| Mr Puggsly said: If they can release base consoles with double the GPU power of the X1X, along with 16GB of RAM and significantly better CPU at $399, I'd argue premium consoles at launch are not that crucial. But the likelihood of that seems really low to me, I'd like to be wrong though. |
Well. The Premium consoles should be a step up again. But I personally think a Premium console should launch a couple years later to take advantage of new technology... But there is not likely to be any newer Graphics Core Next GPU's to help retain backwards compatibility after Navi, so that makes things tricky.
| Mr Puggsly said: You just made a straw man. I said "SOME GAMES" and a resolution boost is huge when its games in the ball park of 720p. You already know some of the games I'm referring to so I won't drag this discussion further. |
The point I am making is that... All that extra horsepower... And the most you are generally getting is just a resolution/framerate boost.
If we go back to the 7th gen when majority of games were 720P or under... The PC used most of it's extra horse power to drive resolutions and framerates up with better texturing, lighting, shadowing, draw distances, models, physics, audio and so on... Yet many claimed the PC was just not optimized because the 7th gen games could get away with just 512MB of Ram.
And now that we have the same situation replicated with the "Premium" consoles... It makes the argument a little more interesting.
| Mr Puggsly said: Significant CPU and RAM upgrades should be equal on the base and premium in my opinion. I mean a CPU capable of 60 fps gaming isn't expensive and 16GB of RAM dedicated to games should be more than enough. The X1X is already giving 9GB of RAM for games so its not a big upgrade per se |
As long as they are ISA compatible, it shouldn't really matter.
More Ram is necessary on a premium console because you generally need a larger framebuffer... And extra room for potentially better texturing and other assets.
| Otter said: I think people are making a mistake using X1X as a point reference. Firstly it assumes that it's hardware is fully being utilised in most games (it's not) & it assumes that native 4k will be the target for most AAA PS5 games (I don't think it will). |
It is fully utilized, the fact that games with dynamic resolutions cannot hit 4k all the time is a testament to that fact... As those engines will use up every GPU resource available to maintain the highest resolution possible.
However... It's not efficiently utilized. Some effects require more bandwidth than others for instance, some require more floating point performance than others, so a few concessions here and there allows you to dramatically bolster the image quality elsewhere... It's why in the 7th gen as game engines started sacrificing things like HDR lighting and implemented cheaper lighting passes, but could use that freed computational power for extra shader effects to improve the overall image more dramatically.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
