"Optimized NVMe" for gaming, huh?

https://hothardware.com/news/sony-ps5-microsoft-xbox-project-scarlett-samsung-nvme-ssd

Well, I guess I'll wait and see what they will do....hope it's not just marketing talk or people will rip them apart for it.

Looks like you know a lot about this stuff, Sony/Microsoft are supposed to use optimized NVMe to reduce loading much faster than what is possible on PC.

It's actually my second time, when I said it the first time it was actually exactly the same spec except oberon was the devkit.

Yes, Playground is the Forza Horizon studio. They opened a 2nd studio back in 2017 which is working on an RPG, and the rumors say it is a Fable reboot. 

They have more successful IP's than just Halo, Forza, and Gears. Fable was pretty big back in the day, I think Fable 3 sold 5m+ copies, while Fable 2 sold 4m+ copies. State of Decay 1 reached like 2m sales, and MS has announced that State of Decay 2 has reached 10m+ unique players through Gamepass. Sea of Thieves has reached 8.4m unique players now I think, and the active playerbase is still pretty decently sized. 

That's exactly what I'm talking about. Yes, Fable was pretty big 2 decades ago, but people just don't care about it anymore. So instead of letting it rest and move on, MS is again beating a dead horse by trying to reboot it. That's why people are losing interest in Gears, Halo and Forza. Don't get me wrong, they are still great games but it feels like MS is always playing catch up when it comes to their exclusives. GT was probably Sony's flagship title back in the day as well, and MS obviously been trying to beat it with their Forza games. Now you can argue that Forza is the better game but the fact is that GT hasn't been the flagship title it once was for a long, long time, even though it still outsells Forza by about 4:1. 

And yes, I'm sure Sea of Thieves and State of decay had a ton of downloads when they are basically giving the games away for free. Gamepass is pretty cool, but I honestly have no idea how MS thinks it will move consoles. When Gears 5 came out, I took a $1 trial on my pc, finished the game and then just deleted it. I will probably do the same when Halo comes out. 

Most will be 4k at first only because we will be looking at cross gen games which are built to run on PS4/Xbox One at 900/1080p, after that I think its highly unlikely.

Ultimately you do not need games to be native 4k to market the system as a 4k system, we have proof of this in PS4 Pro and Xbox One X. PS4 Pro barely ever hits 4k and the majority of 3rd party Xbox One X games miss native 4k too. Stunning graphics trumps pixel counts in terms of marketing what next gen is about, even Hellblade 2's trailer was not a native 4k pixel count because cinematic presentation was more important.

We've seen it already with the pro systems, but performance modes will be even more common next gen where resolution is either locked at 1080p or made dynamic (going as low as 1080p) in order to hit 60fps.

Also as far as Raytracing goes we've already seen Metro exodus show how ray traced global illumination can have a much stronger visual impact than the selective reflection we see in BF5, I think continued innovation in its application will surprise people once its actually part of the console landscape

2 decades ago? Fable 2 released in 2008 and Fable 3 released in 2010. The series has been on hiatus for 10 years now, since Fable Legends got cancelled. Now is the perfect time to give it a reboot. Playground is believed to be mixing the original Fable formula with that of Horizon Zero Dawn, sounds like a hit to me. 

Gran Turismo is only beating Forza Motorsport, Forza Horizon is ahead of Gran Turismo now. Forza Horizon 4 hit 12m players in August. Gran Turismo Sport was at 8m as of June, and GT Sport released a year earlier. 

They are only doing those $1 deals on Gamepass right now to get people interested, those will disappear over time. Microsoft's goal with Gamepass is to eventually get millions of people to sub to it permanently, they envision it as a Netflix for games. They've announced plans to eventually release 4 1st/2nd party AAA games per year, plus a bunch of smaller AA and A exclusives, with the goal being to get people to sub permanently. 

I will be happy if native 4K is dropped by devs. Resource killer IMO and yes you are right Pro was marketed as 4K and was doing good so hopefully this gen will be same. I prefer gfx over resolution and most PC gamers barely game on 4K either. Certain games like racing, sports, fighting etc I am sure they can get 4K native. As far as RT goes I am not sure TBH. Most people seems to be hating the RTX and calling it unwanted. I am not sure console are going to be special and it is also taxing on the hardware. But I like RT and probably will prefer it over resolution. So let us see how it goes.

Even though I also mentioned the gap to Xbox seem rather big. Price and games has always been the deciding factor and it is going to be same next gen. It will also be good if Microsoft can put up some sort of competition next gen.

Radeon 7 is last gen tech, GCN, Graphics Core Next. 5700XT and the next-gen consoles are using RDNA, not GCN. 5700 XT was not designed as a replacement for the Radeon 7, it was designed to sit one performance bracket down from the Radeon 7, it is only 10 tflop to the Radeon 7’s 13 tflop, that is the only reason why it is performing under the Radeon 7, and even then it still comes very close to Radeon 7 in some games like The Division 2 and Forza Horizon 4, which you can see in the pics I just linked. You can safely assume that when AMD releases a 13 tflop RDNA card, likely later this year, that it will beat the Radeon 7 by a decent margin, because RDNA is definitely a step up from GCN in terms of real world vs flops performance. 

50% weaker than 2080ti? I hardly think so, 12 tflop of RDNA should fall around 2080 tier in performance, and that is on PC. Console games get extra optimization compared PC games.Taking into account console optimization, multiplat games on XSX should perform about the same as they do on a PC running a 2080ti. Even this rumored 9.2 tflop PS5 would likely come within 25% of a 2080ti PC taking into account console optimization.

If you use 4 Memory controllers it only gives 448GB/s bandwidth, it's to low for 12TF GPU. Or Microsoft do you as you suggest, 5 memory controllers for 560GB/s memory speed with 20GB Vram, but instead mix 1GB and 2GB sticks for total 16GB Vram and save themself a lot of money. I think you agree with that.

It doesn't matter what speed they have, they will load games in 2 seconds no matter what. What matters is, will Lockhart sell with no Disc-player? Is the price of Xbox series X to high compared to PS5? I think microsoft must launch that console at $450 to compete with PS5.

Xbox consoles at 1.5GB/s speed?

PS5 at 2.5GB/s speed?

Looks like you know a lot about this stuff, Sony/Microsoft are supposed to use optimized NVMe to reduce loading much faster than what is possible on PC.

Considering RT on the consoles will be a designated part of the HW, not using RT will probably just make that part unused instead of working in something else.

About the gfx x resolution, they will have to find the balance to have the best IQ overall.

RDNA via Navi on the PC is a hybrid GPU design that sits between RDNA 2 and Graphics Core Next, it still retains the full Graphics Core Next instruction set.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDNA_(microarchitecture)

Might have more memory controllers. You simply don't know anything yet... So would be good if you can stop asserting something as fact before you have all your ducks in a row.

We don't even have the consoles on the market, there are no benchmarks, we don't even know how fast the SSD is.

But just because it has an SSD, doesn't mean there won't be a load time... There are games that use procedural generation which require very little in regards to transfers from storage to system memory, but require a ton of processing time to generate assets. (No Mans Land is an example.)

Consoles like the Switch are all solid state, still have load times.

Again, 2 seconds is a bold claim, you should stop asserting something as fact when you don't have all your ducks in a row, this is why there are people out in the world who believe sunscreen causes cancer, vaccines cause autism, there is no climate change, the world is flat... And more, because they assert something as fact without having all the details/evidence.

What is so optimized about it? Please. Fill us in.

There is the potential to use the Ray Tracing cores for non-Ray Tracing tasks, it depends on how flexible AMD makes those cores.

Potentially though if the Ray Tracing cores are going unused, AMD could then repurpose that TDP and drive up clockrates to the rest of the chip... Either way, that is just hypothesizing, we will need to wait and see of course.

Those numbers are awfully inflated when people like me could just sign up for $1 and play Forza, Gears, Sea of Thieves and State of decay on pc and then simply cancel the subscription. If I had to pay a yearly or even permanent subscription for Gamepass I would never have played any of those games, though. 

Maybe Fable will be good but I just don't think that franchise has such an appeal anymore. If they want to copy Horizon zero dawn then they should have just made a new ip.