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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.
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...
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.)
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.
The vast majority of my time on the Xbone so far has been in the Amazon Instant Video app. It turns out that the Kinect is (or rather, could be) a great tool for occasional user input. The irritating thing about using the controller in this scenario is that it turns off after some period of inactivity (which is still long enough that your battery drains pretty quickly). So if you want to pause, or move on the next episode, you have to turn on the controller and let it sync wirelessly with the console, which takes a good 5 seconds.
Enter the Kinect.. now you can say "xbox pause" and it pauses. "Xbox play" resumes. "Xbox stop... yes... episode 6" goes to the next episode.
In theory.
The problem is, seemingly at random, one of the commands won't work. It opens up the xbox voice control screen which has some generic commands. It might say something like "Play is not available from here" or something. After many minutes of frustrating experimentation, it turns out that sometimes you have to say "select" before giving the same command that may have worked 2 minutes ago. So it's like, "xbox pause" then a few minutes later "xbox play... xbox.. xbox select.. play." That's dumb.
The other problem is the app needs to be intelligently designed for voice control. Amazon Instant Video is NOT one of these apps. The voice commands map pretty directly to the controller commands, but of course the controller is much faster than the voice recognition. A good example of where that's annoying is rewinding and fast forwarding. "Xbox rewind" starts rewinding.. at 2x speed. So if you want to skip back 30 seconds, it'll take 15 seconds to do so. That's no good. So you can say "faster" which increases the speed. Of course, it takes the xbox a second to recognize the command. If you're rewinding 10 minutes, you end up saying "faster [pause] faster [pause] faster [pause]." It's obscene sounding and it takes forever. Then you let it go for a few more seconds... and "play!" But the voice control just timed out, so it's still rewinding. "Xbox play!" and a second later it starts, but you rewound a few minutes too far. And it's too much of a bother to fast forward.
But that's mostly the app's fault, not the Kinect's.