Albert Penello downplays XBO/PS4 difference in Tomb Raider; "we just shipped"

[freedquaker]

UltimateUnknown said:

Shinobi-san said:
Jesus MS. Why not just stand by your design decisions?

You went for an inferior gpu to get to the $500 pricepoint with Kinect included. Thats quite a feat in itself...why still try and make as if everything else is equal when they not?

The PS4 doesn't come shipped with a Kinect. Just like a X1 doesn't come shipped with 8GB of GDDR5 ram and 18 GCN compute units. Its that fucking simple. Your design decisions. At least have the balls to stick by them and not try and act as if its something different. You end up coming across as idiots and douchebags.

This is exactly what I've been trying to say along. MS held back on the overall specs of the box so that they could pack Kinect in. It was MS's choice. Sony decided to forego peripherals to make their box cheaper and more powerful. It was Sony's choice.

Sony has been sticking up for the choices that they've made and trying to sell their boxes with those merits.

MS on the other hand aren't sticking up for their choice of shipping kinect with the box and haven't been trying to sell why that Kinect makes them better. It just makes it look like they did something wrong when they themselves don't seem to have faith in their own product.

You guys' point of view is straightforward but faulty nonetheless. The bill of materials in several occasions show that XB1, even without the Kinect costs pretty much the same as PS4 to manufacture. So choosing an inferior architecture was not because of cost issues. It was because

a) Simply pure designing decisions. MS does not know how to design sophisticated machines. Original Xbox was nothing but a PC as well (with a custom Celeron-Pentium III CPU). X360 also used the simplest and cheapest design possible.

b) XB1 costs pretty much the same but still much more inferior because MS just scaled up their X360 design. Ever since original XB, they have been using Regular Unified RAM + Tiny Fast RAM. This worked with Xbox and X360, but Esram solutions did not improve enough, and they were able to fit a measly 32 MB, which left no room for an advanced GPU as in PS4.

c) They never thought of putting a GDR5 because they thought it would be prohibitively expensive and the yields would be terrible. They were wrong! They necessarily wanted 8 GB because of their MEDIA CENTER ambitions (3 OSes simultaneously running). So they couldn't even take a GDR5 gamble. Sony was fine with 4 GB GDR5, so they took that gamble and won.

Finally, because of poor design decisions, they ended up with an inferior and more expensive console.