Convince me, PS4 or XBOX One

Preach it. I will be braving the crowds on November 22 not to obtain a PS4 or Xbox One, but to pick up Super Mario 3D World.

Given that that’s a week before Black Friday, I wouldn’t worry much about the crowds.

Can’t help myself with what? I bring factual, knowledgable discussion to these issues. What bias am I using here?

I’ll quote a few parts that are designed to downplay the differences in hardware, statements that are factually incorrect, or statements that are too credulous towards the bullshit claims of the hardware manufacturers.

The article buys the ridiculous idea presented by some Microsoft PR guy that more slow cores is a performance-superior solution. There is not a single task in which 8 slow tablet cores are superior to 4 fast desktop cores. The idea that there’s some magic to matching the number of cores to the number of tasks is silly. Task scheduling is a trivial problem, one very fast could could do 20 tasks better than 20 very slow cores that didn’t add up to the total processing power of the one fast core. This was a cost saving decision, not a performance decision, and it is both factually wrong and deceptive to try to say that it’s somehow a performance-superior solution. That isn’t specifically Xbone apologism there, but general console apologism. But I wanted to point that out regarding the quality of the piece.

They underemphasize the huge difference of a 50% compute unit gain is on the GPU, even saying that for some games the 9% clock speed increase for the XBone will cause it to perform better. This is extremely unlikely, unless the game is very poorly coded. A 50% increase in compute units is dramatically, hugely more important than a 9% increase in clock speed. (And before you think that contradicts what I was saying above about desktop vs tablet cores, that isn’t simply an issue of clockspeed - desktop cores do way more computation per cycle).

In general, most games will be bottlenecked by the compute power of the unified stream processor of the GPU, and sony has a 50% advantage here (or maybe around 40% if they production models clock lower than the xbone). That’s a huge deal - their biggest difference comes in the area that’s going to matter most. That extra compute power is pretty much always going to come in handy. This isn’t really emphasized significantly enough in the article.

The ram issue is implied to be a tie, a false balance approach assuming that because they both come at the solution a little differently, they’re probably equal. It tries to imply that 32mb accessible at 204GB/s (and only half in either direction) is equivelant to 8GB accessible at at 176GB/S. Microsoft’s special little tiny snowflake chip only has a little more bandwidth than the entirety of Sony’s memory. It’s not quite that simple, because pure bandwidth isn’t the only thing involved, but it implies the approaches are more equal than they are, saying that the xbone’s method will “mitigate the need” for sony’s better hardware. Furthermore, they list sony’s approach as being more power-hungry, as another way of mentioning a downside for the sony to imply that the methods are roughly equal because they both have their ups and downs. But it’s ridiculous, the difference in power usage we’re talking about is a small fraction of a watt, not even worth talking about. Sony’s solution is faster, more versatile, and doesn’t require special coding to use.

To be fair, he might be kind of right on this one. He’s basically saying “things are so shitty looking at 10 feet anyway that it doesn’t matter that one console is putting out better results”, but that doesn’t change that the results are better.

Then it says you have to dig deep to find differences between the two, and that isn’t true. Sony has a significant advantage in two critical areas that will affect the end result pretty directly. The final paragraph basically dismisses all the differences as irrelevant. And since the PS4 is superior on hardware, I interpreted dismissing the differences to be a pro-MS bias. Maybe it’s not, it could be that they’re just incompetent and writing a piece about the differences in hardware, and then concluding it doesn’t matter.

I got this far and stopped reading. Re-read what I quoted and bolded. Everything you allege in this sentence is clearly and demonstrably FALSE. The article does no such thing.

Nothing else in that post is worth the energy to read or respond to. I’m not going to participate in the FUD, hope no one else in the thread takes it at face value either.

:rolleyes:

Really, it isn’t worth reading the rest of my post?

The author of the article says

So yes, the “in other words” part says that he’s summarizing the position of the Microsoft employee. Since at other point he attempts to raise points to contradict quotes from people in a similar position, his lack of contradiction of this quite seems to indicate that he doesn’t feel that it needs to be challenged. So it seems like an implicit acceptance of that position.

Incidentally, there are two components to that sentence - one is about practical limitations (heat generation) and one is about performance (implying that many small cores are better at handling many tasks). The first one is a tradeoff, so you could argue it as a valid point, but the second one is simply wrong.

The Xbox One is also being released on November 22.

Everyone’s gonna be at the theaters watching Hunger Games: Catching Fire.

Lol

Interesting read, though i’d question the above bit is a question of if you want throughput or speed. Dont get me wrong, games its probably all about the speed, but ask me to process mass calculations that are properly threaded and i’d probably want 8 slightly slower cores than 4 slightly faster. That said, i’m not sure on the difference between tablet and desktop cores.

I tend to think of this kind of thing like a road - does the task prefer a 4 lane motorway you can drive at 70 on, or an 8 lane where you can drive at only 50?

In the end though I think the console war comes down to two factors

  1. Who fronts the money for the best exclusive
  2. Who’s system is easier to code for

Point one is obvious, but point two means a surprising amount. Easier coding means faster development times, lower costs and a less buggy final product.
I haven’t looked into which console is better on that front - anyone have any experience here?

There really is only one line of inquiry in this regard.
Do you crave domination by The Scrappy One?

Do you wish to measure every accomplishment in your gaming life by comparing it to the last time that you were overwhelmed by the scrappitation?

Do you accept that the true measure of your gaming life’s worth is in single-digit percentages of scrappitude?
If you have accepted this, get the XBone.

If you think you can hide from destiny, if you think that by avoiding the overwhelming scrappination you can pretend to be whole, if you think that the unscrappified life is worth living, then by all means get a PisS4.

(in other words, get what your friends are getting, because they’re freakin’ indistinguishable save exclusive titles and what your friends play)
…or you can just get scraptastic with some XBone.

Two things:

Not all workloads can be parallelized well.

The main issue is not that there are 6 cores vs 4 slightly faster cores. IT’s 6 VERY slow cores vs 4 (or more) MUCH faster cores. we’re talking anywhere from 4-6 times as fast when ti comes to modern processors. The CPU’s on the consoles are almost tablet grade.

I agree with your last points. Exclusives and accessibility are key. But there’s also marketing. For most people it’ll come down to which TV commercial they prefer, or which brand they’ve already bought into.

And I believe devs have come out and said working with the PS4 is easier.

Did I read correctly that neither console will be 3D Blu-ray compatible at launch?

Does anyone care? Who watches 3D blu-rays?

Snarkiness aside, yes, you read correctly.

Blue Light of Death. Worked fine for a moment. Updated from PSN. 10-15 seconds after power back on buzzing sound and picture cuts out. No booting to safe mode. So I have to send it back. Trying Amazon first. If I get another malfunctioning unit , I’ll call SCEA. Don’t know how long it’ll take but I can work on my PS3 backlog.

Don’t know how widespread it is but Sony says no. of duds is within expectations. Amazon reviews all 5* and 1*, More positive than negative though. No I told you so’s, Airk. Good luck X-boxers.

I think failure is supposed to be under 1 % so far, right? But they moved a milion of these so even a low percentage could mean thousands of failures.

Over a million sold in the first 24 hours. And that’s only in North America. This is the strongest launch any game system has had ever. Even the Wii only sold 600,000 units on its first day, and that day was Black Friday.

That’s kind of expected, isn’t it? Gaming as a whole has grown the past 7 years by leaps and bounds.

But I think a lot of people have been arguing that CONSOLE gaming is “a relic of the past” or that AAA games are no longer the juggernaut that they were. This is… well, let’s just say it’s a step towards demonstrating that to not be the case.

The “AAA” games argument is especially stupid. Most talking heads lay it out like so…

“The new Tomb Raider only sold 5 million copies when Square Enix expected it to sell 6 million THEREFORE all video game developers everywhere will go bankrupt by the end of the year.”

What kind of nonsense is that?

The numbers i saw from Sony suggested a .4% failure rate for the PS4 or about 4000 users. I guess we will see how those numbers hold up.