By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
Otter on 17 April 2019
Edit Thread
EricHiggin said:
Bofferbrauer2 said:

Finally, An Xbox 2 model being considerably less powerful than the One X doesn't make sense at all to me. I think it would at least match the One X in GPU performance, with the better CPU and possibly more RAM making the difference between the two.

I agree in general, but at the moment, I can see two reasons why they might do this, if they are doing it.

First, there's a price point they want to hit for whatever reason, and there's certain hardware that's basically necessary across both models, so the GPU TF performance must suffer for the lower end model to hit that price.

Second, if MS feels XB1X owners may feel burned by a base next gen unit that matches or exceeds theirs, by making it weaker it takes the sting away. Now that still leaves everybody else wondering WTF, but as long as the price is right and it has a worthy audience, it doesn't matter all that much.

A 4TFLOP Navi GPU in the base "1080p" machine is a massive red flag imo. The problem with a base model less or equal than 1/3rd  the power of the PS5, is that native 4k is still not guaranteed to be standard next gen, just as PS3 was tauted a 1080p machine but rarely hit above 720p and 10+ years later a system magnitudes more power (X1) is still not hitting that 1080p target on a frequent basis. X1X in particular is setting false standards in this regards, with the Pro & X1X developers have nothing else to do but bump the resolution and tinker the FPS. They're not going to invest the time to exploit the hardware on an individual asset basis. When building games from the ground up for next gen machines however, they'll take a far more dynamic approach to how they utilise the GPU and I'm sure we'll see many games sacrifice Native 4k for far more impressive VFX, textures, lighting and overall aesthetics. Things which everyone will benefit from regardless of whether they have a 4k TV or not. And most gamers still do not have 4k tvs and even when they do upscaling techniques will offer a close to 4k picture without being as much of hardware drain.

So what happens when a game is built to run at 1440p on PS5 and has to be scaled down to a GPU 1/3rd its capacity. The entry level Xbox will be more a 720p-900p console than anything and even then I could see developers botching visuals even further. In the digital foundry age, I think that will MS lots of harm. Worse case scenario is that it actually dictates how developers approach development knowing that they've got such a weak GPU to cater for. Or going by how poor recent base Xbox One games perform I think they'll just stop optimizing for the Anaconda and call it a day once they've reached a passable framerate and resolution.