Which kind of proves my point also, closed box development has always been more efficient than its PC equlivent, the Xbox was basically a PC in a box also.

Yup Sony will no doubt go with off the shelf this time with some fine tuning, Cell cost them way too much and the blu-ray has almost destroyed them.

It still doesn't change the fact that Sony are 133 billion in debt and can't afford to compete with MS, I'm not even sure they can compete with Nintendo.

Just as Nintendo has chosen to go with a lower budget system, there is nothing stopping Sony doing similar (it may not even be a choice at this stage) if they feel they can make a profit from doing it, problem is with Sony they always try to make top of the range products and in this climit nobody can afford them, which is the very reason why they have lost 2 billion in the last quarter.

The main reason Wii was so underpowered was because N64 and Gamecube almost killed them, they had no choice but to go with a low budget system, luckily they were clever in their marketing and innovation.

And yet their playstation brand is their strongest. If any area will get the financial support, it'll be playstation, no matter how much debt they are in as a whole. It's the one area where they have a chance of making profit, and the one area they will continue to push. Hell, the vita is proof of that, if anything that is a bigger financial risk then a home console due to the immediate competition with ios and android phones and tablets. But the vita shows they are not only still willing to back powerful hardware, they're willing to do it at a decent cost and with simpler development tools. They have clearly learned a lot from the PS3 in that regard, i have no doubt that will continue to the PS4.

PS4 rumors hardly even exist. It will not be released before 2014. At worst it will priced same as 720 and have same performance, hardware wise. Although looking at rumors of Wii U and 720 I fear next gen will not really be a huge jump. Exclusives games will make difference

Even there new Sony Chief came out and said that Sony are in perilous times, it will be very interesting to see how 2012/13 pans out.

I disagree. The general audience is clueless about processing power, what to expect in a given timeframe etc. People were badmouthing 360 since E3 2005 until the launch of the competition (PS3/Wii) because they expected PS3 to do this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wig-XT8Rbiw
Explaining to them that 360 and PS3 would be in the same ballpark and 360 was a huge jump over PS2/Xbox was futile - they knew better, Cell was going to be 3 times more powerful, RSX would do blast processing and sparx etc. Then the Wii came out and it hugely outsold both PS3 and 360, because people cared more about waggle than HD and it was at the price they were willing to shell out.

I think the moral of the story is simple - provide features that are appealing to people and deliver a somewhat new experince at affordable price and the audience will gobble it up. I'm not saying next-gen consoles shouldn't have higher performance - they should, as better specs can deliver new experiences (given enough time), but it's not the most important part of a video game system.

i am glad you linked the motor storm video :D i get tired as fuck at argument started from the K2 one..

and yes sza is right there are clueless.. if they was clued up they would not be swapping new editions of ipads every month.

For the general audience you're probably right.. But I'm not the general audience, and I think most people visiting websites like this are not.. Much higher performance and thus much better looking and tech advanced games is the selling point for me.. So if the next-gen isn't at least on par with the highend PC hardware when it comes out I'm less interested in buying it.. I got the Xbox because it was the 1st console to offer proper online gaming, and I bought the Xbox 360 because it offered much higher performance.. Infact seeying PGR3 on the 360 back in 2005 sold it to me..

if it does not visually look better people WONT buy it... unless your a wii.

The Kinect is way more better than the Wii at doing things the Wii wished it could do back when it was made.

I duno Kinect is too much IMO, there is something about it I don't like, not that I like motion controls at all.

Agree, its so much easier and fun to get into.

If they just buld the Kinect in to every box, reduce the input lag and make the detection a little less flimsy i could see some cool stuff done with it, expecially if combined with a regular pad, but right now it sucks pretty bad. I only tried Kinect Adventures though, but it was super lame.

does not make it any more appealing.

Yes it dose... but to the market MS targeted with Kinect, hence the reason its flying off the shelves.

Now with Krazy Kaz in-charge of Sony, PS4 is in very safe hands IMO. I just hope both Xbox 720 and PS4 and loaded with awesome tech; 8 gb's of ram, nice modern CPU and a beefy modern gpu capable of DX11/with 2 gbs of v-ram. Then they should be set for the next 6 or 7 years. Packing such tech would ward off any looming threats from Steambox, Apple or the whole stream the game bull shit (forgot what the name)

And with Phil in charge of MS Europe, I am betting he will secure some awesome exclusives for 720 from the European/UK front. Interesting times ahead

Here are the specs for Xenon (Xbox 2)(Xbox 360) that were leaked back in 2004

I don't have a problem with the Xbox 720 specs as long as they can pull off the new Unreal Engine Samaritan video capabilities at 1080p. This 4K stuff is a load of crap. 4K TVs at a consumer priced level won't be around for another 10 years, as well as 3D without glasses... just too pricey. They Need to get the next gen Unreal Engine running on the hardware at 1080p, and that will move systems. If the new Playstation4 and Xbox 720, can't achieve Samaritan level graphics, they might as well not even release new consoles. I just worry that the currently spec'd graphics cards can't even come close to pulling off Samaritan, and the next version of Nvidia's chipset/card is supposed to do it on one single card solution... where last year it took 3 cards running Fermi tech. These currently spec'd cards are 18 month old tech aren't they?



They were pretty spot on, back then.

...Basic Hardware Specifications
Xenon is powered by a 3.5+ GHz IBM PowerPC processor and a 500+ MHz ATI graphics processor. Xenon has 256+ MB of unified memory. Xenon runs a custom operating system based on Microsoft® Windows NT®, similar to the Xbox operating system. The graphics interface is a superset of Microsoft® Direct3D® version 9.0.

CPU
The Xenon CPU is a custom processor based on PowerPC technology. The CPU includes three independent processors (cores) on a single die. Each core runs at 3.5+ GHz. The Xenon CPU can issue two instructions per clock cycle per core. At peak performance, Xenon can issue 21 billion instructions per second.
The Xenon CPU was designed by IBM in close consultation with the Xbox team, leading to a number of revolutionary additions, including a dot product instruction for extremely fast vector math and custom security features built directly into the silicon to prevent piracy and hacking.
Each core has two symmetric hardware threads (SMT), for a total of six hardware threads available to games. Not only does the Xenon CPU include the standard set of PowerPC integer and floating-point registers (one set per hardware thread), the Xenon CPU also includes 128 vector (VMX) registers per hardware thread. This astounding number of registers can drastically improve the speed of common mathematical operations.
Each of the three cores includes a 32-KB L1 instruction cache and a 32-KB L1 data cache. The three cores share a 1-MB L2 cache. The L2 cache can be locked down in segments to improve performance. The L2 cache also has the very unusual feature of being directly readable from the GPU, which allows the GPU to consume geometry and texture data from L2 and main memory simultaneously.
Xenon CPU instructions are exposed to games through compiler intrinsics, allowing developers to access the power of the chip using C language notation.

GPU
The Xenon GPU is a custom 500+ MHz graphics processor from ATI. The shader core has 48 Arithmetic Logic Units (ALUs) that can execute 64 simultaneous threads on groups of 64 vertices or pixels. ALUs are automatically and dynamically assigned to either pixel or vertex processing depending on load. The ALUs can each perform one vector and one scalar operation per clock cycle, for a total of 96 shader operations per clock cycle. Texture loads can be done in parallel to ALU operations. At peak performance, the GPU can issue 48 billion shader operations per second.
The GPU has a peak pixel fill rate of 4+ gigapixels/sec (16 gigasamples/sec with 4× antialiasing). The peak vertex rate is 500+ million vertices/sec. The peak triangle rate is 500+ million triangles/sec. The interesting point about all of these values is that they?re not just theoretical—they are attainable with nontrivial shaders.
Xenon is designed for high-definition output. Included directly on the GPU die is 10+ MB of fast embedded dynamic RAM (EDRAM). A 720p frame buffer fits very nicely here. Larger frame buffers are also possible because of hardware-accelerated partitioning and predicated rendering that has little cost other than additional vertex processing. Along with the extremely fast EDRAM, the GPU also includes hardware instructions for alpha blending, z-test, and antialiasing.
The Xenon graphics architecture is a unique design that implements a superset of Direct3D version 9.0. It includes a number of important extensions, including additional compressed texture formats and a flexible tessellation engine. Xenon not only supports high-level shading language (HLSL) model 3.0 for vertex and pixel shaders but also includes advanced shader features well beyond model 3.0. For instance, shaders use 32-bit IEEE floating-point math throughout. Vertex shaders can fetch from textures, and pixel shaders can fetch from vertex streams. Xenon shaders also have the unique ability to directly access main memory, allowing techniques that have never before been possible.
As with Xbox, Xenon will support precompiled push buffers (“command buffers” in Xenon terminology), but to a much greater extent than the Xbox console does. The Xbox team is exposing and documenting the command buffer format so that games are able to harness the GPU much more effectively.
In addition to an extremely powerful GPU, Xenon also includes a very high-quality resize filter. This filter allows consumers to choose whatever output mode they desire. Xenon automatically scales the game?s output buffer to the consumer-chosen resolution.

Memory and Bandwidth
Xenon has 256+ MB of unified memory, equally accessible to both the GPU and CPU. The main memory controller resides on the GPU (the same as in the Xbox architecture). It has 22.4+ GB/sec aggregate bandwidth to RAM, distributed between reads and writes. Aggregate means that the bandwidth may be used for all reading or all writing or any combination of the two. Translated into game performance, the GPU can consume a 512×512×32-bpp texture in only 47 microseconds.
The front side bus (FSB) bandwidth peak is 10.8 GB/sec for reads and 10.8 GB/sec for writes, over 20 times faster than for Xbox. Note that the 22.4+ GB/sec main memory bandwidth is shared between the CPU and GPU. If, for example, the CPU is using 2 GB/sec for reading and 1 GB/sec for writing on the FSB, the GPU has 19.4+ GB/sec available for accessing RAM.
Eight pixels (where each pixel is color plus z = 8 bytes) can be sent to the EDRAM every GPU clock cycle, for an EDRAM write bandwidth of 32 GB/sec. Each of these pixels can be expanded through multisampling to 4 samples, for up to 32 multisampled pixel samples per clock cycle. With alpha blending, z-test, and z-write enabled, this is equivalent to having 256 GB/sec of effective bandwidth! The important thing is that frame buffer bandwidth will never slow down the Xenon GPU.

Audio
The Xenon CPU is a superb processor for audio, particularly with its massive mathematical horsepower and vector register set. The Xenon CPU can process and encode hundreds of audio channels with sophisticated per-voice and global effects, all while using a fraction of the power of a single CPU core.
The Xenon system south bridge also contains a key hardware component for audio—XMA decompression. XMA is the native Xenon compressed audio format, based on the WMA Pro architecture. XMA provides sound quality higher than ADPCM at even better compression ratios, typically 6:1–12:1. The south bridge contains a full silicon implementation of the XMA decompression algorithm, including support for multichannel XMA sources. XMA is processed by the south bridge into standard PCM format in RAM. All other sound processing (sample rate conversion, filtering, effects, mixing, and multispeaker encoding) happens on the Xenon CPU.
The lowest-level Xenon audio software layer is XAudio, a new API designed for optimal digital signal processing. The Xbox Audio Creation Tool (XACT) API from Xbox is also supported, along with new features such as conditional events, improved parameter control, and a more flexible 3D audio model.

Input/Output
As with Xbox, Xenon is designed to be a multiplayer console. It has built-in networking support including an Ethernet 10/100-BaseT port. It supports up to four controllers. From an audio/video standpoint, Xenon will support all the same formats as Xbox, including multiple high-definition formats up through 1080i, plus VGA output.
In order to provide greater flexibility and support a wider variety of attached devices, the Xenon console includes standard USB 2.0 ports. This feature allows the console to potentially host storage devices, cameras, microphones, and other devices.

Storage
The Xenon console is designed around a larger world view of storage than Xbox was. Games will have access to a variety of storage devices, including connected devices (memory units, USB storage) and remote devices (networked PCs, Xbox Live™). At the time of this writing, the decision to include a built-in hard disk in every Xenon console has not been made. If a hard disk is not included in every console, it will certainly be available as an integrated add-on component.
Xenon supports up to two attached memory units (MUs). MUs are connected directly to the console, not to controllers as on Xbox. The initial size of the MUs is 64 MB, although larger MUs may be available in the future. MU throughput is expected to be around 8 MB/sec for reads and 1 MB/sec for writes.
The Xenon game disc drive is a 12× DVD, with an expected outer edge throughput of 16+ MB/sec. Latency is expected to be in the neighborhood of 100 ms. The media format will be similar to Xbox, with approximately 6 GB of usable space on the disk. As on Xbox, media will be stored on a single side in two 3 GB layers.

Industrial Design
The Xenon industrial design process is well under way, but the final look of the box has not been determined. The Xenon console will be smaller than the Xbox console.
The standard Xenon controller will have a look and feel similar to the Xbox controller. The primary changes are the removal of the Black and White buttons and the addition of shoulder buttons. The triggers, thumbsticks, D-pad, and primary buttons are essentially unchanged. The controller will support vibration.


- RUMOR: A rumored specs sheet of Xbox 2 is revealed from the development lead of the Xbox Advanced Technology Group:

* CPU - 3.5+ GHz PowerPC Processor, with 3 independent core processors on a single chip, each runs at 3.5+ GHz
* GPU - 500+ MHz ATI Graphics Processor, with 48 arithmetic logic unit (ALUs), Direct3D 9.0, Pixel Shading 3.0, Vertex Shaders
* RAM - 256+ MB of RAM, at 22.4+ GB/sec shared bandwidth for both CPU and GPU
* Audio - processed by CPU
* Media - 12X DVD Drive
* Controller - same as Xbox, ........



This article states that a console to pull this off would have to be 10x more powerful than the xbox 360... I've read specs, saying that the Xbox 720 is only going to be 6x faster than the 360...

http://www.shacknews.com/article/72427/epic-founde...

anm8, there are a lot of new advancements in tech and how the various cores would work together with one another, and how the graphics unit would work with those cores that could easily end up producing a system capable of results that are in excess of 10x more powerful than the xbox 360 right now.

If the specs that are being talked about and speculated on are legit, then the efficiencies gained from the various improvements contained within, will absolutely produce something 10x stronger than the current Xbox 360. And if the next Xbox is somehow packing a SSD drive of a certain level of a performance, then it would probably be an understatement to say the next Xbox will be 10x stronger than the current 360. Some actually believe that the simple inclusion of a SSD would be one of the most under the radar boosts to next gen gaming. Everyone is so focused on what the CPU will be like and what the GPU will be like, but an SSD could go a very, very long way. I mean, the potential for textures and a host of other things just boggle the mind, really.

I read some rumors that Xbox 3 is going to have 16 core CPU and dual GPU solution. Next day I read it's not going to be much more powerful than 360 :P I'll wait for official specs.

Oh yeah Microsoft SSD's would kill wallets. These current ones are fucking robbery too.

i heard the next xbox is going to be gay.

cool?

Dont tell the mass effect fanboys, they'll complain.

Oh no, I don't mean like that, I mean just to include a bit of SSD space on the every console, so games can utilize and take advantage of it, and then continue to sell the same kind of add-on hard drives that they do now. They don't need for the SSD space to be enough to run an operating system like Windows 7 or even Windows 8. Just provide enough space on the internal SSD so that games can meaningfully take advantage of it. 12-18GB of SSD space would mean a hell of a lot for next generation titles.

LOL, I knew I wasn't hearing things, so that one dude on the Normandy in Mass Effect did say he has a boyfriend/husband, or something like that. I thought maybe it was a mistake or something. I have not played far enough into it yet, but I've seen that character.