Xbox Director of Development: Xbox One Effectively a Super-Computer Design

[Vegosiux]

Still, it's not like he's making a good argument. Saying your crap is harder to use than your more successful competitor isn't exactly a good thing, but that's what he's saying.

If I was feeling cheeky I'd say they're trying to appease the hardcore gamers on hardware level. "This is a difficult to use console for real men not like our competitor's plug&play easy-shmeasy no effort console! Haha!"

 

[Rellik San]

"No one knows how to program for our x86 instruction set... well except for everyone who's worked on a PC for the past 20 years... those guys might know a little bit about this."

Yup, this smacks of investor BS. Because lets be honest "out platform is more difficult and finicky to code with," is not a selling point to devs.

Captcha: Create New Things.
I would love too buddy, but the xbone is just too hard to program for.

If I was feeling cheeky I'd say they're trying to appease the hardcore gamers on hardware level. "This is a difficult to use console for real men not like our competitor's plug&play easy-shmeasy no effort console! Haha!"

At which point the PC gamers look up from their monitors derisively snort and go back to business.
And the PS4 owners shrug and don't care because y'know they are in it for games not performance.

 

[ExtraDebit]

I think we all agreed that the more microsoft talks, the more they hurt themselves.

 

[RandV80]

They only bit of credibility here is the guy somehow didn't mention anything about 'the cloud'!

 

[Strazdas]

ok what the hell microsoft. you have perfected lieing i see. a bunch of lies with a grain of truth always sounds more believable.
the truth: they do have less framerate stutter. this is not thanks to hardware though. Windows 8 kernel is simply far superior in this regard to other OSs used before. this also effect all PCs running windows 8. look up tests of windows 8 versus windows 7, the average framrate is not different, framerate stutter gets a massive decrease.

the lies: its not a supercomputer design. its a regular PC with a APU. PS3 was a supercomputer design. in fact, it was a minisupercomputer that was too complex for anyone to utilize fully. Xbox One and PS4 both are just regular slightly modified PCs running in APUs. heck, they even use same boards that your tables are using in some instances.

more lies: optimization is not coming. optimization worked when hardware was unique. it no longer is. any optimization discovered on Xbox One will also be appicable to PC and PS4. in fact i can see only PS4 to be able to optimize (well and WiiU but were not talking about that one now) due to its GDDR5 which makes it kinda unique. well, at least till PCs get DDR4 and GDDR6 (this years end supposedly) in which case we can just outbandwith PS4 GDDR5 and get same optimizations applied.

even more lies: pixels dont have "quality" factor. pixels are pixels. they are either there or they are not. either the journalists didnt understand what they are saying or they are just making shit up.

Daphuq is up with that picture?
Were the photographers told to pose like that?
Why are they even taking a picture of the console?
Have they actually seen in Xbox One before?
Why are some of them using a video camera?
Why are they so close to each other and the console?
Why was even a picture taken of them doing that?

Damn it I'm so confused.

its likely a picture of the day when the console was revealed last year and it was first time they saw it ever. they wanted as good picture as they can to post on thier blogs and stuff probably. photogrpahers do trample eachother for better angles.

Maybe this has something to do with these comments about streamlining the interaction between the component parts, whether any developer will ever actually be able to leverage this into results players can actually notice like frame rates and resolutions is another thing entirely.

people are getting more and more aware of what microstutter is, and they do mention it altrough in a very nontechnical way in this article, so hopefully that.

Sorry...what?

Correct me if I'm wrong...but what the hell does 'quality of pixels' mean?

there is no "pixel quality". the only difference in pixels that we see is by how good our screens are able to show them. as we know, low resolution on high resolution screens look terrible because ourt screens dont know how to deal with low resolutions and do ugly streching. their are just talking bull here.

I'd be annoyed at that if it didn't perfectly illustrate my point that it's irrelevant to bicker over the numbers.

Its not irrelevant.

 

[Arawn]

Both SOny and MS can come up with all the bullshit they want. Dont care about 1080 and 60fps. All i want it great games. Ive been gaming since the Atari, resolution and fps are a non issue for me.

Thank you very much for stating the obvious.Both consoles need to stop worrying about resolution and make a games that last longer than 2hrs. Content over appearance. All this talk of resolutions and fps make gamers like shallow snobs. "My picture is so much sharper" "No my picture is so much sharper." "You don't have higher pixels? What a loser."
And now for second place:

"You don't understand! These are free-range, organic pixels...!"

Ahhhh, no. I think you can play it one way, or another. You can say you're not as good, but only in ways that don't matter. You can say you're better, but in ways no one has noticed. Or you can say that you're not as good, but you will be as good or better once the programmers learn the ins and outs of your particular hardware.

When you're trying to say all three simultaneously, it doesn't come off as honesty; it comes off as spin. I'm not saying all three couldn't have elements of truth simultaneously (though I don't think they do), but it sounds like 110% undiluted weasel.

Moreover, what I've been hearing doesn't sound like "XBox One has the FPS advantage, PS4 has the resolution advantage"; what I've been hearing sounds more like "PS4 has been cleaning XBox One's clock in both fields." Correct me if I've been hearing wrong. (Edit to add: reports on things like Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition seem to imply that this supposition has some basis in fact.)

And while coders will, almost inevitably, find ways to use the XB1's hardware more efficiently as time goes on, it's utterly ludicrous to suggest that those who code for the PS4 will be held in stasis while that occurs. The PS4 people may not have to race to catch up, but with independents already favoring the PS4 and larger companies starting to look askance at the PS4's larger installation base, it's likely that there will be plenty of optimization going on on the PS4 side as well.

I'm getting the impression from an interview like this that Titanfall, however good, wasn't quite the haymaker to Sony's advantage this generation that Microsoft was hoping for. There's nothing for it but to get more good games on your system, guys. And once again, I think you need to either put your talking heads on another track or silence them all together.

All of this makes sense when you think about it. Especially the first parts. Can't use all the excuses at once. Pick one and stick to it.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

I find it amusing that they are saying their system is as powerful as Superman, when in fact, it's Aquaman.

 

[ZZoMBiE13]

I'd be annoyed at that if it didn't perfectly illustrate my point that it's irrelevant to bicker over the numbers.

Its not irrelevant.

Yeah, it is.

Horsepower does not equate to fun. It can work to accentuate, but it isn't what makes a game fun. FTL is the most fun I've had with a game in the last 2 years and I can run it on an old PC with very little power under the hood.

Hardware specs are an interesting debate in the lead up to a console when we don't have much else to talk about. But the machines are out. Their games are made, boxed, and out in the wild. And the X1 has just as many good fun games as the PS4. And at launch it had way more to offer in terms of software. So all Sony's precious "superior hardware" was good for was playing KillZone. Yawn.

Horsepower is not the end all be all way to measure a systems worth. Software is. And both options in the console space are doing pretty well from where I sit. And both have just as many games I'm interested in coming down the line.

 

[Icehearted]

Jargon and spin won't undo the bridges they'd burned a generation ago. The Xbox 360 was a piece of shit with a high failure rate, and for all it's limitations they decided to cobble together a profit machine wherein they could really lean on micro-transactions, digital "ownership" and unwanted "services" shoehorned into what should have been a purely gaming experience. Anyone invested in Microsoft has invested foolishly.

I digress for the sake of a bigger picture. The simple truth is that this is just more jargon and spin, they they are marketing, and all they say isn't meant to present possibilities from the gaming standpoint, but to impress the ill-informed and appease investors. Considering all the waffling and backtracking they've done since this goddamn things was announced it's a safe bet we haven't heard the last of this, and the shit will only get deeper as they flounder in desperation to fleece their fans as much as they can to meet projections as closely as possible. The original Xbox was meant to be Microsoft's dip into console gaming without making things complicated with PC executions of media-hub ideas, and they've clearly forgotten that this is what console gaming was supposed to be about; you put the game in and play. God forbid this happens without having to navigate adds, a bloated and growing menu of absolute fuckery, or drawing comparisons to other delivery systems like personal computers.

They'll never learn how to get it right, they;ll just find bigger ways to fuck their install base. All that processing power and they're focused on bringing HBO and that kind of weird bullshit in to further water things down? No thanks.

 

[McKitten]

I'd be annoyed at that if it didn't perfectly illustrate my point that it's irrelevant to bicker over the numbers.

Its not irrelevant.

Yeah, it is.

Horsepower does not equate to fun. It can work to accentuate, but it isn't what makes a game fun. FTL is the most fun I've had with a game in the last 2 years and I can run it on an old PC with very little power under the hood.

Then why the hell should anyone buy a new console generation in the first place? You're not making a coherent argument here.

 

[Rellik San]

Horsepower does not equate to fun. It can work to accentuate, but it isn't what makes a game fun. FTL is the most fun I've had with a game in the last 2 years and I can run it on an old PC with very little power under the hood.

Hardware specs are an interesting debate in the lead up to a console when we don't have much else to talk about. But the machines are out. Their games are made, boxed, and out in the wild. And the X1 has just as many good fun games as the PS4. And at launch it had way more to offer in terms of software. So all Sony's precious "superior hardware" was good for was playing KillZone. Yawn.

That sounds like an argument I kept hearing when a load of people who just bought an Xbone realised they had nothing new to play on it: "Well the software justi..." no, no it doesn't, the software (assuming you mean Netflix et'al) doesn't justify anything because it's function is a games machine, if I wanted a DVR box to stream content to my TV I can buy one for less than £50. Extra features don't justify the cost of a new a gaming machine and neither new machine has managed to justify itself in the gamer space yet..

 

[FalloutJack]

I find it amusing that they are saying their system is as powerful as Superman, when in fact, it's Aquaman.

That would imply it could operate in water. At this point, Aquaman's going "Sup, Xbone? What's a'matter? You need AIR, sucka'? WELL, TOO BAD!". This is...

Heh heh heh heh...

HAH HAH HAH HAH HAAHH!!!

It's the Condiment King!


Batman as played by Sony, since they aren't Superman either.

Captcha: You win

 

[Hagi]

Wait? What? Quality pixels?

Microsoft. Your Console supports exactly the same color depths (bits per pixel) as the PS4.

Your pixels are identical to PS4 pixels. You don't have better quality pixels. You just have less of them.

 

[Kenjitsuka]

"what's the right one to be focused on?" Hey, marketing 101, like EXACTLY what you are doing now, you hack:
"Focus on obfuscating things that are bad and saying stuff to boost yourself".
You ALWAYS focus on what you can do best or better than the competition, duh.

Really funny where he admits that it's hard to develop for their GPU design, just so he can set up a "So things will be looking waaaaaay up once people learn it!". That didn't really work out for PS3, remember? Also, it sounds like BS; this generation is much more 'generic PC parts that have existed for a long time' than any before it...

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Sorry all a heard was "blah blah blah excuses blah blah blah techno babble blah blah blah bullshit" You can spout all the rhetoric you want, I'm still not buying one and I still refuse to call it a games console. It's still a fucking glorified cable box that just happens to also play games.

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

Ok, dont know if its a dumb day today, but ive read this over twice now and it seems like he's effectively saying nothing to us.
Im far too sober for this shit!

 

[ClockworkUniverse]

If this were true, wouldn't they have been talking about it before launch, instead of bringing it up afterwards to assure people that things will improve?

 

[SecondPrize]

Daphuq is up with that picture?
Were the photographers told to pose like that?
Why are they even taking a picture of the console?
Have they actually seen in Xbox One before?
Why are some of them using a video camera?
Why are they so close to each other and the console?
Why was even a picture taken of them doing that?

Damn it I'm so confused.

That's how photographers look when taking pictures.
This is likely at a release event for the bone.
Probably not, see above.
So they can get video.
Otherwise you just get photos of other photographers crowded around something you can't see.
Dunno, to be meta?

 

[Hairless Mammoth]

Sorry all a heard was "blah blah blah excuses blah blah blah techno babble blah blah blah bullshit" You can spout all the rhetoric you want, I'm still not buying one and I still refuse to call it a games console. It's still a fucking glorified cable box that just happens to also play games.

It's not even a cable box. It's a tumor which also play games that attaches to your cable box and uses an extra 120 watts when you could just hit the source button on your tv remote.

captcha: fishy smell Yep, MS is fishy alright.