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[Eurogamer\DF] Orbis Unmasked: what to expect from the next-gen PlayStation.

madmackem

Member
Yeah really. Very few people heard about XGC and party chat on consoles before this gen. And now everyone expect them to be standard next gen. So yeah, next gen will bring something more advance and much more useful than this gen OS wise and Competitors should be aware of MS since making OS is their core business. It´s very short sighted to assume that 512MB RAM from a hardware company like Sony to match 3GB RAM of MS and company which specializes in software development. I don´t know what´s the next big thing, but i´m sure that you don´t want the Orbis to be way behind again with regards to functionality to the Durango. 3GB OS for Durango will definitely not be just for show.

You do know there was a party chat system on the og xbox right, it was just the next logical step making it part of the whole dash rather making it only usable outside of gaming. Lets not forget as well that it didnt launch in the state it is today it was one on one at the start.
 

demolitio

Member
I didn't say that. Sony seems more committed to gaming and I honestly believe that. Look a the titles releasing this year for example. Look at the fact that they bought Sucker Punch and Media Molecule, have worked closely with Quantic, and expanded Santa Monica and Naughty Dog. Go back and read the past three E3 Microsoft press conference threads. The general sentiment is that they're not doing enough for gamers. Getting timed DLC and exclusive map packs might have been great at the beginning of the generation, but gamers want games.

I simply have more faith in Sony when it comes to gaming experiences and that will not change. I think their strategy last generation of not chasing third parties will pay off big time this generation.

Exactly how I feel. As long as there's parity in multi-platform, then Sony is my choice for sure simply because they take exclusives seriously. I bought a 360, but it seems like I'm waiting for the next iteration of the same few franchises with one or two BIG games a year whereas Sony is still putting out a killer year for the PS3 in 2013. The fact that we know so many solid studios have been working on PS4 games is enough to get me hyped.

I think they need to make sure everyone knows the PS exclusives and all the studios they have in comparison as it's the biggest difference between the two companies. Microsoft would rate higher with me if they added more exclusives like Nintendo and Sony. Not all of them have to be my cup of tea obviously, but it's just a nice way to show people why people NEED their console.

BRING SOCOM BACK FOR PS4. SOCOM 2 HD and then give the franchise to someone new. I know it probably won't happen, but I want to dream.
 

Zabojnik

Member
Not saying that it isn't possible, but Planetside 2 is an extremely CPU-intensive game. For it to be able to run smoothly on 8 Jaguar cores would be quite something.

This kind of talk really depresses me. By the time PS4/720 hit the market Planetside 2 is going to be a 1 year+ old PC game and yet next-gen consoles would have to compromise to make it run. Different hardware structure, I know, and I'm sure devs could make it run on PS4 just fine with some platform specific tweaks, but still. Guess I'm still used to think that a new mainstream console = beastly gaming machine, to which PCs will have to catch up to. Not sure it was even ever true in the past, but it sure felt that way. With PS2 and (partly) PS3 at least.
 
I'm really hoping Planetside 2 comes to Orbis. A fucking stellar game that as a release title could do wonders for Sony....and it looks great.

That will be interesting, seeing as Planetside puts a strain on even the fastest Intel Quad core CPU's, which are quite a bit faster (to say the least) than the proposed Orbis CPU setup...

Maybe that custom module DF talked about will be put to good use from the Orbis's early days.
 

rdrr gnr

Member
That will be interesting, seeing as Planetside puts a strain on even the fastest Intel Quad core CPU's, which are quite a bit faster (to say the least) than the proposed Orbis CPU setup...

Maybe that custom module DF talked about will be put to good use from the Orbis's early days.
Won't be the same game exactly. Smaller player count at lower settings. I wonder how they'll manage the controls.
 
I still don't know why ppl want hardware parity. Same old boring thing as this gen then where both platforms are just port machines for 3rd parties?
 

Ravage

Member
IMO non-gaming apps/multitasking (email,browsing,twitter,etc) should be left to smartphones, tablets and SmartTVs. They are more suited for touch screen interfaces anyway (unless Orbis/Durango apes the WiiU gamepad of course).

Displaying notifications and mirroring content from your phone should provide more than enough functionality for the masses. Sony have this covered with their 'One Touch' feature (at least the content mirroring part) and MS will most likely expand their Smartglass project (if they are smart, it won't be WP8 exclusive lol).
 
The battle for whoever blows the most money ended with SEGA.

Disagree. For example PS3 could've done better if they didn't blow money on cell and blu-ray. A more powerful machine at a similar price point can win more ppl over. If this is the case the only question is who can take a bigger risk with the loss-leader model they're both no doubt going to use anyway to some degree.

Because current gen was the best one ever for single console users ?

Having hardware parity doesn't make that mutually exclusive.
 

Krabardaf

Member
I still don't know why ppl want hardware parity. Same old boring thing as this gen then where both platforms are just port machines for 3rd parties?

Welp it was mostly the same thing in the PS2 era, even if the xbox was substantially more powerful on the paper.
Exclusivities are highly risked, third parties need to exists.

Plus we have seen quite a lot of great first party this gen imo, maybe more interesting ones on the PS3 but still.
 
Welp it was mostly the same thing in the PS2 era, even if the xbox was substantially more powerful on the paper. Exclusivities are highly risked, third parties need to exists.

Don't understand this 3rd parties "not existing". Also PS2-xbox really weren't the third party port sisters this gen is.
 
Third party gaming has become a completely irrelevant thing when it comes to my decision of buying a console. That was cemented this generation. I don't care if the third party games run slightly worse or better if the exclusives outweigh the ones on other consoles. As long as the third party games run somewhat similarly I'll be fine.
 

nib95

Banned
Yeah really. Very few people heard about XGC and party chat on consoles before this gen. And now everyone expect them to be standard next gen. So yeah, next gen will bring something more advance and much more useful than this gen OS wise and Competitors should be aware of MS since making OS is their core business. It´s very short sighted to assume that 512MB RAM from a hardware company like Sony to match 3GB RAM of MS and company which specializes in software development. I don´t know what´s the next big thing, but i´m sure that you don´t want the Orbis to be way behind again with regards to functionality to the Durango. 3GB OS for Durango will definitely not be just for show.

What the hell lol, yesterday you posted this point 2-3 times. I'm back here for the first time today, 40 pages later, and you're still regurgitating the exact same thing lol.

Let me ask you a question though. Do you think it's short sighted of Microsoft to use such slow ram? In a generation where graphically intensive features will only get far more resource and speed intensive, not less. I'm curious.
 

JABEE

Member
There are already three new IPs announced for next gen and the consoles haven't even been announced - Ryse (technically new, definitely next gen), Watch Dogs, and 1313. You're going to see a LOT of new IP at E3 this year. I would go so far as to say 50 percent? Maybe more?

You'll also see some pretty major reboots. There was another one of those off the show floor at last year's E3.

Prince of Persia?
 

misterF

Neo Member
I still don't know why ppl want hardware parity. Same old boring thing as this gen then where both platforms are just port machines for 3rd parties?

Doesn't seem right to dismiss both consoles' whole line up of exclusive games in 2 sentences like you just did.

Both next gen consoles from Sony and Microsoft being similar will force them to be more creative to differentiate themselves. The only worry would be a repeat of the lazy exclusive DLC stuff but that's still better than having 1 console being favored by the 3rd party publishers and the other one getting left behind.
 
Why are there no fake console renders yet?

UNACCEPTABLE.

Here's one for the PS4

img_27272zjz0p.jpg
 
You do know there was a party chat system on the og xbox right, it was just the next logical step making it part of the whole dash rather making it only usable outside of gaming. Lets not forget as well that it didnt launch in the state it is today it was one on one at the start.

Yeah, read my post carefully. Very few people heard of XGC, and now everyone expect it as standard for next gen. There will be more advance software that will require quite a bit of memory and when that happens the Orbis will not be matching all the features on Durango because it lacks RAM. Yeah, we should expect software parity between the 2 instead of MS having a lot better integration of their OS, and Orbis again being left in Durango´s dust.
 

mrklaw

MrArseFace
i am left wondering why would they need that when choke point for deflate decompressor right now is HDD speed not CPU.

It is not a server that needs 500 MBs throughtput for deflate because it has 200 users uploading their backups to it.

Unless those Jaguar cores are slower than HDDs, which I doubt.

Moving the decompression to a dedicated processor might allow devs to bring data in from the HDD during a level and decompress it while the main CPU is running the game, rather than during a cutscene or other low CPU activity time. I'd would still need access to the ram bus though which might be an issue
 

mrklaw

MrArseFace
Everything should be integrated in a single chip.
But the rumor seems to point to the fact that there is a 1,8Teraflops GPU + a 8-cores CPU which also contains additional modules.
I think it's reasonable to expect that this extra hardware might actually be GPGPU stuff to give more flexibility to the design, something that can take the role of the Cell's SPEs derived from the GPU that is integrated in AMD's APU.
That would explain a few things which have been left with a question mark (why devkits are based on an APU+discrete GPU instead of a multicore CPU+discrete GPU, why a few rumors talked about dual GPUs).

Edit: I see that on B3D they're suggesting the same thing, the extra thing in the CPU might be compute units from a GPU acting like a GPGPU module.

This sounds good

Perhaps feedback from First party devs was that using purely jaguar cores would be ok for housekeeping and general stuff, but would be too slow for some of the threads they used to put on SPEs, so they'd need to use some of the compute capacity in the GPU to compensate.

Having a separate bit of silicon just being some compute units gives devs the flexibility to do physics etc and still have the full GPU dedicated to graphics.

Wonder if that means audio will be done on the CPU then and won't have dedicated silicon?


Take fixed tasks that are computationally expensive, particularly for more general purpose GPU hardware, and make hardware that is good at that kind of task specifically. The problem with GPUs is that they're doing a lot of things that they're decent at, rather than fewer things that they're really good at.

Which is ironic because they started off being very focused devices to speed graphics up because the CPU was too general a processor. Now GPUs are becoming general processors and maybe have left behind some basic tasks that are ripe for optimised hardware.

Wonder if any of that will find its way back into future AMD PC GPUs?
 
These machines sound like real beasts.

Compared to today's ancient consoles, sure, I guess. I expected something more compared to PC though.

Of course it will match those.

You will. Really. Square didn't commission Luminous so they could fuck around on PC.

No, you won't. This happens every time and people never seem to learn. Of course Luminous was designed for the next generation of console games. Will it look like that on a console? No. Just as Oblivion didn't look anywhere near as good on 360 as the initial footage made it look.

These trailers are shown on PC to impress people. The real versions will be relatively close but not at the same level.
 

mrklaw

MrArseFace
One of the problems with comparing console to PC is that first you need to move the data (like a texture) from system memory to VRAM over a PCI-E bus.

Typical PC 4/8GB DDR3 => Main Mem bus 25.6 GB/sec => PCI-E 16GB/sec => VRAM 1-3 GB => 100-200 GB/sec to GPU.

There's a bunch of latency and bottlenecks to get through. If you're on a small memory GPU, textures and other data are probably being thrown out and reloaded all the time.

No one has seen what is actually capable from a system like PS4 that has a unified memory on a very fast bus to both CPU/GPU.


AMD should throw 8 jaguar cores onto their next high end GPUs. No bandwidth issues there
 
Yeah, read my post carefully. Very few people heard of XGC, and now everyone expect it as standard for next gen. There will be more advance software that will require quite a bit of memory and when that happens the Orbis will not be matching all the features on Durango because it lacks RAM. Yeah, we should expect software parity between the 2 instead of MS having a lot better integration of their OS, and Orbis again being left in Durango´s dust.

Holy crap dude! You have no clue what Sony OS will offer or for that matter what MS will offer! Can we let least wait until the consoles are announced before we start drawing fanboy lines?

Jesus fuck...
 
it's fucking long...

http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/16tttt/orbis_unmasked_what_to_expect_from_the_nextgen/c7zfgtg

I am privy to information that is under NDA and I can't share specific details but I will detail my thoughts to maybe give an idea of what I've seen and where I think they are going with this. At this moment in time I happen to know more about Durango than Orbis. I wrote a few pieces on a developers forum and since I don't have a lot to do I decided to copy and paste and rewrite some parts of it for Reddit. This is going to be long but somebody might like it. I'll break it down into sections so I don't put too many off.

Ports: When the xbox came out it opened the doors for Bioware to do console development, up until that point Bioware had never released a game on a console but KOTOR was released on both the Xbox and PC. The thing about the Xbox was that it was so similar to a standard PC it just made financial sense to develop for it as it was so easy and didn't cost a lot. This current generation both Sony and Microsoft went with standard GPU's, this is why we have so many ports between the 360, PS3 and PC, go back to the previous PS2 generation and it would have been extremely costly and complex to do porting, Final Fantasy X would have been extremely difficult to get on an Xbox.
If both the 720 and PS4 are running AMD CPU's then that is a revolution, what that means is every developer working on consoles and PC will have a grip on the architecture of all three platforms. The 720 is a Windows PC, the PS4 is a Linux PC. I was wondering how Valve were going to convince developers to put money into developing games for a Linux, they don't need to anymore, Sony just did that for them, porting to Linux just became trivial, you shouldn't be surprised if in a couple of years you end up seeing Max Payne 4 released simultaneously for your Windows or Linux PC, Steambox, 720 and PS4.
 

mrklaw

MrArseFace
Yeah, read my post carefully. Very few people heard of XGC, and now everyone expect it as standard for next gen. There will be more advance software that will require quite a bit of memory and when that happens the Orbis will not be matching all the features on Durango because it lacks RAM. Yeah, we should expect software parity between the 2 instead of MS having a lot better integration of their OS, and Orbis again being left in Durango´s dust.


There is practical planning for future services...and then there is throwing money away by adding tons of ram 'just in case'

512MB (rumoured amount for PS4) is 10x the ram for the OS that ps3 is using. And PS3 can do Netflix, web browser, DVR recording while playing games etc.

A smart OS would abstract a ton of stuff like ios does, so notifications etc come through one place which means less resources needed to handle them.

I'm sure MS have plans for that ram, otherwise they wouldn't be reserving it now. But it'll be for concrete things, not 'what ifs'
 

Corto

Member
I still don't know why ppl want hardware parity. Same old boring thing as this gen then where both platforms are just port machines for 3rd parties?

Users don't, they want to be blown away at a reasonable final price. Hardware companies do though. They don't want to be negatively compared with the direct competition and have significantly degraded third party games on their platform. There's only that much room at the expected final price to really differentiate a Microsoft device from a Sony one. This talk of secret sauces, custom solutions, RAM speed vs. RAM size will only result in marginal differences that will be mostly noticed in first party software.
 

Marco1

Member
Exactly how I feel. As long as there's parity in multi-platform, then Sony is my choice for sure simply because they take exclusives seriously. I bought a 360, but it seems like I'm waiting for the next iteration of the same few franchises with one or two BIG games a year whereas Sony is still putting out a killer year for the PS3 in 2013. The fact that we know so many solid studios have been working on PS4 games is enough to get me hyped.

I think they need to make sure everyone knows the PS exclusives and all the studios they have in comparison as it's the biggest difference between the two companies. Microsoft would rate higher with me if they added more exclusives like Nintendo and Sony. Not all of them have to be my cup of tea obviously, but it's just a nice way to show people why people NEED their console.

BRING SOCOM BACK FOR PS4. SOCOM 2 HD and then give the franchise to someone new. I know it probably won't happen, but I want to dream.
Me too.
If PS4 has ehe edge or are dactyl the same on multi-plats then I will be PS4 only next gen.
I enjoy my 360 but kinect and halo do nothing for me anymore, especially after the boring halo4. I hav zero interest in seeing how that story finishes.
Don't fuck this up Sony. I can't wait to see the HW design also.
 
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