Nextbox infinity anticipation station

[Jeff Kelly]

to put it in perspective, the 32 MB eSRAM is 1.6 billion transistors.

[Venkman]

The whole thing feels rushed. I realize why, but they should be past that. The core video game business of the mid-2000s is not coming back and the WiiU, PS4 and X1 are all kinda diverging in what their core foci are. So if X1 delays by a year, that's not the same kind of impact it would have been six years ago. Developers would have more time to polish their PS4 ports (and as usual there'll be way more ports than exclusives), Microsoft can maybe go through the necessary rearchitecting, they can really clean up their confusing message to continue driving to the business they want to be in (settop box) while doing enough to continue to attract the core users, and conventional wisdom says Nintendo is out of the fight this round.

Yes this is all pie in sky. I'm sure their internal interia is much more focused on splitting the core gamer dollar hoping to continue to keep their share than to risk a lot of people converting from X360 to PS4 instead. Unfortunately for them, the gamers will go to whichever platform has the better games (which sounds like it might be PS4 at this point) and the rest of the people will either be convinced the X1 is their new settop box, or they'll sit out.

E3 will be fun. I suspect they realize now that's make or break for them.

[Jeff Kelly]

That would be true if MS was concerned about Sony or Nintendo. They could ride out another year in that case. The Xbone IMHO wasn't designed to compete aginst Sony but to beat Apple to the punch.

If the rumored AppleTV launches and proves to be even 20% as successful as iPhone/iPad then MS is finished. They try to beat a product rumor to launch.

[Kageru]

They're using relatively standard PC components and still managing to find ways to fail if true. Low yield is also going to make the platform much less profitable which will encourage them to draw more revenue from other sources like used game sales.

In terms of timing it might be they were more focused on their alternate goal of dominating the living room and pretty much assumed Sony was a spent force. Allowing them to be blind-sided in terms of time and capability.

Meanwhile AMD seems to have ambitions of making multi-platform gaming painless. Which makes a lot of sense for them given they are busy fighting Nvidia on the PC space. I could also see Nvidia be pretty keen on making a steambox, though AMD probably wouldn't mind selling more chips either.

[01101010]

Incoming miracle patch 30 days after release! 

 

[Morat20]

STILL not seeing a reason to buy this. Or the PS4. I might buy a new regular Xbox soon, though. My cd drive on mine is failing, and apparently there's some stupid hardware lock on the damn thing for reasons unknown.

So I can either send it to MS to be refurbished, get out a soldering iron and move some chips, or buy a new Xbox...

[Kageru]

Another opportunity to laugh at EA's Chief Technology Officer though.

"Both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 have adopted electronics and an integrated systems-on-a -chip (soc) architecture that unleashes magnitudes more compute and graphics power than the current generation of consoles," he wrote. "These architectures are a generation ahead of the highest end PC on the market and their unique design of the hardware, the underlying operating system and the live service layer create one of the most compelling platforms to reimagine game mechanics."

[Cyrrex]

Another opportunity to laugh at EA's Chief Technology Officer though.

"Both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 have adopted electronics and an integrated systems-on-a -chip (soc) architecture that unleashes magnitudes more compute and graphics power than the current generation of consoles," he wrote. "These architectures are a generation ahead of the highest end PC on the market and their unique design of the hardware, the underlying operating system and the live service layer create one of the most compelling platforms to reimagine game mechanics."

Is there any basis in reality for this claim that these machines will be faster than a high end PC?  I haven't paid much attention to the specs or attempted to do any comparisions at all, but I automatically assume bullshit.  Has there ever been a console that isn't using last year's technology cast-offs?  And even in the unlikely event that they are in fact using cutting edge top end stuff (which they just cannot be at these price ranges...), they will be last-year's tech by the time they go to market.  Last-year's mid range tech, unless I am much mistaken.  You'll be able to by video cards that cost more than the whole fucking console.

So what the fuck?  I am not being rhetorical - just what they fuck is behind this?

[Margalis]

They will be faster dollar for dollar but not in absolute terms.

[Tebonas]

So would be an old PC I buy at a flea market. Thats not really a glowing endorsement.

[Ingmar]

Is there any basis in reality for this claim that these machines will be faster than a high end PC? 

It doesn't say it will be faster. Low end chips from one generation are not necessarily faster than high end chips from the previous generation. Intel's fastest chip is the i7-3900 AFAIK, and will still be faster than the Haswell chips. The improvements are instead in chip size, heat, etc.

[Kageru]

Is there any basis in reality for this claim that these machines will be faster than a high end PC?

None what-so-ever. The only way you could make that claim is a complete and total ignorance of the PC market.

... but then he is from EA.

[Cyrrex]

They will be faster dollar for dollar but not in absolute terms.

And I am totally fine with that.  I don't mind that the console is slower, I just can't stomach the exaggerated claims.

Is there any basis in reality for this claim that these machines will be faster than a high end PC? 

It doesn't say it will be faster. Low end chips from one generation are not necessarily faster than high end chips from the previous generation. Intel's fastest chip is the i7-3900 AFAIK, and will still be faster than the Haswell chips. The improvements are instead in chip size, heat, etc.

I figured that the truth was something like this.  I know why they say it, but it is still deliberately misleading. 

[Jeff Kelly]

Both the PS 4 and the XBox One use a System-On-Chip (SOC) solution that integrates both the CPU and the GPU on a single die.

Both use an 8 core AMD Jaguar CPU and an DirectX 11.1 compatible GPU based on AMD's/ATI's Graphics Core Next (GCN) design. They both went with AMD because AMD extensively redesigned both their CPU and GPU cores to make integration on a single die easier. You can basically 'pick and mix' cores and both CPU and GPU cores are able to access the same L1 and L2 caches and the same memory over a unified memory architecture and optimized bus.

The biggest change concerns the GPU which is more flexible. You no longer have dedicated circuits for geometry, tesselation, floating point and other functions but general purpose computing units that can do all of those functions. So a computing unit can be flexibly used to compute geometry, physics, OpenCL functions etc. The unified cache and memory architecture of the PS4 (and to a lesser extent Xbone) is optimized to allow parallel execution of both CPU and GPU computing and parallel access of the caches and the unified memory by both the GPU and CPU. Even better the architecture allows for parallel exceution of both rendering and general purpose computing operations on the GPU side so for example physics calculation and graphics operations can run in parallel.

The PS 4 uses 8 jaguar cores for the CPU and 18 computing units with 1152 shader cores for the GPU that both use 8 GB of GDDR5 memory via a unified memory architecture. The GPU is clocked at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory has a maximum transfer rate of 176 GB/s. This means that the PS4 has a theoretical performance of 1.86 TFlops/s. This means that the PS4 is close to a Geforce GTX 680 in raw performance.

The XBox One also uses 8 Jaguar cores for the CPU but only has 12 compute units with 768 shader cores. The XBox is also only using GDDR3 memory with a theoretical throughput of 68 GB/s. The raw computing power of the XBox one is at 1.2 TFlops so the PS4 has 50% more raw GPU power than the XBox One but the significantly slower GDDR3 memory further hampers the theoretical performance (if the GPU has to wait for memory reads it can't do anything). That's why MS chose to include the 32 MB of eSRAM to buffer the slow memory access times to the GDDR3 memory.

This will only help though if the SRAM runs at the same clock speed as the GPU cores (single cycle reads). In that case reads from the SRAM would have a maximum throughput of 192 GB/s. In real world performance the XBox One will probably be closer to a Geforce GTX 650.

If the rumors are true and they need to underclock the SRAM by 100 or 200 MHz then this will reduce the speed of the SRAM and therefore the theoretical bandwidth and this will also reduce the performance of the GPU. In that case the XBox One's theoretical GPU power would be at 800 to 900 GFlop/s or half that of the PS4. This means that the Xbone would be in the same class as current $100 graphics cards and it would also mean that the Xbone will not be able to render games at 1080p native (performance and memory bandwidth are not sufficient to push 1080p textures). Even if they could increase yields in the future, XBox developers would be stuck with that performance to be compatible with all of the boxes sold till then.
This would also put the Xbone's performance at only three times that of the 360 (the 500 MHz Xenos in the 360 can achieve 240 GFlop/s)

This means that the PS4 will have a significant performance advantage over the XBone over the entire lifetime of the next gen consoles. This will make PS4 exclusive titles pretty interesting when they can tap all of that performance but will also probably mean that PS4 titles will look or perform better than XBox One titles.

[Phred]

What most of the self styled pc experts seem to miss from their analyses is the cost overhead of shipping all graphics operations across the PCIe bus. While faster than what it replaced, this bus still introduces a huge lag into graphics. Now, imagine if you will, shared graphics memory where both the processor and the gpu can perform operations on graphics without having to pass it back and forth across the bus. As you may know most graphics eventually comes down to pointing the display circuitry at a display buffer to be drawn onscreen. Imagine to switch buffers all you have to do is pass a pointer to where to start. This is why I think the new console's are going to not just be "a thrift shop PC"

[Fabricated]

Since the architectures are so similar I'm thinking that the PS4's performance advantage will actually be quite noticeable on all crossplatform titles without really any work required from the developers.

[Quinton]

Scanout is really not the bottleneck.  Having the CPU complex and GPU complex on a local/faster fabric is nice, but modern GPUs have significant amounts of local memory, large caches, and efficient DMA mechanisms.  I'm not convinced that these consoles are going to see a significant performance advantage here.

[Cyrrex]

Since the architectures are so similar I'm thinking that the PS4's performance advantage will actually be quite noticeable on all crossplatform titles without really any work required from the developers.

For me, this is the money statement of this whole thread.   Because if true, then the Boner is dead fucking meat.  All that extra bullshit won't matter at all.  I know the Wii broke that rule last generation, but I think Sony and MS are more of an apples to apples comparison, despite what MS claims to be attempting.

[Fabricated]

The Wii broke that rule for a while and then people stopped buying games for it, and people stopped MAKING games for it. The Wii was also not positioned as being an analog to the PS3 or 360 but rather targeted a whole different audience.

I dunno if texture popin or framerate differences will really make gamers break for one or the other in single player games (I highly doubt most devs will care to use higher-res/quality assets for PS4 versions), but for CALL-O-DOOTY and any competitive online title if the more hardcore gamer crowd has to choose between 30fps and no AA and AA+60fps, they'll go with the latter I imagine; provided Sony can get PSN feeling as good/integrated as Xbox Live anyway.

[Fordel]

That's a pretty big IF to be fair. Sony's online history is 

[Goreschach]

Since the architectures are so similar I'm thinking that the PS4's performance advantage will actually be quite noticeable on all crossplatform titles without really any work required from the developers.

For me, this is the money statement of this whole thread.   Because if true, then the Boner is dead fucking meat.  All that extra bullshit won't matter at all.  I know the Wii broke that rule last generation, but I think Sony and MS are more of an apples to apples comparison, despite what MS claims to be attempting.

Think about how much more powerful modern PC's are than the 360 and PS3. Several times, at least, even for a moderate gaming rig. How much better are games on pc? Not very. You get better textures, more shader power for cosmetic effects, and better load times. That's pretty much it.

Well, and a real input device.

Developers are struggling to sell enough copies on the current generation to recoup their development costs. Absolutely nobody is going to cut half their potential market just to target PS4 simply for the 'benefit' of creating even more expensive game assets.

[Arinon]

Think about how much more powerful modern PC's are than the 360 and PS3. Several times, at least, even for a moderate gaming rig. How much better are games on pc? Not very. You get better textures, more shader power for cosmetic effects, and better load times. That's pretty much it.

This probably has more to do with consoles being a static platform you can really optimize for while PCs are a random assembly of parts with god-knows-what other software/drivers getting in the way.  That, and lack of incentive to make PC shit stand out, due to us all being dirty pirates.

[Goreschach]

Back in the 8 bit days, sure. But nobody is sitting around banging out assembly on modern consoles. Development has been homogenizing, and this current generation is going to seal the deal.

[eldaec]

How much better is civ 5 than the equivalent on a console?

How much better is deus ex than deus ex 2?

PC flexibility and customer base is inherently niche but you don't measure how much 'better' it is by looking at shader output any more than you compare an Aston Martin with a Chevy by looking at top speed.

[Goreschach]

Discussion was in the context of PS4 having more shader cores than XBOne, so I'm not really sure what your point is.

[Margalis]

Think about how much more powerful modern PC's are than the 360 and PS3. Several times, at least, even for a moderate gaming rig. How much better are games on pc? Not very. You get better textures, more shader power for cosmetic effects, and better load times. That's pretty much it.

Right now PC games are still Direct X 9 centric, in part because the consoles use what is basically Direct X 9, and in part because PC games these days sell better if they work on lower end hardware. Stuff like higher-res textures and higher frame rates and resolution are an easy way to harness more power and memory without making fundamental engine changes.

Once the new consoles hit at least some engines will use DX 11 as the baseline. So instead of seeing games that just have higher res we'll see games that use new techniques. Consoles serve as the baseline for technical features.

[Venkman]

That would be true if MS was concerned about Sony or Nintendo. They could ride out another year in that case. The Xbone IMHO wasn't designed to compete aginst Sony but to beat Apple to the punch.product rumor to launch.

MS's competition is not Apple's ephemeral TV product. In part because I still don't understand why people think Apple is making a TV product. They already have one, it works very well, very few people care, and Apple hasn't been interested in marketing it. But all the pieces are in place:

• Apps on your TV? Check.
• Apps you control with your other iOS devices? Check.
• Apps you can stream from those devices to the TV? Check.
• Anytime/anywhere video viewing that you can bounce between multiple TVs and your iOS devices at whim? Check.

The only thing it can't do is the one janky-ass thing all IR blasters since the first Slingbox have been trying to get consumers to give a shit about: control your cable box. And it can't because Apple specifically chooses not to. And there's lots of reasons they choose not to that all roll back to the same roadblock: cable providers. Consumers don't buy cable boxes. They buy cable from the one company in the area that offers it and get whatever crappy cable box that company wants to give them. No choice here and Apple TV is not going to solve that unless they get into some massive strategic partnership with Comcast or Time Warner ala launch-era AT&T.

So yes, Microsoft thinks their competition is Sony and Nintendo. They don't want to lose the audience they grew for 10 years to Sony. They hope they can turn those people into enhanced TV viewers and advertiser wet dreams. But make no mistake, their strategy hinges on the gamers first.

I just wish they didn't think that, because it puts them into a series of milestones that don't look like they'll be able to hit well.

[Jeff Kelly]

Apple's strategy is to convince broadcasters that they don't necessarily need a cable provider either, that they profit from unbundling themselves from the cable packages.

You don't need Comcast when you could just deliver your content via an HBO, ABC or CBS app. Look at HBO go or the MLB or NBA apps.

The XBone only integrates cable boxes to train their customers to use the XBox for all entertainment purposes and to make them  forget they even own a cable box, but make no mistake, sooner or later when they have secured direct support by the networks, they'll kick the cable companies to the curb.

You watch TV via XBox, your program guide is provided by MS, you won't even use your cable box remote or need to remember channel numbers and you can seamlessly switch from cable to netflix and games.

If it works then most users will have forgotten they even own a cable box after they have used the XBone for some time.

If I were Time Warner or Comcast I'd be very concerned about my future right now. Apple and MS have different approaches but the goal is clear. Kill the cable companies by bringing the networks over to their app platforms with content delivery over IP networks.

In Germany I can already watch most channels via HTML stream, IP multicasting or dedicated apps for iOS and Android. At that point it's easy to make both the XBox or an Apple device to function as the cable box. This is bad news for the cable companies.

They only exist because they provide access to the viewers once that no longer matters they are dead because the cable companies are despised by both the networks and the viewers and both treat them as a (still) necessary evil.

[Fabricated]

Think about how much more powerful modern PC's are than the 360 and PS3. Several times, at least, even for a moderate gaming rig. How much better are games on pc? Not very. You get better textures, more shader power for cosmetic effects, and better load times. That's pretty much it.

Well, and a real input device.

Developers are struggling to sell enough copies on the current generation to recoup their development costs. Absolutely nobody is going to cut half their potential market just to target PS4 simply for the 'benefit' of creating even more expensive game assets.

You missed the point: The XBONE and PS4 are using literally the exact same APU, but the XBONE cheaped out on shaders/processing units/RAM. Devs won't have to do anything different to their PS4 ports. Even the biggest middlewared-to-shit push-button compiled shovelware game will pull higher/more steady FPS and have less texture/terrain popin, for free.

[Goreschach]

Think about how much more powerful modern PC's are than the 360 and PS3. Several times, at least, even for a moderate gaming rig. How much better are games on pc? Not very. You get better textures, more shader power for cosmetic effects, and better load times. That's pretty much it.

Well, and a real input device.

Developers are struggling to sell enough copies on the current generation to recoup their development costs. Absolutely nobody is going to cut half their potential market just to target PS4 simply for the 'benefit' of creating even more expensive game assets.

You missed the point: The XBONE and PS4 are using literally the exact same APU, but the XBONE cheaped out on shaders/processing units/RAM. Devs won't have to do anything different to their PS4 ports. Even the biggest middlewared-to-shit push-button compiled shovelware game will pull higher/more steady FPS and have less texture/terrain popin, for free.

Your assuming that there will be framerate and popin problems implies that the game would have been designed for PS4 specifications. This is incorrect. Developers in the next generation will have too many problems just staying profitable to ignore or hamstring half their potential market by doing this. Because of the ease of porting games for the upcoming generation, the xbone specifications will be the target for virtually all AAA releases, excluding first party developers and paid exclusives. The ps4 will get exactly what PC's get now: some better textures and shader effects. That's it. Doing otherwise would simply be cost prohibitive.

[Goreschach]

Actually, you know what? I'll go one further.

We're in the age where AAA games that sell in the low millions are now considered failures. Given the overwhelmingly negative response to both the xbone and ps4, I'm going to go ahead and predict that for the next half decade or so, the install rate on both next gen consoles is going to be too low to support modern AAA development budgets.

I'll go ahead and be the first to call it: for the next 5 years or so, the majority of AAA games will be cross-generational ports.

[jth]

They released some new information about the resale restrictions, it's looking even worse now.

http://news.xbox.com/2013/06/license

Give your games to friends: Xbox One is designed so game publishers can enable you to give your disc-based games to your friends. There are no fees charged as part of these transfers. There are two requirements: you can only give them to people who have been on your friends list for at least 30 days and each game can only be given once.
(...)
In our role as a game publisher, Microsoft Studios will enable you to give your games to friends or trade in your Xbox One games at participating retailers. Third party publishers may opt in or out of supporting game resale and may set up business terms or transfer fees with retailers.  Microsoft does not receive any compensation as part of this. In addition, third party publishers can enable you to give games to friends. Loaning or renting games won’t be available at launch, but we are exploring the possibilities with our partners.

Emphasis mine.

Unless Sony decides to go with similar restrictions, I don't see a very bright future for XBone. Even without this it was looking to be the first console in a long long time that I'll skip buying, now it's certain. Also, with these plans they will certainly run into some problems with consumer laws in Europe.

*edit* In fact there's already EU legislation in effect saying that resale of digital goods must be allowed. No-one has taken Steam to court about it yet, but once that happens, will be interesting to see how that ends up.

[Hawkbit]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/markrogowsky/2013/06/06/microsofts-shortsighted-approach-might-have-already-killed-xbox-one/

Ouch.  That's a rough headline.

[Paelos]

I love Forbes lately. I really do.

[Cyrrex]

They released some new information about the resale restrictions, it's looking even worse now.

http://news.xbox.com/2013/06/license

Give your games to friends: Xbox One is designed so game publishers can enable you to give your disc-based games to your friends. There are no fees charged as part of these transfers. There are two requirements: you can only give them to people who have been on your friends list for at least 30 days and each game can only be given once.
(...)
In our role as a game publisher, Microsoft Studios will enable you to give your games to friends or trade in your Xbox One games at participating retailers. Third party publishers may opt in or out of supporting game resale and may set up business terms or transfer fees with retailers.  Microsoft does not receive any compensation as part of this. In addition, third party publishers can enable you to give games to friends. Loaning or renting games won’t be available at launch, but we are exploring the possibilities with our partners.

Emphasis mine.

Unless Sony decides to go with similar restrictions, I don't see a very bright future for XBone. Even without this it was looking to be the first console in a long long time that I'll skip buying, now it's certain. Also, with these plans they will certainly run into some problems with consumer laws in Europe.

*edit* In fact there's already EU legislation in effect saying that resale of digital goods must be allowed. No-one has taken Steam to court about it yet, but once that happens, will be interesting to see how that ends up.

Has Sony really said anything yet about how they are going to handle used games this time around?  Really, Microsoft is handing them yet another massive advantage here, probably the biggest one of all.  They would be beyond foolish not to take it.