Fair enough, that's true. But I think they need to be super aggressive with the pricing and have crystal clear messaging and naming so people know what they're buying. A coworker bought a Xbox One S thinking it was the Xbox One X, you know S like on iPhone 6S etc :p wasn't too happy about that but buying an Xbox thinking it would be an 8K capable monster and come home with a 720p Lockhart would be brutal.
It truly begs the question that if the PS5 could maintain lets say 10 teraflops exactly they would have just locked the clocks there. The fact that they chose to go with variable clocks suggests it's going to go lower fairly often.
I think Sony could have saved us a headache if they would have given us the floor operating frequency instead of saying the max then being non-committal about how low it goes. I will take their word that it doesn't dip much lower but they could have explained it much better.
Of course they could have done that, but as I said, the fact that they didn't is telling.
For sure, if it's much lower then they would get roasted for it but now it's just bad optics. Hopefully we will get concrete information soon enough but I feel like we won't get straight answers until we are watching digital foundry comparisons of 3rd party launch titles.
It's really not a problem for them as most people see the number and move on, and that was the point. They get to post a maximum figure without anyone knowing what the real number is. It's dishonest IMO, and I think if the roles here were reversed and Microsoft had announced a variable number like this there would be a furor like no other.
If the roles were reversed Teraflops, ram speeds, and LOCKED speeds would be way more important. MS would be on the receiving end of a scorched Earth media response.
This is an assumption. There is nothing that indicates this to be the case. In fact, Cerney's word is the only thing to indicate one way or the other; and so far, what he's indicated is that it will sustain near max clocks the majority of the time.
That's the problem though. It may be at close to Max settings at all times but so what is the floor then? Sony wasn't clear on what that means. Just that it'll operate at close to Max boost regularly.
This is fine if you can design your game where the workload leads to predictable outcomes. This is why a workload profiler is baked in and is supposedly deterministic in nature. If that solution indeed works, it won't be much different than how devs currently profile their game's resource utilization.
It's clearly an assumption, but I don't think it's an outlandish one. It's just a funny thing that we had a real leak that indicated they were working on a 9.2 tf GPU, and then when they officially reveal it we're told it's 10.3 but with variable clocks. We've never seen a GPU with clocks this high, which makes you wonder how sustainable they really are?
Everywhere you had people saying MS needed to take the power crown or it they failed. They now have, so it's just a matter of keeping their messaging on point (so far so good) and matching Sony on price. If specs were reversed honestly I guarantee you'd have people shouting everywhere that MS has failed and that we'd have another Xbox One generation.
I don't know about it being a bottleneck but XSX's ram pool is split in two with both running at different speeds.
Sounds reasonable. Sony will almost assuredly lead this upcoming generation, though I'm expecting the gap to shrink e.g. Xbox at 70m, PS5 at 110-120m.
I doubt it wasn't intended. Remember, we saw data associated with Steppings A0 and B0, which were a year old or older by the time the leak got out months ago. At that time they were already at E0 stepping (many revisions of silicon later). i believe a dev (or someone who had spoken with a dev) actually mentioned they intended to target 2.3 Ghz but settled on a slightly more conservative 2.23 Ghz. We have heard for a while now that their design philosophy was "narrow and fast". This would be in lines with that.
And that's fine and could very well work out but it's not as defined as saying "locked" of varies from X to X. It's not that it can't be basically locked it's just that from the presentation the amount it varies is ill-defined.
Yeah, well the proof will be in the pudding. I hypothesized in the other thread that the design philosophy Cerney took while architecting the system and considering tradeoffs was to drive decisions on component choices with maximizing i/o throughput and minimizing bottlenecks all along the i/o pipeline from the perspective of the system's weakest link (it's storage), all while maintaining coherency, in mind. That's how they arrived at narrow and fast: it's easier to more fully saturate a GPU with less CUs (less parallelization of workload means more efficient use of resources by default), the GPU caches' high bandwidth are driven by the high GPU clock speed, and a high clock speed still enables it to be very powerful despite the lower number of CUs. This seems all intended and driven by the main goal of maximizing throughput and coherency all along the pipeline, as well as minimizing bottlenecks the whole way through.
They talked about the upsides of having a consistent clockspeed so if they would do something they would likely clock it higher all the time, which today seems unnecessary since they're well ahead on GPU power even though some pretend they are not.
MS already has Halo Infinite for launch, I think that is more than appropriate of a counter.
I may be misunderstanding, but I think you misunderstood what Brad meant. Lockhart is absolutely relevant and the 4TF vs the 9-10 TF vs the 12.2 TF is fair. But comparing the Lockhart 4TF vs the 6TF Xbox ONE X is misleading. That's his point, which is exactly what you're saying too. Regardless, even One X was aiming for something higher than 1080p. If MS pushes hard on the "same great games at 1080p" narrative, I think the marketing is far easier than people think. (I daresay, much easier than explaining boost clocks on the PS5. If even DEVS and industry professionals are this confused right now, I really hope Sony has found a good way to teach people about this tech.)
The higher clockspeed on PS5 could definitely show itself in some scenarios. We've all tried clocking our GPUs I assume, and seen that the benchmark score absolutely increase (after 10 hours of clocking and crashes) and we ended up with 5 or so extra fps. This is with the same amount of compute units though.
Let's be real, this isn't Sony's first rodio and they're not going to be putting out a product which has discernible performance day to day, box to box.
Again, Sony are definitely trying something different. They are trying to achieve and balance 4 things in the following order of priority: scope change in terms of game design and interactivity, accessibility, high performance, and reasonable price.
How is that?
Everything is relative. Specialized SSDs and supporting custom i/o hardware will significantly increase high speed storage's usefulness in the context of a closed box console ecosystem. It will enable things not even possible on the PC at the moment.
Yikes - is that how it's going to work? Sounds hellish for devs to manage (=random frame rate drops for us end users) unless the power drops are deterministic and repeatable.
We know it's not the most ideal situation for developers.
XSX has the better RAM setup though.
I wonder if people realistically expect next-gen games to swap 5GB of assets every second. I see a ton of obstacles of that not happening:
How does the bus width factor into the price?
Absolutely. I think the question is that we don't know HOW relative they will be. By the end, 1X and Pro ended up being even more similar in architecture (if not function) than X1 and PS4, which were already closer than any one before. From how we're talking about them breathlessly on this forum, it seems like XSX and PS5 may be diverging a bit again - and yet, when we take a step back, it seems almost a given that they're more similar than ever (again, in overall approach, not necessarily in frames or resolution or whatever).
Yeah it obviously wasn't a wellplanned purchase, she essentially just impulse bought the console at a sale after remembering that we had talked about it at work, might not have payed attention to the X at all, then came to work proud about finding it at such a low price. :p
