Is the next gen Xbox GPU more powerful than the RX 5700 XT?

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Originally Posted by watercooled

£700 GPU performance does not mean that would cost £700 in a console. Not to mention the current £700 Nvidia GPUs are only that price because of a lack of competition and is the wrong way to go about estimating wholesale pricing for this theoretical semi-custom Navi die. Generally, very little profit is made on console hardware, in fact they're often sold pretty much at cost or for a loss initially, so again, not comparable. Unless it's a second console released by Microsoft and they still have one available for a reasonable price to target their existing market, they'd get demolished by the competition. Outrageously expensive phones again cannot be directly compared because the cost of often amortised by way of a 24+ month contract - relatively few people will pay >£1000 up-front for a phone (and numerous reports seem to indicate that people are keeping phones for longer now).

I don't think people stopped making a fuss about the cost of phones either, the iPhone X sold terribly from what I remember, and even Apple weren't brazen enough to release that as the only option. The console market has proven time and time again that customers will switch platforms if cost/release date/performance encourage it. Don't forget the PS3 was more expensive and later than the Xbox 360. Likewise the PS4 was both cheaper and higher performance than the Xbox One, and very few people wanted Kinect forced upon them. Both times, the cheaper console sold substantially better. I very much doubt Microsoft would ignore history and try to force an outrageously expensive console onto their customers - they'd just flat-out lose to the competition again, but probably worse than ever before if it was >$1k as you suggest, something I personally very much doubt. Even with speculated hardware I don't see it being close to that figure.

Even the $499 launch price of the Xbox One had to drop in response to competition (being the generally slower console didn't help either), to more than double that for the base model would be ludicrous. It wouldn't surprise me if it's more expensive than $499 if they can justify it and if competition allows it, but again I think it would be pushing it and very risky if they don't have a cheaper base model to sell alongside it.

That ~$1000 figure is also pushing way too far into decent PC territory, which would strip the console of one of its key advantages, plus you have to remember many previously-exclusive Xbox games are now also available on PC anyway.

The problem with GPU chiplets isn't the size, it's the interconnection. It's something we'll likely see in the future at some point, I'm just not sure whether we'll see it on these consoles - the speculated core counts don't really demand it, and it would take considerable engineering work to implement it into Navi. Like any silicon engineering decisions, there would have to be a good reason to do it. No doubt, there's already a lot of extra work been put into the semi-custom part given they're expected to have hardware ray-tracing capability and MS/Sony historically make their own modifications regardless, but making it into chiplets would not be a trivial task. Again I've no doubt it's been considered, it's personally I think it's more likely than not we'll see the GPU on a single die this time. Could be wrong though!

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The same way that the iphone X was supported by the iphone 8, there will be a cheaper xbox that can keep numbers on the platform
https://hexus.net/gaming/news/xbox/1...aper-lockhart/
The claimed "1440p @60" performance target for the cheaper system neatly matches the rumoured PS5 specs in this thread's article (i.e. ~5700XT, or 3x xbone X / PS4 pro performance), so we can expect two well matched consoles competing on price. The extra features of raytracing (I'm assuming it won't be on the cheap consoles, for the same reason it's not on the 5700XT - no point half doing it a la 2060) and 4k performance are enough to command a higher fee, and a £1k console will sell enough to make MS a comfy profit

I would expect the vast majority of sales to still be outright purchases though. But again, like I say it's not accurate to just look at retail pricing of similar PC hardware and extrapolate that to consoles because they're very different business models. AMD ostensibly make narrower margins on the semi-custom hardware at the wholesale level to start with, and then the consoles themselves aren't sold with large profit margins, as is the case for enthusiast PC hardware. Plus I think the raw manufacturing cost of processors is a lot less than many people realise. Sure, R&D and other one-time costs have to be considered in overall costing but in the case of consoles this is amortised by way of taking a cut on game sales.

kompukare did some back-of-envelope calculations of die costs (again, not factoring in R&D/mask costs etc which are significant) a while back for the chiplets: https://forums.hexus.net/cpus/371038...ml#post4112303
If anything, defect density should be lower than that now and with EUV, and wafer costs likely lower too.

Scaling the 5700XT die area linearly with the CU count, and using the same methodology (i.e. plugging a square die into that calculator, same defect density & wafer cost), the cost per working chip comes to <$133. But it's not a case of die costs driving prices (which we agree on), pricing is based on what the market will bear. Recent releases have shown that AMD isn't seriously committed to bringing top end GPU prices down to sensible levels (even the 5700XT, the natural successor to the 480 in the product stack, coming in at twice the launch 480 cost) so the current top-end GPU pricing will continue, meaning that the only other way of gaming at the fidelity offered by a 56 CU xbox will be a $2k+ PC. Consoles generally undercut PCs, but they've no obligation to do so by two octaves. People are happy to pay that money for 4k gaming & RT (as 2080 tis are selling), so why would microsoft pass it up*?

* other than a PS5 pro with a smaller profit margin

'What the market will bear' doesn't mean 'as high as possible until there's no-one left buying it'. As I said earlier, the console manufacturers have also learned the hard way, on multiple occasions, that people will just tell them where to shove their overpriced console if they price it too high. Even $500 for the Xbox One was treated that way by the market, especially when the competition were offering a $400 console. And again, despite brand loyalty, there were plenty of Xbox 360 fans who moved to PS4 that generation.

Again, comparing to PC isn't really valid given it's a very different market. They don't have an 'obligation' to do anything, but as I've said before, and again in this post, history tells us otherwise if they actually want to retain some market share! Even with a cheaper base model, they still need to price the 'premium' model sensibly enough that they actually sell some of them. I'm not sure if you're relating top-end GPU pricing to this topic or just comparing to it, but if it's the former, AMD have pretty much nothing to do with console pricing.

To a point, die costs do drive prices in the console market given how close they're priced to BoM costs, time and time again.

I had this debate before the PS4 generation with a couple of friends who expected astronomical pricing, and again with the 'pro' refresh. It's just not the same as PC pricing.

Finished watching a youtube vid regarding the specs for the Xbox Series X, and it basically stated that was the equivalent of the RTX 2080 Ti in performance.

Whatever the results it's a day 1 purchase for me.

Spoiler: NO!

I really hope the actual console doesn't say "Solid state DRIVE DRIVE" on the front. *snicker*.

MAx price of £550 is allowable , anything more and it will die in the water. There may be room to bring out a Premium version later down the line (the folllowing xmas?). Also the cheaper version is baked in , and they both have a strong interest in streaming games , which lets face it, is the obvious choice for the future . better to have a steady £9.99 a month every month, rather than massive sales once every 6-7 years. Boiled frogs, take notice.