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EricHiggin on 28 May 2019
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eva01beserk said:
EricHiggin said:

With speculation on how the TF's will unfold for Navi with RDNA now, if the TF number is lower for the Navi cards, like how Nvidia's TF is usually below Radeon but has greater performance, it wouldn't be crazy to think MS may just use Radeon VII. It's already on 7nm, only launched 6 months prior to Navi, and very well may allow Anaconda to claim the performance crown on paper, even though the performance could be similar to Navi in PS5, or potentially even sightly weaker on screen. Ray tracing has been shown to be possible on Vega, and we don't know for sure about Navi yet, but both consoles could support ray tracing using these. Based on the price of Radeon VII vs the rumored prices of Navi, if Anaconda used VII, it would likely end up more expensive than PS5 at launch, or MS would have to eat that early input cost to match PS5.

Question is whether or not it would be worth it vs paying a royalty on Navi, if it's not (timed) exclusive for PS consoles. I also wouldn't find it crazy to think maybe MS wanted to use Navi and didn't want to pay royalties, so they gave SNY a wicked deal on Azure and in turn SNY allows MS to use Navi free of charge. This would allow PS to better compete with XB in the cloud and would allow XB to better compete with PS in consumer hardware.

That could be a strategy, but I think sony would be loosing out on that deal. While Cloud gaming will be big someday, its not today. Sony could destry 9th gen and be recognized as the gaming king and even if cloud gaming they are behind, the brand name alone and catalog of games and history of value hardware will be to big for people to ignore.

Also, some said that half the price of vega VII was the 16gb of hbm2. Where they to switch to gddr6 would massivly lower the cost of the card. Loose some performance, but cant say how much.

You have to bend sooner or later or you may/will break. It's like MS not taking the cross platform play offering from PS during the PS3 era. In retrospect, they should have. PS is starting to realize this as well as many other things, and you can see they are slowly and carefully implementing it with PS4 and prepping for PS5. The longer PS waits, the worse it get's for them, especially if MS gains too much of a cloud lead in the next gen, and especially if Stadia takes off and becomes more popular than anticipated. You always have to be looking more than just a couple steps ahead, but also can't be looking way too far ahead like the PS3 and XB1.

I would assume we would see 8GB HBM2 or 16GB DDR6 in an Anaconda. If this were to be the case, it also would allow MS to launch anytime between holiday 2019 and late 2020. With XB1 sales tanking, it wouldn't be outrageous to think they may try to launch well before PS5, with everything being taken into account. The one potential downside would be pissing off the XB1X owners. The big question there is, how many of them are spec heads who only care about having the highest spec'd hardware available? If it's the majority, which is probably the case, then Lockhart and Anaconda can launch this holiday and it won't matter much and won't really hurt the XB brand. They wouldn't lose many customers and would gain a year lead on PS5.

If MS shows their next gen hand at E3, I wouldn't be surprised to hear it's launching this holiday. To show most if not all of what they have planned now, only to launch holiday 2020, gives PS a TONNE of time to decide how they want to proceed. Not like PS could completely change the hardware, but there's a lot they could do in 18 months to counter especially when it comes to marketing.