I'm not asking you which games they are, but do you know for real or are you just speculating?
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VGLeaks Durango specs: x64 8-core CPU @1.6GHz, 8GB DDR3 + 32MB ESRAM, 50GB 6x BD...
- Thread starter Shikoro
- Start date
I'm not asking you which games they are, but do you know for real or are you just speculating?
Baconsammy
Banned
Yep. The goal is to make money. Not to win the I'm-more-powerful-than-you race. Nintendo showed that this gen. Where they failed is that you never want to exit one generation limping. If MS is successful with whatever approach they've chosen, power is insignificant ultimately. If their goal, however, is to hype some media/DVR interface mechanism, they can't afford to fall on their face as hard as TVii did. If it's one of their main focuses, it better be a I-gotta-have-that-shit thing. Otherwise you've sacrificed power for something very few people want.
MS doesn't want to control the living room, they want to control attention. If Orbis commands more attention than Durango, thats more ad space & money going to Sony than Microsoft.
-ImaginaryInsider
Member
There is obviously more to the design or they wouldn't have made the poll with the different aspects. I'm sure they are desperate for hits, but I doubt even gaming journalism would try to pass off vanilla GCN features as a full fledged leak.
Also even the leaked Battlefield 4 info draws no performance/feature difference between both next gen consoles.
So in their tech presentations they can say 'hey, we compress this and compress that, to give greater efficiency blah blah' and just generally point out every little thing that GCN already does but might not be well known, but can be used as a performance bullet point?
But that wouldn't make any sense as the developers already know these stuff so pointing it out to them would achieve nothing.
phosphor112
Banned
Well.. It's all about PR I guess. "We have this thing" you know?
SlickShoesRUCrazy
Member
I want to throw out there that there is a strong possibility that we raw going to be seeing multiple devices with the Xbox moniker on it, at least that is what Paul Thurrot says on many podcast and seems to want to say more, but can't.
Before anybody jumps to conclusions, if there is multiple devices coming, we have no idea what any of these things pertain to.
Before anybody jumps to conclusions, if there is multiple devices coming, we have no idea what any of these things pertain to.
You don't PR developers and besides I don't think that's what they are trying to achieve.
My guess would be that these diagrams are made by the staffs of VGLeaks themselves as some of them, including the earlier Orbis and Durango stuff, are not correct.
But yea, I agree with you.
Some developers might not? Maybe this is meant more for tech press? Maybe they weren't exposed fully in directX or exploited and MS want to highlight them? maybe they want to illustrate how closely couoled they are to the esram for bandwidth advantages? I don't know, just speculating.
If rumors about only 16ROPs are true then i see why they didn't care about better Ram bandwidth.
It just fits so well.
It's design choice they choose Kinect as their main future and they couldn't get better hardware because console would be to expansive in comparition to ps4.
They just do what Nintendo did with Wii and WiiU and that is valid strategy for making profit.
It just fits so well.
It's design choice they choose Kinect as their main future and they couldn't get better hardware because console would be to expansive in comparition to ps4.
They just do what Nintendo did with Wii and WiiU and that is valid strategy for making profit.
Baconsammy
Banned
Betting on "lightning in a bottle" isn't a valid business strategy. If they cede the "core" gaming experience back to Sony in America, they might as well not even release a game console. Just release a multimedia box and be done with it. I doubt Kinect is the main focus other than being a part of the system that all games must have support for (voice support etc the basics). I think Microsoft is smart enough to know that they destroyed Sony in America by appealing to the core. To ignore that is certain death for them. But then again, they're the company that released the Kin line of phones against the iPhone.
I think it's the other way around; MS chose 8GB of DDR3 and hence chose 16 ROPs.
Welcome to PR tactics where you can sell someone something which he already have.
-ImaginaryInsider
Member
Tunafish on B3D eluded to that possibility, given the weirdness of the diagram.
Btw: SuperDAE did it again and sent Documents about Durango to Kotaku. So expect some news on Kotaku as well.
Good
These would be changes from Xenos so might be noteworthy. If you're talking about how ROPs no longer reside on eDRAM/eSRAM it would make sense to note that by way of compensation they now use depth/color compression, and to detail the data formats supported etc.
it might be a mentality of 'good enough'. Good enough to give a good looking halo, gears, fable etc. They might be banking on the fact that franchises like Halo having a really strong following in markets like NA.
SlickShoesRUCrazy
Member
The halo brand is not as strong as it was 6 years ago.
Baconsammy
Banned
IMO 360 succeeded because it had some of the best exclusives, but mainly it succeeded because it's the best choice for third party titles. If they lose that, they lose America. IMO obviously.
The casual market is not a market I'd ever want to bank on.
What's the evidence of that? It sold more copies out of the gate than any other Halo. And the limited edition version of the console is still selling for 100 dollars over MSRP.
Many things changed since premiere of X360. They see mobile market growing and they want to show something that will say "I am different to your phone game" If their new improved Kinect always works this may be big thing to casual people.
Even if they scaled back hardware Sony will have more problems because of that. Games are scaled back to lowest dominator and for casual people 30 or 60 fps doesn't matter and someting like vsync and aa is not a concern.
So Microsoft will have console on which games will be almost the same (for casual people) and will do more for almost the same price.
Perhaps - but it's still second only to mario and pokemon when it comes to first party exclusive franchises.
True. I remember reading a thread here on how the online portion has gone down in activity compared to past Halo games. Maybe the exclusive deals they have with third parties might be some huge ones or something. Tbh I have no idea
True and I think the wiiu is a good example of that. I remember with x360 from the get go it was all about the core crowd. It was amazing. I felt they lost touch with that towards the later years. I was hoping for a return to the good ole days with the next system but I'm starting to worry. Hopefully everyone here (because I personally have no clue about these tech stuff, it's just fun to read) is not seeing the whole picture and tomorrow we will get more (and hopefully better info) on the hardware
Number of people still playing online is far less than previous Halo games IIRC.
REMEMBER CITADEL
Banned
Things that people are seeing here and elsewhere on GAF are colored by their expectations, and for some reason many of them believe that the next Xbox is going to be a media box with barely any focus on core gaming. Why? In part it's due to a misinterpretation of Microsoft's late gen strategy which is perfectly normal, reasonable and expected. It signifies nothing but a desire to broaden the appeal of the Xbox brand - not to exchange one market segment for the other (because it makes absolutely no business sense to give up on the segment you already have in your pocket, and companies do like money), but to add others to it. Of course, in part it's also due to fear, uncertainty and doubt spread by immature people who would like nothing more but to see the company they don't like go down and their platform holder of choice go up. Wishful thinking is omnipresent in all next gen threads, including this one, and on all sides.
Meanwhile, everything we actually know about the next Xbox points to it not being a low end machine focused solely on entertainment and casuals. Microsoft's recent investments in new game development studios and core franchises tell us that, relatively beefy specs that have been leaked tell us that, and most importantly, developers claiming that Orbis and Durango would both be powerful machines of similar performance tell us that (even the latest Edge insider rumors corroborate the PS3-360-like parity, even though the title of that thread suggests something else).
So yes, there's plenty to learn still, but the speculation and the drama you can often find in these next gen threads is really exorbitant.
I would say MS owes their superiority in the US to their superior (if only marginally) multiplats over the PS3. If they give that up, I don't see MS keeping the core gamers they gained with the 360, unless their business plan is something we haven't thought of.
if you want to broaden but still include existing segments, IMO you shouldnt' ramp down first party investment to quite the extent that MS did.
And the technical information we currently have shows a notable difference in power which either suggests a focus on cost effective hardware or a focus on things other than pure gaming.
nelsonroyale
Member
Seems to it is almost a mechanistic vs qualitative argument.... Some people are trying to compare evidence based on the little we know about the actual technical specs, others, such as going by selective interpretations of pieces of hear say. Boring as it may seem, comparisons really are useless until we have comparable info. Can't say one is more powerful clearly at the moment, can't say there is parity either.
I think it's because they had headstart and they hit with few exclusives that really changed gaming market like Gears of War on other hand Sony struggled to get third party support and GT was not yet released.
When a lot people had x360 in their homes their friends started to buy same console to play together and this just rolled like that.
When 8 of your friends have ms console and only one ps3 then you will buy x360.
Biggest reason is that MS got all mayor games and when Sony finally started delivering quality exclusives it was to late to change anything.
Superiority had little to do if anything at all.
REMEMBER CITADEL
Banned
Microsoft has a different strategy than Sony when it comes to first party studios, I already talked about that earlier in the thread. The bottom line is, they stopped investing in new core properties a couple of years ago (just retail, mind you, there's still plenty of them on XBLA, including some experiments that will inform their next gen strategy when it comes to things like f2p games, asynchronous gameplay an so on) because the tail end of the generation is not the time to do that (yes, I know, Sony does that and that's fantastic, I think games like Puppeteer and The Last of Us look great, but that doesn't change the fact that it's not what publishers usually do), because their core segment is already there and well served both by third parties and their own popular franchises, and because they've started ramping up for the start of the next generation.
First of all, a 50% or so of difference in theoretical peak performance that our current knowledge suggests does not translate into a significant real-life difference. The difference between Xbox 360 and PS3 was even more pronounced on paper, you really need something like 2-3 times more powerful hardware to make a plainly noticeable improvement. For instance, Wii U is definitely more powerful than both PS3 and Xbox 360 (overall, even though it lags behind in certain regards), but it doesn't really show.
But far more importantly, the technical information we have is incomplete. The technical information the developers and trusted insiders have is more complete (although still not final) and better understood, and they tell a different story.
I don't think Sony struggled with 3rd party support, just those early PS3 multi plats weren't as good as their 360 counterparts. If anything, it was MS who made gains by getting DMC, GTA, & FF day and date in the US.
90TilInfinity
Member
In America no doubt. Worldwide though Gran Turismo is probably stronger, and Halo 4's numbers are comparable to Uncharted 3 & God of War III. Though Halo did release alongside CoD, so it did really well considering.
REMEMBER CITADEL
Banned
I agree that Microsoft scored a bigger coup by wrestling away those traditional console franchises away from Sony (and MGS, Ace Combat and many others), but Sony has profited as well. Unlike last gen, BioWare is not tied just to Microsoft anymore, Team Ninja, as devalued as it is, is not tied just to Microsoft anymore, Bethesda is not tied just to Microsoft anymore (come to think of it, it practically is, unfortunately), and so on. Of course, the biggest loss for Microsoft was Bungie.
This would probably be the case if both systems were based on completly different architectures, like this gen. However, both next-gen systems aren't so different any more and both are probably rather easy to develop for.
I'd be careful with such predictions. Next thing you'll say is that there will be hyperrealistic graphics and 240FPS.
REMEMBER CITADEL
Banned
That's not necessarily the case, the info we have is rather sketchy and contradictory, and there are suggestions that they're quite different under the hood (of course, the memory subsystems are completely different), although some components that they use appear to be similar (and I'd say that even if the architectures were entirely identical, 50% on paper still wouldn't translate into a big real-life difference, diminished returns and all). And I have to repeat, the developers know the whole deal and they're well aware of the intricacies of both systems. What little developer feedback has reached us suggests that we're talking about the same ballpark.
iamshadowlark
Banned
1) The gap between the final PS3 and final 360 was lower than these current rumored machines.
2) PS3 is generally scarce with BW, which killed its overall efficiency. It was extremely hard to utilize that power. It required some memory juggling that most developers didn't put in time for, those that did namely first parties were able to produce fantastic results despite this.
The overall point is, that you can't brush aside a 50% power difference(if true) because of what may or may not have happened this past generation. From system to system it is a case by case basis, with some fundamental concepts.
Kill Your Masters
Member
Of course you can't but we don't have the whole picture yet. Before we get final specs it's just all speculation.
We have reports that mention a "slightly more powerful PS4", and then we have the 50% gap when looking at current leaked specs. This is what confuses me, as 50% does not really equal "slightly more powerful".
FatalMuzza
Banned
There's talk that the xbox720 GPU is not an AMD part at all. Instead it may be PowerVR. If this is indeed true, these GPU's operate on completely different architectures, and flops measures are no longer apples and apples.
REMEMBER CITADEL
Banned
No. When it comes to FLOPS, the CPU was around 100% more powerful in PS3's case, while the GPUs were roughly comparable (on paper, in reality Xenos was far more advanced), with Xenos having a slight advantage according to Microsoft's figures, and being even weaker according to some other suggestions made at the time. That's more than the rumored floating point processing power difference we have here.
It wasn't just the bandwidth, it's far more complicated than that. The CPUs were incomparable, the GPUs didn't really belong to the same generations, they had different memory organization and so on. We'll see how close or far apart Durango and Orbis are in terms of architecture when we get (a lot) more data.
1st Course
Member
It just seem like there are no AAA third pary exclusives anymore. next gen probably will be all about first party efforts + entertainment ecosystem.