

Microsoft's Yusuf Mehdi  (Source:
The Xbox 360 will also get another three years of support








Source: Games Industry International

Comments     Threshold


Well DUH
By quiksilvr on 9/6/2013 10:36:59 AM , Rating: 2
They're selling a mid-range PC for $500. Of course they're going to make a profit off of it.

RE: Well DUH
By hpglow on 9/6/2013 11:15:16 AM , Rating: 2
Mid range? Try budget PC. Depending on what kennect costs MS could be pocketing some serious cash per console after they get production cost down.

RE: Well DUH
By Flunk on 9/6/2013 11:23:20 AM , Rating: 2
Mid-range gaming GPU, 8GB Ram and budget processor. Of course that's based on today's market.

RE: Well DUH
By retrospooty on 9/6/2013 12:25:58 PM , Rating: 3
"Mid-range gaming GPU"

The GPU is mid, but the combined RAM (VRAM and system RAM) is DDR3, RAM that would be used in a PC... It is low end for a video card, so yes, its a low end. PS4 has a much better solution using high speed GDDR5 for all ram, system and video.

RE: Well DUH
By Mint on 9/6/2013 1:01:08 PM , Rating: 1
32MB SRAM isn't free or pointless. It will have a big impact on bandwidth because it can offload all framebuffer bandwidth, which has always been the biggest consumer of bandwidth. That's how 360 outperformed PS3 for so many major titles.

The only reason we don't see embedded memory on PC GPUs is that gamers play at high resolution and AMD/NVidia don't want to risk having a bad result in a top game not optimized for a very unique architecture. MS is in a very different position with 99% of its market having no more than 1080p, having tools to work with eDRAM for 360, and having devs optimize for its platform. Note that Sony's most successful consoles used eDRAM also.

The biggest impact will be with GPGPU on workloads that need high BW on large datasets. That's been a complete non factor so far, so only time will tell if that'll mean anything.

Otherwise, XBox One has WAY more effective bandwidth than a similar GPU on the PC, so your assertion is dead wrong.

RE: Well DUH
By OnyxNite on 9/6/2013 1:31:55 PM , Rating: 2
The thing with eDRAM in the past is that it was much faster than other types of RAM. In this case while it is almost twice as fast as the XBone's system RAM it is still slower than the PS4's RAM.

XBone's DDR3 RAM: 68.3 GB/sec
XBone's eSRAM: 102 GB/sec
PS4's GDDR5 RAM: 176 GB/sec

The Xbone's DDR3 and eSRAM bandwidth ADDED TOGETHER doesn't even equal the PS4's.

RE: Well DUH
By inighthawki on 9/6/2013 2:53:33 PM , Rating: 2
But it's really close, and the DDR3 and ESRAM will have much lower latency, which means that you could theoretically end up with better memory performance from far less stalling on the processors.

My favorite part is how everyone is comparing numbers like it means sh*t until someone actually reviews the console to see the real difference.

RE: Well DUH
By Mint on 9/9/2013 10:32:36 AM , Rating: 2
Those are old numbers. When doing doing reading and writing together - e.g. alpha blending, which is the most BW heavy operation a GPU does - it's much faster than 102 GB/s:

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Which article are you referring to, just out of curiosity?

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RE: Well DUH
By troysavary on 9/6/2013 1:15:50 PM , Rating: 2
Have you read anything on the co-processors on the chip? MS did a lot of their own R&D on this chip. It isn't a case of buying a midrange AMD APU, slapping it in a case and calling it a day.

RE: Well DUH
By retrospooty on 9/6/2013 3:03:27 PM , Rating: 2
Yes, I know. In the end the memory bandwidth is still the bottleneck. eSram will help, but not enough for huge high res textures (which is the major weakpoint of PS3 and XB360 today) , so in the end we well see games made with lower res textures than they should have been had MS chosen a decent speed for their memory. Benchmarking wont even tell us because the higher res textures wont be there to turn on and off, they will just not exist. Make sense?

RE: Well DUH
By inighthawki on 9/6/2013 3:06:58 PM , Rating: 2
In which case benchmarking will tell us precisiely the data we want, because if it is true that the RAM in the xbox one is a huge bottleneck, we will see the same framerate at lower quality, hence worse.

RE: Well DUH
By retrospooty on 9/6/2013 3:08:30 PM , Rating: 2
No we wont, the texture of X size wont be used because it wasn't fast enough, so they use textures < X. USing system RAM for VRAM IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH. stop arguing for MS bad choices.

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RE: Well DUH
By inighthawki on 9/6/2013 4:51:19 PM , Rating: 2
I think you are misreading my post. It is not defending Microsoft's decision for slower ram at all. I'm just super confused why you think this wouldn't show in benchmarks. You do not need both consoles to use the same size textures to benchmark. You compare performance relative to the texture quality used. If the PS4 and Xbox one both achieve 60fps but the Xbox one uses half resolution textures, then the benchmark shows that the PS4 has better performance. It's that simple.

Stop letting the bias cloud your reading ability and actually read what I wrote, not what you think I was going to say.

RE: Well DUH
By retrospooty on 9/6/2013 5:42:48 PM , Rating: 2
What I meant there, is that the reduced texture size that will be in use in games is what will be used to benchmark... Yes, that reduced size may score a bit better on the PS4 and that would show us the PS4 is faster, but the issue isnt that the PS4 got 55 fps and the XBO got 52... The issue is that we wont know how it would look and run with the higher textures if they used faster VRAM because developers will dumb down the textures to match the hardware, and PS4 will get the same dumbed down textures. So we all lose.

RE: Well DUH
By retrospooty on 9/6/2013 5:46:13 PM , Rating: 2
Meant to add... The choice by MS to use standard system DDR3 ram for VRAM instead of faster GDDR (something that mid range cards have been using for a decade at least) was purely a cost cutting choice. That $500 console probably saved some miniscule amount per unit like a few dollars and it will hold back image quality or the nest 7+ years.

RE: Well DUH
By inighthawki on 9/6/2013 6:09:40 PM , Rating: 2
It's ridiculously easy to keep high res versions of all the textures and scale them down for a particular release. That's why there are plenty of cross platform (console->PC) games where the PC offers high res textures. If the PS4 can support higher res textures, nothing is holding them back. Game developers don't apply a "least common denominator" strategy for something as simple as texture resolution.

RE: Well DUH
By retrospooty on 9/6/2013 6:44:16 PM , Rating: 2
Sadly, yes they do. You're right they don't have to but that does seem to be the way to do it. Its been mentioned several times by several developers they will just go to the spec of the LCD. no matter how you slice it in 2013 using system RAM for video RAM sucks.

RE: Well DUH



RE: Well DUH
By Mint on 9/9/2013 11:10:07 AM , Rating: 2
No it isn't. Who told you that? This is the second time you repeated this falsehood.

PS3 and XB360 are not limited by memory bandwidth for textures. It's limited by memory SIZE. 512MB is not enough to keep a lot of high res textures in RAM and available for rendering.

Texture pop-in is caused by optical disk or HDD bandwidth.

Texture bandwidth is quite small per clock cycle. Only uncompressed textures (or dynamical drawn reflection maps) will need high bandwidth.

