Honestly, i think the real issue is people thinking they know anything about hardware. "Knowing enough to think you are right, but not knowing enough to know you are wrong" Neil deGrasse Tyson, Mike Tyson's older and much less famous brother.
It's their insecurities feeding into it. Let's not forget that the FOCUS on Teraflops and the importance that word has played in the last 10 years. People see that Demo, see that it's on PS5, hear what Tim is saying and immediately their thought is "Wait WTF, 12 is bigger than 10! Why isn't this an Xbox Demo? Why aren't they saying this can also run on Xbox and run better, cause it's 12 TF! WTF!!! WTF!!!" So much of peoples EGO's, hopes, and dreams are now tied to that 12 TF number. And honestly the same goes for the SSD crowd. You're never gonna get away from it.
Yep. And to throw in a bit more; it's funny how some of the people who worship everything SSD (particularly PS5's SSD) are the same ones who were almost always worshiping TFs up until Road to PS5. Always going with TF numbers higher than 12, even into 13/14/15 TF territory.
And even back then, at least some people were trying to tell them that TFs aren't everything. Now they think SSDs are everything and the only thing that really truly matters, because they perceive the "loss" of their preferred platform in the "TF battle" can be translated to a "win" in the "SSD battle" but, once again, they don't really understand the weight of these different technologies into the overall system design, or that there is more than one singular approach to resolve design challenges, even the ones Cerny focused on in his presentation.
To be fair MS did that to themselves, they could have postured better if they were concerned that people would flock to Sonys system because of this demo. Its no different then when Sony fumbled out of the gate talking about an SSD when MS was hammering home the idea of 13TFs. I agree that people try to read between the lines and connect dots when there are no dots to connect however it happens in both camps and you nor i can do anything to change that. What we do know is Epic decided to showcase thier new engine running on the PS5 and not thier previous partners MS. IMO there are only two logical reasons this could be one Sony made a deal with them or the PS5 is more capable of showing of thier new engine. Microsoft fans will support conclusion one and Playstation fans will support conclusion two.
This is true. There's something I want to touch on though real quick. To an extent the perception is MS's fault because they definitely played into the TF angle with their messaging. However, I would not say they only focused on TFs. When they did that blog/Twitter info drop they still led with TFs, but they did touch on a lot of stuff aside from the TFs. They talked about Velocity Architecture, Sampler Feedback, Direct ML etc. Lots of things outside of the "brute force" of pure TFs in fact.
However, I think the issue is that MS did not spotlight that stuff the way Sony did with the SSD and audio at Road to PS5. So that's kind of painted the impression with some people that XSX is anemic in those departments because of lack of in-depth focus on those things in a way that shows the paper specs don't mean everything. If you know where to look around there's some Xbox engineer people who have provided some really interesting notes on aspects of Velocity Architecture like the Sampler Feedback, BCPack, even other things like mesh shader level support (which is double the maximum size of Nvidia's GPUs), and specific aspects of DirectStorage only for XSX.
But that's kind of the problem: you have to go hunt for those nuggets of info. It's a bit surprising that, them being known primarily as a software company, MS's Xbox division haven't put the software stack optimizations regarding XSX at the forefront of their messaging. However, this is where I think WE are kind of to blame here. They kind of knew that the power narrative was something that devastated them with XBO, and a lot of people probably would not have bothered paying attention to them seriously if they lost the power narrative again. Which is why they aimed for a system with a higher TF performance (and higher CPU performance as well).
If they led off with their software-orientated optimizations people at the time probably wouldn't have paid attention because let's face it, A LOT of people were still caught up only focusing on TFs, right up to Road to PS5, where a lot of them were virtually forced to focus on a different metric hence the SSD obsessions that've gained traction. It's the same obsessive, narrow-vision energy they had with TFs in earlier speculation, simply shifted to SSD I/O instead. For all intents and purposes their motivations are exactly the same, the clothing's just been changed.
What I'm thinking is that the hardware event in June will involve a focus on a lot of XSX features outside of GPU TFs, including a front-and-center focus on things they mentioned early on but got buried by both them and a lot of people who could only see TFs at the time. If they can show how their approach to resolving SSD I/O bottleneck issues is competitive with Sony's, while being more mass-market friendly (since a lot of it is software-based it should have scalable performance on a range of devices which benefits 3rd-parties immensely), then they can effectively put a lot of the speculation on their SSD I/O approach being fielded by some as a "bottleneck" to rest. If they can show how their approach is superior to Sony's in some areas, then that would be even better for them.
Whatever they do decide to focus on going forward with hardware talk, though, will be paid more attention to since a lot of people now have SSD tunnel vision syndrome. Anything even
partly related to SSD I/O, they will latch onto with a laser focus.
That sounds so ridiculous to me. It's a 3rd party engine.
