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Since 7577 DaysOh eight core server chip costs two grand lawlz that must be a good point.
Since 7577 DaysSources with first-hand experience of Microsoft’s next generation console have told us that although the next Xbox will be absolutely committed to online functionality, games will still be made available to purchase in physical form. Next Xbox games will be manufactured on 50GB-capacity Blu-ray discs, Microsoft having conceded defeat to Sony following its ill-fated backing of the HD-DVD format. It is believed that games purchased on disc will ship with activation codes, and will have no value beyond the initial user.
Our source has also confirmed that the next Xbox’s recently rumoured specs are entirely accurate. That means an AMD eight-core x64 1.6GHz CPU, a D3D11.x 800MHz graphics solution and 8GB of DDR3 RAM. As of now, the console’s hard drive capacity is said to be undecided, but Microsoft’s extended commitment to online delivery suggests that it will be the largest unit it has put inside a console to date.
Though the architectures of the next-gen Xbox and PlayStation both resemble that of PCs, several development sources have told us that Sony’s solution is preferable when it comes to leveraging power. Studios working with the next-gen Xbox are currently being forced to work with only approved development libraries, while Sony is encouraging coders to get closer to the metal of its box. Furthermore, the operating system overhead of Microsoft’s next console is more oppressive than Sony’s equivalent, giving the PlayStation-badged unit another advantage.
Unlike Nintendo, Microsoft is continuing to invest heavily in motion-control interfaces, and a new, more reliably responsive Kinect will also ship alongside the next Xbox. Sony’s next-generation console camera system is said to have a similar set of features, and is expected to be discussed at the company’s PlayStation event on February 20.
You can read more about how Sony’s next generation console compares in last week’s story, PlayStation 4 revealed.
Some new stuff from the rumor mill.
Since 6284 DaysAlways Online = Check
No used games = Check
Well good luck Microsoft.
Real Madrid C.F. fan.
Since 6649 DaysThats part of the reason I find it so odd that MS would entertain the notion of using mobile chips that are already a generation old to power their brand new console, It's just such a bad fit. Sure you get the smaller power draw and easier heat management but then you drop down into the performance realm of much weaker devices.
Since 7520 Daysha
ha..
this is not trolling this is the laugh of a sad man :(
PSN:ManThatYouFear
GT: ManThatYouFear
Steam: Psn_ManThatYouFear
Real Life: ThatTwat
Since 6463 DaysPrepare To Drop!!
Since 8274 DaysNah... I didn't think so.
Casual game prices, and sales and normal pricing on Steam, will help be the downfall of this next gen, if they keep these over inflated prices for titles, and titles that have been out for a while.
Really they should drop the price on DLC too, after it has been out for 6 months, and make it free after a couple of years... I mean c'mon really?
Prime example:
http://www.joystiq.com/2013/02/05/pc-witcher-games...
To celebrate the announcement of The Witcher 3: Witch Harder, CD Projekt Red has instituted a 50% off sale on previous Witchers on GOG and Steam. On GOG, The Witcher: Director's Cut is $5, and The Witcher 2: Enhanced Edition is $15 (both with extras) through Friday at 10:59am GMT.
On Steam, The Witcher is $5, and The Witcher 2 is $10, as is its Prima Guide. In addition, CDP has permanently dropped the MSRP of the Xbox version of The Witcher 2 to $29.99/€29.99/£19.99. Perhaps the company wants you to play these before the new one comes out.
See any stupid inconsistency here?
Since 7577 Days2) These specs are a lot more detailed/refined than the leaks from last year.
Those examples are fire sale prices on old games. New releases are still full price. Could we see Steam-like sales if next gen consoles are gaming prisons? Sure. Will they really be much better than the current cost of second hand games? Doubtful. It's not hard to find a game as old as The Witcher for the 360 for such a price second hand.
Since 7443 Days
Since 6981 Days
Since 7577 Days
Since 7469 DaysAnd, Grift, contrary to what you think I'm saying, I still firmly believe that these two consoles will be monsters. To not consider them as such in comparison to where we came from, I think, is to not properly appreciate just how much more capable and efficient these new machines will be. They will absolutely destroy by a pretty healthy margin what we considered to be the most amazing looking games this gen, and will stun quite a few people in the process of doing so.
I haven't moved in the slightest from what I've been saying from the start. Dare I say, it is actually you who has come to better understand what I've been saying from the very start, and thus you now think it's more "realistic." What I've been saying from the start has always been "realistic," if pretty optimistic, because I was always talking about something that was guaranteed to happen, as devs get a handle on developing for both machines, just as they have with past machines. I've been singing the praises of what I think these consoles will be capable of, because it's pretty obvious what hardware with this kind of power will be capable of with serious console level optimizations. I don't doubt the power of these consoles for a single second. If you believed that doubts were creeping in, then you are grossly mistaking my comparing of what I believe will be two incredibly powerful consoles to one another. Consoles are consoles, pcs are pcs. You should only ever look to the pc to draw the most base conclusions of the chips that are going in based on design similarity, but you can hardly ever know just how good it will be until you see the games, but it's a pretty safe bet that the results will be far better than what people, especially if they are underestimating these machines, are thinking. In fact, I'm sure even people who are incredibly optimistic about the two consoles, such as myself, will still be floored by what devs manage to achieve.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, these consoles with the hardware they are both packing, will produce visual results that seem well in excess of the raw numbers that we are looking at on paper. If the leaks are to be believed, and everything truly remains as is, both consoles will punch far above their weight in terms of visual performance, and will compare pretty favorably to, you guessed it, high end gaming pcs. And one way in which my point will be proven will be when people start to see the ever increasing pc requirements they'll need just to have a shot at handling ports from Durango and the ps4. PCs have dramatically more raw horsepower, but they lack the kind of complete optimization potential that is available to consoles. So, in many ways, people think they know what GCN or AMD 7000 series class GPUs can achieve, but they really have no idea, just as it took the PS3 to fully showcase what a 7800GTX could do, or the 360 to showcase what a R600 could truly do.
Halo Reach using 360 tesselation unit extensively.
Hironobu Sakaguchi is coming back to reclaim the throne :)
Seeing it in motion on your HDTV, will blow your mind!!
Don't ask any questions just shut up and buy Halo : Ghosts of the Onyx one of th
Since 6981 Days
Since 7469 Dayshttp://www.extremetech.com/gaming/147577-xbox-720-...
Pretty detailed write-up here.
Some interesting parts, I think.
Here’s why that’s significant. A CPU/GPU cache has two goals: First, it needs to provide the data the CPU is looking for as quickly as possible. Second, it needs to be accurate. Increasing the set associativity of a cache increases the chance that the processor will find the data it is looking for — but it also increases search time.
Having that much system bandwidth to play with would mean Durango wouldn’t be as reliant on a small, high-speed data cache to hit its performance targets, and that likely creates additional flexibility for programmers to play with. The VGLeaks website implies that the benefits of the 32MB ESRAM cache are latency-related rather than bandwidth, and that makes sense given the figures we’ve seen.
Halo Reach using 360 tesselation unit extensively.
Hironobu Sakaguchi is coming back to reclaim the throne :)
Seeing it in motion on your HDTV, will blow your mind!!
Don't ask any questions just shut up and buy Halo : Ghosts of the Onyx one of th
Since 6649 DaysAs I said before the 560TI released in 2011 provides 1.2TF of power, it does the job but it certainly isnt something to get excited about in 2013 nevermind 2014 and beyond.
The 680 GTX is 3TF !! even if the PC hardware manufacturers were completely inept and only used 50% of that power it would still outstrip what the 720 could do and thats an old GPU that came out a year ago nevermind what comes out this year or next year. Being in any way excited for a 1.2TF part just confounds me.
Since 7469 DaysYou can't even think about trying to run certain games that have been ported from 360 or ps3 on a 7800GTX on a pc today and somehow have the experience be as pleasant as it is on the PS3. It's not really a matter of the GPU manufacturers being inept handicapping their video cards. It's the fact that a full pc operating system has so many demands to meet, and the directx api is pretty restrictive in a number of ways that it really does masked significantly what a lot of gpus can truly achieve. I don't think being a closed box only nets you an extra 10-20%, because there are specific things that console gpus can literally do over 10x to 100x better when not held back by having to do their job with a restrictive pc directx api along with a full blown computer operating system. When I say over 10x, I'm not saying it's 10 times more powerful overall, but I've read up on this quite a bit and the limitations placed on the hardware in our computers would stun most. You in some cases don't get what you paid for, because so much of it is hidden away behind all sorts of restrictions.
Example.
The direct link to the article is screwed, but you can find all of what he said online. Look at these parts. I can't say how much gain you get, but it's clear from some of the stuff this guy says, it's clearly not minor.
Assuming a 7970M in the PS4, AMD has already released the hardware ISA docs to the public, so it is relatively easy to know what developers might have access to do on a PS4. Lets start with the basics known from PC. AMD's existing profiling tools support true async timer queries (where the timer results are written to a buffer on the GPU, then async read on the CPU). This enables the consistent profiling game developers require when optimizing code. AMD also provides tools for developers to view the output GPU assembly for compiled shaders, another must for console development. Now lets dive into what isn't provided on PC but what can be found in AMD's GCN ISA docs,
Dual Asynchronous Compute Engines (ACE) :: Specifically "parallel operation with graphics and fast switching between task submissions" and "support of OCL 1.2 device partitioning". Sounds like at a minimum a developer can statically partition the device such that graphics can compute can run in parallel. For a PC, static partition would be horrible because of the different GPU configurations to support, but for a dedicated console, this is all you need. This opens up a much easier way to hide small compute jobs in a sea of GPU filling graphics work like post processing or shading. The way I do this on PC now is to abuse vertex shaders for full screen passes (the first triangle is full screen, and the rest are degenerates, use an uber-shader for the vertex shading looking at gl_VertexID and branching into "compute" work, being careful to space out the jobs by the SIMD width to avoid stalling the first triangle, or loading up one SIMD unit on the machine, ... like I said, complicated). In any case, this Dual ACE system likely makes it practical to port over a large amount of the Killzone SPU jobs to the GPU even if they don't completely fill the GPU (which would be a problem without complex uber-kernels on something like CUDA on the PC).
Dual High Performance DMA Engines :: Developers would get access to do async CPU->GPU or GPU->CPU memory transfers without stalling the graphics pipeline, and specifically ability to control semaphores in the push buffer(s) to insure no stalls and low latency scheduling. This is something the PC APIs get horribly wrong, as all memory copies are implicit without really giving control to the developer. This translates to much better resource streaming on a console.
Support for upto 6 Audio Streams :: HDMI supports audio, so the GPU actually outputs audio, but no PC driver gives you access. The GPU shader is in fact the ideal tool for audio processing, but on the PC you need to deal with the GPU->CPU latency wall (which can be worked around with pinned memory), but to add insult to injury the PC driver simply just copies that data back to the GPU for output adding more latency. In theory on something like a PS4 one could just mix audio on the GPU directly into the buffer being sent out on HDMI.
Global Data Store :: AMD has no way of exposing this in DX, and in OpenGL they only expose this in the ultra-limited form of counters which can only increment or decrement by one. The chip has 64KB of this memory, effectively with the same access as shared memory (atomics and everything) and lower latency than global atomics. This GDS unit can be used for all sorts of things, like workgroup to workgroup communication, global locks, or like doing an append or consume to an array of arrays where each thread can choose a different array, etc. To the metal access to GDS removes the overhead associated with managing huge data sets on the GPU. It is much easier to build GPU based hierarchical occlusion culling and scene management with access to these kind of low level features.
Re-used GPU State :: On a console with low level hardware access (like the PS3) one can pre-build and re-use command buffer chunks. On a modern GPU, one could even write or modify pre-built command buffer chunks from a shader. This removes the cost associated with drawing, pushing up the number of unique objects which can be drawn with different materials.
FP_DENORM Control Bit :: On the console one can turn off both DX's and GL's forced flush-to-denorm mode for 32-bit floating point in graphics. This enables easier ways to optimize shaders because integer limited shaders can use floating point pipes using denormals.
128-bit to 256-bit Resource Descriptors :: With GCN all that is needed to define a buffer's GPU state is to set 4 scalar registers to a resource descriptor, similar with texture (up to 8 scalar registers, plus another 4 for sampler). The scalar ALU on GCN supports block fetch of up to 16 scalars with a single instruction from either memory or from a buffer. It looks to be trivially easy on GCN to do bind-less buffers or textures for shader load/stores. Note this scalar unit has it's own data cache also. Changing textures or surfaces from inside the pixel shader looks to be easily possible. Note shaders still index resources using an instruction immediate, but the descriptor referenced by this immediate can be changed. This could help remove the traditional draw call based material limit.
S_SLEEP, S_SETPRIO, and GDS :: These provide all the tools necessary to do lock and lock-free retry loops on the GPU efficiently. DX11 specifically does not allow locks due to fear that some developer might TDR the system. With low level access, the S_SLEEP enables placing wavefront to sleep without busy spinning on the ALUs, and the S_SETPRIO enables reducing priority when checking for unlock between S_SLEEPs.
S_SENDMSG :: This enables a shader to force a CPU interrupt. In theory this can be used to signal to a real-time OS completion of some GPU operation to start up some CPU based tasks without needed the CPU to poll for completion. The other option would be maybe a interrupt signaled from a push buffer, but this wouldn't be able to signal from some intermediate point during a shader's execution. This on PS4 might enable tighter GPU and CPU task dependencies in a frame (or maybe even in a shader), compared to the latency wall which exists on non-real-time OS like Windows which usually forces CPU and GPU task dependencies to be a few frames apart.
Full Cache Flush Control :: DX has only implicit driver controlled cache flushes, it needs to be conservative, track all dependencies (high overhead), then assume conflict and always flush caches. On a console, the developer can easily skip cache flushes when they are not needed, leading to more parallel jobs and higher performance (overlap execution of things which on DX would be separated by a wait for machine to go idle).
GPU Assembly :: Maybe? I don't know if GCN has some hidden very complex rules for code generation and compiler scheduling. The ISA docs seem trivial to manage (manual insertion of barriers for texture fetch, etc). If Sony opens up GPU assembly, unlike the PS3, developers might easily crank out 30% extra from hand tuning shaders. The alternative is iterating on Cg, which is possible with real-time profiling tools. My experience on PC is micro-optimization of shaders yields some massive wins. For those like myself who love assembly of any arch, a fixed hardware spec is a dream.
...
I could continue here, but I'm not, by now you get the picture, launch titles will likely be DX11 ports, so perhaps not much better than what could be done on PC. However if Sony provides the real-time OS with libGCM v2 for GCN, one or two years out, 1st party devs and Sony's internal teams like the ICE team, will have had long enough to build up tech to really leverage the platform.
I'm excited for what this platform will provide for PS4-only 1st party titles and developers who still have the balls to do a non-portable game this next round.
Halo Reach using 360 tesselation unit extensively.
Hironobu Sakaguchi is coming back to reclaim the throne :)
Seeing it in motion on your HDTV, will blow your mind!!
Don't ask any questions just shut up and buy Halo : Ghosts of the Onyx one of th
Since 7577 Days
Since 7469 DaysPCs always lead in specific categories, but I've believed for years that consoles, generation after generation, have consistently done quite a few things better than pcs. What they lack in raw power, they more than make up for in a variety of areas that I don't think the pc matches all that well, but that's a different story altogether. :)
Halo Reach using 360 tesselation unit extensively.
Hironobu Sakaguchi is coming back to reclaim the throne :)
Seeing it in motion on your HDTV, will blow your mind!!
Don't ask any questions just shut up and buy Halo : Ghosts of the Onyx one of th
Since 6981 Days
Since 7469 DaysHalo Reach using 360 tesselation unit extensively.
Hironobu Sakaguchi is coming back to reclaim the throne :)
Seeing it in motion on your HDTV, will blow your mind!!
Don't ask any questions just shut up and buy Halo : Ghosts of the Onyx one of th
Since 7577 DaysSony's OpenGL (and superior GPU) magic won't apply to the Xbox at any rate.
Since 7469 DaysIt sounds like Durango might be built around virtual texturing, at least that's what folks seem to think over at b3d. More walls of text incoming!
Lionhead already has plenty of experience working with virtual textures, presentation here.
http://miciwan.com/GDC2011/GDC2011_Mega_Meshes.pdf
http://beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1703415&postcou...
And it doesn't have to be unique texturing - after all, Carmack has been asking for virtualization for more than a decade, when Megatexture could not even been a theory (content creation tools have gone through small revolutions in that time, allowing for several orders of magnitudes of increase in detail).
Also consider that Lionhead has had a complete engine using VT for at least 1.5-2 years now, with plenty of experience but no released product. As far as I know they're owned by Microsoft, so it could have been the testbed application to study hw usage patterns and bottlenecks for VT.
I also don't like the magic secret sauce talk, but this could make up for a lot of the supposed performance deficiencies. Maybe even get us some nice anisotropic filtering on ground textures, which has been quite lacking in all X360 titles
But now the approaches are more and more similar, we've seen a lot of convergence and quite a lot of general, must-have features have been crystallized. It is quite unlikely to see significant changes in the structure of the rendering pipeline now, at least until realtime raytracing becomes truly affordable.
So it makes sense to design a more special purpose architecture which is tuned for these convergent engines.
It might limit experimentation with radically new approaches like a fully voxelized engine - but such new approaches would also require a complete overhaul of the content creation pipeline, which is the most expensive aspect of game development and thus the hardest to change. By the time all major studios could be convinced to do that, the current generation would possibly be close to its end anyway.
I wonder what Tim Sweeney thinks about this, though.
http://beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1703373&postcou...
Perhaps one of the move engines could be used to DMA said polys into main ram without impacting on GPU performance.
Tiling makes an awful lot of sense, especially after looking at the amount of Wii U GPU taken up with edram.
function is offline
Halo Reach using 360 tesselation unit extensively.
Hironobu Sakaguchi is coming back to reclaim the throne :)
Seeing it in motion on your HDTV, will blow your mind!!
Don't ask any questions just shut up and buy Halo : Ghosts of the Onyx one of th
Since 6463 DaysPrepare To Drop!!
Since 7469 DaysEverybody thinks that MS did all of this in a reactionary manner to a lack of bandwidth, but I'm starting to think that couldn't be any further from the truth. No way in hell all of this is some reactionary response to a lack of bandwidth. Seems way too specific for that. They had a plan in mind, they executed on it, and the end result is what we are now looking at, give or take whatever inaccuracies there may be, since this info is said to be as old as Feb 2012.
Sony built with the PS4 the kind of system you would almost expect Microsoft to build. Very straightforward and to the point, with a clear focus towards getting it all done with power and speed. What special purpose hardware that seems to have been done is largely on some extra compute units for compute related work, but it's as straightforward a console as sony has ever designed. Whatever development needs arise, they feel they have the power and speed to deal with things as they come, and they may indeed be correct.
Microsoft, on the other hand, didn't go about building Durango in any kind of straightforward manner. They built it with all kinds of special purpose acceleration hardware, with the goal of making it ideal for specific development techniques or goals that they have in mind. If there's something that got going or caught on during this gen, but maybe wasn't as feasible on the 360, and is something they see as a good way to go forward even in this gen, then they made sure the next xbox was well geared towards those things. I guess, Tiled rendering, virtual texturing, and then they probably worked their way outwards from that goal. They seemed to sacrifice raw power in exchange for what they wanted, but can probably say they made some not so insignificant efficiency gains as well.
2 fantastic posts here worth the read.
http://beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1703520&postcou...
This one especially, as he makes sure to point out that this isn't some magic bullet, but he also accounts for any who may be thinking to downplay it as insignificant also. He more or less believes devs will want to take advantage of this.
http://beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1703522&postcou...
Halo Reach using 360 tesselation unit extensively.
Hironobu Sakaguchi is coming back to reclaim the throne :)
Seeing it in motion on your HDTV, will blow your mind!!
Don't ask any questions just shut up and buy Halo : Ghosts of the Onyx one of th
Since 7469 Dayshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M04SMNkTx9E&feature...
Halo Reach using 360 tesselation unit extensively.
Hironobu Sakaguchi is coming back to reclaim the throne :)
Seeing it in motion on your HDTV, will blow your mind!!
Don't ask any questions just shut up and buy Halo : Ghosts of the Onyx one of th