Friday, November 25th 2011
Microsoft Working On Not One, But Two New Xbox Product Lines
Finally, next generation gaming consoles are around the corner. It will have an uplifting effect on the entire gaming industry as it will raise the bar for visual and technical detail in games. Many of today's games are designed keeping consoles in mind, and so their PC platform versions don't look much more than what has come to be known as "console-ports". There are a few exceptions to this, but it would be refreshing to see most game developers move on to creating games that take advantage of today's insanely powerful PC platform, because the console platform will have caught up technologically.
Rumors have it, that Microsoft will be developing not one, but two product lines that succeed the Xbox 360, and we're not talking about product variants here, but two distinct lines. The first of the two will be an entry-level console designed more like a set-top box, designed around the Kinect controller (perhaps something to compete against Nintendo Wii U). The second product line will be the one that will be supercharged with the latest technologies that will raise the bar in graphics. It will compete with whatever succeeds the Playstation 3. There is talk that it will pack a 6 core processor, an AMD-made GPU, and 2 GB of fast DDR3 memory. This console could be unveiled to the world (although not launched), at the CES event held in January. Meanwhile, Microsoft is allowing TSMC some time to refine its 28 nm bulk process.
Source:
TechSpot
Rumors have it, that Microsoft will be developing not one, but two product lines that succeed the Xbox 360, and we're not talking about product variants here, but two distinct lines. The first of the two will be an entry-level console designed more like a set-top box, designed around the Kinect controller (perhaps something to compete against Nintendo Wii U). The second product line will be the one that will be supercharged with the latest technologies that will raise the bar in graphics. It will compete with whatever succeeds the Playstation 3. There is talk that it will pack a 6 core processor, an AMD-made GPU, and 2 GB of fast DDR3 memory. This console could be unveiled to the world (although not launched), at the CES event held in January. Meanwhile, Microsoft is allowing TSMC some time to refine its 28 nm bulk process.
81 Comments on Microsoft Working On Not One, But Two New Xbox Product Lines
2gb of memory is enough, I am playing battlefield 3 on my ps3 @ 720p with only 512mb of memory, and a very old in standard video card also, (7800 series nvidia gimped).
All consoles have to do, is slap some stronger cpu/graphics cores in them and finally allow full 1080p pixel gameplay, and that will be a mass improvement over the consoles of today.
They do not want to go overboard on memory, because just a bit overboard will cost millions in overall total for distribution period.
There going to down the specs low enough, till there is still considerable improvement over today's consoles, and still offer headroom for next-gen consoles with the same cheap prices.
2gb sounds like enough, even if 1gb goes to all background process on the console, there will still be another 1gb of ram to handle a full 1080p graphics experience for the console.
And trust me, someone will develop a game that does everything explained above, and is just shy of using over 2gb of ram.Yes this sounds like a possible solution for the future, but a bit in the future.
Isn't there supposed to be some issue involving hard-drive manufacturing and raising overall prices because of recent events?
I would not want to try to think negatively but, even if this decision was made it would affect the market for us PC players and spectators for sure. Quality of hard-drives might go down because of mass production, and it might become overall harder to get hard-drives of quality or at all because time and money will be spent on consoles, and those consoles will barley be enough return profit because they make them as cheap as they can, and sell them at similar prices. This can be possible though.
Also the overall talk about digital downloads is great for consoles, but I am sure 50-60 dollars for 1 hard media of any kinds, and a plastic covering is great profits for everybody, and I just can not see someone sacrificing that, or having the potential to "raise prices" on video games if there digital in the first place. Why? Because people just wont accept something pure digital and see the prices raise, that argument will blow up on anybody who made that decision.
That is why us PC gamer's get are content extremely cheap from digital suppliers(or host/servers) because there is just no justifying locked in prices for digital content in the first place. A lot of people are simple, and I believe that the console player base and older people that have been used to physical copy's of games just wont accept that, they need it in there hand for more insurance and happiness.
Also taking everything into the digital download world will definitively give the people in charge more power if not loads of power to do what they want. Limited installs, Prices changing on the fly, Even more lack of customer care(game-stop covers that great). I say game-stop covers Customer care great because, if I were to buy a non working title, I can go back and get a replacement. If the same happens for digital, I would have to make phone-calls maybe across the continent threw sections of there customer service.
I could imagine the servers that would be needed to handle the entire console player base downloading blockbuster titles would have to be out of this world with millions accessing and requesting at the same time. (10gb general game request per person). There are also still a huge amount of players, millions still running on some sketchy internet, It would take hours above the 10 mark for them to finally get a start and installation of there games.
Its all possible, and non of B's points are ludicrous, because they have been proven to be more efficient and reliable, it will just take a pretty big movement and assurance to get a start on that for millions of players on consoles.
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ohh yeh, switching the topic a bit, Game-pad vs keyboard and mouse.
Keyboard and mouse is overall completely better then a game-pad, no argument. Game-pads have way more limited movements, buttons, and flexibility then a mouse and keyboard.
A mouse is the aiming reticle of all axis for the player, and is completely controlled by your entire palm, arm, and shoulder muscle movements. I want to see someone with a ps3/360 analog stick use there entire arm to do the same. When aiming with a joystick your only using your fore-arm and hand muscles that are eventually toned and memorized for efficient game play.
When people make some of the control layouts for the consoles, you are eventually needed to focus on pushing a button on the game-pad which sacrifice's focus for aiming and the analog stick movement.
With keyboard and mouse, you never let off your aim because its completely dedicated to one side of your body and nothing else, and the keyboard side layout for actions is exactly similar to a console but instead of your thump of 1 index finger having to move up and off to press a button on a game-pad, you have your entire hand dedicated to a wall of buttons, 5 fingers vs limited movement and fingers on a game-pad.
Its hard to explain, but its the truth.
@ Nihilus the correct term you are looking for is G H E Y. That covers what gay used to mean back in the 80s, as in 2011 gay means gender choice :D
PC-gaming needs this.
While the point that consoles need less ram is correct (no beefy OS in there... just your game's 'lovely' textures), even 2GB is too little.
Console generations don't come on yearly basis...
2GB is going to run out very quickly, and after few years as a PC-gamer, I'll have to keep myself from throwing up by looking at my game's textures and model complexity.
As for the whole PC vs console, who cares, I have an 360 that barely gets used and when it does it's just to stream media mainly, my PC serves me well for everything including a better experience of gaming and console players will most likely have the same opinion only about the console vs PC but that's not what the OP is about.
I think MS are trying to corner the market by heading off Nintendo Wii/Wii U or whatever the next gen Wii is called and at the same time having a superior next gen to compete with the PS4
While I believe there are a lot of valid points on this forum being made. I think were forgetting key information, that being TWO Product lines. This is no different than how cars (SE,SXT,Hemi) and Video Cards are produce (low, mid, and high end)
The Low end set-top box will probably have 2gb of ram with a dvd rom. My thoughts here is this will be cheap so Nintendo don't out sell both consoles again (cause it was so cheap). Since Nintendo's new Wii-U I think has a ATI R700 chip (last I heard) expect this to be competitive with that.
Pure speculation here but the high end elite
- PS3 has 256 ram and 256 video, I'd expect 384 or 512 - It can't be lower than the ps3
- Digital download only - probably see an external blue ray add on (to keep cost down)
- 28nm video chip??
- It will have to be either 720 or 1080p. If they want to give this console 5 years of life or more, this will future proof it.
It's kind of like partitioning hard drive ;)
//yeah, "2 posts" guy continuing the "bold" statements ;P
what I would really want to know is what kind of memory will be used for the gpu DDR3 in gpu terms is well you know
most games released are broken on launch require extreme amount of patching there lackluster in creativity and much like Mozilla Firefox version war, most games these days seem to be a 2 a 3 or a 5 in a series. Tired of the same old shit, gaming was great on console and PC years ago, back when Xbox PS2 and PC were all in stride and doing well, we had true innovation, great games, varied content, and block buster titles..
ooo Uncharted 3 looking at this series its heavily scripted tomb raider without the stigma of shity cashins ruining the franchise... YET.'
ooo Gears of War 3
Final Fantasy 13^2
key point here is theres hardly anything new, on any gaming platform if you look back its the same old recycled cliche's that we see in Hollywood. But instead of rehashing vague ideas. aka locations or particular times in history. its gotten to the point its just simply lets remake the same games, over and over. There are always a few diamonds in the rough. games that truly stand out there fun, but for the most part even those games i get the feeling ive done all this before. Maybe because I wasted a shit ton of money in college to learn how most games are developed on the artistic side, i notice these things, but simply put every developer these days is taking the shortest direct path to $$$ which from a business stand point makes sense, but for me as a consumer / gamer leads to lackluster content. That after a single play through Ive no desire to pick the game up again, where full price for 6 hours dosent cut it nor do the half baked online mods for games that were never ment to have one. I also cannot stand controllers anymore, having the fluid and precision of a mouse in terms of aiming. looking around, etc along with flexibility of button choices which i currently have 3 extra buttons I can use on top of the typical left right and middle click on the mouse coupled with around 25 buttons within easy reach for my left hand means i have around 32 buttons at my disposal that are within a comfort zone.
In the end if people want consoles they play on consoles people want PCs theyll play on PC,
but i will say this if consoles supported keyboard and mouse out the gate with there games, the ability to customize button layout. I would switch to console. and stay there. I honestly would. I just cant stand the controllers anymore as a younger kid i didnt mind it but these days, controllers feel clunky, they feel like there trying to squeeze to much onto a device and gameplay suffers because of it.
Then it again it dosent help developers cater to dumber and dumber people, very few games have decent difficulty, most are easy. Few games have challenging puzzles look at how Resident Evil is setup today vs years ago, all action no brain. Maybe i need to smash my head into a wall a few times and hopefully lower my attention span then I could probably enjoy more of whats out there. Currently having seen both sides of the industry I feel there is no balance anymore, and that the creative and interesting aspects of games have been replaced with cookie cutter adrenaline rides where I have no true freedom to do as I please. Im actively particpating in something that really dosent need my participation. In which case movies tend to be more interesting.
Examples of this would be most single player FPS games these days, they come straight out of Micheal Bay's ass and into the world of EXPLOSION!!!!! EXPLOSION EXPLOSION EXPLOSION!!!!!!. lol.I want games, not movies with controllers. I want actions to mean something because I made that choice not because it advances me down this straight corridor to another straight corridor to another straight corridor etc. Games are dumbed down these days, Uninspired, boring, again a Few games have been great. but compared to the great games that came out years ago. Today the industry has grown so large and so money hungry to survive. Its caused the decline in quality products, and a flood of copy cat clones.
On the Hardware Front
2gb of ram is plenty for a console they need a reason to replace it later. to continue the cycle.
most likely Console os will use 100-200mb of Ram that leaves 1.8gb for a Game,
look at todays games, they crash all the time Skyrim prime example its only using 1.1- 1.2gb of ram on PC but the Ram Allocation is 1.95gb which causes a crash. Consoles dont encounter this issue meaning the games could in theory use 95% of the max memory allocation provided to a 32bit application. 32bit wont be replaced anytime soon on the console front, with next gen consoles games will still be 32bit based. this wont change untill it does 2gb of ram will be the staple because in the end on a 32bit platform there looking at 4gb allocation most of the time, and in that situation 2gb of ram 1gb of vram would let the consoles push 1080p and have little issue, now if they decide to go with 1 large ram cache then yes 3gb - 4gb makes sense but if they do split it much like the Wii u and PS3 have done we will most likely see a 2gb ram 1gb vram ratio,
2 GiB of RAM is still pathetic considering how cheap DDR3 memory is these days. Even your cheapo PCs have at least 3 GiB and most mainstream desktops now have 6-8 GiB. It's going to remain the major limiting factor of consoles (relatively small environments, shitty textures, etc.).
they make both so it should be simple enough to tune one, the other or even both to make it happen
If someone ever gets upset with you, know it is because they think you personally believe what you say.
Yes, games can be shipped on multiple disks, but everyone knows that that is every gamer's nightmare. And a PS4 game will take 6-8 DVDs.
I know you don't support this, so why argue for it?
Consoles can 'cache' games, yes, but install them. Not until there are 1TB HDD, and even then.
Again, you're simply arguing against me because you want to be right, not because you believe what you are saying.
In times like that, I choose to nod and move on. Do the same.Excellent example right here.
*nods*
Oh and that argument about 64bit, Xenon as far as it's known to people is 64bit, though games seem to be 32bit since all ports are 32bit [:confused:]
Once again about memory size, take into calculations the fact that console manufacturers always go for CRAZY bandwidth memory, current PC DDR3 1333Mhz in dual channel just matches X0's bandwidth across almost whole system (bus connecting gpu, mem, cpu is ~22GB/s), it must be a really nice thing when developing. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:X360bandwidthdiagram.jpg
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bit_rates (PC DDR3 at the bottom)
With each generation most of components/parameters are upgraded at least x2, but more often x4/x8
So I don't think they'd stick with that same bandwidth on RAM with current "cheap" DDR3s (that would allow for 4-8GB) that would provide them with 1,5x, maybe max. 2x bandwidth upgrade.
In short, the "next gen" consoles are going to be crippled out of the starting gate which makes PCs all the more appealing to develop for. In 5 years time, I wouldn't be surprised if most games are running on 64-bit binaries and consoles will have to make the switch to 64-bit just to stay competitive. It's going to happen sooner or later just as it did with 16-bit to 32-bit.When they run around saying a console is 64-bit, it usually means the FPU(s) can handle 64-bit. It can also mean the register size. It doesn't have anything to do with the processor's ability to access RAM. For example, most CPUs found in computers would be considered 128-bit because they can handle quad-precesion floats.
Just because the processor supports it doesn't necessarily mean any of the developers use it.That's because the GPU and CPU are using that same pool of RAM--GPU being the #1 customer and for fair comparison, you got to look at GDDR5:They cut corners to save costs everywhere possible and it makes life hell for developers trying to push the envelope.