Murbella
4189
They certainly don’t seem to be giving it away with the system being a hundred dollars more for worse hardware.
jpinard
4190
In the last financials MS stated the Xbox One is profitable out the gate at the $500 price-point on a per unit basis. For years MS consistently bemoaned the fact they lost money on every Xbox360 sold, and as far as I remember, Executives at MS (probably Ballmer) demanded the Xbox One not do a repeat of that.
Yeah, I should’ve phrased that differently since I didn’t mean to disagree. Should’ve said “and then they decided to include it anyways”.
The original Xbox was a money sink, but the 360 stopped selling at a loss relatively quickly Remember, they had hard drive and non-hard drive skus of the 360. If you wanted a hard drive, you paid more for it this time around. They also owned the chip designs this time around, a direct lesson of the problems they had with Intel and Nvidia on the original Xbox.
Frankly, the only major black eye for MS (granted, it was a big one) was RROD. That cost $1 billion to fix. But even after that, the 360 was never a money sink.
Rock8man
4193
Digital Foundry gives the Xbox One architects a chance to defend their design. It will be interesting to see a wide range of benchmarks once actual multiplatform games start coming out for both consoles.
Canuck
4194
Wow my eyes glazed over reading that I’m afraid. Microsoft’s problem is that the numbers that everyone understands at a glance, the number of G flops for example, are all heavily leaning in Sony’s favor. No one but the most hardcore of the hardcore are going to take anything away from that article. It really doesn’t matter at all. People will eventually make judgements based on what they can see which won’t be until the two consoles are played side by side and even then there’s unlikely to be any major differences at the beginning of the gen. Three or four years down the road we might see the PS4 pulling off some amazing stuff but by then it won’t really matter.
Yeah, MS’s real goal with this PR maneuver is to kick the can far enough down the road. Their technical fellow is mostly blowing smoke and sidestepping the actual arguments comparing the relative merits of both consoles. They go to great pains to avoid mentioning cost as a factor, even though that was obviously a huge factor in choosing DDR3, ESRAM and a free upclock instead of 14 active CUs. They also keep using the word balanced in an attempt to imply the PS4 is unbalanced. But the fact is they were completely out flanked by Sony’s gamble on GDDR5. Balance is not a virtue in this case. PS4 is more powerful and more efficient and more forward looking. And it’s cheaper.
That’s not to say Xbox One won’t have attractive games, but the attempt to paint the hardware difference as not meaningful is disingenuous, to say the least.
One thing I did learn from this article as that the comments I’ve seen in various places about developers having to learn to properly use ESRAM were likely spurious
“This controversy is rather surprising to me, especially when you view as ESRAM as the evolution of eDRAM from the Xbox 360. No-one questions on the Xbox 360 whether we can get the eDRAM bandwidth concurrent with the bandwidth coming out of system memory. In fact, the system design required it,” explains Andrew Goosen.
"We had to pull over all of our vertex buffers and all of our textures out of system memory concurrent with going on with render targets, colour, depth, stencil buffers that were in eDRAM. Of course with Xbox One we’re going with a design where ESRAM has the same natural extension that we had with eDRAM on Xbox 360, to have both going concurrently. It’s a nice evolution of the Xbox 360 in that we could clean up a lot of the limitations that we had with the eDRAM.
In other words, it pretty much seems to be a more powerful expansion of an architecture 360 devs know well already.
That being said, I would agree that, when it comes to raw power, Sony seems to have made the right choices. Ultimately, we’ll see what games are worth playing on each system. I’m looking forward to it.
Wendelius
Sure, but the point of comparison is no longer a draconian PS3, it’s a simpler PS4. 32MBs is also pretty small and deferred engines in common use employ lots of intermediate buffers and render targets. There would probably be less grousing among devs if they went with 128MB+ of EDRAM instead of 32MB or ESRAM.
Swery, he of Deadly Premonition fame, is back on Xbox One with a game that sounds insane and hilarious. Here comes the Kinect must have game: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-09-24-d4-looks-like-the-first-game-to-be-truly-better-on-kinect
That one goes straight on my want list.
Wendelius
Rock8man
4199
Eurogamer:
Forza Motorsport 5 also deepens the partnership with Top Gear, with Jeremy Clarkson being joined by James May and Richard Hammond (he’s not a real hamster). There will also be a digital Stig for the first time, setting laps on the tracks for you to beat.
Oh man. And with that one paragraph, they’ve tipped the scales and I want an Xbox One again instead of a PS4 at launch. Damn it.
Telefrog
4200
Rock8man
4201
Yeah, given that I paid for Xbox Live Gold for up April 2014 years ago when I found a good deal on Xbox Live Gold (and I used to play multiplayer a lot), this again is arguing for me getting an Xbox One at launch. That way I can check out Xbox Fitness until April 2014 at least.
Ah. I read that too quickly. This is free for a year? That’s great. Plenty of time to evaluate.
MichaelD
4203
If anyone wants a Day One edition, I have one on preorder from the MS store that I’m planning to cancel; I’ll happily sell it to someone else for cost instead (via paypal) and change the delivery address. PM me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyXjfLpD4Zk
Toys R Us tells parents why the Xbox One is on their Hot List.
“It has an 8-core processor making it one of the fastest Xboxes so far!”
I’d rather buy the fastest xbox myself.
I think that ad might back fire. Parents might end up thinking if they buy an xbox one their kid will turn out like these two annoying kids. Sweet!
“Uh-huh. Awesome. That is too cool, and easy. That’s amazing.”
His excitement is palpable.
From an Insomniac team member:
