the more powerful hardware, but the software doesn't always show that.
they need to create an attitude of "games look better on xbox" amongst consumers.
that trickles down from serious gamers to the general population, and sells boxes and games.

 

[Cyan]

if they knew they'd be losing so much money, I'd go with nVidia hardware instead, I think it'd be worth it

 

[see colon]

if they knew they'd be losing so much money, I'd go with nVidia hardware instead, I think it'd be worth it

What about the CPU, though? Going with Intel and nVidia would likely be more expensive for identical performance, and even keeping an AMD CPU would cost more. And I would assume either option would result in having separate chips for CPU and GPU. Would you still have unified memory or some sort of split?

 

[Cyan]

What about the CPU, though? Going with Intel and nVidia would likely be more expensive for identical performance, and even keeping an AMD CPU would cost more. And I would assume either option would result in having separate chips for CPU and GPU. Would you still have unified memory or some sort of split?

oh well, I hadn't thought about the CPU. Still if you have money to spare, I'd go with an Intel CPU -or maybe an Intel APU, from the Battlemage and Celestial era-.

For development purposes, split memory pools might be tougher, but if they do provide the right tools, it could be a non issue and translate into a huge performance uplift, like on PC. In fact that way PC ports could be easily translated to a Xbox. The first Xbox was my favourite Xbox -I got one in early 2005- although X360 was better -but flawed hardware wise- and XB1 was my last -probably my last pure console ever-.

 

[see colon]

oh well, I hadn't thought about the CPU

Weird. It's probably the most central part. Split memory is fine for performance, but leads to redundancy that can increase prices vs using unified memory.

I think part of the reason we have AMD consoles this generation is because we had AMD consoles last generation. The partnerships worked out well for both Microsoft and Sony. But I think the reason they went with AMD was a couple of things. If I remember correctly, when both consoles makers went with an 8 core Jaguar CPU, a competitively priced Intel part was a dual core i3. And while the i3 would certainly have better single core performance, I think that 8 threads gave the consoles a path for optimization throughout the life of the consoles. The fact that you have the same vendor for the GPU means you only have to negotiate with one company. Plus you can have more exotic memory configurations like both PS4 and Xbox One have.

I think there's a reason that Playstation, Xbox and Switch all have SOCs that include a CPU and GPU from the same vendor.

 

[orangpelupa]

btw what if microsoft allows windows 11 licenses to be activated on xbox series, transforming them to a full-blown windows PC?

do you think it will bring benefit (profit, wider marketshare, etc) to microsoft?

or it will make things worse?

 

[Silent_Buddha]

btw what if microsoft allows windows 11 licenses to be activated on xbox series, transforming them to a full-blown windows PC?

do you think it will bring benefit (profit, wider marketshare, etc) to microsoft?

or it will make things worse?

I could only see them doing that for a substantial fee (I'm guessing somewhere around 400-500 USD to turn it into a Windows device). They are still highly reliant on OEM PC makers and being able to turn the XBS-X (or even the S) into a full blown Windows device would not go over well with their OEM partners. As well, if it's a full blown Windows device, there's not much that MS can do to make money off of the console. Basically noone would have to use the MIcrosoft storefront to buy games so MS would be generating a loss with every console sold. It's not like Apple where every iOS device is sold at high margins, so even if noone buys anything on an iOS device Apple are still making a hefty profit.

Regards,
SB

 

[vjPiedPiper]

Actually $100 worth of tensor like cores, would probably have been the only way to usefully spend an extra $100 per console,
having an appreciably better up-scaling tech than your competitor would be a significant within gen advantage.

Imagine Jedi Survivor with DLSS2 on Xbox vs FSR2 on PS5. minimal extra work for devs, noticeable visual improvement.
Anyway, enough fantasy land for now!