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

demolitio

Member
Perhaps. But I wouldn't be surprised to see a bait and switch to a 2 teraflop gpu from Microsoft right at the death. :p

They know devs talk. Best way to conceal rumours is to give out initial goals then low ball gpus then really ramp it up in the final kit. boom.

/conspiracy theory hat off.

That would be hilarious to read about at least. Hell, even getting that not to leak would be a difficult task knowing people nowadays.
 

Karak

Member
Perhaps. But I wouldn't be surprised to see a bait and switch to a 2 teraflop gpu from Microsoft right at the death. :p

They know devs talk. Best way to conceal rumours is to give out initial goals then low ball gpus then really ramp it up in the final kit. boom.

/conspiracy theory hat off.

You can bet devs speak to both. In hidden communications and hand signals:)
 

James Sawyer Ford

Gold Member
Perhaps. But I wouldn't be surprised to see a bait and switch to a 2 teraflop gpu from Microsoft right at the death. :p

They know devs talk. Best way to conceal rumours is to give out initial goals then low ball gpus then really ramp it up in the final kit. boom.

/conspiracy theory hat off.

Wouldn't be a good idea to do something like that with launch titles in the works for years.
 
I'm sure not everything has been followed to a T, but again the general performance target may have not changed from their initial plan.

The document is not a "target" for performance, not a route, it is just ideas.

C´mon, even they called "Wii U" as Wii 2, we can´t say "it show the performance target for a 2013 launch".
 

Reiko

Banned
Wouldn't be a good idea to do something like that with launch titles in the works for years.

And we are under the impression that it's okay to break NDA?

I don't see llhere risking his position like the people who leaked this rumor to DF.

These specs can be true or false. I'm just not putting much faith behind it.
 
I find it very odd that the WiiU RAM is, according to Gaf's self-styled experts, a crippling bottleneck, yet the Durango, which uses the same type of slow RAM and can chew through it much more quickly thanks to greater horsepower, is somehow not bottlenecked via the magic of eDRAM or something mumble mumble ( even though the WiiU also has eDRAM.)

People freaked out when they found out that the WiiU has double the RAM of the 360 but uses a slow RAM type. But the Durango apparently has double the RAM of the Orbis and the same slow RAM type as the WiiU.

I'm not saying that this is some sort of obvious Durango design flaw, but I do question the objectivity of people who see the WiiU RAM setup as dire and the Durango setup as perfectly fine. If you believe that slow RAM is a bottleneck on the WiiU you almost certainly have to also believe it's a bottleneck on Durango, which has more RAM and higher horsepower and thus needs higher bandwidth just to break even vs WiiU.

To be fair, Durango's rumored RAM bus is 4 times the width of WiiU's. It'll provide at least 4 times the memory bandwidth. WiiU's memory was so slow as to be utterly crippling.

I don't expect Durango to be nearly that bad, but it is an open question as to whether a 3 times increase in memory bandwidth over the 360 is a good balance with 6 times the shader power. Especially if the eDRAM is only 32MB and not the larger general use working memory I think a lot of use were expecting.
 

Margalis

Banned
I might be wrong here but I thought both speed and amount wise durango > wiiu Ram by a mile. Isn't the wiiu ram like 1 GB for games?

Larger amount of slow RAM if anything introduces a tighter bottleneck.

I'm sure the Durango RAM is faster than the WiiU RAM, but because it has more horsepower it can chew threw RAM much faster and has more RAM to chew through, which means it needs a lot more bandwidth than the WiiU does in order to avoid a similar supposed bottleneck.

Again I'm not saying this bottleneck actually exists, I'm just saying I find it odd that this sort of RAM is too slow for the lowly WiiU but somehow fast enough for a more powerful system.

Brad Grenz said:
To be fair, Durango's rumored RAM bus is 4 times the width of WiiU's. It'll provide at least 4 times the memory bandwidth. WiiU's memory was so slow as to be utterly crippling.

If you make a bottle 8 times bigger and make the neck of the bottle 4 times bigger you've made your bottle neck narrower by comparison.
 
Next week rumor will be "durango has a nvidia gpu in addition to the AMD one to allow it to do amazing physx." "Orbis will have a fluxcapcitor" and "secret Wii u chip of alien technology discovered"
 

Ashes

Banned
Next week rumor will be "durango has a nvidia gpu in addition to the AMD one to allow it to do amazing physx." "Orbis will have a fluxcapcitor" and "secret Wii u chip of alien technology discovered"

All of those > secret sauce.
edit: Ps4 with an xb360 chip would be amazing. Troll developers, gamers, everyone! :p
 

jsnepo

Member
Next week rumor will be "durango has a nvidia gpu in addition to the AMD one to allow it to do amazing physx." "Orbis will have a fluxcapcitor" and "secret Wii u chip of alien technology discovered"

I hope Orbis can go to the future and bring back FFVsXIII and TLG to the present.
 
I find it very odd that the WiiU RAM is, according to Gaf's self-styled experts, a crippling bottleneck, yet the Durango, which uses the same type of slow RAM and can chew through it much more quickly thanks to greater horsepower, is somehow not bottlenecked via the magic of eDRAM or something mumble mumble ( even though the WiiU also has eDRAM.)

People freaked out when they found out that the WiiU has double the RAM of the 360 but uses a slow RAM type. But the Durango apparently has double the RAM of the Orbis and the same slow RAM type as the WiiU.

I'm not saying that this is some sort of obvious Durango design flaw, but I do question the objectivity of people who see the WiiU RAM setup as dire and the Durango setup as perfectly fine. If you believe that slow RAM is a bottleneck on the WiiU you almost certainly have to also believe it's a bottleneck on Durango, which has more RAM and higher horsepower and thus needs higher bandwidth just to break even vs WiiU.
Maybe the same types of people are freaking out about both WiiU and Durango. Maybe, just maybe, they might be using alarmist tactics for both.
 

Striek

Member
It's about an ignorant view of "numbers" as you can get. It's extra amusing because the same people are quick to berate others for just "looking at numbers on paper" when someone says that Durango has twice the RAM.
What a bullshit post.

Been a lot of posters calling out "the other side" lately when its really seeing what you want to see and feeling victimised. Its weak shit.
 
Some games are poorly optimized on PC (Saints Row 2), some are poorly optimized on consoles. That really doesn't do much to forward the argument that a mobile AMD processor when stuck inside a console box is suddenly going to perform as well as an i5 because "optimization!"
cpu code is very optimizable thanks to low-level api programming.
i guess it is comparable with programs written on java and programs written with c on pc.

however, if the gpu has more or less the same architecture and efficiency, there is no magic optimization for gpu calculations.
 

wizzbang

Banned
That would be my bad :D I should have worded my answer better. No I don't think either console will or should be region locked. Not only from a consumer point of view but even from a business point of view I see no reason to do so

We the consumer in general would all agree but historically, I believe region free consoles are the minority :(
 

James Sawyer Ford

Gold Member
And we are under the impression that it's okay to break NDA?

I don't see llhere risking his position like the people who leaked this rumor to DF.

These specs can be true or false. I'm just not putting much faith behind it.

Well, I think the Orbis specs are pretty safe since Eurogamer posted about it.

They did the same thing with PSP2 a long time before it was even revealed: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-psp2-features-quad-core-gpu-blog-entry

As for Durango, I'll feel more confident once we get some reputable and established sites reporting on it. But for now, the leaked specs seem to be verified by multiple sources in the dev community, although again they don't have the complete picture -- they do have the bulk of the specs that matter the most. I think the information we have now is giving us about 80% of the picture.
 

thuway

Member
There will be a shit ton of crow eaten for those of you who believe Orbis is 50% more powerful than Durango. It can't be stressed enough, FLOPs are not telling the whole story.
 

James Sawyer Ford

Gold Member
There will be a shit ton of crow eaten for those of you who believe Orbis is 50% more powerful than Durango. It can't be stressed enough, FLOPs are not telling the whole story.

FLOPS from the same vendor, same general architecture, similar CPU setup...

Sorry, I have a hard time believing it ISN'T an apples to apples comparison when one GPU has 50% more FLOP performance. Sure, they're not EVERYTHING, but they're a good indication of performance particularly if it's from the same family of parts.

Going to have to be a lot of sauce to turn that deficit around.
 

B.O.O.M

Member
We the consumer in general would all agree but historically, I believe region free consoles are the minority :(

well both sony and MS have been good about it in recent years. It's only Nintendo who seems to be a big supporter of the idea for whatever reason. So for now I think we can be cautiously optimistic :)
 

kpjolee

Member
There will be a shit ton of crow eaten for those of you who believe Orbis is 50% more powerful than Durango. It can't be stressed enough, FLOPs are not telling the whole story.

For comparing GPUs based on same architecture from same generation, FLOPs numbers may be the all the story we need, just saying.
 

ghst

thanks for the laugh
FLOPS from the same vendor, same general architecture, similar CPU setup...

Sorry, I have a hard time believing it ISN'T an apples to apples comparison when one GPU has 50% more FLOP performance. Sure, they're not EVERYTHING, but they're a good indication of performance particularly if it's from the same family of parts.

Going to have to be a lot of sauce turn that deficit around.

it's more than just FLOPs, as i explained in my last post, it's like each witness separately tells a new part of the same corroborating story.
 

Ashes

Banned
ps4 will offer BC, just not for the console you were expecting!

Don Matrick taps Kazuo Hirai on the shoulder.

Anyways, talking about Xbox heads, did you guys see this?

Microsoft taps Krikorian to help run its Xbox business


(Reuters) - Microsoft Corp said on Thursday it hired technology entrepreneur Blake Krikorian to help run its Interactive Entertainment Business as the world's largest software company plans bigger things for its Xbox gaming console.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/10/us-microsoft-xbox-krikorian-idUSBRE90910320130110

Not at all surprising really.
 

thuway

Member
FLOPS from the same vendor, same general architecture, similar CPU setup...

Sorry, I have a hard time believing it ISN'T an apples to apples comparison when one GPU has 50% more FLOP performance. Sure, they're not EVERYTHING, but they're a good indication of performance particularly if it's from the same family of parts.

Going to have to be a lot of sauce turn that deficit around.

The extra silicon on the next Xbox will be dedicated to freeing up resources for the GPU. You can expect things like MSAA, certain situations in lighting, AO, etc. to be completely free. I've heard rumors that the machine is designed to where exploiting 100% of the hardware will be very simple. Something I have not heard on Orbis. Than again, I never heard of any such Orbis special sauce either.

Sony on the other hand is using a brute force method. I have zero idea which will win, and if any one is a dev on this board or programmer, we want to hear what you have to say.

Microsoft's specs on paper suggest a smaller profile, thinner unit, and a lighter BoM. This is certain.
 
FLOPS from the same vendor, same general architecture, similar CPU setup...

Sorry, I have a hard time believing it ISN'T an apples to apples comparison when one GPU has 50% more FLOP performance. Sure, they're not EVERYTHING, but they're a good indication of performance particularly if it's from the same family of parts.

Going to have to be a lot of sauce to turn that deficit around.
As far as Im concerned, we are missing more than half picture of each system. You can keep thinking you already have the whole picture and be likely proven wrong or you can wait and see.
 

Ashes

Banned
As far as Im concerned, we are missing more than half picture of each system. You can keep thinking you already have the whole picture and be likely proven wrong or you can wait and see.

Less than half I'd say. We don't even know what the controllers look like.
 
Is DDR5 going to allow everything to be super quick on the system? Like super efficient GameCube like boot times, getting to trophy information super quick, no menu lag etc.?
 

zon

Member
Does anyone have an idea of what the manufacturing costs might look like for the Orbis? I'm curious about what kind of price we'll be looking at when it releases.
 

ghst

thanks for the laugh
The extra silicon on the next Xbox will be dedicated to freeing up resources for the GPU. You can expect things like MSAA, certain situations in lighting, AO, etc. to be completely free. Also I've hear rumors that the machine is designed to where exploiting 100% of the hardware will be very simple.

this was all supposed to be true on the 360, too. the result being that while 2xmsaa was effectively free, games like halo 3 had to be dialled back to 640p due to limited bandwidth. there's always someone who needs to be paid.

it doesn't how fast you can render an image if your memory can only let 100 GB/s chunks through at a time.
 
The extra silicon on the next Xbox will be dedicated to freeing up resources for the GPU. You can expect things like MSAA, certain situations in lighting, AO, etc. to be completely free. Also I've hear rumors that the machine is designed to where exploiting 100% of the hardware will be very simple. Something I have not heard on Orbis. Than again, I never heard of any such Orbis special sauce either.

Right, because making the hardware design more complex by adding hardware for special tasks will make development easier. And btw, Orbis has a dedicated compute unit for additional tasks. Did your sources did tell you that, too? I must bookmark some of those posts here, will be interesting to see who will be right in the end.

Is DDR5 going to allow everything to be super quick on the system? Like super efficient GameCube like boot times, getting to trophy information super quick, no menu lag etc.?

The system will certainly be a lot faster/more responsive than the PS3, but generally this is more an issue of mass storage access time.
 

James Sawyer Ford

Gold Member
The extra silicon on the next Xbox will be dedicated to freeing up resources for the GPU. You can expect things like MSAA, certain situations in lighting, AO, etc. to be completely free. I've heard rumors that the machine is designed to where exploiting 100% of the hardware will be very simple. Something I have not heard on Orbis. Than again, I never heard of any such Orbis special sauce either.

Sony on the other hand is using a brute force method. I have zero idea which will win, and if any one is a dev on this board or programmer, we want to hear what you have to say.

Microsoft's specs on paper suggest a smaller profile, thinner unit, and a lighter BoM. This is certain.

GPUs are already very specific in their architecture. We heard a lot about "free AA" with eDRAM last gen, but that never materialized.

I have no doubt Microsoft (and Sony for that matter) have extra hardware blocks that help out with even more specific tasks (DSPs, audio/video chips, GPGPU compute units, etc).

But please don't kid yourself into thinking Sony's "brute force design" is something wildly inefficient in comparison. These chips are from the same architecture of GPUs and won't have anything magical in them that has yet to be placed on a GPU roadmap.
 
The extra silicon on the next Xbox will be dedicated to freeing up resources for the GPU. You can expect things like MSAA, certain situations in lighting, AO, etc. to be completely free. I've heard rumors that the machine is designed to where exploiting 100% of the hardware will be very simple. Something I have not heard on Orbis. Than again, I never heard of any such Orbis special sauce either.

There's no such thing as free MSAA. Free PPAA maybe, in which case congratulations on the FXAA, but MSAA requires literally rendering extra pixels. There is no extra bit of hardware that can do that without the GPU. And modern GPUs have MSAA specific hardware built in to do certain operations that CAN be sped up.
 

kpjolee

Member
The extra silicon on the next Xbox will be dedicated to freeing up resources for the GPU. You can expect things like MSAA, certain situations in lighting, AO, etc. to be completely free.

I think just beefing up the GPU is better, less complex, and more efficient way than putting extra dedicated processor for those tasks.
 

mrklaw

MrArseFace
MS is going after the Hardcore first and foremost. Make no mistake about that. They will have some surprises this E3 for sure.

I'd just like them to continue to go after the hardcore and not give up after a couple of years. Sure, if the machine sells well you can manage on third party only, but I enjoyed a lot of early first party games on 360 and would like to have see more of them.
 

James Sawyer Ford

Gold Member
I think just beefing up the GPU is better, less complex, and more efficient way than putting extra dedicated processor for those tasks.

Especially if it introduces a whole new set of limitations and bottlenecks by being extremely specific in nature. It's hard to predict what will be a "fixed cost" in rendering architecture, given how wildly different certain engines are.
 
I think just beefing up the GPU is better, less complex, and more efficient way than putting extra dedicated processor for those tasks.

You need to look all the components, you can´t design a console with the GPU raw power in mind. What happen if you put a GTX 680 and a Pentium 4 in a PC?

It is not something like "put all the power here".

Especially if it introduces a whole new set of limitations and bottlenecks by being extremely specific in nature. It's hard to predict what will be a "fixed cost" in rendering architecture, given how wildly different certain engines are.

You are thinking with a PC in you mind, a console is not a PC.
 
I might be wrong here but I thought both speed and amount wise durango > wiiu Ram by a mile. Isn't the wiiu ram like 1 GB for games?
I saw someone do a calculation on B3D.

Orbis: 3.5 GB for games, 192 GB/s; @30 fps => 6 GB data per frame; @60 fps => 3 GB data per frame
Durango: 5-7 GB for games, 68 GB/s; @30 fps => 2 GB data per frame; @60 fps => 1 GB data per frame
Wii U: 1 GB for games, 12 GB/s; @30 fps => 0.4 GB data per frame; @60 fps => 0.2 GB data per frame

Perhaps only 68 GB/s would be a bottleneck relative to the 192 GB/s mooted for Orbis. But I don't think it's comparable to the dearth in bandwidth that the Wii U has relative to both... is it?

And in terms of amount the gulf is undeniable.
 

ghst

thanks for the laugh
I think just beefing up the GPU is better, less complex, and more efficient way than putting extra dedicated processor for those tasks.

beefing up the GPU would require increasing the memory bandwidth.

increasing the memory bandwidth means converting to GDDR5.

converting to GDDR5 means scaling down the amount of RAM.

scaling down the amount of RAM means smaller OS footprint.

a smaller OS footprint means compromising the core aim of the console.

alternative solution: split memory pools, 8970Ms and five-hundred-and-ninety-nine US dollars.
 
Am I the only one who get the feeling that people hear way more about Durango than Orbis, in general?

If you live in the West, yeah, likely. On one hand, the 360 did manage to get North American love even after PlayStation 2 broke records so it is possible, but it looks like MS nailed the marketing for Western culture and Sony seems to be doing pretty poorly in that regard lately.
 

Durante

Member
The extra silicon on the next Xbox will be dedicated to freeing up resources for the GPU. You can expect things like MSAA, certain situations in lighting, AO, etc. to be completely free. I've heard rumors that the machine is designed to where exploiting 100% of the hardware will be very simple. Something I have not heard on Orbis. Than again, I never heard of any such Orbis special sauce either.
"Completely free" MSAA/AO/lighting sounds like bullshit to me.
 

Razgreez

Member
Microsoft's development tools will be better. It's what Microsoft does best.

edit: @above: Yes.

Blanket definite statements like these often end up as egg on one's face. Based on recent (last decade) history it would make sense that ms tools should be better but the most recent example we have of development tools for a console is the Vita and it is generally accepted as being simple to develop for

"Completely free" MSAA/AO/lighting sounds like bullshit to me.

It is. AMD have been known (benchmarked) to take less of a knock using MSAA but only at the highest resolutions - which we might actually never get to with these consoles
 
You need to look all the components, you can´t design a console with the GPU raw power in mind. What happen if you put a GTX 680 and a Pentium 4 in a PC?

It is not something like "put all the power here".

What kind of example is this? A Pentium 4 with a GTX 680, seriously?? The CPU of both console is a lot more powerful than that, and when you reach a certain point with CPU power, you don't necessarily need that much more to provide nice graphics.

You are thinking with a PC in you mind, a console is not a PC.

No, he thinks with countless different companies in mind, which are using countless different graphics engines.
 

jaosobno

Member
Is DDR5 going to allow everything to be super quick on the system? Like super efficient GameCube like boot times, getting to trophy information super quick, no menu lag etc.?

If PS4 combines 192 GB/s GDDR5 with some sort of small on board flash (8-16GB) for OS functions and essential apps, jumping to OS or checking out trophies should work very fast. Dedicated core will probably refresh your trophy info in the background so it should be available immediately (without having to wait for the sync).
 

ghst

thanks for the laugh
"Completely free" MSAA/AO/lighting sounds like bullshit to me.

any way you could give estimates for data per frame in a demanding modern PC title maxed out at 1080p with 8xMSAA/16AF?

something like a high density environment in Far Cry 3.
 

mrklaw

MrArseFace
Well reasoned. And ofc it fits both companies. For MS Xbox is a risky sideline, it needs to prove its worth and also help the rest of the company.

Meanwhile Sony are the more traditional and experienced player.
Also off only one has the big tech to expand beyond games.

However Sony took an interest in the cloud, maybe a lot of that stuff just won't be on spec?

Sony make TVs, bluray players and recently google TV boxes. They own a movie studio. Arguably (assuming they talk internally which is a big if) they have lots of knowledge and experience in playing for the living room.

If MS really do to all out and do deals with AT&T and FIOS etc, that limits their market in the US due to potential exclusivity, and more importantly in the rest of the world where the broadcast ecosystem is completely different (and very fragmented)

I'm curious what they come up with, and semi-confident that us in the UK would at least get something out of it, but it is a big risk. Maybe they are tying to head off a potential apple or google play for the living room before its all sewn up

God knows somebody needs to shake things up, I just don't see why it'd come from a games console. At model will be heavily reliant on IPTV which Sony (and everyone else) would be able to copy quickly on smart TV and bluray players, and won't all service providers want to be horizontal?
 

kpjolee

Member
You need to look all the components, you can´t design a console with the GPU raw power in mind. What happen if you put a GTX 680 and a Pentium 4 in a PC?

It is not something like "put all the power here".

I am not talking about "put all the power to the GPU", but it would be much better approach to have more powerful GPU instead of putting dedicated hardware for perform those specific tasks thuway has mentioned.
GPU already does those functions well in spades, so why put extra processor to perform those tasks? That is like designing a console like back in SNES days, like it had all those task-specific processors doing all different stuff.
 

Durante

Member
any way you could give estimates for data per frame in a demanding modern PC title maxed out at 1080p with 8xMSAA/16AF?

something like a high density environment in Far Cry 3.
No, I didn't create these games.

However, I'm happy that it looks like we'll finally get decent AF in console games with PS4.


It is. AMD have been known (benchmarked) to take less of a knock using MSAA but only at the highest resolutions - which we might actually never get to with these consoles
"Less of a knock" is a fair expectation, but a very different one from "completely free".
 
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