Ah yes i remember that video, if the virtual texturing is one of the streams there using and the tools they provide the devs are good, it wil be interesting to see what they do with it.

WTH is all this Virtual Texturing talk about..

I see.

That Lionhead video looked pretty cool.

While you keep desperately looking for ways to suggest that the new xbox is going to be some kind of weak, failure of a machine, I'll keep being excited about the prospects for the console. Once a steady stream of games start being shown for both machines, we can get back to focusing on what's most important, the games. Actual games have a way of getting smug individuals, who seem to have a vested interested in consoles appearing weak, to retreat, if ever so slightly.

It's no wonder Halo 4 on a soon to be 8 year old console can still look so much more amazing than most pc games. It even looks more beautiful than Crysis 3. Raw power and tech can only get you so far, as consoles continually showcase generation after generation. Superior art and production value > more generic mashing together of far more advanced tech every fucking time. I can only imagine what Halo 5 will be like on Durango. Oh shit, what have I done!? :P People on beyond3d, some who are actual game devs, believe the new xbox might be geared/designed towards being pretty good at virtual texturing. Corrine Yu from 343 Studios is pretty big on this and has been advocating for it, and there are videos where she does this, and Lionhead studios has also been pushing pretty aggressively for it, and there are videos as well as presentations that they've done on the subject. There's quite a bit of well documented experience on the subject coming from two pretty important first party Microsoft studios.

You know looking at this thread, I'm really surprised at all of the speculative tech he's posted about it. The few people I know in and around the industry and in forensic security(they know way more people in gaming then I do) have told me that Durango's specs are 9-10 months old, and that the only reason we're hearing about it NOW is because Microsoft is no longer concerned about leaks regarding the alpha phase. They wouldn't tell me the actual name, but they did tell me that the hardware has already gone beta and ISN'T EVEN CALLED Durango anymore. That certainly backs up the "Kryptos" rumors, but the point is that Durango is old hat as far devs are concerned.

It shouldn't surprise any of us if we soon learn that the hardware set for the beta is quite different from Durango. Everyone just needs to relax.

lol I think the Durango codename is stuck to it, kinda like metro is stuck to the touch/tablet style apps in Windows 8, despite Microsoft officially trying to call them something else. Quite a few devs are still calling it Durango. Kryptos is a much cooler sounding codname, however, but then that would mean we could no longer call the next Xbox 'Durango Unchained,' if it's accurate. :D

What I'm basically doing is speculating on leaks as we have them, even though it wouldn't surprise me in the least if the information we have is not entirely accurate, or contains some very serious omissions (which I've heard there indeed are.) That said, if this was 100% accurate specs with no changes, I don't see the problem. Specs aren't the prime seller of a console, and they don't automatically ensure us the best, most diverse set of games, either. We could still get absolutely incredible games on the leaked specs for the new xbox as it now stands. There's a reason why I look at anyone making fun of the Wii-U's more detailed specs revealed recently as folks who are just missing the larger point. It doesn't matter how strong the Wii-U is compared to the new Xbox and PS4. It's plenty strong enough to give us high quality gaming experiences.

I never felt specs were determinative of whether or not a console or set of consoles could see must have killer apps developed for them, but this fact seems to completely fly over people's heads sometimes. I'm equally excited about all 3 new consoles because of the games. I see a lot of doom and gloom out there for consoles that are either just getting started (Wii-U) or that aren't even officially revealed yet (New Xbox), and then I realize that we're officially back in console warrior territory of years past lol.

It's possible that the leaks are out dated and they shifted gears, we knew they were old specs and theres no doubt they could respond to leaked sony specs 6 months ago. As long as the hardware was on an upward trajectory it would have no negative impact on devs. The problem is that the leaks are very detailed and very specific in how they arrange the bandwidth to get the maximum performance from the chip. It isn't easy to upgrade that across the board and having invested the R&D in it I don't know how willing they would be to change it to match sony.

What we're arguing about is that the specs as they stand in the leak are pretty poor for a console releasing in practically 2014. You can have the best tech in the world, ways of getting around bottlenecks etc but a 1.2TF GPU wont suddenly be better than a GPU with 50% extra horsepower. You can ignore the 4 CU's being dedicated to other functions because the 720 will either lose what those functions are or will have to sacrifice those 4 CU's aswell to match and then you have a 800Gflop GPU vs a 1.2TF GPU and you're back to the same argument.

Makes no difference to me, as the games will tell the true story, and if the devs themselves are saying that in real games terms there will be a slight power difference then thats fine with me.

See, that's what stuns me. Where is this 50% more power argument even coming from? People have pulled this out of thin air entirely, and it's so bizarre.

1.2tflop vs 1.8tflop does not represent 50% more power... But let's look at it another way.

12 CUs, each containing 4 VUs/SIMD a piece, each containing 16 stream processors, which means each Compute Unit has a total of 64 Stream Processors or, I guess, ALUs.

That would mean the xbox, according to leaked specs, has 768 Stream Processors or ALUs. Now let's go to the PS4.

The PS4 18 CUs, each of which contains 4VUs/SIMD a piece, each also containing 16 stream processors, which means, just like the xbox, each Compute Unit in the PS4 has 64 Stream Processors.

Let's go ahead and give the PS4 all 18 for graphics rendering, that comes out to 1152 Stream Processors compared to 768 in the Xbox. That's not 50% more. But if you add in the fact that 14 seems more intended for Graphics rendering while the other 4 are meant for compute work, that advantage becomes even less. 896 Stream Processors on the PS4 to 768 for the new Xbox. And, unlike the leaked specs for the PS4, the Xbox's leaked specs do not suggest that there is any kind of intent to dedicate any of the Xbox's compute units so strictly to compute tasks. I'm not saying it's meaningless, but I'm also saying clearly that it isn't as big a deal as people are making it out to seem. The PS4, however, is said to have 100% more ROPS than the xbox GPU. 16 for the Xbox, 32 for the PS4, basically 4 render backends compared to 8 on the ps4. That's also not insignificant, nor have I ever said that it is.

There are other things to consider, though, the ESRAM on the Xbox isn't pointless. It's low latency and the documents point out that a big part of that low latency ESRAM is to sustain peak performance of the render backends or ROPs. Another overlooked aspect, I think, is that both GPUs have 512KB of shared read/write L2 cache. However, keep in mind that the Xbox GPU has less Compute Units to share that all with in the first place, so each Compute Unit on the Xbox GPU is actually, on average, getting quite a bit more L2 cache dedicated to them than is the case for the PS4 GPU's compute units. With the PS4, it's basically 18 Compute Units divided by 512KB of shared L2 cache, compared to 12 Compute Units divided by 512KB of shared L2 cache. Each of those 18 compute units in the PS4 is looking at about 28KB per compute unit, whereas the Xbox is looking at 43KB per compute unit. And those 4 move engines, as described, further help offload work, performing specific important tasks at minimal cost. Besides that, they look very useful for saving some much needed bandwidth. In fact, they even provided some numbers in the xbox leak for how much bandwidth can be saved compared to if they had the GPU itself handling those tasks using shaders. You see anywhere from 9.4GB/s saved to 42.GB/s saved in terms of bandwidth. I know the PS4 having access to 176GB/s of memory bandwidth in one pool is more desirable, but the xbox can simultaneously access and perform operations using both the 102GB/s on the ESRAM and the 68GB/s from main ram. It's more complex to work with the Xbox's setup, but not much more so, because plenty of devs already have experience working with the Xbox 360's EDRAM, and they became quite familiar with that. But the ESRAM also gives them all the things they wished the 360's EDRAM did, but didn't.

I know you don't just combine bandwidths, so I won't, because isn't technically accurate, but the end results are more or less the same. But beyond all of this, beyond all of this theoretical stuff, when we get into the real world running of applications, you never know under which circumstances one implementation might be more efficient than the other. I still lean to PS4, as I think the simplicity and power is a safer bet, but what the xbox is doing shouldn't be overlooked. It's a pretty well thought out and balanced design. It might be able to get closer to its more conservative theoretical numbers than the PS4 gpu might. Here is where I see the more visible advantage of the PS4 coming, the work that will be done on those 4 extra compute units. The benefits that the PS4 gets from those are more likely to show up in games than this huge difference in graphics rendering power that some want to think is going to just crush the new xbox. One last very important point, the processors. It has been implied for some time now that the Xbox's CPU might very well be a bit more beefed up than the PS4's CPU, likely making up for some of the compute work that will be done on those extra 4 compute units on the ps4, but doing them instead on a beefier CPU. Hey, we won't know until we see the games, but I think the huge performance gap that some think will be evident won't be quite as pronounced as some are thinking.Completely agree. And if there is a huge gap, we're more likely to see it in the exclusives, rather than the multiplatforms. Now, I don't believe the PS3 had some huge advantage over the 360, but according to a lot of posters, they feel the PS3's exclusive showcased that all the hype Sony did about the PS3 being stronger than the Xbox 360 was true. I didn't see it that way. It's the age old story where exclusives play to each platform's strengths, and that's that.

http://beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1703679&postcou...http://beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1703686&postcou...

I personally wondered this myself, with the Xbox seeming so customized in it's design compared to a relatively more straightforward power design for the PS4. It may not be possible for devs to properly gauge final performance unless they have final hardware.http://beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1703688&postcou...So, basically, it sounds doubtful that early xbox titles, with the system being so custom in design, will be able to take advantage of all the unique design decisions in the new xbox, whereas the PS4, being more straightforward and, thus, easier to gauge actual performance, may see its early titles benefit accordingly. So then this comes down to how quickly Microsoft can get actual final hardware to devs prior to release.

lol trying too hard.

PS3 is powerful than 360 but next gen leaks are true, which I am sure. Evrything gets leaked, The gap is going to be really big. Only person who can tell this are pro gfx programmer. Like this guy

http://www.examiner.com/article/ps4-gddr5-ram-compared-against-xbox-720-ddr3-ram-and-esram

I hope that the specs of both console are better but now PS4 is not good it should be little better than geforce 660ti not 640ti but 720 is pathetic lol.

Agree.

You, my friend, are in for a big surprise. :)

Also, if anybody wants to understand virtual texturing and how it works, a dev that worked on a virtual texturing system in a 360 title explains it in detail.

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1580827&p...

It's a similar texturing technique that was used in Rage by iD software.

So, even the split memory pool of the PS3 presented no major obstacle for virtual texturing, and it's well suited to smaller memory amounts. From same dev post I linked to from above. Bare with me, I love reading this kind of stuff. :)

ok i'm going to let this page hit 20 before i come back in now...

Wall of text is as big as wall of china.

Don't like it, ignore it. Just posting it for anyone who might find it interesting, especially because it's looking more and more relevant to the design of the console.

Calm down man.

Okay, now this is a pretty damn impressive analysis.

It's an article translated from Spanish to English, a pretty detailed analysis of the leaked Durango specs, and what's amazing is that he finds and showcases direct patents from Microsoft that further indicates the deliberate nature of how Durango seems setup. There's just about no doubt now that this seems largely geared towards virtual texturing. Naturally this being from Spanish to English, a few things are lost in translation, but you understand enough of it. The most amazing part of it all, though, is just how significant he makes the design of the Durango GPU sound.

http://www.microsofttranslator.com/bv.aspx?from=es...It's basically saying, it appears, that even though AMD included some very important features inside GCN architecture that john Carmack has been requesting for years, that the implementation even in GCN was not fully complete or realized. He's saying that Durango's GPU design completes what AMD did not with GCN. He makes it sound like a pretty damn serious improvement on the GCN architecture. This part below.This is either very impressive sounding bullshit, or Microsoft and AMD are onto something with this design.

isn't virtual texturing what rage used? ie, the blurry mess no matter what platform you played on, including the PC? granted, they made for varied, seemless texturing of worlds, but the quality of it was shocking. i'm hoping that isn't where things are going tbh.

Well the problem with Rage might have been that it was a pure software implementation without the necessary hardware level support backing it up. I read up on the specifics a few times regarding rage on beyond3d, and I believe it was explained on there, but I don't remember where those exact posts were on the site. Shouldn't be too difficult to find, though. I think it might have even been mentioned in one of the more recent Durango threads. My first thought would be maybe the consoles couldn't handle it, but if it was also an issue on the pc, then it's more than that.

That analysis says that GCN was the first piece of hardware in a while to bring back some hardware support for it, but they seem to also be saying that, even though the capability is there on GCN through hardware, that it still isn't entirely complete or perfect, in that it wasn't entirely in hardware, but had to be aided through a combination of software and shaders, and I think the implication is that Durango's design supposedly improves on or completes the hardware level support for this type of technique in a more superior way.

This AMD slide seems to highlight that Rage's implementation was all software, not backed by the hardware support they put into GCN. The analysis seems to back this, too.

I love how excited Optimus gets around next gen console launch :D Makes for a great Gamersyde, I must admit.

I don't really agree with that statement. Just makes for a LOT...and i mean A LOT! Of reading.