News - Xbox 720 will be six times as powerful as Xbox 360

[Tattysnuc]

I'm not convinced.

The 6 series gpu was a good offering from AMD, however, why would MS commit to buying en mass outdated GPU's. These are very likely no longer in production and AMD don't own their own fab, so this decision, if true, confuses the hell out of me.

[scaryjim]

... why would MS commit to buying en mass outdated GPU's. These are very likely no longer in production ...

I assume they're paying for a custom design which they'll then have fabbed themselves - the article says it has "specifications best matching" the 6670, not they they've bought a job lot of 6670 GPU dies or add in cards. Without actual specifications we can't be sure, but I'd hazard a guess that they're looking for the best compromise between performance and thermals. If they can get a performance tweaked GPU with ~ 50W TDP it'll make cooling the system a lot easier - something MS might be quite interested in this time around

[Platinum]

The infrastructure isn't here for that yet.

I want the option, my 360 has the drive space for the games.
Steam has been around for years and works pretty well.

[crossy]

Digital distribution of all games on launch day or GTFO tbh.

As an option? Sure ... As the only way to acquire software? Nope.

Two reasons for the latter: firstly I'm not convinced that broadband provision in this country is necessarily good enough to permit this; secondly, can you imagine the speed (or lack thereof) that you'll get downloading a major title like CoD:MW4 (or whatever) on release day? Hint: welcome to the wonderful world of dialup speeds.

Personally, I still prefer to have that shiny disk, firstly because it generates jobs elsewhere (no need for Gamestation, Game, etc if there's no physical shipments), and secondly because - at present - that disk still has some trade-in value once I've finished with it. Oh, and I'm a big fan of printed instructions!

Think I probably will buy the '720 - especially if it's backwardly compatible with the current range of XBox360 games - directly or via some kind of emulation. Was a big fan of the 360 Slim that I traded my old 360 in for - well, up until the sound on the power and disk-eject buttons stopped working.

[Jedibeeftrix]

the article says it has "specifications best matching" the 6670, not they they've bought a job lot of 6670 GPU dies or add in cards.

480 VLIW5 shaders being roughly approximate to 384 VLIW4 shaders....................?

Either way this is desperately unambitious, and very disappointing, "next-gen" look more like "last-gen" when it arrives next year!

[j.o.s.h.1408]

someone mentoned this btw:

Btw, just on a final note - I have some fun maths for you:

It has been stated that the Xbox 720 will be 6 times more powerful than the 360, and it will be 20% more powerful than the WiiU. It has been stated that the WiiU will be 2 times more powerful than the 360.

So... Lets say the Xbox 360 has 50-Powers.

WiiU = 50x2 = 100-Powers.
720 = 100x20% = 120-Powers

Hold up! I thought that it was meant to be six times more powerful, wouldn't that mean:

720 = 6x50= 300-Powers?

So again, MS talking rubbish about it being times more powerful.

[Hicks12]

interesting there josh but bare in mind that this is from a "close source" and not an official announcement from Microsoft... it could well end up being a 7850 or similar!.

[abaxas]

History has shown us one thing about MS consoles.

It will be a noisy bugger. The rest is speculation.

[kalniel]

Hmm the 6670 can be passively cooled...

[capt_cornflake]

Digital distribution of all games on launch day or GTFO tbh.

Have you seen the price of the 360 games that are currently available to download?
a few years ago I'd have said they'd be opening themselves up to the mother of all anti-competition investigations if they limited games to only being bought through their marketplace.
Seems Apple can get away with that sort of thing though, so who knows?

[Terbinator]

History has shown us one thing about MS consoles.

It will be a noisy bugger. The rest is speculation.

I don't remember my Xbox being noisy?

[shaithis]

Maybe Nintendos model doesn't work too well after all......

[Hicks12]

i think nintendos model worked significantly well really, that article make it sounds terrible but a 500m year loss forcast isnt that much in the context of Nintendo especially since they're due to replace their current home console this year.

If it was microsoft/sony game division it would be bad, reason being is that Nintendo make money on their console not a loss so for the last 5 years they have been raking it in .

Obviously time will tell if its serious or not, hopefully it isn't as i wouldn't like Nintendo to disappear!

[abaxas]

Maybe Nintendos model doesn't work too well after all......

Obviously winning both the home and portable console war for this generation, is not a good business model at all.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

AFAIK,there was some noise that it was actually a pair of HD6670 level cards.

[The Hand]

Though older info John Carmack states here:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...0x-as-powerful
..that the next Xbox will be 10 times more powerful rather than six?
Adopting Blu-ray doesn't surprise at all, they always needed some kind of optical legacy drive for DVD, CD at least and why hand another reason to the customer to get a PS4?