Tachikoma said:
Jereel Hunter said:
Tachikoma said:
Consider the following.
Assume the rumors of the final retail units for the next xbox are true and it uses 8GB DDR3, to 1-up Sony they switch it to 12GB, or 16GB, it's still a problem, because:
- DDR3 < GDDR5 in speed, by a huge margin
- Enjoy your $500+ console for 12gb, $550-$599 for 16gb
- Increase in memory from 8GB to anything higher won't actually make much of a difference at all for 1080p because the amount of resources you can cram in to a single scene is limited, hence why modern day graphics cards use a hell of a lot more ram the higher you bump your resolution, but the general normal is that about 2gb is enough for 1080p - on top of that though you have the issue of the bandwidth limiting the next xbox's performance.
I'll give you an idea of what Microsoft are probably thinking right now:
"Damn, our industry spies were right, it has a crazy amount of ram, we can't afford to bump up ours without taking a significant loss on each console, lets just stick with the plan and hope our broader approach to putting a game playing windows 8 media center in every home has wings for both our gaming sector and our OS sector.
The one thing you can take away from this is basically that there is virtually no possibility in hell now, if leaked durango specs are to be believed (given the closeness of the ps4 specs we can assume the durango ones are more or less accurate too), that the durango will be able to outperform the orbis in any area. |
I'm not sure where you're getting your pricing from - DDR3 ram is very cheap, they could easily bump it up to those numbers and still have their costs significantly lower than the PS3... though it seems more likely they'll choose to upgrade to the faster DDR5 to match the PS3.
The real question is how Sony is affording this? the PS3 is still quite a bit in the red for it's lifespan, and it seems like they once again are releasing a system that will be very expensive for them to produce...
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Embedded system manufacturers can purchase GDDR5 ram units in bulk, works out at around $27 per 2gb as of Jan 2013.
Yes DDR3 is much cheaper, but it's much slower too.
Neither the PS4 or the 720 will *EVER* be profitable in their lifetime on the market due to the technologies used, this generations money will be made from services, microtransactions and premium content.
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I don't question that DDR3 is slower - merely that you indicated that Microsoft would be cost a lot to boost their ram to 16gb, when it's a far cheaper solution to Sony's. Also, bear in mind that GDDR5 is currently used for video cards... it's unlikely, with space as it is in consoles, they're just going to order chips in bulk and stick in 4. But it's always more expensive to have the same amount of ram on less chips.
As for profitability, I was referring to the business as a whole - including games and online eservices. PS3's cost was too high to be made up - hopefully they're not making the same mistake here.
