I just read 5 pages of Sony fans attempting to downplay the "special sauce" because they desperately want to believe what some other rumor said about Orbis being more powerful and Xbox fans defending something they don't have any facts about yet. It's 2013, baby! In other words, 2005 the Sequel. Good times for gamers, fun/hard time for forum mods.
What am I even reading.
So if someone makes a wild claim , being skeptical makes one a fanboy of the 'other team'? (I'm on neither team in this race for mediocrity btw)
I also love how the ERP guy's words are being twisted.
He explains how compute power is only a part of what defines a gpu's overall performance, and people here spin it into it being irrelevant or being able to be compensated for (by a factor of 50 percent even in this case).
He never alluded to such a thing, he was very careful to make that clear too with his closing sentence. He was getting annoyed by people taking a black and white half assed view on performance.
Like a lot of people here still thinking that somehow 12GB of ram would be better than 8 GB regardless of bandwidth or latency because of the memory size bottlenecks of last gen, or the clowns who deduce that ps4 won't get cross game chat again because last time it had less ram accessible for those tasks than xbox360 with its unified ram, hence their logic that having half the ram this time will have the same result.
Or those who think that unified ram = automatically better in every way because they can't process that the problem with ps3's split pool was not that it was split, but that it was not enough ram for that configuration.
(unified = not having to move data as much but it's also not affordable to get enough of it at suffucient bandwidth , hence why on pc you use a large pool of slow DDR as cache and general purpose/cpu ram and a smaller pool of fast vram set aside for the GPU, you know, so you can enjoy the bandwidth, the room to cache to avoid having to page from the HDD AND keep the price low. Win Win Win. Split ram is only a problem if you run out of ram for any part of the chain in the process in the appropriate pool.
At the same time the lack of memory bandwidth gets ignored by the same people who argue the Floating point performance isn't the whole picture. (cherrypicking)
And their argument for them being twins like last gen is that 'cell didn't pan out to make the hoped for difference so they ended up close'.
So how do you get from there to 'but this time the magic sauce and new performance tricks WILL work out , and they will work out so well that they'll close this 50 percent on paper performance gap in compute power and the large bandwidth difference.
Just step back for a second and ponder how much cognitive dissonance is required to conclude that from saying cell was too hard to use and mostly a bunch of hot air being blown.
I don't have to have an opinion on the performance to be annoyed at HOW people come to their conclusions, because the example above sure isn't good science, it's some contradictive mental gymnastics.
Oh and the ridiculousless of trying to pin a bandwidth number or ram number 'on 1080p' (people were playing half life at 'hd resoluushiuns' on 1600x1200 crt monitors 14 years ago with 64MB vram @2.7GB/sec on a geforce 2 mx), it depends on how much you want to do do at that resolution , wether you use deferred rendering etc etc.
So many people drawing parralels from last generation and drawing conclusions or seeing patterns without bothering to understand even the most basic mechanics behind them.
Again, I'm a pc gamer first, psp gamer second, xbox360 and ps3 gamer third, I have no horse in this race, I'm just amazed at the amount of spinning being done here without a single iota of logic to back it up.
Until a developer comes out and can describe how the memory bandwidth and compute power is compensated for (and actually compensated for, not being limited to doing less but doing less faster).
I'm too old and too jaded to fall for blind faith hype and marketing crap from controlled leaks anymore.
Right now my only feelings on the leaks are those of weary pessimism and skepticism, for both consoles.
The thread was entertaining on it's own until today.
This seems about right for this thread.
People spinning and misinterpreting information like crazy, every time anyone provides any objective information or footnote it is immediately spun or misinterpreted, half of the time by the very person posting it and then they jump at eachother's throats over it.
edit: this rant is caused by the turn to an agressive tone and hostility people show to eachother compared to yesterday.
The misinterpeting and shenanigans mentioned above are all good fun until people went hostile towards eachother over their man staring at shadows on his cave wall views.