Nate4Drake said:
MS must do a very good presentation, and use all the weapons they have to come back competitive like it was back in the 360 generation. 2 SKUs, one for the mass market, and the other for hardcores could be a way to be more competitive from Day One, and be very insidious if the cheapest SKU is much more cheap than a much more powerful PS5, and Anaconda slighty more expensive, otherwise most gamers would still choose PS5, if the gap in power is not very significant. DonFerrari rised some good points though, talking about the weakest hardware holding down "Anaconda"; can scalability solve this completely ? My understanding in such a topic suggests that the more the difference in power is high between SKUs, the more the weakest one could hold down the Elite SKU. Now let's assume the rumor is true, and we have one SKU with a 4TF GPU, and the other with a 12 TF GPU. As DonFerrari already said, no way the other components will be the same. The weakest SKU will have a weaker CPU too, as it doesn't need that level of power to "feed" a much less competitive GPU, the total amount of RAM will be probably reduced, and sure much less memory bandwidth. So let's talk about developing games on several SKUs, two from MS and one from Sony. This is not helping at all, and the complexity of scalability will increase if you wanna try to push every single SKU. The reality is, most 3rd party developers will never waste much resources and money to do it, and the main differences will be in resolutions/frame-rate, draw distance and effects; the weakest SKU will hold down all the others. 1st party developers, on the other hand, can do more, but having one SKU with a GPU 3X more powerful, together with a faster CPU and RAM compared to the other, they must develop anyway with the lowest common denominator in mind, and have to give gamers the same core experience; this is a limiting factor. Sony, on the other hand(if it's true they will release only one SKU), can make its exclusive games shining, taking full advantage of all the resources available in the way they want, without bothering about the weakest and less capable hardware. So, what consumers(those not loyal and tied to any Company) will choose on Day One ? A very cheap SKU from MS, but massively underpowered considering it is a Next Gen System, and compared to PS5, which will have probably a very competitive price ? Or Anaconda, very expensive and more powerful than PS5 ? Or PS5, great hardware at a competitive price ? It depends. I'm not sure which is the best strategy. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Nothing new, but I found interesting watching it, about BC with all playstation system, and some translations from the Japanese text. |
I'm basing my thoughts on the rumoured leaks of Lockhart & Anaconda sharing the same CPU, having 12GB vs 16GB of ram & of course, the 4 vs 12 TFLOP GPUs. So I'm not sure why you're alluding to a weaker CPU - have there been new leaks?
I'm admittedly a novice in tech specs but isn't resolution pretty much a GPU related matter? I.e. the geometry, ai, etc. are the same amount of work for the CPU, regardless of whether the GPU is rendering in 1080 or 4K? Frame-rate is different & effects both.
Isn't that essentially what the Switch is doing - it has a down-clocked GPU in handheld mode so reduces resolution but otherwise everything else is the same?
I accept I could be wrong here though and will happily stand to be corrected.
MS knows one of the mistakes they made with XB1 was to fall below PS5 on performance so it seems to me that it would be imperative for them not to hobble their top sku by creating a poorly thought out entry sku that would meaningfully limit the technical scope of games.
I guess my question would be - are you saying that creating a 1080 & 4K sku is technically impossible without hobbling the the latter sku? I think that if executed badly it could but I don't see why it's technically impossible... or even necessarily that difficult as long as they don't cheap out on the other components (which isn't the case, based on the these rumoured specs).
