Major Nelson on X1 Power: "I can't wait for the truth to come out."

[Shinobi-san]

Machiavellian said:

Shinobi-san said:

Machiavellian said:

Shinobi-san said:
30-50% is NOT a huge performance difference.

But you cant deny that that difference is real and that it does exist. Its as clear as fucking day.

MS can talk themselves blue in the face about how well there software does but at the end of the day that gap is there.

Whether or not this relates into anything tangible to the consumer is completely up to the devs.

Its clear on paper but if you are not coding against both platforms you really do not know exactly how much real world difference it is.  I am not sure if how MS designed the X1 that the memory advange will give Sony an edge.  What it does mean is that coding for the X1 compared to the PS4 will be different. GDDR has the latency so it will be interesting how that will be negated.  MS has a more complex memory setup but not all game code need that kind of bandwidth so more efficient code to use the ESRAM will be required but who knows it might all equal out in the end.  I am not sure if having more CUs will be a huge advantage over MS custom co-processors.  We might find that for gaming, MS offloading a lot of stuff to their co-processors frees up the GPU enough to maintain close performance with the PS4.  

On paper, the PS3 smoked the 360 but in reality it was a lot closer and both systems had strengths and weakness to pretty much balance out the games.  Right now the difference we see for the systems is in the GPU numbers which may or may not play as big a role as people are stating in the forums and the memory setups.

There is a lot going on in the X1 setup so making a definitive statement that one system is stronger than another probalby will no be clear until developers under NDAs start to give their opinion on programming on both systems.

Theres quite a big difference though in the GPU's...

Offloading a few tasks to co-processors wont offset that. The PS4 also has multiple co-processors (not as much it seems given the info we have) which it offloads audio processing and video compression etc.

I mean theres a reason why these systems have such weak CPU's. They are almost fully reliant on the GPU's. And when we do compare GPU's the Xbox One's falls short.

And also just remember when speaking about the memory....if GDDR5 memory was as cheap as DDR3, then MS would have gone with GDDR5 memory. No arguments about that. Thats why Sony made a big deal about it at their conference. That's why high end GPU's use GDDR5 ram...ESRAM is a workaround. A good workaround but its a workaround. I feel like people forget this. The latency difference is there, but given the context we talking about, this isnt really an issue.

And really the PS3/360 comparison is completely different. They have very differenct architectures, very different technologies etc. Now we actually have comparable systems and everybodies acting like we cant compare them like for like? Whatsup with that :?

And the whole NDA stuff...im not sure exactly what you refering to? The supposed dgpu? If you are talking about that then thats a completely difference case though. The way Alberts is talking though..it doesnt seem like Xbone will have the raw performance advantage.

Yes, the difference in the GPUs are big but thats the point I raise.  MS has about 6 co-processors they are not talking about.  Without knowing what these processors do, who knows how much offloading of graphics can be done on the X1 to releave the GPU and even the CPU from their task.

The problem with only comparing the GPU and not the entire system is that people who are not coding to both platforms do not know if other parts of the hardware play a role or not.  Co-processors are ways for custom designs to offload that processing from the CPU and GPU.  This is why its not evident yet eactly how this might play out.  MS might have felt its more efficient to offload specific intensive processing to specialize hardware.

As for memory, it wasn't the expense of the memory but the timing.  MS designed their system for 8GB way before 8GB of GDDR5 was possible to fit within the console.  Do not forget that Sony was rumored to be supplying 4Gb before Samsung was able to produce 512mb chips which allowed Sony to increase the memory to 8.  MS already designed their system for 8GB and needed ESRAM to fill in the bandwidth part.  Since this was already done, there was no changing the system once 8GB of GDDR5 was possible.  The latency part will come into play for anything that cannot be offloaded to the CU.  Since the CPUs are weak anyway, the latency can become a problem if there is to much CPU task that require lower latency than bandwidth.

The NDA stuff is concernign the rumor that is going around the dGPU.  I was only mentioning it because people kept saying that MS would be telling the world they had this chip but the rumor already covered why this was not happening.

As for what Albert is talking about, he is stating that raw physical numbers (mainly the GPU) does not tell the who picture.  There are other parts within the X1 that make up the difference.  Only way we will see that is in the games.

@bolded: Fair point. I didnt really think of it that way.

Although i cant see co-processors making that much of a difference(just opinion/hunch). I mean calling it a co-processor isnt actually telling us much. But we all know that GPU's are the best components for graphics, effects etc. So in that sense, Xbone is limited to it's GPU theoretical power for certain GPU specific tasks. So is the PS4, and il say it again that the PS4 also has co-processors. We just dont know how many it has.Cerny spoke a lot about offloading tasks as well...freeing up CPU and GPU resources.

I dont see either system offloading GPU specific tasks to the co-processors but more CPU tasks to assist the weak CPU.

My point about the memory though was that if MS could have gone with GDDR5 and cost was not an issue or if there were no issues at all. They would have gone with it.

I think theres a bit of PR spin to what Albert is saying to be honest...i dont see how they can close a .5 tfl gap in performance with a few co-processors. At the end of the day these arent fully fledged GPU cores, or CPU cores as far as i understand. If they are then its another story but as far as i know they not. And apart from PR spin i think MS is just explaining how they are making their console more efficient, explaining the design decisions etc. It's not like MS went and added co-processors just to compete with Sony. If MS wanted a more beefier GPU they would have added it in. Raw computation performance just didnt seem to be the gameplan really.