Is 900p okay? Is Xbox One a worthy 8th gen console now?

[captain carot]

Pemalite said:

H3ADShOt3 said:

So then if making these consoles more powerfull than a pc when it first releases it will automaticly make it cost 700$/600$? How did mircosoft manage to make the 360 pretty much more powerful than a pc at the time for 400$ in 2005? My knowlage ain't huge on this but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be impossible to get it under sub 500$ at launch if they were more powerful..

You can't have a console more powerful than a PC. It's never happened and never will.

The proof is in the games, PC games always look better. Always.

Most consoles use PC derived parts anyway, the Xbox 360 for instance used a Radeon x19xx/2900 series semi-custom hybrid GPU, it wasn't more powerful than what PC gamers had at the time.
PC Gamers also have the option of multiple cards.


The fact of the matter is... AMD's Graphics Core Next GPU/architecture is old.
That particular GPU architecture was already a few years old when the current consoles launched, it was already past it's use-by-date.

AMD has done some re-organizing and refocusing recently to try and become competitive again, hopefully that means a new GPU architecture more often, having the same cards on the market for 5~ years has been unprecedented.

The consoles *could* have been faster if AMD spent more money in R&D, but AMD is doing it tough I am afraid.
Ironically even PC gamers are turning away from them which has impacted AMD's bottom line and ability to compete.

A very long time ago consoles where pretty different and relied on custom chips>not as versatile as PC hardware back then but could achieve things a PC couldn't or only a ten times more expensive PC could.

With PC-HW getting more and more features like 2D acceleration, 3D acceleration, more and more capabilities like HW-T&L, shaders... that slowly vanished, though fast hardware stayed expensive.

 

About consoles price and power:

360 and PS3 where massively subsidized, one reason of the long time losses MS and Sony made. Ad the RoD to that, cost tons of money again.

More power also means more heat and energy consumption, likely a bigger console and/or louder fan.

 

Let's look at the PS4, it's smaller, more powerful at least GPU-wise so:

2x GPU power would roughly mean 2x the power consumption if you're going for shaderunits. If you're going for clock speed it's even worse. Then you need a more powerful CPU to actually feed that GPU and because putting more and more cores into a CPU doesn't make that much sense it possibly would be about clock speed at least to some degree.

So our console gets way more energy hungry>cooling gets bigger/more expensive and possibly louder, console gets bigger.

More die space for the APU needed>higher price per APU

Lower yield because of more failures per APU> higher price again

You need more memory bandwidth> wider bus and more expensive mainboard.

 

In the end  two times the power might make manufacturing more than two times expensive.