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EricHiggin on 20 June 2019
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Bofferbrauer2 said:
EricHiggin said:

A 2018 or 2019 'XB2' would have been extremely tough to get a decent SSD in there in terms of speed and size, along with PCIe 4.0 or whatever recent/future tech they're using to achieve these loading speeds they are promising. Not to mention it would also almost certainly lack ray tracing. You can imagine PS would probably try to move up their schedule a bit in a 2018 scenario, but they could wait a year if it was launched in 2019 instead. PS having a bigger, faster storage solution, PCIe 4.0, and ray tracing, would be a marketing nuke against MS. The cost for XB to try and come close to the tech and specs PS5 would have, would cost way more than $500 if launched by now or soon. It could have led to another Dreamcast scenario.

I agree on 2018, but 2019 could have been possible. The main difference probably would have been the version of Navi GPU(without hardware Raytracing in a 2019 case) and Ryzen CPU(Zen 2 instead of potentially Zen 3).

PCIe 4.0 is certainly not used in a console yet (too expensive and consuming, and doubly so for hardware which supports it), the SSD might potentially be smaller (we have to see if PS5/Scarlett really use an SSD as storage or just as a buffer for the HDD) - and it would have been more expensive.

In other words, no Dreamcast scenario - more like a mix of 360 (launching one year early, giving itself a head start) and XBO (somewhat underpowered compared to the competition, but not excessively so).

Sure the hardware launching this year could have been as up to date as possible, but how expensive do you think that would be for MS and how much would they be willing to subsidize it? Would MS have paid to put Ryzen on 7nm, because if they didn't it would consume considerably more power at 14nm. Would they pay to have Navi put on 14nm? If the console performance was considered high at 14nm, that means a bigger PSU, bigger or more expensive cooling, larger console shell, etc. It wouldn't have been all that much different than the PS3 engineering and manufacturing cost as well as subsidy to try and get it to $500 by now. If they charged anymore than that, or lost the performance crown by a significant amount again due to lower input costs and lack of subsidy, it would have been Dreamcast for them.