Yeah if ms does bundle kinect then this lower price people are talking about could be out the window.
Can MS change their ram to GDDR5 or is it too late at this point?
- Thread starter Globox_82
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Yeah if ms does bundle kinect then this lower price people are talking about could be out the window.
Tough to say which will be lead. They could target 720 and just have the PS4 version run better or have extra features like better AA or higher res textures (possibly from PC version or something), or they could target PS4 and remove stuff until it works on 720. I'd think the first would be easier.
Keep in mind that Sony is probably bundling their camera with the PS4 as well.
Guerrillas in the Mist
Member
I could see them trying to up the amount of RAM in the system, but big changes like that are probably not possible at this stage if it's coming out this year.
Upping it to 16 GB is completely possible. Changing to GDDR5 will require them to be launching after Sony.
ChosenPredator
Banned
this is something that has been bugging me Sony has had 4gb GDDR5 then there was news it upgraded by 4 but now people are saying microsoft can't do this too...are people just making this stuff up on the fly hoping MS won't do this...my brain hurts.
-Pyromaniac-
Member
I wouldn't say that's for sure for Sony, and Kinect probably still costs more.
Alebrije
Member
Yea Microsoft can change some spects but I do not see they doing radical ones, in fact they can keep Durango as it is , We need to remember that more power does not always means better games.
As a SONY supporter I know 8 gb GDDR5 wont give to Sony a Gears of War or Halo franchise by defaul.
I am sure MS will deliver an excellent console as they did with the XBOX 360.
As a SONY supporter I know 8 gb GDDR5 wont give to Sony a Gears of War or Halo franchise by defaul.
I am sure MS will deliver an excellent console as they did with the XBOX 360.
Dance Inferno
Unconfirmed Member
But it will significantly affect purchasing decisions of multiplats. Hell, the main reason I bought a 360 was because I wanted the better version of multiplats, as I'm not even that big a fan of MS's IPs. If PS4 has the better multiplats next gen then I may not even bother with Durango.
LukasTaves
Member
I doubt Ms would change to gddr5. The whole point of the memory design they chose was to increase performance of the system memory without resorting to expansive and power hungry buses...
They will be in a bad place however if the OS takes all the rumored space, as with current rumors Ps4 has more memory available to games, so i'd say, that they could go to 12GB or so of ram, have a huge amount of that reserved and still match the memory available to games Ps4 is going to have.
But i do think the better question is: Does Ms needs to change to GDDR5? It's not like it wasn't a choice for them in any way. It's difficult to say what was their goals for the console were. But whatever it was i'm inclined to say that for said goals their choice design was the one who performed better. But of course since these goals could be from having a cheap ass memory system in a media box that also plays games to having a high end performance target doing the best it could to minimize the power drawn...
They will be in a bad place however if the OS takes all the rumored space, as with current rumors Ps4 has more memory available to games, so i'd say, that they could go to 12GB or so of ram, have a huge amount of that reserved and still match the memory available to games Ps4 is going to have.
But i do think the better question is: Does Ms needs to change to GDDR5? It's not like it wasn't a choice for them in any way. It's difficult to say what was their goals for the console were. But whatever it was i'm inclined to say that for said goals their choice design was the one who performed better. But of course since these goals could be from having a cheap ass memory system in a media box that also plays games to having a high end performance target doing the best it could to minimize the power drawn...
HoodWinked
Member
the original kinect was $60 worth of parts, ms is managing costs so its likely going to be cheaper this time around they had years to refine the device.
if durango came out next year they could have used DDR4.
if durango came out next year they could have used DDR4.
Joel Was Right
Member
So what does this mean for Sony and for next-gen gaming in general? First up, unless Microsoft has radically upgraded its graphics and memory configuration for Durango in the last nine months (an engineering nightmare unlikely to happen - it can't really add more chips as Sony has done),
Alebrije
Member
Well , that´s the main doubt at this moment :
Will developers use PS4 as a base for the multiplats or will be Durango? if it is the last one , we hardly will see a RESIDENT EVIL using all the PS4 potential.
Essentially yes.. unless they use DDR3 stacking. The ESRAM is interesting as well and not completely useless as some here seem to think.
I didn't say he was full of shit, I'm saying anyone who makes the claim you quoted that 8 GB of DDR5 is "overkill" is full of shit. I'm not going to waste my time going to B3D to double check what you quoted and make sure you aren't taking it out of context.
Go take a look at industry reaction to the 8 GB of GDDR5 announcement. The foremost tech pushers (Carmack, Crytek guys, etc.) are all quite pleased with it. This is what they wanted. So why in the world would you put more stock in a quote from B3D than what the foremost professionals in this field are saying?
None of them think it's overkill. Most of them were saying that 8 GB of memory was just enough to meet their demands, and you can be sure they weren't talking about 8 GB of just DDR3. These guys are addicted to the GDDR5's bandwidth on modern graphics cards like a junkie is to crack. This is why MS is bending over backwards with their ESRAM "solution". 8 GB of GDDR5 isn't overkill, in fact I'd say for the first time in the history of the video games industry we're seeing a console that isn't being RAM starved from day one.
ESRAM is not useless, but it makes things more complex for developers to work around than just having a unified pool.
This was what Sony was making a big deal of in their showing. Making it as simple and easy to develop for the platform so developers can actually focus on other stuff.
ESRAM just makes it so that developers have another headache they have to deal with.
Dance Inferno
Unconfirmed Member
I don't see why they wouldn't. Right now the way multiplats work is they develop on the 360 and then port to PS3, cutting out features as necessary. I can see them doing the same next gen: developing for the PS4 and cutting out features for Durango.
Depends. If the game is also on PC, the PS4 version could some enhancements from it, similar to the WiiU version of NFS.
Alebrije
Member
It could be this way for sure , but at the end all will depend about which console moves (sells) more software. And that´s why I give Durango adventage since current 360 moves more games than any other console. Microsoft won let lose this great advantage. We also have to notice that current Durango spect will bring great graphics and maybe the difference wont be so radical compared with PS4 the firsth years.
Alebrije
Member
That is pretty sure , but from a PC ported to console as you say.
Except developers have been coding and scaling for a performance outlier platform this entire generation with PC, and now both consoles look to be lining up with x86 architectures and a PC-equivalent amount of memory.
Assuming the Durango is a weaker overall system and assuming it becomes the target platform for games due to least common denominator design, we could easily see a situation where it's much like running a PC game today where Durango's version is 'low' settings, PS4's are "high" and an enthusiast PC's are "ultra".
This of course assumes that it becomes the target platform. Everything we've heard so far about the PS4 is that it's a developer's dream (which makes sense, since Mark Cerny is kind of a big deal when it comes to the concepts behind how games are designed, and it's his baby). The Durango obviously has at least a few hitches thrown in due to the DDR3/ESRAM caching.
It's entirely possible that PS4 becomes the lead platform, not due to hardware superiority but instead entirely due to being the easiest platform to work on. This might be even more likely if the rumors of Sony having OpenGL as a native API are true, and that would be one hell of a shot at DirectX's market dominance.
Read his quote well. He is saying that they can achieve the same thing using a cheaper method hence the "overkill"
Both console have their memory setup that makes sense based on how they are designed. The eSRAM and DMEs complement the ddr3. This is an industry whereby for the past 3 generations, there have been at least two consoles with an embedded DRAM module on it. The fact that Sony went with GDDR5 does not make the other method useless.
Pretty much a nice synopsis there. These guys have seen the PC gaming industry become capped by console specs due to the need to hit a broad audience. They've been beating their heads off of the incredibly low memory caps for at least one and in many cases two generations.
Sony's announcement was the equivalent of them sitting every major PC developer down and saying "stop worrying about memory so much, we've got that covered, focus on your games."
No you can't, the best you can do is a cheap imitation. Also, that misses the entire point. Obtuse hardware designs that using caching can 1. never match superior bandwidth and 2. require developers to do additional work to make it happen.
Sony's solution doesn't require any hoops to jump through to get great performance. It's great out of the box and no one needs to worry about it anymore. No one will spend weeks trying to tweak how you feed the faster memory cache on a PS4 game. It all just works. That is the furthest thing from overkill.
Sony built a system entirely focused on making the lives of developers easier. There is no such thing as overkill when it comes to that.
Dance Inferno
Unconfirmed Member
I imagine most games next gen will have a PC version in development. You're right though that the 360 sold more and so developers use it as the lead system. Hopefully the PS4 does well enough that it doesn't get shortchanged by third parties.
Oh wow, if you really can't see the point he is making then there is no point arguing with you.
Do we know how old durango dev-kit specs are?
Exactly. Switching to gddr5 makes no sense as the system has been designed to get the most out of its components.
Precisely. It's in a state of finely tuned balance. It's a lot of knee jerk reaction going on here.
I completely get the premise of what you quoted, that an alternative, cheaper, method to simulate the quantity/bandwidth combination present in the PS4 would have been better and that Sony's "brute force" approach is "overkill".
I'm just saying that it's an incorrect statement. You can't backdoor your way into a cheaper method to produce the same results, and anything you can do that produces even a cheap facsimile of it will require greater work from developers to fine tune memory management. That goes against the entire point of what Sony is doing, removing both the quantity and bandwidth bottlenecks from the memory equation without asking for any additional work by the developers.
Yes, I'm sure Sony is just wasting money when they could instead have gone with an ESRAM solution that would have been just as effective. The entire existence of GDDR5 versus cached designs is a canard foisted upon consumers by the enthusiast graphics card manufacturers, all to charge us more money. Obviously faster memory is overkill when you could instead design a cached architecture that gets equal results.
AgentP
Thinks mods influence posters politics. Promoted to QAnon Editor.
I'm on about the fact that real eSRAM would be surpising, if they really go through with it great, but the eSRAM will make their SOC massive and have low yields. If it is really something like 1T-SRAM than it is still "low latency", but not like real eSRAM.
Ya, I misspoke, I was referring to the difference between GDDR5 and GDDR3, which is a clock doubling and hence twice the bandwidth.
something fishy
Member
right but that pre-supposes that no other machine will ever have lower memory requirements like much of the pc space and thus can't really become the only focus for pc development.
The fab makes the 6t-sram more likely as it can be fabricated at more fabs than the 1t-sram actually. And I say that based on the fab they are most likely to use.
There is some point your missing there. GDDR5 would be extreme overkill in the the rumoured next Xbox, with its esram. A waste.
I got your point, and sure it would. But you said it meets the "same ends" and that was what my response was regarding. The majority of the statement is factually correct, that last bit is not.
Sho_Nuff82
Member
I don't know if this has been covered yet, but is there any chance that MS could increase the amount of ES RAM?
And if this is how the PC game and most people feel about Sony's decision, I want to support them and the PS4. I don't own a PS3, but I will get a PS4 if the developers prefer the type of support and hardware Sony gives them. I am a video game bandwagon fan it seems.
Zombie James
Banned
Quite frankly if you expect the durango to be some sort of low setting while the ps4 is some high setting, you are setting yourself up for disappointment. The ps4 has 50% more FLOPs that the durango, it can't run twice the framerate as that means it needs 100% more power, it can't run at 1080p while durango runs at 720p as that would require the ps4 to render 2.25x the pixels or have 225% more power. The systems will be close, simple as that.
TimeEffect
Member
Oh I see, corrected it.
Reminds me of nVidia when they stated that RSX was a 2TFlops chip.