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[El_Chino]

Wow, MS bumping specs while Sony takes RAM away from games. It's time to rethink who has the momentum going into next-gen.

A dangerous thing to say here.

 

[twobear]

Just because this comes out now doesn't mean they just did it yesterday.

 

[Kleegamefan]

Wow, MS bumping specs while Sony takes RAM away from games. It's time to rethink who has the momentum going into next-gen.

Well done

 

[PSGames]

What features, other than the ones hidden behind a paywall?


Dedicated servers seem like their best one.

Yes.

Dedicated servers
Skype
Snap Multi-tasking
Kinect (Voice/motion controls)
Smart Match
HDMI Pass-Thru
TV Guide
Dynamic achievements
SmartGlass
Windows Apps


Not to mention all the exclusive apps and content from providers like the NFL.

 

[Chittagong]

G-G-G-GAMECHANGER

 

[warthog]

Funny to see microsoft acting like this. Feels like they rushed things a bit...

 

[ChosenPredator]

Ah here we got another one :/



Every good news is welcome, specially regarding an upgrade hardware wise.

i honestly think every piece of news for xbox should be made by mods now or it gets out of hand.

 

[KoopaTheCasual]

Wow, MS bumping specs while Sony takes RAM away from games. It's time to rethink who has the momentum going into next-gen.

You're really reaching with this one. Can't tell if serious.

 

[Takuya]

Why to you need to announce a clock speed before announcing an upgrade?
He says, they tweaked from 800 to 853 - that totally fits the definition of an announcement of an upgrade.

Because they never announced the previous standard. An upgrade is to raise the standard; which was never announced.

 

[Kjell]

Either it's a coincidence .. or they duct-taped / added a ATARI Jaguar ( 2 CPU's at 26.59 MHz = 53.18 MHz ) to the AMD Jaguar CPU

 

[JAYSIMPLE]

You know how with every driver update with GPU's we see performance increases of like 20 percent per game. yeh expect that this gen!

 

[BruiserBear]

I wasn't implying they were being shady

but more that perhaps the PR strategy and what they are allowed to talk about has changed

I think this is more interesting than the actually increase in clock speed

You said their prior strategy was to dodge talking numbers, which wasn't even true. They did talk numbers to a degree, but they just never got into specifics about the GPU.

As I just pointed out, it's quite likely they never got specific about the GPU because they knew the clock speed might still change.

 

[Majanew]

Well it doesn't matter because 1.84 and 1.31 are rounded numbers as well!

Never round off until the end!

With a fully rigorous calculation you get XBO 29 % (28.92) less capable and PS4 is 41 % (40.68) more capable.

I didn't have the full numbers for PS4 (1.843200 ) and XB1 (1.310208)

Now I do

 

[LeeFowler.CU]

They basically said, "Specs don't matter." and suddenly they are talking about upgrading.

If they didn't matter they wouldn't talk about it.

This is good news for everyone but just another example of confused messaging.

lol dat narrative. They never once said that specs don't matter. What they did say was that they didn't target the highest spec target. This announcement does nothing to change that. They have a certain thermal envelope they want to stay under, and they'll keep tweaking things while they can.

 

[bGanci]

First of all this wasn't really an announcement. It was discussed on a podcast in a casual form. He was just expressing excitment on how everything is coming together. This is not huge news but it is good news. #XboxOne2013 lol

 

[cyberheater]

This is not an upgrade.
.

There is no need to allow the fanboy in you to say such stupid things.

 

[Queen of Hunting]

gaf is obsessed with how many flops each console is. remember isnt the xbox 360 like only 230 flops ? so the ps4 and xbone being alot higher will have some interesting results

 

[le.phat]

Wow, MS bumping specs while Sony takes RAM away from games. It's time to rethink who has the momentum going into next-gen.

i dunno, compare the specs and ps4 still is much stronger. Now throw the price difference into the equation and i think it doesn't really need that much rethinking lol.

 

[Steverulez]

Funny to see microsoft acting like this. Feels like they rushed things a bit...

Acting like what? Keeping their community informed of their plans?

Releasing info slowly like this is much better than flooding the media with new info where some of it gets lost.

 

[Pitmonkey]

So this was true.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=618996&highlight=

 

[LukasTaves]

How come nobody is commenting on the better and bigger news from this?

A new video driver/apis, while the other was apparently (from their wording) a lot closer to default dx 11.2 could be amazing for performance.

 

[raven777]

they haven't actually changed any chips, and upgraded 53mhz right? Is this possible because of just better optimization/customization?

 

[reptilescorpio]

Chance they can hit the PS4 GPU level?

 

[Pwn]

Wow, MS bumping specs while Sony takes RAM away from games. It's time to rethink who has the momentum going into next-gen.

Time to redo the fucking math!

 

[maabus1999]

So then the "insider" yield issue was all BS...Man glad I stay in the PC realm. All the comments over this rumor/bad news/good news cycle has just been silly on GAF.

 

[Impeccable]

lol dat narrative. They never once said that specs don't matter. What they did say was that they didn't target the highest spec target. This announcement does nothing to change that. They have a certain thermal envelope they want to stay under, and they'll keep tweaking things while they can.

There's no difference aside from semantics though, heh.

It's just confusing to go from not talking about specifications other than "not targeting the highest" to suddenly even bothering to mention an upgrade.

'tis all.

 

[stryke]

lol dat narrative. They never once said that specs don't matter. What they did say was that they didn't target the highest spec target. This announcement does nothing to change that. They have a certain thermal envelope they want to stay under, and they'll keep tweaking things while they can.

Maybe you should talk to Albert sometime.

Ironically though, he hinted "something" here in Gaf as well regarding this.

 

[Freki]

Chance they can hit the PS4 GPU level?

0 if they don't want to use nitrogen cooling...

 

[Canis lupus]

adjustments to hardware like this are made quite often, n64, cube, xbox, ps3 and probably others have had tweaks late game. Microsoft probably could push it further if they upgraded the heat sink but we don't even know what the specs of the machine are so any tweak news means little. Hell sony could down clock to reduce noise/heat due to the slim form factor. Don't worry too much about specs until we are closer to launch and things are finalised.

Would be something if a down/upclock happened to PS4 gpu. How mant FLOPs on PS4 GPU with a 50mhz increase?

 

[teiresias]

Does this actually constitute an "announcment" of the clock bump? I mean, it reads like it's just something that gets said almost in passing as an example of the process in building a machine like this, so I can't really give MS crap for saying it the way they did (granted, I haven't listened to the actual podcast).

Clock changes are fairly normal during development and there's no timeline given for when this actually happened. The actual bump itself is so small that for GI to be trying to make a huge deal out of it seems weird. It's certainly not the kind of bump that makes up for the architectural differences between the two console's GPUs.

 

[Thrakier]

Wow, MS bumping specs while Sony takes RAM away from games. It's time to rethink who has the momentum going into next-gen.

Be careful, some people actually might think that you are serious.

 

[LeeFowler.CU]

Negative? I'm stating a fact, they never released their spec, so how is this an upgrade?

All this is, is an announcement of their clock speed for the first time. They call it an "upgrade" because that sounds better in PR.

We've known their clock speed since forever yo.

 

[Majanew]

So then the "insider" yield issue was all BS...Man glad I stay in the PC realm. All the comments over this rumor/bad news/good news cycle has just been silly on GAF.

Yield problems were real. Downclocking the GPU because of it was false.

 

[jhmtehgamr20xx]

Now see, this is something that can realistically be done this late in the game, unlike some switch-out of DDR3 to GDDR5 or w/e else the rabid types were throwing around.

Makes me curious if Sony's done something similar (preferably to the CPU tho). Just curious...

 

[Bundy]

Hence the concern that they are doing this out of desperation in order to try to be more competitive with Sony. Which is good in and of itself, however it would be bad if they are knowing pushing the console beyond its safe thermal limits and compromising the longevity of the box purely for a measly extra 53MHz.

Of course they're the only ones that will be aware of the console's thermal profile. So I imagine they would have done tests on final or near-to-final silicon and together with the humongous box design, they've decided its still operating within the safe thermal envelope.

It does make me wonder though, whether Sony might start looking into an upclock after this news? I'm sure they've looked at it already. On one side they have a simpler and likely smaller APU design, and so should produce less heat. On the other they don't have the might huge box, but then their are however way more adept at designing cooling solutions for consoles (see PS3 fan/heat sink assembly). Will be interesting to see if they respond to this.

They don't have to.
SONY/PS4 already has the clearly better/superior GPU (over 40% faster, etc.).
Their system is great / no need to do anything here.

Chance they can hit the PS4 GPU level?

0%

 

[Angelus Errare]

Man between this, eSRAM + DMEs + UMEs + WMDs + Clouds

What chance does PS4 stand?!

Spoiler

This is good news, every little bit helps.

 

[Abominuz]

I like to Sony do the same.
I like this war its entertaining to see Sony and MS dancing their asses of for me to buy their console.

Can someone please make a fact or fiction thread.
There are so many bs rumors and so many missed facts its getting confusing for the buyer.
Some member please make a thread like:

Boost GPU XBox One
Fact : confirmed by Microsoft.

Cloud Xbox One enables better graphics
False : its a glorified dedicated server.

 

[GrizzledGrump]

At the end of the day, this just puts the Xbox One back at square one. That spec "upgrade" basically makes up for the GPU resources that are allocated to the Windows VM.

If you want to make my pants tight, increase the clock speed by 100's of MHz. When I switched RAM and I could only overclock my CPU by 300 MHz, I got pissed off.

53 MHz isn't an "overclock" in my opinion, it's a rounding error. The big news in all of this is that it flies in the face of the rumors of a down clock and yield problems.

So the big story isn't some inconsequential GPU boost, but rather the fact that XONE is on track and we shouldn't have unusually low shipments this holiday.

 

[ultron87]

Microsoft to mention on a podcast they slightly changed a number!

 

[Evoga]

Wow, MS bumping specs while Sony takes RAM away from games. It's time to rethink who has the momentum going into next-gen.

And charging to play online. When it rains it really pours for sony.

 

[Takuya]

lol dat narrative. They never once said that specs don't matter. What they did say was that they didn't target the highest spec target. This announcement does nothing to change that. They have a certain thermal envelope they want to stay under, and they'll keep tweaking things while they can.

Considering the enormous size of their box in comparison to the hardware contained within, as well as taking into account the external power brick, it shows how late their hardware decisions/engineering were in building the machine. The thermal envelope would have directly affected the size of the machine, they were very conservative with the box size because their numbers weren't all that perfect.

 

[benny_a]

So then the "insider" yield issue was all BS...Man glad I stay in the PC realm. All the comments over this rumor/bad news/good news cycle has just been silly on GAF.

Why is the yield issue BS?

What is BS is that there was a downclock. Nothing about the yield. We'll see about yield when the shipping numbers are out.

 

[statham]

i honestly think every piece of news for xbox should be made by mods now or it gets out of hand.

The difference in those two threads was huge, one was garbage and the other had MS's Albert and Insomniac participate in.

 

[ChorusLindarr]

Exploding with a lot of people trying to throw cold water on the value of it.


Also, so much for all the claims that they were having production issues with their chips. lol

To be fair this says nothing about their yields. It's all dependent on how aggresively they would want to be able to compete with Sony. So this could in fact be a decision by them to eat the losses on worse yields in order to have a more capable box.

It's equally plausable a scenario in my mind.

Quoting a developer from B3D (as much as I hate to do so), "clockspeeds almost never go up, once chips have come back from the fabs". So I would imagine, given the historical precedent, that MS is likely being more aggresive with their loss-eating on unusable silicon.

 

[Finalizer]

Also, so much for all the claims that they were having production issues with their chips. lol

Not necessarily. The way I understood it, the culprit for the yield issues was the ESRAM. It might be that whatever didn't succumb to defects had enough headroom left for a slight GPU upclock.

'Course, that all depends on how much you buy into the yield issues rumor, just saying that this news doesn't disprove that rumor in its wake.

 

[Jarmel]

Great, hopefully they can push it even further. The higher the XB1 baseline, the better the multiplats are going to be on PS4.

 

[KoopaTheCasual]

lol dat narrative. They never once said that specs don't matter. What they did say was that they didn't target the highest spec target. This announcement does nothing to change that. They have a certain thermal envelope they want to stay under, and they'll keep tweaking things while they can.

Except they did:

Xbox head of planning Albert Penello hit out at Sony for proudly displaying its "numbers" but said discussions about which console had the better specifications were "meaningless."

Breakdowns of the hardware within the two consoles has revealed incredibly similar innards, with the PS4 perhaps having a very slight edge in terms of power. This won't matter, according to Penello.

He told Official Xbox Magazine: "The problem is that Sony decided to go out and publish a bunch of numbers, which are in some ways meaningless. Because this isn't like 1990, when it was 16-bit versus 32-bit."

Source: http://www.techradar.com/us/news/gaming/consoles/xbox-bigwig-hardware-specs-don-t-matter-because-it-s-not-1990--1162653

 

[EagleEyes]

Maybe i'm LTTP but i was listening to the podcast and had no idea that you were gonna be able to skype call from X1 to PC and vice versa. Thats pretty cool as I thought it was just going to be limited to Xboxes only.

 

[Uno Venova]

Does this actually constitute an "announcment" of the clock bump? I mean, it reads like it's just something that gets said almost in passing as an example of the process in building a machine like this, so I can't really give MS crap for saying it the way they did (granted, I haven't listened to the actual podcast).

Clock changes are fairly normal during development and there's no timeline given for when this actually happened. The actual bump itself is so small that for GI to be trying to make a huge deal out of it seems weird. It's certainly not the kind of bump that makes up for the architectural differences between the two console's GPUs.

Exactly, once again the title really screwed things up. If they did have some blog post announcement about a small upgrade, that would be weird. This is fine.

 

[Huff]

You said their prior strategy was to dodge talking numbers, which wasn't even true. They did talk numbers to a degree, but they just never got into specifics about the GPU.

As I just pointed out, it's quite likely they never got specific about the GPU because they knew the clock speed might still change.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/xbox-executive-says-comparing-specs-is-meaningless-6410875

talking about this is a change from old policies. for the better