Is the "Console Killer" budget even a feasible idea?

[robbee]

@iFreilicht @EdZ

This came out today: http://vrzone.com/articles/teardown-finds-nintendo-switch-costs-257-make/125298.html

An estimated margin of $42 when sold at retail price. And that's only the manufacturing, so not including transport, marketing, r&d, ...

 

[iFreilicht]

Very cool, thanks for sharing! For margin you can only ever factor in manufacturing, everything else is only known by a very small group of people at Nintendo. We'll never know what R&D cost for that thing.

 

[SeñorDonut]

One of the problems with the dual cores (for me) is that they don't run Planetside 2 very well. It's a horribly optimized game, but darn it it's such a great mass combat experience and nobody ever thought to compete with it.

Planetside 2 is on the PS4 though so IDK if that has some kind of quad core CPU in it?

PS4 has an 8 core CPU (technically two quads), but it runs at something like 1.08 GHz

 

[JosephEK]

PS4 has an 8 core CPU (technically two quads), but it runs at something like 1.08 GHz

I would've never guessed that modern consoles ran at such low clock speeds.

One thing I've never thought of asking about was whether AMD had some kind of advantage since I would think game devs would optimize for them first due to the fact that many titles, atleast the AAA ones are ports from consoles with AMD hardware, so wouldn't they have an advantage?

I was reading something about the Scorpio this morning that said it would have like 6 Teraflop computing speed and be better than an RX 480. Though I myself am not that impressed by this console "4K" bandwagon because I still use 1080p displays and don't plan to switch for quite some time. I've said before that I want AMD to do like what they did with VR and bring "4K to the masses" 200 dollar product sort of thing.

I'd rather see 60FPS at 1080p than 30FPS at 4K. If I run these new consoles on a 1080p display will it give me higher frames or are they still locked at 30 FPS?

 

[IntoxicatedPuma]

MS is saying Scorpio is 4K @ 60fps. It's same amount of memory and bandwidth as GTX 1080, so I guess maybe this is possible.

 

[Thehack]

MS is saying Scorpio is 4K @ 60fps. It's same amount of memory and bandwidth as GTX 1080, so I guess maybe this is possible.

It has been possible to run at 4k at reduced settings. The last notch of settings really bring GPUs to their knees. You can get about 95% of the eye candy at medium or high. If you leave it at that and then run it at 4k it's very possible.

 

[|||]

Very cool, thanks for sharing! For margin you can only ever factor in manufacturing, everything else is only known by a very small group of people at Nintendo. We'll never know what R&D cost for that thing.

For public corporations, you can sometimes ascertain costs in regulatory filings.

It has been possible to run at 4k at reduced settings. The last notch of settings really bring GPUs to their knees. You can get about 95% of the eye candy at medium or high. If you leave it at that and then run it at 4k it's very possible.

Console game developers tweak the heck out of their visual settings for consoles to optimize them. For PC, they just let it be up to the end user, as the immense variety of system configuration precludes them from optimizing the settings in any meaningful way.

 

[IntoxicatedPuma]

It's just easier to tweak the game for console, because their is only one possibly SKU to deal with where you would have malfunctions (per platform). If I tweak something to improve performance on an Nvidia card, what will that do to those on AMD? If I load my game full of high resolution textures to make it look better, what happens to all the people on a GTX 770 with 2GB of RAM?

It's not so much that we tweak stuff to make it better on Xbox or PS4, it's more that we can tweak it because we don't have to worry about ruining the game for everyone else. We have a clear understanding of if the tweak improves performance for everyone, or it doesn't.

I'm sure this is the wrong place to say it, but I really feel the PC market could use some consolidation. For my last project we were fixing bugs that caused the game to crash immediately - only on AMD Phenom or older CPU's when paired with an HD5000 or older graphics card. When you are dealing with those kind of issues and ensuring your game actually runs on it, how can I optimize my game for a 940MX while running an i7 mobile CPU? Or maybe I should optimize on a GTX 580 with AMD FX8300? Or how about an i5 6600k and R9 290X?

 

[SeñorDonut]

It's just easier to tweak the game for console, because their is only one possibly SKU to deal with where you would have malfunctions (per platform). If I tweak something to improve performance on an Nvidia card, what will that do to those on AMD? If I load my game full of high resolution textures to make it look better, what happens to all the people on a GTX 770 with 2GB of RAM?

It's not so much that we tweak stuff to make it better on Xbox or PS4, it's more that we can tweak it because we don't have to worry about ruining the game for everyone else. We have a clear understanding of if the tweak improves performance for everyone, or it doesn't.

This is why nVidia needs to either use AMD's open source APIs or make theirs open source and let AMD use that.

 

[DarkStar]

PS4 has an 8 core CPU (technically two quads), but it runs at something like 1.08 GHz

It's actually 1.6Ghz for standard PS4 and 2.13 for the PS4Pro. Both the CPU and GPU also have direct access to the main GDDR5 RAM pool (8GB). It's some fairly interesting architecture, honestly.

 

[Biowarejak]

IIRC, GDDR5 is actually similar to DDR 4, so it's neat that they found a way to share system resources with it in a singular pool.

Imagine if you could take the money you spent on ram and put that in your graphics card that'd help these budgets some.

 

[IntoxicatedPuma]

Don't forget, both consoles limit the RAM to the graphics card. Same with those CPU cores, some are only used by the system.

 

[DarkStar]

Don't forget, both consoles limit the RAM to the graphics card. Same with those CPU cores, some are only used by the system.

True! Both systems devote a portion of memory and at least a single core to operating system functions, but it tends to vary across system updates. Typically, I think it's no more than two cores and two gigabytes of ram on the PS4 side of the coin. In the case of that hardware, there's also a dedicated ARM CPU with its own 256MB memory block, but I'm uncertain of what it actually does.

 

[IntoxicatedPuma]

PS4 is 4GB i think, I could be wrong. I know xbox freed up a core and some RAM in fall 2015 when they realized their performance was lagging behind Sony. Havent heard about the ARM CPU on board, I'll ask some programmers if they know anything about it.

 

[DarkStar]

PS4 is 4GB i think, I could be wrong. I know xbox freed up a core and some RAM in fall 2015 when they realized their performance was lagging behind Sony. Havent heard about the ARM CPU on board, I'll ask some programmers if they know anything about it.

On the PS4 the hardware reserves between 2.5-3.5GB. It's an even 3GB on the Xbone. Both give access to seven out of eight cores, but the Xbone has a slight clock advantage (1.75GHz vs 1.6Ghz). All that aside, these are both older architectures and they're pretty even with an old Alienware Alpha from a performance standpoint, so I can't imagine it'll be very long until the 'console killer' is doable at console prices. Speculative Zen/Vega APUs should go a long way toward that reality.

 

[JosephEK]

So this new X Box Scorpio is designed to play all games at 4K 30FPS right?

What's the cheapest desktop GPU capable of doing that? At very least maybe RX 480 / GTX 1060? And how much do systems that feature those GPU typically cost? I can't imagine them being less than 600-800 dollars unless you hurt the quality of things like PSU, cooling and storage.

Maybe Consoles are actually pulling ahead even more in terms of value.

 

[SeñorDonut]

So this new X Box Scorpio is designed to play all games at 4K 30FPS right?

What's the cheapest desktop GPU capable of doing that? At very least maybe RX 480 / GTX 1060? And how much do systems that feature those GPU typically cost? I can't imagine them being less than 600-800 dollars unless you hurt the quality of things like PSU, cooling and storage.

Maybe Consoles are actually pulling ahead even more in terms of value.

Short term value. Consoles still require you to pay for online multiplayer, have no steam sales, and can't be used as a general purpose PC.

 

[Biowarejak]

Not to mention, any internal upgrades void your warranty. An older maker adage goes, "If you can't open it, you don't own it"

 

[Calvin]

Consoles only come with a controller so the PC budget would only include a keyboard and mouse. $400 is more than enough to out spec a console, the OS and console size case is where you'll end up going over budget lol.

 

[IntoxicatedPuma]

So this new X Box Scorpio is designed to play all games at 4K 30FPS right?

Microsoft is targeting 4k at 60fps.