[ArsTechnica] Next-gen consoles and impact on VGA market

[zendo911]

I have been trying to make an estimated comparison between what's in the PS3 and the 6670, and here is what I came up with:
- Assuming the GPU in the Ps3 is a crippled down version of the 7950 GT, I assumed it should be in line with a 7800 GT.
- A 7800 GT is almost 45% of the performance of a 8800 Gt (I used this card as a middle measure-againts reference).
- A 8800 GT = HD 4770, which is almost 50% the performance of a 6670.
This will lead to an approximation that pluging a HD 6770 into a PS4 will give us 4x the performance of the PS4. But given that a 7800 GT on a PS3 doesn't equal a 7800 GT on a PC, we need another way to think about it, just ask yourself what modern GPU will it take to play BF3 on Medium settings on a 720p resoultion @ 30 fps ?! you'll end up with a GPU that's comfortably 10x faster than whatever is inside the PS3 ... so yess, even a 6670 inside a PS4 will give us a good graphical boost.

However, being a greedy gamer I dream of a kepler-level GPU inside one of those consoles. Remember the GK104 was supposed to be a $300 - $350 part after all (that's for a complete retail card with all the excesses), so a GK107 on a 28nm inside a console that's to be released in 2013 when the 28nm is mature and all good isn't a far cry after all.

Given how people are easily paying $800 for a smart phone that's obsolete in one year, I just can't imagine why a console can't cost up to that same amount, all it actually needs is to have a differentiation factor, to offer something not offered by competitors, Sony tried this with the PS3, but failed to make it any more revolutionary than the xbox 360, they failed on the excution rather than the concept. The current console players seems too content and unleveraged to my taste, I just wish another big player jumps in and revolutionize the whole thing, Apple iPlay anyone !!!

 

[taltamir]

just ask yourself what modern GPU will it take to play BF3 on Medium settings on a 720p resoultion @ 30 fps ?! you'll end up with a GPU that's comfortably 10x faster than whatever is inside the PS3 ... so yess, even a 6670 inside a PS4 will give us a good graphical boost.

Yea, PC games are a LOT cheaper to develop then console games because you don't have to spend so much money on optimizing them for performance to eke out every last FPS from an anemic platform.

 

[RussianSensation]

... so yess, even a 6670 inside a PS4 will give us a good graphical boost.

I think PS4 is rumoured to use an A8-3570K or similar CPU which itself has a graphics card onboard. The performance in cross-fire should be similar to HD6770. It will be a nice increase compared to PS3 and 360 however by the time these next generation consoles launch (end of 2013), that type of GPU power will be very slow. Maxwell is due by 2014 and AMD will be on HD9000 series by 2014 I imagine. It wouldn't have been unrealistic to expect at least HD7850 style GPU inside PS4 by end of 2013. HD7850 will be low end by early 2014.

Of course it's possible that MS/Sony may be much more aggressive with pricing. I doubt Sony will sell their new console for $600. Also, MS seems to be very much interested in Kinect 2.0. With these additional features and focus on not losing a lot of $ on hardware, that doesn't leave a lot of hope for a lot more powerful consoles. What made the current generation somewhat bearable was that PS3 and Xbox360 had mid-range GPUs or slightly faster. If next generation also lasts 8 years and starts off the bad with HD6670~HD6770 GPU level, it's going to be a lot more difficult to advance graphics at a rapid pace (just look what happened since Crysis in 2007 due to the current consoles holding us back).

 

[PrincessFrosty]

The Xbox 360, launched November 2005, and the PlayStation 3, launched November 2006, were both cutting-edge systems at their release.

This line really proves the person writing the article doesn't know what they're talking about. They both released with relatively decent CPUs, but with hardly any memory and the GPUs were nothing more than mid range video cards from the PC.

If you inspect the whole gamut of hardware available at the time of release the horsepower inside the consoles were underwhelming, and what do you expect for such a cheap price.

Still, the relative power of the next gen consoles, assuming the rumours are true, put them in an even worse position, which is not good for gamers both in the console space and the PC space since what we see on the PC is going to be just ports of console games for the next 6 years again.

I tell you what, if the next 6 years is set to be average looking games based around the design requirement that we all have mid 6xxx range AMD cards, I think I'm done with gaming. There's only one thing worse that putting up with this stagnation and thats going into another generation of hardware which is even more behind the times than the last set.

 

[Ancalagon44]

This line really proves the person writing the article doesn't know what they're talking about. They both released with relatively decent CPUs, but with hardly any memory and the GPUs were nothing more than mid range video cards from the PC.

Uhhh... what?

The ATI Xenos used in the 360 was the first unified shader architecture GPU anywhere, quite a way ahead of ATI's products at the time. The RSX in the PS3 was closer to high end than mid range, as a poster above mentioned, something like a 7800GT.

 

[toyota]

This line really proves the person writing the article doesn't know what they're talking about. They both released with relatively decent CPUs, but with hardly any memory and the GPUs were nothing more than mid range video cards from the PC.

If you inspect the whole gamut of hardware available at the time of release the horsepower inside the consoles were underwhelming, and what do you expect for such a cheap price.

Still, the relative power of the next gen consoles, assuming the rumours are true, put them in an even worse position, which is not good for gamers both in the console space and the PC space since what we see on the PC is going to be just ports of console games for the next 6 years again.

I tell you what, if the next 6 years is set to be average looking games based around the design requirement that we all have mid 6xxx range AMD cards, I think I'm done with gaming. There's only one thing worse that putting up with this stagnation and thats going into another generation of hardware which is even more behind the times than the last set.

um the gpu in the 360 and PS3 blew away what MOST gamers had for the next couple of years.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

um the gpu in the 360 and PS3 blew away what MOST gamers had for the next couple of years.

I don't care what most people have, I care about them making an accurate statement about where the consoles were in the curve of hardware growth and to suggest they "leapfrogged" the PCs at the time is an outrageous lie.

Just because most people don't upgrade on the front of the curve doesn't mean the hardware is non existent, you could easily beat the RSX with any high end video card, a GeForce 7900 GTX was way faster, the 7950 GX2 I had at the time was an awesome card, or any configuration of SLI of these sorts of cards would stomp all over the RSX by greater than a factor of 2.

Within a "couple of years" we had cards like the 8800GTX which were twice as fast again, the consoles started life behind the curve and only ever got worse as time went on, pretending otherwise is stupid.

 

[Arkadrel]

um the gpu in the 360 and PS3 blew away what MOST gamers had for the next couple of years.

You could get a Radeon x1800 back then too, it was just high-end.
By 2006 you could get a much faster card for under 200$.

The Xenos is a custom graphics processing unit (GPU) designed by AMD (former ATI), used in the Xbox 360 video game console. Developed under the codename "C1,"[1] it is in many ways related to the R520 architecture and therefore very similar to an ATI Radeon X1800 series of PC graphics cards as far as features and performance are concerned.

This was back around november 2005..... and a xbox 360 cost like 399$ in the US.
The MSRP at launch date, for a ATI Radeon x1800 XL, was like 400$+ back then.
(in reality the Xenos GPU was probably slightly slower than the x1800 series, but hardware codeing has its benefits)

The design behinde the Xbox 360 must have been a amasing feat,
if they could make much of any profit off of the sale of it.

By todays standarts even a 7850 inside a new Xbox would be insane.
The question is if people would pay 400$ for a Xbox like that today?

I don't care what most people have, I care about them making an accurate statement about where the consoles were in the curve of hardware growth and to suggest they "leapfrogged" the PCs at the time is an outrageous lie.

They didnt leapfrog, but the Xbox was probably close to a high-end PC GPU by the time it was out (think 400$ GPU's).
A year lateron PC GPUs for less than 200$ where kicking the Xbox's arse again.

 

[toyota]

I don't care what most people have, I care about them making an accurate statement about where the consoles were in the curve of hardware growth and to suggest they "leapfrogged" the PCs at the time is an outrageous lie.

Just because most people don't upgrade on the front of the curve doesn't mean the hardware is non existent, you could easily beat the RSX with any high end video card, a GeForce 7900 GTX was way faster, the 7950 GX2 I had at the time was an awesome card, or any configuration of SLI of these sorts of cards would stomp all over the RSX by greater than a factor of 2.

Within a "couple of years" we had cards like the 8800GTX which were twice as fast again, the consoles started life behind the curve and only ever got worse as time went on, pretending otherwise is stupid.

the gpus in those consoles were like having 6800gt sli which was considered super high end at the time of release. getting a console was cheaper than getting video card that was faster than in the console. they WERE cutting edge gpus when released.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

the gpus in those consoles were like having 6800gt sli which was considered super high end at the time of release. getting a console was cheaper than getting video card that was faster than in the console. they WERE cutting edge gpus when released.

Price isn't a factor here, the article clearly states the current gen consoles "leapfrogged" the PC and were "unmatched" and that's not true, not only did they NOT leapfrog the PC they didn't even match the high end PCs at the time.

What was considered super high end at the time would be something like 2 7900GTXs in SLI, which would be something in the order of 3x faster than the RSX. The RSX is essentially like a gutted 7800 with the ROPs and memory bandwidth dialled back to something closer to a 7600, it was essentially a mid range GPU solution from the 7xxx generation.

Console graphics hardware from this generation is a slightly modified SUBSET of PC hardware that was engineered and went through R&D in the PC space to facilitate PC graphics acceleration, and because it's subset of PC hardware, by definition it cannot be unmatched by it.

Console manufacturers leech off the work that has gone into development in the PC space, the consoles have GPUs which are only as fast as they are because of the years of constant R&D in the PC space building better and faster GPUs, R&D that's paid for by the PC gamers who regularly buy new GPUs and pour money into the market to aid its continual improvement.

If theoretically PC gaming died and that took out the discreet graphics market with it, where would the consoles get their next gen GPUs from? They'd have to pay for all that R&D up front to create something better than what the previous generation had, and then they really WOULD be "cutting edge" and "unmatched" and have "leapfrogged" the PC, they'd probably also cost $2000 each or more likely have pathetic Wii style hardware.

 

[taltamir]

Within a "couple of years" we had cards like the 8800GTX which were twice as fast again, the consoles started life behind the curve and only ever got worse as time went on, pretending otherwise is stupid.

A couple of years? The 8800GTX came out 3 days before the PS3 and 8 days shy of a year after the xbox360.

November 16, 2005 - Xbox360 available.
November 8, 2006 - 8800GTX released
November 11, 2006 - Japan release of PS3
November 17, 2006 - Canada, Honk Kong, Taiwan, USA release of PS3

 

[njdevilsfan87]

With the GPUs they used in the Xbox/PS3, it would be like the equivalent of putting a HD 6950 into a console today.

A 6670 GPU would give them a large graphical boost regardless, but it wouldn't match the highest end PCs like the 360 and PS3 were able to do at release. But if MS and Sony decide to go budget on their consoles for profit... as long as they release a new one every 4-5 years I'll be fine with that. If they take 7-8 years again, then God help us gamers.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Good point...well the 8800GTX was much faster than a 7600 for sure.

I was looking at relative release dates of the high end 7xxx range cards and saw late 2006 for the 7900 cards so assumed the 8xxx series was a good year behind that, I guess the 7900 released late in the 7xxx series then, probably a refresh, too long ago to remember from memory

Anyway the point remains, the hardware was not leapfrogging anything, this whole thing reminds me of a rage inducing comment made by Pachter in this video about nobody having a PC faster than a PS3 xD http://www.gametrailers.com/episode/bonusround/311?ch=4&sd=1 (1 Hour 15mins and a bit)

Caused pages of fun discussion on the hardocp forum years ago - http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1477330

 

[Anarchist420]

They should use dx11.1 compliant nvidia hardware or they should just do 2 upgraded multicore cells each with their own memory. Those cells would need to have double fp precision and some texture units that could do full trilinear mipmapping plus hq af as good as nvidia's hardware as well as boundless texture support ... because that would be better than Dx11.0 AMD GPUs.

Then again, they're trying to make a profit. That said, I'm not expecting 120 hz input, I'm not expecting good AA with every game, and I'm not expecting higher precision frame buffers. I am expecting 1080p to be mandatory and every game to have 8k^2 textures lossily compressed 8:1 and full screen aliasing, however. The importance of 1080p at all costs is the biggest sham IMO.

 

[taltamir]

but the cells SUCK!

Also, the biggest issue with the consoles is their utterly pathetic RAM quantity. 512MB was pathetic when the consoles released. Its unacceptable today. We have cellphones with 2GB of RAM today. "Here is our high end gaming console with 1/4th the ram of a cellphone".

 

[cplusplus]

They're more than likely not using anything 7xxx series related (remember, AMD has both these contracts) for the next consoles because there's really no guarantee that even by the middle/end of next year 28nm production will be up to the point where they can produce the amount of GPUs needed to make enough consoles for the immediate launch period. So that's why we'll have a 40nm based architecture like the 6670, probably with some Northern Islands/Sea Islands tweaks thrown in to help it age a little bit better. Though, if I were AMD, I'd try my hardest to get something based on GCN in there.

And I agree that the most important thing right now is that they don't skimp on the RAM, for both the system and the graphics card. Everything should be running at 1080p native (or at absolute least 720p), so it doesn't need a ton. 2GB on each would be nice, though I'm expecting less for the graphics card.

 

[taltamir]

2GB is skimping it... the 4GB 32bit barrier delayed adoption for years but we are finally breaking it and there are some games that require more. And RAM is dirt cheap and gives huge massive advantages. Especially in loading times.

They should be using 4GB at absolute minimum. 8GB is preferred. 16GB is unrealistically expensive for a console (although it would of course find use).
And thats for system ram only, GPU should be having its own dedicated 2GB of GDDR5.

Of course, in the past they used shared ram between system and GPU so it would not surprise me if they do so again.

 

[RussianSensation]

Within a "couple of years" we had cards like the 8800GTX which were twice as fast again, the consoles started life behind the curve and only ever got worse as time went on, pretending otherwise is stupid.

I agree with your assessment that relative to current GPUs, the next generation of consoles will look even more underpowered than PS3/360 did. However, while 8800GTX launched 2-3 days apart from PS3 and it cost $599 I believe. That would be impossible to fit into a PS3 not just from a cost perspective but even the power consumption and system cooling capability. The article isn't correct to state that we didn't have faster performance on the desktop but as toyota alluded, 6800GT SLI or something similar cost a lot of $ back then.

RSX in PS3:

550mhz GPU clock
24 ALUs
8 Vertex pipelines
24 Texture units
8 ROPs
128-bit memory bus @ 22.4GB/sec
256mb of vram

vs. 7950 GT desktop

550mhz GPU clock
24 ALUs
8 Vertex pipes
24 TMUs
16 ROPs
256-bit memory bus @ 44.8GB/sec
512MB of VRAM

So it is true that RSX was a cut-down mid-range card. However, by the sound of it the GPUs in the next Xbox/PS4 will be between HD6670 and HD6770 level of performance. By end of 2013, that's completely low-end. In fact that'll be below low-end because AMD will surely have a faster HD8750 card than HD6770 is.

I suppose you could argue that 8800GTS 320mb was the new mid-range card from NV but that card cost $399 but I believe it launched in Feb of 2007, way past PS3's debut. Again, just not realistic to have expected that in a PS3 in November of 2006.

At the same time, HD7850 will probably be $150 card by end of 2013. So really, it's feasible to put that in but probably for cost reasons we won't see it. I honestly think 7850 would have been perfect. It's seriously much faster than 6770 and it has 2GB of VRAM. It consumes under 100W in desktop form. That means a mobile version of this chip is probably doable in under 50-60W.

 

[taltamir]

The only rumors with any backing I saw thus far said next gen consoles are licensing AMD APUs.

The wii's massive success meant a lot to sony and MS.

 

[RussianSensation]

I think it's 4 Core 4 Threaded (16 threads in total) PowerPC architecture for Xbox 720 of which 4 threads will be used for Kinect 2.0. This console has been rumoured to have HD6670 or similar GPU.

PS4 is rumoured to have A8-3850/3870K or similar with HD6670 for CF with that APU for a total of 6770 performance level. PS4 isn't rumoured to use PowerPC CPU.

Latest information leaks point to PS4 beating 720 in GPU processing power but MS focusing on media center features and Kinect 2.0 among other secret features not disclosed as differentiators. Sony is rumoured to be committed to beat 720's GPU performance however. At the end it probably won't matter as much as the prices unless PS4 has substantially faster GPU.

 

[toyota]

except for exclusives does it really matter if one console has a slightly better gpu though? arent developers going to try and make the game run smoothly on the slowest of the XBOX720 and PS4 without taking the time to make it look slightly better on one because its extra work?

 

[njdevilsfan87]

I told my little brother this morning about the 6670 and he asked if it was better than the GPU in his computer (a 6850), and I told him not even close. He then replied with, "you know what, I'm not buying consoles anymore". And this kid didn't start really PC gaming until the past year or so. Steam, and the nicer graphics of the PC have moved him over (he once commented to me about how much "cleaner" L4D2 looked on his PC vs his 360, to the point he couldn't play it on the 360 anymore). It looks like these new consoles will convert him completely.

 

[Fire&Blood]

Plenty of time for someone else to swoop in and steal a lot of the mainstream user base with portable devices. Next ipad maybe? It's only a matter of time until smartphone/tablet games level the playing field (in terms of image quality) with 2005-2006 consoles. Sony could be better of with integrating a Playstation tablet into Android and updating countless Playstation bestsellers for the mobile devices, instead of pushing a dedicated mobile platform without a massive ecosystem and a costly home solution at the same time.

Now, if PC gaming wasn't an orphan that it is, it could take advantage of this gap until the next gen consoles arrive. Many are threading the waters and contributing to the PC but no one really sands firm behind PC gaming to make things happen. Bumping a mass production $499 back to school box to $599 should be enough room to squeeze out some gaming performance, enough to beat the consoles at the least. A pc could sue some more mobility, external cable management could use some creativity, as it is moving the PC even a few inches is a pain for most. Obviously such push couldn't come without games to help drive sales but the sad thing is that even if the PC exclusive titles grew rapidly in numbers and appeal, there is no daddy figure to push the PC, just a bunch of step dads stopping by every once in a while.

 

[RussianSensation]

except for exclusives does it really matter if one console has a slightly better gpu though? arent developers going to try and make the game run smoothly on the slowest of the XBOX720 and PS4 without taking the time to make it look slightly better on one because its extra work?

Ya, that's pretty much it. I think the small differences in graphics won't show up in cross-platform games for the most part. Maybe in exclusives. Price and what games are available on each console will matter more. MS charging $50 a year to use Netflix / online gaming is a big difference. Some may view it as worthwhile, others may want to save $400 of costs over 8 years to buy games.

I can see MS doing something creative with their sales model. Maybe charging $99-199 upfront for the console to lock you into a 2 year contract with some monthly fee. They did it recently with the 360 and apparently it sold well. Also, given how long this generation has lasted, I don't think graphics will be as big of a selling feature as before. I think MS will really try to use Kinect 2.0 as an integral feature integrated into each console. And probably Sony will continue to allow you to upgrade the HDD using after-market SSDs, etc. and try to lock in mature titles. MS's marketing $ has allowed them to lock in certain perks such as delivering DLC and content to their users first (COD). Online match-making capabilities of Xbox Live, etc. A lot of those things are probably way easier to sell than better graphics, esp. if PS4 and 720 will have similar graphics. The outlier is the Wii U. Will the market embrace another casual console or will the Wii U fade fast 2-3 years out? Inability to play BluRay, and likely a very small internal HDD, lagging online gaming platform, have a potential to hurt it this time now that the casual gaming market has already purchased the Wii.

 

[Kaldorine]

Wow this thread reminds me of the ole skool 360 vs ps3 wars back in the day. It looks like the boys never get to old to argue about the some ole things over and over.