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Best bit is that the TV functionality won't be available outside of the United States on launch (between the lines, will never be parity) as I predicted. Just a continuation of Microsoft's trend of making those outside the U.S. pay more to receive less.
http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/06/...-always-online
Microsoft: anti-games, anti-freedom, anti-american.
Rumour has it that they're having problems with chip yields thanks to the large footprint of the ESRAM and might have to downclock as a result.
UI isn't looking quite as smooth as it did during the demo. I'm going to assume it'll be sorted for the release though, not that anybody outside of the U.S. will be able to use it anyway.
Her accent makes me want to cut my ears off...
Can they afford to downclock? They're at a performance deficit vis-a-vis the PS4 as it is. I hope for their sake they aren't buying their own bullshit about the cloud making up for it.
We've been hearing about yield problems for almost a year now, though. Might be old news.
I'm sure the PS4 is going to have its own set of problems. Like, where in the world are they going to get all that GDDR5 and how are they going to keep it cool?
What happened was Microsoft tried to cut corners by using ESRAM and some software foolery to try and get as much performance from their now proprietary SoC as Sony would get out of the reference AMD design though brute force. That would put them at performance parity until devs figured out how to maximize the usage of PS4's processing power. Microsoft wanted to save money on their end to increase profit margins and, if the competition required, to give them more room to undercut Sony on price. This is what I concluded when I read the AnandTech article breaking down the hardware differences of the two platforms back when the Xbone was announced.
Basically, the bean-counters fucked it up for engineering. I'm laughing so hard right now.
I dont even think it's that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Warsaw
In their minds, the 360 was highly superior to any other console and PC.
To continue what they were doing seems like a good idea. The only thing they had to watch out for was heat so they wouldn't wind up with another RRODfest. I doubt it was even to cut costs since they had to specially engineer busses when they didn't really have to. GDDR5 is more expensive than DDR3, but not that much.
They accounted for that, but didn't think anything about the actual manufacturing process itself. After all, that's something that those manufacturing guys will work out right?
They just kind of flat out ignored the biggest reason why you continuously try to move to a smaller manufacturing process. By doubling the size of the chip, the likelihood of defects appearing on the architecture and not blank/unused space goes up dramatically.6
Also, to be clear, "padding profit margins" is incorrect.
Consoles are not profitable (except the original Wii) when they launch. The jury is still out on whether Microsoft and Sony made *any* money over this (very long) generation once you offset the late mid/late-generation profitability with the massive early/mid-generation losses.
True...for now. I'm pretty sure there is a point when the consoles stop being sold at a loss due to age. I also know that the tech in the Xbox 360 and PS3 was cutting edge at the time while the stuff in the new ones is old hat. Still, I guess I could rephrase it as "sold at less of a loss."
This is why MS charges arms and legs for even indies to put their games on XBLA