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The Xbox One: Hardware Analysis & Comparison to PlayStation 4

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Re: The Xbox One: Hardware Analysis & Comparison to PlayStation 4

#31

Post by wmf »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #27

My take away: - PS4 and XBox One are going to be similar hardware wise, with the PS4 having an edge in raw power and the XBox One having an edge in "cleverness" (e.g. memory caching) and power consumption (lower). - Microsoft is re-using Hyper-V in a very awesome way(!). - HDMI passthrough is Microsoft's "ace in the hole." - Developers are going to have a great time this generation thanks to how similar the hardware…

Using cleverness to get better performance than your competitor is an edge; using cleverness to get the same performance in the common case but worse performance in the worst case is poor design.

I suspect that HDMI passthrough will be a frustratingly unfulfilled promise, as it is with Google TV.

Recent GPUs are virtualizeable (using multiple command queues); this is mostly targeted for VDI or cloud gaming but unused in PCs. http://www.nvidia.com/object/enterprise-virtualization.html

Re: The Xbox One: Hardware Analysis & Comparison to PlayStation 4

#32

Post by rbanffy »

tracker1 wrote: post #22
sp332 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, the developer experience is very important, and hardware is only an issue if you're really pushing the limits. Differences in SDK made a huge difference in popularity between the PS3 and the 360. Since the 360 handled background music, matchmaking, and voice chat natively, devs had a huge head start over competitors on the PS3. Helping out the devs had a direct effect on the players' experience, which led to…

Yeah.. but it does look like MS is backpedaling in support of indie devs for the XBox One.

OTOH, it seems developing for the One will be easy. At least, as easy as developing for Windows.

Although I personally have little love for Visual Studio, most Windows developers would never leave it.

Were it programmable in Lisp, I suppose developers would use it to read e-mail and chat on IRC ;-)

Re: The Xbox One: Hardware Analysis & Comparison to PlayStation 4

#33

Post by rbanffy »

josh2600 wrote: post #16
shock-value wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily -- the Xbox include a Kinect in the box which will increase its price/lower its profit margin. The PS4 has a camera but nothing as sophisticated/expensive as the Kinect.

Total Tangent: I just saw Jaron Lanier speak in SF last night and he was very proud of the work he did on the Kinect. I find that particularly interesting in light of his sort of decrying the digital-social culture we've developed in the last decade. Strange guy with a lot of really different opinions; was a lot of fun. The Xbox including the new Kinect definitely lowers margins, but if Kinect becomes an integral par…

> The Xbox including the new Kinect definitely lowers margins, but if Kinect becomes an integral part of the gaming experience it will be a sound bet.

Indeed. Bundling it is the best way to ensure the Kinect is used in every title.

Re: The Xbox One: Hardware Analysis & Comparison to PlayStation 4

#34

Post by djKianoosh »

erickhill wrote: post #6

Took me a while to discover the meat of the article was hidden inside a drop-down navigation system. I honestly nearly bailed thinking, "This is all there is?" What an awful idea. Thank goodness I saw it at the last minute.

It's really bad in mobile browsers.. a thin gray line, very easily missed

Re: The Xbox One: Hardware Analysis & Comparison to PlayStation 4

#35

Post by joenathan »

wmf wrote: post #31
UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #27

My take away: - PS4 and XBox One are going to be similar hardware wise, with the PS4 having an edge in raw power and the XBox One having an edge in "cleverness" (e.g. memory caching) and power consumption (lower). - Microsoft is re-using Hyper-V in a very awesome way(!). - HDMI passthrough is Microsoft's "ace in the hole." - Developers are going to have a great time this generation thanks to how similar the hardware…

Using cleverness to get better performance than your competitor is an edge; using cleverness to get the same performance in the common case but worse performance in the worst case is poor design. I suspect that HDMI passthrough will be a frustratingly unfulfilled promise, as it is with Google TV. Recent GPUs are virtualizeable (using multiple command queues); this is mostly targeted for VDI or cloud gaming but unused…

I don't think it makes sense to compare the Xbox One to Google TV, Google TV is very much a side project for Google which is obvious because they aren't putting much effort behind it. While many people already use their Xbox for streaming Netflix and Hulu, the HDMI passthrough is an extension of that.

Re: The Xbox One: Hardware Analysis & Comparison to PlayStation 4

#36

Post by joenathan »

aclevernickname wrote: post #28

So, I have a Linux Desktop PC, with 8GB of RAM, and an AMD A10 processor. I'm running XBMC (or LXDE or Front Row), and running 5 VM's on it under KVM. Cost about $450 when I bought it. price is about $570 now. I've had this setup (with a slightly slower AMD proc) for over 2 years, and I've been running BSNES, Dolphin, PCSX2, Nestopia, and MAME fairly regularly. Today's announcement informed me that I've been enjoying…

>I've been enjoying much of the next-generation gaming experience already.

You can't be serious. Although you can very soon be enjoying the next-generation gaming experience, what's exciting to me about this as a PC gamer is that all next gen games will be designed with x86 in mind, which should make porting trivial compared to this generation.

Re: The Xbox One: Hardware Analysis & Comparison to PlayStation 4

#37

Post by scott_s »

rbanffy wrote: post #33
josh2600 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Total Tangent: I just saw Jaron Lanier speak in SF last night and he was very proud of the work he did on the Kinect. I find that particularly interesting in light of his sort of decrying the digital-social culture we've developed in the last decade. Strange guy with a lot of really different opinions; was a lot of fun. The Xbox including the new Kinect definitely lowers margins, but if Kinect becomes an integral par…

> The Xbox including the new Kinect definitely lowers margins, but if Kinect becomes an integral part of the gaming experience it will be a sound bet. Indeed. Bundling it is the best way to ensure the Kinect is used in every title.

I don't think the goal is to make sure the Kinect is used in every title. Rather, it allows any title to use it.

Currently, the Kinect is a peripheral, which means that developers can't assume that it's there. If they want to use it, they have two options: be a full-on Kinect game that doesn't make sense without the device, or have controller-only options for everything. That's a lot of pain. But if they can assume that the Kinect is always there, there's no tradeoff.

Re: The Xbox One: Hardware Analysis & Comparison to PlayStation 4

#38

Post by dublinben »

guiambros wrote: post #23
erickhill wrote: post #6

Took me a while to discover the meat of the article was hidden inside a drop-down navigation system. I honestly nearly bailed thinking, "This is all there is?" What an awful idea. Thank goodness I saw it at the last minute.

That's the experienced offered by most hardware review sites - AnandTech, DP Review, Toms Hardware, Extreme Overclocking, etc. Certainly to pump up pageviews, and thus generate more revenue. Having said that, it is still bad design/usability. They could easily fix by keeping the model of separate pages for each topic, but moving the content from the drop down to an index at the bottom of each page, and also use prev/…

There are previous/next buttons on each page, labeled with the title of the preceding or following page.

Re: The Xbox One: Hardware Analysis & Comparison to PlayStation 4

#39

Post by georgemcbay »

joenathan wrote: post #35
wmf wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using cleverness to get better performance than your competitor is an edge; using cleverness to get the same performance in the common case but worse performance in the worst case is poor design. I suspect that HDMI passthrough will be a frustratingly unfulfilled promise, as it is with Google TV. Recent GPUs are virtualizeable (using multiple command queues); this is mostly targeted for VDI or cloud gaming but unused…

I don't think it makes sense to compare the Xbox One to Google TV, Google TV is very much a side project for Google which is obvious because they aren't putting much effort behind it. While many people already use their Xbox for streaming Netflix and Hulu, the HDMI passthrough is an extension of that.

I think it makes sense in that the base technology is exactly the same. There is really only so much you can do with HDMI + IR blaster (or for the lucky few with very new TVs and/or set-top boxes) HDMI with CEC.

There are tons of edge cases you run into when you don't have full control of the tuning stack. As one example (I can think of dozens easily):

Family has a single-tuner old school Scientific Atlanta DVR (still very popular with cable operators despite being horribly obsolete). They set it up to record a show, it is currently recording said show, person interacting with the Xbox One does something to change the channel to one different than the one being recorded on... oops! There is no way for the Xbox One to know this is a potentially destructive operation for the DVR. At worst the DVR changes the channel and loses half your show, at best the DVR is smart enough to prompt you about this and stop the channel change, but how does the Xbox One know this occurred? There are some high-end DVRs with APIs that exist in an attempt to deal with situations like this but they are very few, very far between and there are no standards for them.

Corner cases like this present themselves all the time with these HDMI-in/HDMI-out devices like Google TV and they are inherent problems with the current state of set-top box technology. No matter how many resources Microsoft throws at this, the end result will still be kind of lame a lot of the time and a far cry from the seamless experience you see in the on-stage demos.

Re: The Xbox One: Hardware Analysis & Comparison to PlayStation 4

#40

Post by [deleted] »

wmf wrote: post #13
rbanffy wrote: post #3

It looks like the Sony machine will be more expensive (or its profit margins will be a lot lower). The PS4 seems to have a lot more hardware under the hood than the One. Having said that, as I pointed out elsewhere, it's now how many things your device does, but how well it does the thing that'll define its function. If it's an entertainment system, it's how well it entertains people. If it's a videogame, it's how fu…

The extra CUs in the PS4 are offset by the ESRAM in the One; I would expect the die size is similar. Sony has more expensive RAM, though.

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