Xbox 720, PlayStation 4, WII U - Gerüchte & Fakten Thread

Mattrick: "Wer BC will, ist so richtig zurückgeblieben"

Microsoft’s Mattrick says he doesn’t think compatibility is really a problem. He said only 5% of customers play older games on a new videogame system anyway, so spending time and money to develop technology to allow them to play older games isn’t worth it.

“If you’re backwards compatible, you’re really backwards,” he said.

Social media research firm Fizziology said its surveys of potential customers before the Xbox event showed 12% of them would be unhappy if there wasn’t backwards compatibility.

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Sony said it is working to make its gaming system offer customers a way to play older games made for the PlayStation 3 (and earlier) by streaming all the information from servers. Microsoft indicated it isn’t planning to offer that type of service.

In terms of the GPU hardware, hard information was difficult to come by, but one of the engineers did let slip with a significant stat - 768 operations per clock. We know that both Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are based on Radeon GCN architecture and we also know that each compute unit is capable of 64 operations per clock. So, again through a process of extrapolation from the drip-feed of hard facts, the make-up of the One's GPU is confirmed - 12 compute units each capable of 64 ops/clock gives us the 768 total revealed by Microsoft and thus, by extension, the 1.2 teraflop graphics core. So that's another tick on the Durango leaked spec that has been transposed across to the final Xbox One architecture and the proof we need that PlayStation 4's 18 CU graphics core has 50 per cent more raw power than the GPU in the new Microsoft console. Now, bearing in mind that we fully expect PlayStation 4 and Xbox One to launch at similar price-points, how did this disparity come about?

The answer to that comes down to a specific gamble Sony made that Microsoft could not - the utilisation of a unified pool of GDDR5 memory. In the early days of PS4 development, only 2GB of this type of memory looked viable for a consumer-level device. As higher density modules became available, this was duly upgraded to 4GB. By the time of the reveal back in February, Sony had confidence that it could secure volume of 512MB modules and surprised everyone (even developers) by announcing that PS4 would ship with 8GB of unified GDDR5 RAM. The design of its surrounding architecture would not need to change throughout this process - one set of 16 GDDR5 chips would simply be swapped out for another.

Microsoft never had the luxury of this moving target. With multimedia such a core focus for its hardware, it set out to support 8GB of RAM from day one (at the time giving it a huge advantage over the early PS4 target RAM spec) and with serious volume of next-gen DDR4 unattainable in the time window, it zeroed in on supporting DDR3 and doing whatever was necessary to make that work on a console. The result is a complex architecture - 32MB of ESRAM is added to the processor die, along with "data move engines" to courier information around the system as quickly as possible with bespoke encode/decode hardware to alleviate common bottlenecks. Bottom line: if you're wondering why Xbox One has a weaker GPU than PlayStation 4, it's because both platform holders have similar silicon budgets for the main processor - Sony has used the die-space for additional compute units and ROPs (32 vs. 16 in One), while Microsoft has budgeted for ESRAM and data move engines instead. From the Xbox perspective, it's just unfortunate for Microsoft that Sony's gamble paid off - right up until the wire, it was confident of shipping with twice the amount of RAM as PlayStation 4.

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microsoft doesn't care about indie developer.

one thing MSFT doesn't seem to understand is that indie developers are the regular developers of tomorrow.

let me tell you something: most indies i know already don't want to publish on a xbox console. publisher or no publisher.

After the Xbox One reveal, I went ahead and did it all over again -- but the reaction has been rather different this time around. In the same space of time that I waited for responses to my Wii U and PS4 pieces, I've received just a handful of replies, most of which said they weren't working on Xbox One games.

Funkuchen schrieb:

Final Design:

PlayStation 4 currently beats Xbox One in terms of raw power and has a more mature developer environment, Avalanche Studios has told us.

The Just Cause creator is working with each next gen console right now, and says that in terms of pure specifications and working environment, PS4 is the preferable console. But with Xbox One’s cloud capabilities and further developer support coming, Sony can’t claim an early victory just yet.

We asked Avalanche’s chief technical officer Linus Blomberg how the two consoles compare. “It’s difficult to say, as it’s still early days when it comes to drivers,” he told us. “With each new driver release, performance increases dramatically in some areas. The PlayStation 4 environment is definitely more mature currently, so Microsoft has some catching up to do. But I’m not too concerned about that as they traditionally have been very good in that area. The specs on paper would favour the PS4 over the Xbox One in terms of raw power, but there are many other factors involved so we’ll just have to wait and see a bit longer before making that judgment.”