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Microsoft teases ultrapowerful next-gen Xbox — and maybe a handheld

Shin-Ra

Junior Member
My favourite claim [albeit from AMD] about the Xbox One:


This one aged like fine milk in a warm climate.
2olDZkR.png


This was Microsoft's claim on their own site.
 

Bernardougf

Gold Member
I THINK, ITS MY OPINION, I HAVE NO MONEY ON THE LINE

Just wondering if they are hoping it might move the needle some if they have a monster console ready around the time of GTA6

I don't care about Rockstar and next gen updates or any of that what if this next machine has a great built in DLSS type of feature that no extra dev work is required.

ALL OF THESE THOUGHTS ARE TOTALLY RANDOM BY THE USER AND DO NOT REPRESENT ANYTHING THAT MAY OR MAY NOT HAPPEN.
So what you are saying is that all this will happen and they will go with intel+nvidia.. thanks for your official confirmation .. we all will hold to your words very fondly
 

Wooxsvan

Member
I fully believe MS is capable of going Nvidia because they can utilize their expertise with Hypervisor tech and OS layers to help w/ back compat. Things that Sony are doing in a completely different technological way.
BUT I fully expect that to make the console the most expensive we have seen in years
 

Buggy Loop

Member
Guys, I don't know if you are aware of Open AI "Sora", we invite you to take a look for those who do not know the (disturbing) product resulting from AI.

I bring it up here because I wonder if part of that Sarah Bond manifestation of "unseen generational leap" may be based on AI advances in graphics and computing.

I don't know, but that by writing a sentence or phrase you can have a video that is impossible to distinguish from reality... I wonder how something like this will be transferred to game development and video game technology (apart, predictably, from job losses 🙄)


As reference:




Holy shit

Sora actually renders a 3D environment. This is a bit like omniverse but like way better



This is NOT from minecraft, it's Sora AI

Ok this is a game changer.

You can basically have real life graphics
 
Yeah but they are not gonna give you the biggest leap ever. And PT has a huge cost. On my 3080, i can get from 120 fps down to 20 fps when turning on PT. Why would devs give up 4x more GPU power on more accurate lighting when it go towards better assets, character models, textures, geometry and other things that would make a bigger difference than lighting accuracy.
I don't expect next gen to offer massive leaps forward in more accurately tracing lights and their interactions with the game environment. Only ML acceleration will make the most difference. The leap in rendering with path tracing will be noticeable, but not gargantuan. It'll be there though.
 

Buggy Loop

Member
My head is blown from openAI Sora

Why even bother with polygons, texture pipelines and path tracing? At the pace AI is advancing, by 2025 they'll be rendering a full game with whatever parameters you gave it. It's fucking exponential progress. All these are 3D with physics, again not physics in the sense of video games but the AI knows how it should be reacting.

confused fuck me GIF
 

mckmas8808

Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
My head is blown from openAI Sora

Why even bother with polygons, texture pipelines and path tracing? At the pace AI is advancing, by 2025 they'll be rendering a full game with whatever parameters you gave it. It's fucking exponential progress. All these are 3D with physics, again not physics in the sense of video games but the AI knows how it should be reacting.

confused fuck me GIF

There's gotta be a catch here.
 

Buggy Loop

Member
There's gotta be a catch here.

Can't think of one. There might be limits and things where it has errors / weirdness to it but the train of AI is accelerating so fast.

I'll quote my post from the other thread but :

The paper is a must read


"We do this by arranging patches of Gaussian noise in a spatial grid with a temporal extent of one frame. The model can generate images of variable sizes—up to 2048x2048 resolution."

" Emerging simulation capabilities We find that video models exhibit a number of interesting emergent capabilities when trained at scale. These capabilities enable Sora to simulate some aspects of people, animals and environments from the physical world. These properties emerge without any explicit inductive biases for 3D, objects, etc.—they are purely phenomena of scale."

"Sora serves as a foundation for models that can understand and simulate the real world, a capability we believe will be an important milestone for achieving AGI."

I'm stealing a quote from someone on openAI reddit but he nailed it :

I think a lot of people are looking at this the wrong way. Everyone is thinking... oh cool, it's a video Gen tool.

That's not the main story though.

The real story is the fact that this thing can model the future and past and project it into pixel space using an internal world model and do it very well.

Humans have something like that too. It's called imagination. When you walk around absorbing the data from your eyeballs, you are constantly thinking of what could happen next. When you close your eyes you can imagine it.

Now we have a system that does this quite well. And this is also a key part of making things like truly autonomous cars and robotics a reality. It really is a only a matter of time and getting the right hardware

Unless governments put heavy stoppers on AI, because this tech basically just set the endpoint on the horizon for entire industries to collapse and massive layoffs, but also create entire new ones. It's scary and fascinating at the same time.

And this is the tip of the iceberg. The technology is so new and advancing at such a rapid page there society has no time to react and integrate it for impact to be felt.

We won't even be able to tell what's real or what's AI.

This will put into question why even bother to make powerful rendering hardware with shader pipelines, RT cores, vertices and so on. You'll need such a massive rig and so many artists and money to make what Sora will generate in a few seconds

This is the old NERF tech to better understand just how insane AI is



AI knows what time of day should look like and since references are all with real life, you effectively get free path tracing quality. Now Sora is like eons ahead of that 3 years old demo.
 

sendit

Member
My wildcard predictions:

Next-Gen Xbox in 2027 with an Intel APU

Next-Gen PlayStation in 2028 with an AMD Chiplet SoC

I doubt that. Xbox would do better partnering up with Nvidia over Intel. Nvidia is fully in a position to offer an ARM based SoC.
 
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AJUMP23

Gold Member
I don’t know that I want a high end handheld other than whatever Nintendo is doing.

I would need something compelling or cheap to not put a box on my tv. Or give me a second screen.
 

Dorfdad

Gold Member
What if the next box is 2 skus
$800 but it includes 2 years of Gamepass. This lets them sell gamepads at a slight loss but add users and offset the nextbox costs some.
$650 without gamepass - You pay for the hardware.

I understand the economics of consoles costing less than PC's and that 650-800 might be really high considering the economy and state of the world with inflation etc.
However I think this would allow them to make a fairly capable console with vastly more modern parts instead of half passing the memory and GPU's.

However I dont want to hear about some stupid ass special HD. Let us use off the shelf parts like the PS5 does. This is one of the reasons people choose the PS5 forcing me into buying overpriced lower capacity drives with massive markups was a mistake IMHO.
 
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What if the next box is 2 skus
$800 but it includes 2 years of Gamepass. This lets them sell gamepads at a slight loss but add users and offset the nextbox costs some.
$650 without gamepass - You pay for the hardware.
You really think you pay for the hardware for EITHER case?
Xbox customers really don't understand economics. You are still buying the console at a loss to MS either way. The console is suppose to get you to pay for games at full price. The fact that you don't because you use Gamepass, means there is simply no profit at all. That is the entire reason the third party talk is happening; Xbox customers is used to getting everything they want at a loss to Microsoft and now Microsoft had to go to Sony gamers to get profits.
 
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lestar

Member
The only way an xbox handheld could be a success is if MS released an steam deck competitor, with a gaming focus and optimized version of Windows
 

pasterpl

Member
You really think you pay for the hardware for EITHER case?
Xbox customers really don't understand economics. You are still buying the console at a loss to MS either way. The console is suppose to get you to pay for games at full price. The fact that you don't because you use Gamepass, means there is simply no profit at all. That is the entire reason the third party talk is happening; Xbox customers is used to getting everything they want at a loss to Microsoft and now Microsoft had to go to Sony gamers to get profits.
Some people still don’t understand that gamepass doesn’t mean free games, you pay subscription fee, with 34M subscribers let’s make an average of 10USD a month, this gives MS 340M/month (just over 4B USD a year just from subscribers), then if the game is good these subscribers might buy it (people tend to forget that you can still buy games that are on the gamepass), buy DLC for that game etc. In addition, not all games release on gamepass and MS getting cut of these sales. Then there is “early access” for games that land day 1 on gamepass (I myself bought deluxe/premium editions of forza horizon, starfield, forza motorsport etc.). Then there is whole GaaS approach.

what you describe is “old” model, and we can see how this is stopping to work with Sony margins. They cannot discount PS5 even if this means mising their sales targets because margins are so thin, games take longer to develop and require higher budgets.
 

Three

Member
I don't know, but that by writing a sentence or phrase you can have a video that is impossible to distinguish from reality... I wonder how something like this will be transferred to game development and video game technology (apart, predictably, from job losses 🙄)


As reference:

I can distinguish that from reality by the fact that the cat has 3 hands
 

DJ12

Member
$999 consoles is the way to go. People pay that every year on new phones for text messages and instragram.
Judging by how much the series x cost 999 doesn't seem expensive enough to move into a premium market. I imagine 999 would be where they would've liked to be for a device that cost them 700 to actual produce.
Sarah said largest leap ever in terms of perf.

Xbone to Series X, in sheer FP32 numbers is 9.2X, despite being different architectures and RDNA2 has a massive gains over Polaris/GCN.

Just to get the message across to the layman, it's at least 9.2X or more, let's round it off at 10X.

120 TFLOPS ZEN5 + RDNA5, with architectural gains and efficiency, and this sounds like a pipe dream on an alien planet if the target for this console is $500. HeisenbergFX4 HeisenbergFX4 please tell me my math is wrong and I can go back to sleep. 💀
Where are you getting power from. She said technical leap. Could be as simple as adding bespoke tech for ai.

Guaranteed the will be no large technical leap over something that already exists as there's not really been innovation since raytracing was implemented.

But it's ms so could literally be the most minor thing being hailed as a game changer.
 

Mr Reasonable

Completely Unreasonable
Judging by how much the series x cost 999 doesn't seem expensive enough to move into a premium market. I imagine 999 would be where they would've liked to be for a device that cost them 700 to actual produce.


What do you mean by premium market? Are you looking at the components and what are considered premium in PCs or premium in terms of what a consumer is prepared to pay?

Because for the average consumer 999 for a console is crazy money, I think.
 

DJ12

Member
What do you mean by premium market? Are you looking at the components and what are considered premium in PCs or premium in terms of what a consumer is prepared to pay?

Because for the average consumer 999 for a console is crazy money, I think.
What a consumer is willing to pay.

It's pretty clear ms cannot compete in the mass market with sony.

I think some people would pay 999 for a console experience, sure it would be a smaller market.

The device wouldn't be targeted at the average consumer it would be targeted at the one x ps pro crowd.
 

panda-zebra

Member
Some people still don’t understand that gamepass doesn’t mean free games, you pay subscription fee, with 34M subscribers let’s make an average of 10USD a month, this gives MS 340M/month (just over 4B USD a year just from subscribers),
Just prior to Game Pass launching, Microsoft was used to receiving at least $3B a year from xbox live gold subs totalling almost 50M - for just simple online access and a few old games to add to a collection each month. The costs of servicing those subs for that return was miniscule to what GP/U demands; the mechanics and logistics of handling the greater MAU spending more time downloading and playing, the costs of feeding the service with new titles vs. the vacuum left by near non-existent sales, the pressure 3rd parties now endure attempting to sell in an environment where a customer base now no longer sees games as having the same value they once did when they're gorging on at all-you-can-eat buffet, etc.

then if the game is good these subscribers might buy it (people tend to forget that you can still buy games that are on the gamepass), buy DLC for that game etc. In addition, not all games release on gamepass and MS getting cut of these sales. Then there is “early access” for games that land day 1 on gamepass (I myself bought deluxe/premium editions of forza horizon, starfield, forza motorsport etc.). Then there is whole GaaS approach.
The only way people used to get games was buying them 6 years ago. That added up to quite a lot of cash when every single one was a purchase. The whole "GP actually promotes sales has been debunked. that effect was only in the early years before sub totals reached their natural limit they're been hovering round the past couple of years. Nintendo is still doing rather well with this "outdated" model where you make a thing then sell it, Sony too. It's not going away - Microsoft even want in on it more with their own games as we're seeing.

That there are some people willing to pay for a subscription that gets them "all the games" and then succumb to FOMO in the days before a game drops is indeed a rare cherry on top for Microsoft and I don't think it's insignificant at times given player numbers in some games in that early period. I'm unsure who it was that pioneered this practice, who it was that showed them the way on this gaming monetisation "innovation" with it's little deluxe sweeteners or extra cosmetics or xpacs etc. to tip the scales, but it's akin to the speed pass/lightning pass/VIP pass we saw appear elsewhere in our lives and people really are that stupid it turns out. It's their money to spend however they like but I'd suggest they'll have to take a step back at some point and question where the value is anymore.

We've now got the latest figures and are told there's been double-digit percentage growth in PC/xcloud side subs (which doesn't really offer huge insight because there's too many variables and nothing good to work from), however, the grand total is surprisingly barely different to the previous GP+Live subs total, within half a million or so even post-Starfield. There was apparently quite some overlap in the two subs and combining services wasn't about massaging figures but a branding thing, but realistically it probably means there's been a little drop-off on the console side through natural churn or maybe just stagnation, and the areas where Microsoft sees the real growth potential of that 100M+ target (PC/xcloud-use subs) made up for it and then some - not surprising when console sales are lagging the previous generation and Spencer's said console-side subs are pretty much about retention not expansion from here on.
 

Mr Reasonable

Completely Unreasonable
What a consumer is willing to pay.

It's pretty clear ms cannot compete in the mass market with sony.

I think some people would pay 999 for a console experience, sure it would be a smaller market.

The device wouldn't be targeted at the average consumer it would be targeted at the one x ps pro crowd.

It'd be a ballsy move, I think of Xbox as being my main platform, could afford it and play games most days.

Even then, they'd have to do a hell of a lot to justify that price. When I look at games on PC I don't often think there's a giant gulf between PC and console gaming. With that said, a console priced at 999 would get a bit closer to the best looking PC stuff - it'd still not be the best thing available.

I'm not sure I could see the value in it, personally.
 
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Goalus

Member
it’s baffling to me that Phil Spencer has managed to lead two utter failures of generations in a row now (this one he’s entirely responsible for) yet is being given yet another chance 🤦🏼‍♂️ do they really think third time’s going to be the charm under this existing leadership group?
And Jim Ryan was fired.
Strange, isn't it?
 

Loxus

Member
Imo, this just seems more likely what it's going to be every passing day.
nNqGeNV.png


Big CPU cores can be Zen6 / little CPU cores can be ARM64. Zen4c isn't a little core like Intel's E-cores, so this can be a possibility.

I can see this being a Switch/PS Portal like hybrid handheld that can get a huge performance boost when connected to the cloud, with a dock mode for playing on a TV.
 
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