Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Relaxing Xbox One Kinect Requirements, Giving GPU Power a Boost?
MojoKid writes "News from gaming insider Pete Doss is that Microsoft is mulling significant changes to the restrictions it places on developers regarding the Xbox One's GPU. Reportedly, some 10% of total GPU horsepower is reserved for the Kinect — 8% for video and 2% for voice processing. Microsoft is apparently planning changes that would free up that 8% video entirely, leaving just 2% of the system's GPU dedicated to voice input. If Microsoft makes this change, it could have a significant uplift on system frame rates — and it's not clear that developers would necessarily need to patch the architecture to take advantage of the difference."
Is a 10% boost going to take 720p to 1080p? Or 1080p 30 fps to 60 fps? Not likely. Fact remains that even moderate PCs today outperform both the PS4 and Xbox One at a similar price point. Toying with 8-10% GPU consumption is insignificant in the big picture.
...year of Xbox One
I wish they would devote 8-10% of their resources to making their voice recognizer worth a damn. It was hilariously bad on xbox 360 and then I watched some xbox one launch parties and saw what a travesty it still was.
Fact remains that even moderate PCs today outperform both the PS4 and Xbox One at a similar price point.
Not in your or mine wildest dreams
The PS4 from Wikipedia "The CPU consists of two quad-core Jaguar modules totaling 8 x86-64 cores. The GPU consists of 18 compute units to produce a theoretical peak performance of 1.84 TFLOPS. The system's GDDR5 memory is capable of running at a maximum clock frequency of 2.75 GHz (5500 MT/s) and has a maximum memory bandwidth of 176 GB/s. The console contains 8 GB of GDDR5 memory" for US$399.99, €399.99, £349.99
vs
For just the base unit of the PC for the same price http://www.amazon.com/Dell-Ins... Processor: Intel® Pentium® processor G2030 (3M Cache, 3.0 GHz), Memory (RAM): 4GB DDR3 SDRAM, 1600MHz-1X4GB, Storage (hard drive): 500GB Hard Drive, 3.5", 7200rpm, SATA, Optical Drive: DVD+/-RW Tray Load Drive, 16X, SATA Color: Black
I am a bit tired of these comments being modded up in the hope of PC gaming making a comeback.
... the algorithms use mostly the same kind of operations, which are are what GPUs specialize in.
It might have something to do with the ability of GPUs to crank through FFTs like nobody's business...
You see this on PCs occasionally as well - reprogrammable GPUs work really well as DSPs, and since dedicated sound chips aren't widely available (and are much more expensive than just reserving a little throughput on a part already present) it makes a lot of sense to do it.
Yes, it was.
From experience I can tell you that the Golden Screwdriver liberated more than just measly 10% of disk capacity (or whatever other resource).
The News here is that the Xbox is significantly crippled compared to the cheaper, less abusive opposition Sony!? Kinect is not the selling point to justify the Xbox's inflated Price. This is being reflected in the current sales numbers with worldwide sales being (almost) half that of that of the PS4 (or a little higher than the PS3) http://www.vgchartz.com/#This%.... The only other thing of note is software is no longer the significant factor it was in choosing a console. Personally though I have my eye on Android gaming.
Sorry, the computing power difference between PS4 and Xbox One is far higher than 8%:
http://www.extremetech.com/gam...
And most of the recent cross-platform games have visually confirmed that.
Not to mention that this is probably the first time in consoles' history that the most powerful console is even cheaper than its direct rival (!). And why is that? Because of the kinect that NOBODY wants, especially after the NSA scandal.
It's a marketing disaster from MS, no excuse. They basically made any possible mistake that they could have done.
"Most people will take a constant 30 FPS over a 40 FPS average frame rate that bounces between 20 and 60 FPS" On OSU I lock mine down at 120 because turning it off it runs around 1000 -1200 but the jumps can be worse than low FPS. You don't need a good card for it that for sure because even my crappy integrated gets over 100. Sadly it only ran 4-10 on Path of Exile hence the upgrade.
http://www.geek.com/games/tomb...
zeus on the loose no excuse http://www.globalresearch.ca/weather-warfare-beware-the-us-military-s-experiments-with-climatic-warfare/7561
retaliation for tricking the never ending holycosters into composting their dna into the lhc? vanity addicts sheesh
Probably because it's the right tool for the job.
FX8320: 150 on sale, 170 Retail Pricing (This is the cheapest 8 core AMD offers and thus the closest CPU capacity to the xbone/ps4. Also power management allows underclocking down to at least 800 mhz, so you should be able to find an equivalent clocking to the 1.9 ghz one or both of those consoles uses.)
MSI 970A-G43: 70 dollars on sale Maybe 80-90 Retail
Hard disk: 50-150 for 500 gig to 4 terabyte.
Memory: 8 gigs for under 100 dollars, including ECC (Kingston ram. Look under server memory on Newegg.)
AMD GPU: XFX 7850 2gig 169.99 Retail @ Newegg.
Case: 30-100 dollars depending on your preferences. I haven't bought one over 40 dollars in a good 10 years and most included a PSU.
Grand total: Around 200 bucks more.
This is still missing a kinect, keyboard, mouse, and controller, as well as OS.
It's not quite as cheap as any of the consoles, but it's much faster cpu-wise, should spank the XBOne memory-wise, and should give the PS4 a run for its money when GPU prices drop again (7950's were going for ~250 just before Christmas, which would've added another gig of GDDR5 to help compete with the PS4's GPU/GPGPU processing capacity.) Combine it with SteamOS and you've got a competitive 'console' that will probably outlast the current generation consoles handily while allowing much more diversity in usage (and room for 32-64 gigs of ram and a much more powerful GPU before you are finished with it.)
Kind of. It can do the job well enough that using specialized audio processing hardware is a thing for applications that have additional requirements besides "needs X GFlops for audio stuff", for example where power is a big issue (e.g. hearing aids) or where ultra-low latencies are required.
From what I've seen the improvement in graphics from my PS3 to the PS4 or XB1 just isn't enough to justify spending the money on a new console. I think like a lot of people I'll be skipping this generation and seeing what comes around in the next 5-10 years.
But how can the MS/RIAA/NSA now "monitor" players with just the voice and not the full video?
The idea that a game would drop below 60 FPS on hardware that developers know about ahead of time makes my head want to explode. Yet, I saw a game stutter to about 10 FPS on the new Xbox One at my friend's house. Like I need one more reason to reinforce the fact that PC gaming is the superior type of gaming.
The solution is to buy a Steam machine
When will those come to Best Buy
Valve will know which games you can play on it
Valve doesn't know much. Valve knows which games I can buy through Steam. But a Steam Machine runs not only games acquired through Steam but also games acquired through unknown sources. It's really just Debian with a real-time kernel and the Steam client, and the user can always exit Steam and drop to GNOME to run non-Steam games.
Consoles are no different. Some console gamers buy games only once they're cheap used or once they're PlayStation Greatest Hits (or other companies' equivalent). Not everyone has to beat a game in 30 days after launch.
I don't see Microsoft doing much different. Maybe they reserved the CPU/GPU for similar reasons and now they've figured they don't need to any more, or can wake the Kinect up when the user hits pause or starts talking. I'm sure the change if it happens has a lot to do with the recent criticism the XB1 received about resolution and GPU performance when compared to the PS4. It's doubtful they'll ever reach parity but perhaps they can boost performance enough that in most instances it is close enough.
Consoles do outperform PCs in one respect: number of players that can play at once. Because most PCs are stuck at a desk (as opposed to using the living room TV as a monitor), most PC games aren't written to take advantage of multiple USB gamepads. So if you have only one PC in a household, all the players need to take turns, and if you have the luxury of multiple PCs, you need to buy multiple copies of each game. True, not all multiplayer games for consoles include same-screen multiplayer, but I'm pretty sure that far more do than on PCs.
You can do a lot more with the PC, however (that said, you can also get infected with a virus and suffer a good deal more frustration).
Still, I can play multiplayer without paying for a subscription, and have plenty of affordable games via Steam/GoG.
There are a lot more than three. This includes every Loki game, every game that runs in Wine, every Humble Bundle or GOG game ported to Linux, and every NES homebrew game that runs in FCEUX.
I have the money to buy an xbox one without giving it second thought.
But I just don't see a reason yet. No killer games on the xbox one. Little improvement in gameplay/graphics.
The only console I see right now with killer games (Mario 3D) is the wii u.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Since TV's are fixed rate, what would be the point? Even if the Xbox One is capable, it's just self congratulating silliness.
But how can the MS/RIAA/NSA now "monitor" players with just the voice and not the full video?
oh for fuck sake they will monitor your cell phone just like they have for the past couple of decades which is much more effective since they can record your voice and triangulate your location, that is even before cell phones had cameras and gps locator units in them. nobody even gives a shit about a monitoring kinect or ps eye when you can monitor cell phones. but oh you didnt think of that did you.
Is that your mentality when it comes to televisions and movies?
Well, I was considering this 65" LED-LCD, but the movie it's playing looks identical on it as on that 50" over there.
BF4 is not a Xbox One game. It's a game created for the last generation. An Xbox One version is going to have mild if any real differences akin to upconversion of a DVD in a Blu-ray player.
No, "OMFG! THIS IS AMAZING." isn't what you should expect here. When BF5 is only available for the current generation, that's when you can begin making comparisons like this.
"These days games are heavily threaded."
BS. games for this "next-gen" may very well be "heavily threaded" (assuming 8 threads is heavily threaded), but right now, not at all.
most PC games still run a primary thread with a few others at most for peripheral crap. its why strong single thread performance is still king in game performance. just google game benchmarks where they take an i7 or whatever and start reducing the number of active cores/threads; right now 4 is the most you need, and youre certaintly not seeing anywhere near -100% performance with every core/thread taken away.
having hardware capable of 8+ threads is nice and all, but its the programming that has historically lagged behind. i mean... how long have we had quadcore CPUs for now? and were just now, in the last few years, starting to see fairly meaningful returns.