Just going to quote myself from a couple posts above here. Rather than bother explaining to the general populous here that you can't just compare a teraflop to a teraflop. Nevermind the fact that you're trying to claim a console which will likely be around $500 will have performance anywhere approaching to a video card costing $1200 alone. You keep arguing with yourself here bud, you're always right after all.
No dude, they'll offload processes to Azure or something that will make it work. Magic! I think the icing on the cake was him using their job on Halo 5 as an example because it is 60fps on multiplayer. Little does he know I play Halo 5 often, and the multiplayer varies between 720p and 900p upscaled to 1080p. Proving my points post by post.
You expecting the price point to be $500 with what we know is no more absurd than my thinking there are possibilities that you haven't thought of. 6 teraflops of power at $500 would be an absolutely steal, as a card with that much power alone costs that by itself. I know that fact perfectly, buddy - I linked to a freaking article that says just that... READ... see the "with some fancy engineering" link. You haven't proved a thing, nor have I. The fact is, none of us know jack other than what they have shared. It is all speculation. They have engineered on the fly scaling to maintain FPS, so of course they could use that with Scorpio. They have engineered custom chipsets for Hololens, that they could also use. They have also offloaded compute cycles to Azure on multiple titles, so again - they could use that with scorpio. I do know for a fact that they have some huge features that they haven't released as of yet, and because of that fact I am going to be more optimistic than not. No one really expected them to get HDR support out of the little power of the Xbox One S, but they did just that... and their 1.4 teraflop One S can also do 4k native media playback, while the far more powerful Playstation 4 Pro can't, and Sony freaking invented Blu-ray.
Well, you also have to wonder whether or not Sony wanted it in the Pro. It might be possible to enable it with just a firmware update.
This seems like kind of an odd comment in the context of the discussion (which, from my understanding, was about power). I don't think PS4 Pro not supporting 4K blu-rays has anything to do with power, but rather that it does not come with an UltraHD blu-ray drive. What does that have to do with graphical performance?
I think the whole pro/scorpion thing is silly since devs have to make games work on both systems... It'll be interesting to see how much difference the scaling is between the 2. I mean since consoles aren't keeping up with pc's (already) they might as well at least let the devs develop for the platform they prefer (best console/pc etc). All this will do is fragment the top tier market more when looking at pc vs console. I mean if the thing can pull off 6 teraflops I want to see a game optimized for just that, unless the devs can make it run at 5ps on the original systems (and that still counts as being compatible, hahah). Anyway, I am impressed with xbox s offering UHD Blu-ray, and the talks about one copy of games (well first party, counting as owning on pc and xbox). I might dump my ps4 just for a cheap UHD player. I do wish Microsoft got back in on their htpc/media extender stuff. Still rocking cabled cards... I'm a pc gamer anyway, but still use consoles when I get lazy..
Right, Sony kind of got cheap and just didn't include the drive. It was similar when Sony dumped a lot of media features on the ps4, and finally added them back in.
Yeah, the PS4 is a truly crap media machine. I find it interesting that last gen, Sony went whole-hog on the hardware... included rechargeable batteries in the controllers, a million media card readers, a mandatory larger hard drive, included wireless, hi-def optical drive, etc, with an emphasis on being a great multimedia device, instead of "just" being a gaming machine. And the 360 thrashed it in early sales. It seems to me like Sony/MS have kinda reversed themselves. XB1 is a better media machine than PS4 (though the gap is not quite as wide as PS3 vs 360), and MS insisted on bundling Kinect early. A little strange, since MS won the early battle by focusing only on games before. Seems like they expected the customers to switch their focus, and they just... didn't. Anyway... I agree with you that Pro/Scorpio both seem slightly silly, since all games will need to be compatible with the older boxes. I won't be rushing out to buy a Pro or Scorpio. And I can't say that I'm in any rush to go 4K. From what I understand, 1080p is already at the edge of what the human eye can see, for the viewing distance I'm at in my living room. So... why? Maybe one day I'll buy a ridiculously enormous TV and then I'll care, but I plan to wait until my two existing TVs stop working.
Because 4K drive or not, the system has to be pretty bulky to stream native 4K media... that's the very reason native 4K Blu-ray players are still $300 or more (not talking about those that simply upscale). However, you could have gotten an Xbox One S for $219 two weekends ago when it was on sale for $269, and with a Sling TV $50 rebate. People didn't think Microsoft or Sony could include a 4K drive at the Xbox One S price point and with a minor upgrade in hardware, and they did... while still having to pay the Blu-ray licensing fees that Sony would not have to pay. The entire point is, to not underestimate Microsoft's ability to push the their hardware to the max. As others mentioned, it won't be possible with a firmware update because the Pro won't have a 4K Blu-ray capable drive.
Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform makes cross-system compatibility quite trivial. The Xbox Play Anywhere games, are games that work both on Xbox One, and the highest end PC you can throw at it. The Xbox One, Xbox One S and Scorpio will all run the same OS, just different supported hardware. Again, a point I made earlier in the thread - stop thinking of the Xbox as a console, and instead think of it as an affordable, and hands free gaming PC platform at varying price points.
I still don't understand what that has to do with graphical power. Your previous post suggested the Pro couldn't do 4K due to horsepower constraints ("4K native media," not just "4K native media discs"). The Pro can't render modern games in 4K, but the idea that it wouldn't be able to stream native 4K media sounds nuts to me. Where are you seeing that it can't?
And if that's the case, then it's meaningless to me, since I do have a high-end gaming PC. The only reason I have an XB1 is for the few games that are unique to the console. If all exclusivity from PC goes away, I don't need an Xbox at all. And if it doesn't, then those games are still being designed primarily with the lowest common denominator in mind, same as the PS4 Pro. Fine by me if people are desperate to make their PS4/XB1 games look a little shinier, but for now I'm fine with the regular models, plus my gaming PC. There's just not a compelling case for purchasing either for me yet. They may need to discontinue support of the old models before I'm moved to switch.
Drexler fan 22nd cleared this up pretty much, and while I see your point on a tiered system, I'd rather just have the devs focus on the best system and not be limited by trying to get games to work on a system that's only doing ~1.4 teraflops vs the newer advertised 6, or at the minimum having the option to focus just on the top tier if they wanted. Here's the reason... If they're only offering higher res/hdr/higher textures, they're still going to be limited instead of just focusing on the Scorpio, because I'm sure Sony/MS's definition of keeping the old ones playing is making them play at a reasonable rate, thus limiting more features like say more players in a battlefield server or something, or other features that would be Scorpio exclusive. I mean on the PC devs can go crazy (see Star Citizen etc), and while older pcs can play it by turning stuff down/off I don't know if the console companies are going to want that. Like on the Scorpio maybe it'll allow some crazy draw distance like you can do on the PC for GTA, but the devs won't utilize it because they have to keep within the limits of what MS/Sony considers acceptable play rates (so Scorpio players aren't getting some crazy advantage). This really comes down to the definition of what's acceptable but keeping old systems around vs allowing developers to truly optimize the max potential of the top system is not very console-like.
Streaming 4K is all about Bandwidth. You can stream 4K now on Netflix. You dismissed Azure offloading like it was a joke, but I can assure you that it is not. I encourage you to see what they are doing with process offloading for Crackdown 3 as a precursor of what may be to come with Scorpio. Like Titanfall before it, they are showing what the power of Azure can do for a console gaming experience. If they simply use the Scorpio to display 4K graphics, and offload the compute to Azure, they could certainly push 4K VR. Is that feasible or cost effective? Probably not, but it is a possibility. Netflix states that to stream their 4K video you need a constant 25Mbps, so it isn't that hard to believe that you stream a VR game or VR content from the could in 4K at 50Mbps. I know you think I am a fanboy and talking out of my ass, but I know Microsoft far better than most - and I would not be bringing up things outside of the realm of possibility. I hate being wrong more than I love Microsoft. And when I do bring up things that may happen, I am more than happy to also share the likelihood of such. Crackdown 3's announcement video from 13 months ago, claims "Play with 20 times the computational power of your Xbox One." EDIT: The launch-spec Xbox One, which was the one out last August when they released Crackdown 3 video, has 1.3 teraflops of GPU compute. 20x1.3 is 26 teraflops of compute! Now, this was also before they had general availability of Nvidia GPU in Azure. In short, I am hypothesizing that Microsoft figured out that 6 teraflops was just the right amount of power to stream 4K VR from Azure. Of course, you'll need the bandwidth to do so - so you might as well upgrade to Comcast for Business or another unlimited ISP now. If they don't get close to 4K, I know it will be over 1080p as Phil Spencer has said as such. You won't find an Xbox One game unique to the console that isn't on the PC in the future. The only games that have been that way are generally Microsoft published games, and Microsoft is going to start making all Xbox One games that they can (starting with the ones they publish), Play Anywhere. I do think they may hold off on Halo for a few months to help drive console sales, but Halo Wars 2 is coming as a Play Anywhere title. That's the point, Xbox is not just a console, it is a platform. There is a reason they are bringing keyboard and mouse support to Xbox One, and they have allowed streaming to PC since Windows 10's launch. They don't care where or how you game on Xbox, they just care that you game on Xbox. Responding by line with each bolded quote. 1. Why? PC game makers have been creating PC games for systems of varying capabilities since the dawn of PC gaming. It isn't that tough for Microsoft and their development partners to move that process to consoles. This process would actually be easier, and the product on the lower end machines could run better, as they only have to scale the product down for a limited subset of hardware configurations. 2. By devs going crazy, do you mean with online play? I mean graphical intensity isn't all that big of a deal to scale up and down based upon hardware. The Xbox One is powerful enough to do fully open worlds, and vast areas, look at Fallout IV and GTA V as examples. We've basically hit the hardware limitations as far as scale goes, it is all about graphical intensity now. Sure, you could have an area the size of the US or even infinite through procedural generation, but devs have shown with continuous loading that it really isn't a big hurdle to cross. When it comes to the future of online games, it is all about Azure (or AWS) cloud utilization, console or not. Azure's gaming platform is available for all titles as well, not just Xbox One. So a dev could write for PC, and port to Xbox One and PS4 without even changing the backend all that much. That is why Microsoft made the push for cross-platform support not too long ago, as multiplayer games can and should be platform agnostic in the future. Sony has to want to come out and play, though. The upcoming title Crackdown 3 will be the perfect example of process offloading. It will be a nearly fully destructible world, something that is impossible to do by relying only on the local processing power of the Xbox One. That is the point I was trying to make to Drexlerfan22. They could theoretically make games that process completely in the cloud, and your local system (Scorpio) as an example, is simply streaming that content to your VR device in 4k. It is not coincidence that they've added Nvidia GPU capabilities to Azure. 3. I disagree, simply because I've been a PC gamer for two decades. I can play the latest and greatest PC games on a $400 gaming desktop in medium settings, while my best friend and his water cooled $4000 computer can play on ultra settings with 60FPS. I get all of the same functionality and gameplay, just not the pretty graphics, 4k and 60fps. Those same games are also ported down to consoles like the Xbox One and Xbox 360 (GTA V for example). I can play BF4 and Dota 2 on my Core i7 Surface Pro 3, with an Intel 5000 integrated GPU, and then go home and play the very same games on my $1500 gaming PC at 1080p and 60fps. I don't see this as an issue at all.
Really great post. MS is doing a lot with the cloud. It's why they also want to be able to use big data in the same way to answer questions about cancer. They want to be able to analyze and store a lot of data off site, but make it so that it doesn't feel off site. This same work can and will be used for gaming. Now, a better question is, if Xbox is a platform and not a console, how long until we have the HP Xbox, or Xbox by Dell, or the AsusXbox? I don't know if Microsoft will go that far, but then for them it becomes less about price minimization and hardware maximization and more about can we do things server side faster and better.
That's all fine, but it still doesn't seem like you're talking about what I was pointing out at all. You're talking about VR and applications to gaming. I'm talking about your saying "...and their 1.4 teraflop One S can also do 4k native media playback, while the far more powerful Playstation 4 Pro can't, and Sony freaking invented Blu-ray." That quote seems to suggest that if the PS4 Pro had an UltraHD drive, that it still just wouldn't be powerful enough to play a 4K movie. I don't think that's correct. That's my entire point. Not talking about VR at all. And that's great. Hope it's true, because then I won't need a separate Xbox console in my living room at all and can just stick with my powerful gaming PC that I upgrade myself. Thus, as I said, the Scorpio upgrade is meaningless to me, just like the Pro is.
