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goopy20 on 09 March 2020
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shikamaru317 said:
goopy20 said:

The ps4 launched at $399 and got a standing ovation for it during the reveal. When they announced the ps3 at $599 people were in outrage, though. The Xbox 360 also launched for $399, while the Xone also got some serious backlash when they revealed the $499 launch price. So yeah, most people will expect it to be $399 or $499 max. But nobody wants it to be too cheap and feel like they're buying some half ass next gen console that's just a slight upgrade from what they've been playing on for the last 7 years. 

I'd say it's more than a slight upgrade over last gen base hardware. Let's compare it to PS4, since both are designed to be 1080p consoles.

GPU: PS4 has a 1.8 tflop GCN GPU. Xbox Series X is expected to have a 4 tflop RDNA 2 GPU, which is expected to be at least equivalent to a 6 tflop GCN GPU in terms of real world performance, possibly more. But for the purposes of illustration, we'll say that the 4 tflop RDNA 2 is exactly equivalent to a 6 tflop GCN GPU. 6 divided by 1.8 = 3.33, so we're looking at a 3.3x graphical improvement over PS4 at least.

RAM: At least 4 more GB of RAM available to developers than base PS4, and more than double the RAM speed.

CPU: We have double the thread count (from 8 to 16), double the clockrate (from 1.6ghz to 3.2 ghz or more), and a pretty significant boost in IPC (instructions per clock), so we're looking at a 4-5x CPU improvement over PS4.

Storage Speed: 5400 RPM hard drive in PS4 has a read/write speed of about 50 MB/s I believe, rumor is the Phison SSD that MS is using in Series X is 3.7 GB/s read, 3 GB/s write, or about 74x faster in read speed and 60x faster in write speed than PS4 (we don't know for sure if Series S will be using the same SSD as Series X, but I would imagine we are looking at a 30x improvement in storage speed at least for Series S).

All in all, we're looking at a pretty significant increase over last gen base hardware for Series S. 

Of course it's still a decent upgrade but it's still a 50% downgrade from the ps5, which will probably be the base console for most developers. And if they would use Series S as the base, that would suck major donkey balls to be honest. We can forget about ray tracing and overall visual fidelity will be compromised across the board if that would happen. Just like Witcher 3 got downgraded when they decided to release it on consoles too.

I don't want next gen graphics to take a leap from a GTX660 to the ancient GTX780, I want it to be a leap to RTX2080 level performance. Maybe it's just me, but I really see no reason why any core gamer would actually be excited if Lockhart exists. It's maybe something for people who can't or don't want to spend $500 on a new console at launch, but those people can also just wait a bit for a price drop. But why would any gamer want to see developers use a $299 Lockhart with compromised specs as the base console for next gen games for the coming 7 years?

Last edited by goopy20 - on 09 March 2020