Microsoft announces Xbox One S and teases Project Scorpio

[HEXUS]

Rival to PS4.5 Neo is over a year out.

Read more.

[HW90]

If they're releasing Scorpio a year after the PS4K then they're going to see a serious dent in sales.

[TheAnimus]

Is the Scorpio also not just against the PS4K, but the, by then, established VR?

I doubt they will have much problem competing against the 4K even if it is a year later. But the VR might well be a winner takes all combination.

[scaryjim]

Do we have anything even vaguely resembling a release date for the PS 4k/4.5/Neo? I know people are expecting an announcement, but AFAIK that's as far as the rumours have got. I don't see any reason to assume the new PS is landing this year.

As to VR, I don't see that as a killer application for this year - I think AMD are spot on when they say that the cost of entry is too high, currently. OTOH if they do manage to bring the cost of entry down with their releases this year, it'll prime the development pump, and means that if MS bring VR ot the XBox next year there's a good chance there'll be lots of decent VR content available for it on launch. And Project Scorpio should be powerful enough to run it.

[Smudger]

Tempting to pick the One S up just as a cheap 4k blu-ray...

[kompukare]

Strange, because the rumour was that Sony wanted to shrink theirs and add something for the PS4Neo but it turned out to be too expensive to re-design Jaguar and the graphics for 16nm/14nm FinFet+, so how are Microsoft doing this XbOne Slim?
Is the FF+ part which would be expensive, and they are only doing a shrink down to 20nm non-FF+?
It's the big cost of a FF+ which were driving the rumour of the PS4 Neo using a different CPU.
As for Scorpio, maybe AMD can get some kind of Navi multi-GPU design in there and use that drive support and scaling for Crossfire.

[jefCon]

Tempting to pick the One S up just as a cheap 4k blu-ray...

Ditto, have been looking at this as a possibility for replacing my Media Centre adding the TV adapter...

[shaithis]

So, next-gen, next-year

[jigger]

This will make a mockery of building a high end PC with high resolution gaming in mind. Things are looking ominous for the gaming PC.

[Corky34]

I wouldn't be so sure, yes you may get *some* games at 4k and *some* VR content but i have my suspicions that what Microsoft & Sony consider acceptable maybe very different than what most PC gamers would, much like they consider 30FPS acceptable but most PC gamers balk at that idea.

[Katar]

How much is a console that can do 4K going to cost? I've not paid much attention to how GPUs perform at that resolution as I'm till on 1080p, but aren't we talking a £500 GPU to get a decent consistant framerate? Though I guess Microsoft's and my views on acceptable framerates will be widely different.

[jigger]

I wouldn't be so sure, yes you may get *some* games at 4k and *some* VR content but i have my suspicions that what Microsoft & Sony consider acceptable maybe very different than what most PC gamers would, much like they consider 30FPS acceptable but most PC gamers balk at that idea.

This machine would make light work of 4K looking at the current spec's.

[jigger]

How much is a console that can do 4K going to cost? I've not paid much attention to how GPUs perform at that resolution as I'm till on 1080p, but aren't we talking a £500 GPU to get a decent consistant framerate? Though I guess Microsoft's and my views on acceptable framerates will be widely different.

Probably around £500 for the machine.

[scaryjim]

How much is a console that can do 4K going to cost? I've not paid much attention to how GPUs perform at that resolution as I'm till on 1080p, but aren't we talking a £500 GPU to get a decent consistant framerate? ...

AFAIK there isn't a single GPU in existence that will give you a smooth 60fps at 4k across a wide range of PC games; not even the £600+ GTX 1080. But then that's operating through a variety of abstractions that allow developers to target a wide range of hardware with the same code. With a console game you know *exactly* what hardware you're working with; you can use no end of methods to optimise performance and image quality with absolute certainty that they'll work on 100% of those consoles. PCs trade flexibility for lower relative performance. So I see no reason to think that a 6 TFlop GPU in a console won't be just fine for 4k gaming - they'll simply optimise the IQ and shaders to run quickly on the fixed hardware.

[Corky34]

This machine would make light work of 4K looking at the current spec's.

In what type of game at what FPS as what level of upscaling, like i said what Microsoft & Sony consider acceptable is probably a long way from what you and i would.
Lets not forget for years they've both been saying how playing at 30FPS is acceptable when most people know it's not.

[Pleiades]

Well Zen and Vega will have been thoroughly bedded in by that time, would that be enough to account for such a huge performance uplift? Bit hard to judge so far in advance of course.