I clarified any confusion during our Fable 3 discussion, but you kept pressing. Give it a rest, I generally expect better from the mods. It wasn't even a discussion to win.

Half Life 2 on Xbox didn't run fine, but it certainly ran. Performance was the worst aspect of that port and makes it a difficult version to revisit.

You missed the point in regard to RAM. While 5GB certainly is not a ton of RAM for games, but the RAM requirements for PC gaming stayed relatively stagnant. Hence, modern games haven't seem to hit a wall due to struggling with RAM limitations like previous gens did. Even the Switch is doing impressive games like Witcher 3 with even less RAM, albeit struggling with textures.

I don't feel the disparity in specs between base X1 and X1X are significant enough. Therefore anything that could be developed to take full advantage of the X1X at 1080p/30 fps, should be able to scale back relatively easily for a base X1 if they mostly scale back GPU heavy effects. It seems like almost most 8th gen games can work on Switch because the specs disparity just isn't big enough, even if there are minor compromises. The example you gave for Wolfenstein 2 on Switch is mostly aesthetic and was likely done to boost performance. Anyhow, we all know the X1X's primary focus was making X1 games look and play better, which at the very least it certainly does that. Sometimes the disparity is so big it seems like the games were developed for X1X specs, Soul Calibur VI for example looks bad and loads horribly on base hardware.

Open world games were pretty common last gen as well. The big difference this gen is more online open world stuff. I imagine RAM was helpful for that but they still existed on last gen.

Well there isn't much a debate to have on Ashes of Singularity, maybe its complex AI is incredibly demanding, maybe its an optimization issue. I do see video of a FX-6300 running the game relatively poorly, but it runs. I mention that because that CPU in practice seems to give similar performance to consoles.

Oh lord... let me elaborate. I feel the Jaguar CPUs in the current consoles have shown great potential. For example, I'm playing Gears 4 (Gears 5 soon), Forza Horizon 4 and other titles that stick relatively close or stay at 60 fps. There are also games that did a good job hitting 60 fps on base hardware like Forza, GT, MGS, Halo, BF, CoD (some better than others), etc. In my mind, that's pretty good for CPUs people call trash. Either way, I can't deny there is CPU bottleneck in many games that make hitting 60 fps impossible. However, GPU was also limited for high quality visuals/effects, high resolutions (900p-1080p) and 60 fps at the same time.

People often say it was the CPU that was too limited in the 8th gen, but GPU was also a culprit. Because even when CPU bottleneck wasn't a primary issue for 60 fps, it still takes a lot of GPU power to achieve 60 fps with high visual fidelity. Limited GPU power is why dynamic resolution is common in 60 fps games.

In the next gen however, we seem to agree bottleneck on CPU shouldn't be an issue for 60 fps. Also, resolution at 1440p-4K will become even more common. Essentially the compromises needed for 60 fps become less work. For example, the X1X offers more 60 fps content because it has a little extra CPU power and they can drop the resolution (and effects) to reduce GPU bottleneck. Hence, less work to hit 60 fps means more games should (WILL) offer it.

Personally, I was happy with a lot of the experiences that the Espresso CPU in the Wii U managed to deliver, but I still won't dispute that it was still, objectively speaking, a terribly weak CPU for a home console releasing in 2012.

The Wii U in general was not impressive hardware for 2012. I bought a Wii U for exclusives and they weren't technically much better than 360 or PS3.

I'm not defending the Jaguar CPUs because its running games I enjoy. I'm just pointing out in practice Jaguar CPUs were used for impressive content and achieved 60 fps more often than given credit for.

People also say 8th gen consoles had good GPUs but very dated CPUs. Essentially they were unbalanced, but I disagree on that as well. The best looking games on that hardware were generally 30 fps, primarily because that's frame rate those GPUs could handle with that visual fidelity and the Jaguar CPUs were perfectly suited for that. However, those same CPUs could produce 60 fps games if that was the focus.

A lot of Wii U games were 60fps as well, because those games were tailored to the capabilities of Espresso, just as games made on PS4 and Xbone were tailored to the capabilities of the Jags. Doesn't change the fact that the CPUs in all 3 consoles are objectively weak.

definitely not, even Nintendo dropped BOTW on the wiiu and there was only about 15m of those things sold, If MS skipped the X1 with Halo 6 then that would be 43million of the hardcore MS Xbox fans that would feel somewhat let down by the move.

There really is no reason not to put some form of a port of the game onto the X1 family of systems, especially with how many titles now use things like dynamic resolutions or checkerboarding so it should allow the game run easily on the X1X at the very least, hardware wise a 6TF machine should be fine running anything from next gen with a few cutbacks.

Now you are changing the tact of the discussion to step away from your prior fallacies...

It ran fine, not amazing, I have the game on the Original Xbox so I can see first hand.
It ran better than allot of other titles of the era like Morrowind that's for sure.

Back then it was okay to push titles out with framerates under 30... Heck, it wasn't exactly uncommon during the 7th generation either.

The Xbox 360 port fixed up allot of the deficiencies as expected.

Ram requirements have remained stagnant because hardware on that front has generally remained stagnant.

The sweet spot for Ram on PC is around 16Gb currently because of price/performance issues earlier on in the generation on PC which meant people weren't  upgrading their Ram as prolifically as they did prior... That will likely change as we transition into DDR5 memory over the next year or two.

That doesn't mean games can't use more Ram, it just doesn't generally happen.

GPU Ram requirements on the other hand have increased massively since the 8th gen consoles launched, we went from 1-2GB GPU's to 8GB-16GB... For some reason allot of people ignore those jumps on that front.

We don't know if the specifications of the Xbox One and Xbox One X are significant enough, how you feel is ultimately irrelevant to this point...

We have absolutely no information on the hardware demands that Halo: Infinite will bring or what cutbacks Microsoft had to make in order to make the game viable on inferior platforms.

We do have some information on some of the rendering effects being employed thanks to the trailers showcasing them, but that's about it.

I am not saying a port is impossible, clearly it is possible as it's actually happening. - My point of contention is what did they have to give up to get there?
Is it just resolution and framerate? Unlikely. Will they have to go back and re-engineer parts of the game to reduce the rendering load? Cutback of effects?

Player counts thanks to the CPU jump was one of the big enablers this gen, Battlefield for instance saw an increase in multiplayer counts per map.

Plus Physics.

Openworld is more common because less engineering needs to be dumped into making it possible... Last gen developers were getting cleaver with various approaches like implementing impostering, compressed texture and mesh streaming from disk, which the CPU would unpack... And so on just to fit everything into less than 512MB of memory.

The FX-6300 is faster than Jaguar anyway... And all AMD FX processors were generally crap anyway. - It's not an optimization issue... You really need to play the game and see the details they added into the complex A.I. - It's probably the best game to showcase what you can do on the A.I front when you have oodles of CPU time to play with.

Those titles achieve 60fps because they are fairly light on the CPU effects like Physics.
The games on PC are simply doing more... And as a result tend to use more CPU cycles.

But just because a game isn't hitting 60fps doesn't mean it's a CPU limitation, if you are GPU limited you won't hit 60fps either.

Now because I own Forza, Gears, Halo, Battlefield and Call of Duty... Many of which I played on base hardware and on my Xbox One X, I can say those games weren't doing much in the way utilizing the CPU's heavily... So Jaguar is of course not going to be a hindrance.

But what-if we had 10x more CPU power at our disposal? Those same games will still be 60fps, but we would have far better A.I, more physics, better scripting, more characters on screen, better positional audio... We wouldn't have needed Microsoft's original push to leverage the cloud for destruction for Crackdown 3 for example.

The CPU's are certainly trash, Jaguar was garbage even on it's original release on the PC, even it's predecessor Brazos was pretty average on release... Sprinkle half a decade on top of that and it hasn't done it any favors.

Scarlett is set to change all that in a big way of course... And for once I am actually excited that console manufacturers are taking CPU performance seriously for the first time in generations.

For the base Xbox One, GPU and memory bandwidth was a limiter from even it's launch day, many games ended up at 720P because of it.

Dynamic resolution is there to make full use of the limited GPU resources, but because you are GPU limited doesn't mean you aren't CPU limited either, it's being disingenuous to assert that only one can happen at a time or that one doesn't exist because you have 1080P/60fps.

Games generally just feel like a prettier version of the 7th gen, one of the reasons for that is because of the CPU side of the equation, things didn't take a massive leap, it was a more conservative jump on the performance scale... More so if you were coming from the Playstation 3.

CPU bottlenecks can exist even if you are at 60fps.

Console developers generally work within the constraints of what they have on a console... So developers make significant cutbacks in various areas... On PC those limitations tend to be removed and we can see what developers originally envisioned from some aspects... And the difference that a CPU makes can be rather large in a few key areas, some of which has been alluded prior in my post.

The Xbox One X can achieve 60fps more often because it has more bandwidth, more memory, more GPU performance... And yes, a slightly faster CPU... But you can't give all the thanks to the CPU, it's still a limitation.

Espresso was a more capable CPU than the Xbox 360 though, less than the Playstation 3, mostly thanks to the fact it wasn't an in-order design... But it was held back by clockrates.

But overall, it fit nicely in the 7th gen in terms of CPU capability. Nintendo typically emphasizes 60fps in it's titles anyway, so they work with what they have really well.

Indeed. The WiiU's hardware wasn't super impressive. - Many games when engineered with the WiiU's limitation in mind though did shine on the hardware... Mostly Nintendo exclusives.
But overall, if the console had more memory bandwidth it could have almost been an Xbox 360 Pro from a hardware perspective.

Eitherway... Games for Windows Live! Isn't a legitimate excuse. Just remove it (And patch all the older GFWL titles too) and sell more keys on Steam. Microsoft is just being lazy, they deserve the criticism on this front either way.

I fired it up not long ago, performance wise it's not something unexpected, it had semi-decent frame pacing so it still controlled okay... I mean if we were to look at Halo 3 that had terrible framerates and poor framepacing which meant the controls felt extremely floaty... But the game still played fine for that era, obviously it's a far better experience on the Xbox One, just like Half Life 2 was a far better experience on the Xbox 360.

Either way, I feel like this is side stepping my actual point... That improvements in hardware capability tends to open up the possibility of new gameplay mechanics... The original Xbox was a showcase for this... Shadowing and Lighting took big strides thanks to programmable pixel shaders... And a few games actually leveraged this, can you guess which?

The CPU was also the best of the generation which enabled games like Elder Scrolls Morrowind and Half Life 2 on console.

The PC tends to run with better, more expensive visuals, that's not free.
It's like comparing SSAO that many consoles games used which is lower quality, less memory and GPU intensive than HBAO... The PC's hardware does get used extensively you know.

Oblivion uses 512MB~ of memory on Xbox 360... When I re-engineered the shaders, polygon reduced allot of the assets, reduced texture resolution, I was running the game on only 128MB of memory on PC... Does that mean the Xbox 360 is less efficient? No. It's just pushing better visuals.

At one point though the PC was running a more memory intensive Operating System, especially with the advent of Vista, even when we shifted from the 9x to NT kernels... But since the 8th gen, that is no longer the case where the Xbox One and Playstation 4 reserve a few Gigabytes for OS/background duties.

Plus we have more and larger caches, it wasn't unheard of for graphics drivers at one point to duplicate the GPU's vram in system memory, Intel was notorious for this which became a significant issue when Aero came about... But over time the PC does get more efficient and it's no longer the case.

The PC is slightly less efficient, but not a generational difference. Again... Read above.

Keep in mind that PC games using 4GB in 2013 is being compared to games that would use 5-6GB on the 8th gen... But was probably still pushing out higher visuals. - That doesn't make consoles less efficient, it's just resources being used differently.

I am aware that the 7th gen had a lot of open world games, never said it didn't. - Heck the 6th gen had a heap of open world games, but it wasn't the norm like it was in the 8th gen, especially from outlets like Ubisoft.

Not really.

Just because Ashes of the Singularity... A PC exclusive that leverages all the CPU time you can throw at it tanks a low-end, last generation CPU, doesn't make the PC significantly less efficient, it's a different use of resources.

The FX 6300 is more than capable of playing the majority of multiplats just fine... Shit. I can run the vast majority of multiplats on a Core 2 Quad from 12 years ago... That's a 7th gen equivalent CPU. - Jaguar hasn't pushed up the CPU bar all that much in the last decade on the gaming front... It's simply a shit CPU.

Even Digital Foundry recognizes the limitations of AMD's Jaguar... So why don't you?

We will wait and see.

Although the gaming industry is extremely mature at this point... And big publishers don't like to make allot of gambles and would thus rather push out yearly releases from reliable franchises...

However, I would imagine there would be some experimentation that will happen on the Physics, Particle and A.I. side of the equation next gen, maybe something like Supreme Commander on console with actual decent A.I?

On the graphics side, because we don't know much about the Ray-Tracing implementation going on in next-gen, the CPU might be employed to assist in culling or some-such. - Can only speculate though.

Crackdown 3 was a colossal failure, the Xbox One just didn't have the hardware resources to achieve what their original advertised vision entailed.

Destruction isn't a new concept, Red Faction has been doing it for ages, Battlefield has been doing it for ages, it's a known quantity.

However the processing that goes into such a scheme is significant... And the scope that the original idea for crackdown 3's showcase meant that the cloud was a necessity because Jaguar was simply not up to the task.

Jaguar was the only option this generation. AMD was not in a good place on the CPU side of the fence... Which is a reversal to where they are now, where their GPU side is where they are dropping the proverbial ball.

But what improvements have we seen this generation over last generation on the CPU side? We are seeing larger multiplayer maps with more people, we are seeing more extensive use of physics based particle effects. - But considering how marginal the CPU improvement Jaguar brought to the gaming table over the 7th gen was, I think developers have done well with the hand they were dealt.

When consoles rely on PC technology and use only low-end and mid-range components, there is only so many options available I guess.

It will only assist loading if there is heavy scripting, unpacking, decompression and procedural generation and so on going on during the initial load phases.
The main limitation for load times is the last century optical and mechanical disks.

I absolutely agree... It seems it's been the path they are heading towards anyway... But considering I have every Xbox console and 500+ games, I wouldn't be against the idea, but I refuse to use the Windows Store... So I would prefer it to be a stand alone application.

The reverse could also happen where PC games operate on Xbox... We saw some hints towards that with the App side of the equation this generation, with even some emulators popping up on Xbox and some games implementing a store-front for mods and so on.

But that is also a double edged sword... It will mean there is less incentive to pick up an Xbox console... One of the reasons why I even bothered with Xbox was due to a couple of games like Halo and Fable.. They were day 1 purchases which made me jump on the Original Xbox... They did get PC releases later though, but by that point I was invested.
That meant the Xbox 360 and Xbox One were must-have purchases on day 1.

At this point though I have gaming devices for every area of the home, the Xbox One X in the lounge room for couch-gaming, Nintendo consoles in the bedroom for gaming in bed, PC and Playstations in the games room.

And a Ryzen notebook for gaming when away from home/traveling long distance... My platform of choice is of course the PC.

Side note: holy shit it is annoying as fuck trying to isolate just one passage in VGC's text editor and delete everything else; it should take me a matter of seconds, instead it takes minutes cos every time I try to delete just one paragraph the stupid thing automatically highlights everything above that and tries to make me delete it all.

Anywho, yeah, it's quite ironic that the the last time a Halo game launched an Xbox console, with the original game, it was very much a showcase for the capabilities of next gen hardware that simply couldn't have been replicated on the hardware of the prior gen. And I can't help but feel that a Combat Evolved that was multiplat with N64/PS1 tier hardware would not have been the classic it became as its signature sophisticated AI and huge levels just wouldn't have been possible. 

Would it though?

I just don't see the incentive for people to buy Xbox anymore. The Xbox One has been out for 5 years, and it's sold only 45 million. The OG Xbox was out for 4 years and sold only 24 million. The Xbox One is pushing into six years now, and has only sold just under double that? It's almost on par sales percentage wise. Especially considering nearly all of their exclusives are available on PC now... why would anyone really spend the money on a new Xbox when they can just play all of those games on a PC? Reasons I'm saying this is because all my friends that are into gaming are either playing on a PS4 & switch, just a PS4, or sold their consoles and built gaming rigs. Halo is a massive franchise, but it's been in decline since Bungie handed the reigns over to 343. I'm stoked for the new Halo and intrigued as always, but I really don't think it would be in anyones interest at Microsoft to make Halo a Scarlett exclusive. It would hurt their pockets way too much given how dismal their sales were this generation, and it would be a huge disservice to all of the people that bought Xbox's and have been waiting for 3 years for this game. I really don't think Scarlett will be big either. I see it as a stepping stone for their transition into game streaming. I truly believe Scarlett will be the last physical console that Microsoft puts out. They've proven unable to topple Sony, and they have a new competitor with a giant load of money and developer support behind them (Google).