Dyre Straits

Not sure if this has been posted elsewhere. Couldn't find it.

Xbox 720 vs PlayStation 4: Whats in Store? | Fox Business

Microsoft's Xbox 720 and Sony's PlayStation 4 are the two gaming consoles that have been heavily discussed on the Internet over the last few months.


Though both the companies had denied any such developments, gamers expected announcements of the devices at the CES 2012. However, no such announcements were made and now it is expected that official announcements will be made at the E3 2012.

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Judas

damn hardwareheaven.com took a dump and lost my post i was making... always seems to happen

i really do not think the next xbox is going to be named 720/1080 or whatever.... that would be bad with 2160p bumping it's ass into the market with a vengence.

some of those rumors are pretty terribly written... that article is full of mostly little information let alone rumors..

It's like they made an article about hot air and then forgot to put the hot air in it.

Geezus, they didn't even put in any specs or consideration of what was used for GPU processing power in the previous generation and really didn't have much to say for the xbox.

So far the rumors have been floating about that while XBOX has been considering the fusion CPU... there is still discussions about it going the intel way. Now being that there is also an idea to break the common in order execution methods they currently implore to using the out of order execution that most current computer and PC games use. This will make porting from one to the other MUCH easier not to mention more flexible for multi threading not to mention allowing several tasks to be done .... no more exiting the game to use another fuction "necessarily"... you can essentially suspend or use a console version of "alt tab"

In either situation, it would be a good idea to go with a CPU/GPU solution in which the amd fusion or intel's iGPU is used for less involved tasks such as youtube/netflix/Blu-ray playback allowing the console to shut that gpu right off while it uses the igpu/fusion for those tasks.

It was also discussed that a quad core was most likely going to be the minimum cpu to be used, not likely to sport hyper threading if it ends up being intel, but it's possible.... (i7?)

They were also discussing SSD style hybrid potential, with up to as much as 16gb of SSD super fast hardrive built into the console for arcade models or for cases where a hardrive is present allowing hybrid use, basically keeping the main OS/most used applications or configuration information on the ssd part of the drive and using the optional built in hardrive for extra space. It would be dynamic in that it would keep the primary stuff always but depending on the games you are playing, it would figure out the best way to keep the most commonly loaded games, the parts of them stored in the SSD for faster loading, rather than the slower standard hardrive. (this is very similar system to Seagate Hybrid Drive technology idea with the 500gb platter and the hidden 4gb SSD used for the redundant caching combined with an intelligent controller that figures out the important files needed to speed things up)

The GPU expected to be used for the xbox at least is still leaning on the ATI/AMD side with something that'll surpass the ATI/AMD HD7xxx series potentially. Not as powerful as the TOP end model mind you, but relatively close. The current xbox360 uses a very similar gpu to that of the x1800....

Lastly, combined with all that, we could quite easily see 4gb of DDR3 being packed into the system as well as the move to 64bit natively being persude. Unfortunately it is a good chance that this will still be shared between system and gpu tasks. This is a high probability on both consoles.

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blibbax

I'd say that odds are we'll see a new PowerPC (or whatever it's called) CPU, an AMD 28nm GPU and 2-4GB DDR3 (despite how stupid that is) in the new Xbox.

The PS3 probably a new or revised cell processor, AMD or Nvidia 28nm GPU and 2-4GB DDR3.

Anything more than that is anyone's guess right now.

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Judas

i don't see how having 4gb of ddr3 would be stupid...

Specially if sony has already hinted at making certain that 2160p support is available out of the box or with firmware updates. Running high resolutions like that will require modern gpu power.. but it's the physical and video ram that really needs the space.

The developers of Grand Trismo voiced that due to the limitations of ram/vram..... was the hard part...

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blibbax

I meant that 4GB will be too little by the end of the product's life cycle. DDR3 is dirt cheap atm.

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Judas

oh yeah... i thought you ment it was to much....

Yeah DDR3... i'd pay the extra 40 bucks to double it to 8gb of DDR3 PC1600mhz ram used in the next ps4/xbox2160

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niceguyrichy

if they put anything less than 8GB in, they need their collective heads examined

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Dyre Straits

There was one thing in the article that caught my attention: The idea of putting games on USB Flash Drives might be something I'd like to see done for the upcoming XBOX wxyz. I don't think I'd be too keen on the "cloud storage" concept, though.

And, yeah, anything less than 8 GB DDR3 on an x64 system would cause a whole lot of head-scratching if they don't do at least that.

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mkk

I would guess that they are/have primarily been fighting with the problem of finding a cost effective way to make their system regularly run games at 1080p resolution. It might seem like an easy thing to put in 512-1024 MB or GDDR4/5 memory in the box, but they would no doubt really want to employ a one-chip solution. Those are still limited to DDR3 for graphics memory and that won't cut it speed-wise. There's a risk they could end up going with a single chip APU that uses more expensive memory like maybe DDR4 that could be fast enough, but then sticking to a setup with relatively slim total amount, like in the 1-2 GB range to keep costs down. Primarily that would mean a continuation of the low resolution texture plague. I can't imagine their coming up with a APU that runs both DDR3 RAM and separate graphics memory at once. Something like that might be just as expensive as separate chips.

The overall economy is essentially giving them time though, as they just can't release something very much more expensive than the last time. Unless one of them decide to get on with it and put together a system that isn't at all so much more advanced in the end, just to have something new. Like a 1-2 GB DDR3 APU system capable of DX11'ish level graphics but practically limited to 720p resolution. That could be a worst case scenario for us PC gamers.

I don't think that having a lot RAM is very meaningful for consoles though. Look at how PC games are still essentially stuck in 32 bit mode, where 2-3 GB is the limit. There's no need for moving console game makers over to 64bit code, though in the end they'd have it easier to simply declare a brand new console to be 64bit only as opposed to a PC.

SincerelyHis

Damn... My friend just showed me the recently leaked information of the Playstation 4 and Xbox

720 and I must say, I was completely amazed. I didn't think this info would be released for quite

a while, but it's managed to find its way onto the Internet, luckily!

If you guys want to check out the PS4 and Xbox 720 for yourselves, here's the site I saw them on:

LINK REMOVED BY STAFF

MIG-31

I have removed the link as i have doubts of it's legitimacy.

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Judas

it's not meaningful simply because they are still stuck within the 32bit limits..

so you either keep the low memory and therefore keep the popetual motion of remaining in a 32bit games developer looping cycle where nothing advances and you don't give them any incentive or reason to move forward..

There used to be a time where you couldn't get enough of it..... and developers loved the extra physical ram because it increased there options and level of detail or what they wanted to do. Now we have more than enough and no way to make use of it because we have games like we do today which don't seem to be advancing at all and stagnent in level of detail and textures and crap like that... basically unimpressive.. and they have shoehorned themselves into that situation simply due to the pre-existing conditions. Give them an easy out like nothing up to or exceeding 4gb.. and they'll take it and continue manufacturing 32bit games....

Just like if you present dx9 backwards capability, there is a good chance they'll continue developing using that instead of moving forward.

There really is not reason not to bust open as much physical memory as possible.....

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