I can only see it getting worse once Scorpio graphics look a generation beyond games 2 years away.
Xbox One X
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Most the gaming media seems to have flunked out of economics 101. Gamers apparently can't handle choices...unlike every other market. MSs messaging is confusing...despite the fact they've consistently promoted the same thing since unveiling the Scorpio for about a year now. If MS games are on PC, people will just buy them there instead of buy the console...even though MS has said they're fine with this. Power doesn't matter now...even though it really meant a lot in 2013. Mid gen refreshes were ok in 2016. Mid gen refreshes are not ok in 2017.
What was anyone expecting though? The highest rated news channels for either political party are sensationalist bull...
It's not about news or analysis. It's about click bait. If we can't be honest about real news, why shouldn't we have Fox News vs MSNBC in gaming too.
What was anyone expecting though? The highest rated news channels for either political party are sensationalist bull...
It's not about news or analysis. It's about click bait. If we can't be honest about real news, why shouldn't we have Fox News vs MSNBC in gaming too.
You guys know this crap didn't just start, right? It's been in full swing since the original X1 reveal. It's had a profound affect on all things Xbox ever since. Nothing new here.
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The Xbox 360 launch price in 2005 was $399. Adjusted for inflation in 2017 that would be $497.68. I wouldn't be surprised if the Scorpio launch price is $499. The problem with the Xbox One is that the included Kinect wasn't seen as value. People will pay $$$ for top hardware.
I would say base sku $449 minimum for a 1TB Forza 7 bundle and $499 for 2TB model and $599 for 4TB model + Scorpio Elite controller
Yep. I've said this before. $500 is fair...especially if, like Xbox 360, it stacks up favorably to PCs. I don't believe they intend for this thing to take the masses by storm. I think the #1 reason for Scorpio is to stop the rhetoric that MS isn't capable of making good hardware. When MS was releasing more exclusives than PlayStation, they couldn't overcome resolutiongate and the perceived value of the hardware. Scorpio is a stepping stone in every way. Like the set-up pitch before PS5 and Scorpio 2.
I also don't believe it's necessarily good for Xbox gamers for MS to take a big loss on this. 360 wasn't a huge loss. MS was able to invest in a lot more exclusives as a result. Recent interview by Blackley said that a new hardware launch combined with MSs new monthly game service may be the excuse Spencer needs to get money from the board for 1st/2nd party stuff. He hinted at the fact Spencer wasn't able to get that investment recently...which makes sense.
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Well at least one good thing if it is $499 is that I wouldn't necessarily have to buy many games, or any as I have a few heavy hitters in my digital library already.
That's probably a good discussion. Which games would you go back and play in your existing library if they received the bump to the high end PC version?
I feel like Witcher 3 and Doom have the biggest visual gaps between high end PC and Xbox. I'd probably play both those again.
I'm saving Witcher 3 and ME:A for Scorpio. Also got FO4, think it's getting Scorpio patch. Then there is the rumoured RDR2 with more foliage on Scorpio than Pro ;-)
Odds are like all their other consoles, MS chose a RRP first to target then asked, what can we build for release in holiday 2017 and come in at that price then designed it to fit that budget.
The Witcher 3 won't be getting any PC level upgrades, as CD Projekt Red already said they are done working on it (also why no upgrade for Pro). At the least, we should see more stable framerates (not much issue on the 'Bone) and a constant 1080p as the game supposedly has a dynamic resolution.
Doom will be a nice upgrade, as it is a tad blurry on the 'Bone.
I agree with this to an extent, but we have to remember Sony got blasted with the $600 PS3 for a long time. Microsoft has improved their image but it will take longer than a generation to repair their folly with gamers and media as a whole. The entire DRM thing of the Xbox One was seen as sharply anti consumer by alot. It doesn't help that Microsoft as a company has had this image issue as well.
I know they said it...but with assets already available on PC, I'd be surprised if MS didn't try to change their mind. Witcher is regularly a go-to when people want to know how their new PCs stack up. Is Witcher DX11 based? That might be the only reason not to. Porting 4K assets for DX12 games shouldn't be difficult.
Don't forget the tale spun so large that nobody really notices it's there. Xbox 360 was a huge success, but Xbox One was a big failure. You see this repeated again and again. WRONG! Xbox One has always outsold the 360, so how can this be? Why do they ask if Scorpio can get them back on track? I mean, Android outsells Apple year over year, but why aren't they saying Apple "lost it's way" with the iPhone?
I'll tell you why this is: Instead of making positive news about the PS4 doing really well (which it has), it's all about the negative spin. Rather, how it's burying the Xbox; therefore the Xbox One is somehow failing. They are playing to this Jerry Springer mentally that has somehow taken over the gaming internet populace. For a once great, passionate hobby, it's now become a circus of us vs them. It's really sad. The discussion in this very thread (well, 4.0) has gotten like this too. The amount of trolling, and just general hype-policing is really obnoxious. If you aren't interested, go away! This pretend Xbox interest for some that seems to come up whenever a new console comes out is obviously just a front to keep them on board long enough to cause annoyance to everyone else. They will bail again, but not until they have wreaked enough havok to make them feel important.
Anyone know if you'll be able to notice much of a difference in multiplatform games between PS4 Pro and Scorpio?
Man MS needs to do something about about their marketing dibs on AAA games. Seems like Sony has them all.
I mean showing off first footage of RDR2, D2, BF2 etc. on Scorpio would've been a huge boost for them, a necessary boost.
Instead Sony has all the big ones wether its Red Dead, BF2, D2, COD etc. MS so far has Shadow of war which doesn't look like the hit they need.
Hopefully they can at least get Cyberpunk 2077.
I mean showing off first footage of RDR2, D2, BF2 etc. on Scorpio would've been a huge boost for them, a necessary boost.
Instead Sony has all the big ones wether its Red Dead, BF2, D2, COD etc. MS so far has Shadow of war which doesn't look like the hit they need.
Hopefully they can at least get Cyberpunk 2077.
At the very least we will see Xbox one V PS4 level differences. At most Scorpio games will be native 4k with high-res textures.
No way has Microsoft put all this effort in without 3rd and 1st party support.
E3 will bring the games
E3 will bring the games
While you can look at it that way, I see it as a big game that will be missed from the other titles that might get attention. People might think it's good I see it as someone will not be the talk of the town.
I think 3rd party all will be with SONY and not have any with MS. Keep in mind that 3rd parties are in battle with others to win money.
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Xbox vs PS2 level of difference is a good guess.
PS2 games will look like better PS2 games on Xbox.
Games built for Xbox will look quasi extra generational.
Diving into Project Scorpio’s backwards compatibility, 4K, VR, and 1080p support
- Backwards compatibility, current game improvements
- All Xbox Scorpio games (that’s our shorthand, not Microsoft’s specific nomenclature) are required to be backwards-compatible with Xbox One titles. The only exception to this may be VR titles, which require peripherals that the original Xbox apparently won’t support. The general implication from Microsoft is that it takes backwards and forwards compatibility seriously, and the company’s work on Xbox 360 emulation for the Xbox One also illustrates that point.
Here’s how Andrew Goossen (Microsoft Technical Fellow, Graphics) explained the situation to Digital Foundry:
“In designing for compatibility, there are two choices that we can take from a performance perspective,” Goossen said. “One of which is to design hardware to emulate the performance capabilities of the original [console] as much as possible, or the other one is to say, we’re just going to turn on all the performance and we’re going to deal with all the issues.”
Sony represents the emulation option that Microsoft is discussing here. Boost Mode has been made available so that existing PS4 titles that aren’t optimized for the PS4 Pro can still take advantage of higher clock speeds — but not the second GPU implementation inside the console.
Microsoft is taking the harder route of making the Xbox Scorpio’s firepower available to all games, but that means checking to ensure those titles run properly and don’t suffer slowdowns or other issues.
Microsoft further clarified that while games should be able to sustain a constant frame rate on Scorpio even if they struggled to do so on the original Xbone, the new console doesn’t automatically raise the frame rate. That’s typically the developer’s decision and is tied to the game engine. (It appears developers will have the option to add support for a faster locked frame rate, but that’s up to them).
I’m not sure this is actually a problem. 30 FPS gaming gets a worse rap, in my opinion, than it actually deserves. While I still prefer 60 FPS targets, I’d much rather have a rock-solid constant 30 FPS than a game that swings erratically from 20 FPS – 60 FPS depending on what’s on-screen at any given time. It’s been my personal observation that what most people don’t like about 30 FPS is that a performance whack at 30 FPS pushes you down into stuttering territory in the 20-25 FPS range, whereas the same percentage decline from a 60 FPS target puts you in the 40 – 50 FPS range. The slower the base frame rate is, the more noticeable stuttering becomes.
Digital Foundry expects Xbox One games to run smoother, avoid screen tearing, hold their maximum possible resolutions, and offer improved texture filtering — according to Goossen, the new Scorpio system automatically converts bilinear and trilinear filters to 16x anisotropic filtering on-the-fly. In the image below, Forza Motorsport 6 Apex is using 4x AF on the left(corresponding to default texturing for the Xbox One) and 16x AF on the right.
4x on the left, 16x on the right. Click to enlarge. Image by Digital Foundry
This texture filtering improvement will also carry over for Xbox 360 games played via emulation. Microsoft is also promising faster loading and improved texture decompression performance to accelerate how long it takes to actually get in-game and playing.
VR support
Microsoft expects Project Scorpio’s firepower to be primarily useful in delivering two kinds of content: VR and 4K. This does not mean that 1080p gamers are left out in the cold, but we’ll cover that separately. VR support really isn’t in question; the Polaris-class GPU inside the Xbox Scorpio is significantly more powerful than the GTX 970 or R9 290 GPUs that are typically specced as minimum hardware for 1080p VR.
Microsoft is expected to announce Oculus support for Scorpio, given that it already has a partnership with Oculus to distribute an Xbox One controller. There are also rumors of additional, Windows 10-specific optimizations that will improve VR performance in some degree, but data here is thin. We know that at least one game, Fallout 4, is being converted to VR specifically for the Xbox One. But this situation is easily the murkiest of the various Project Scorpio questions. Ars Technica points out that the next-generation Xbox doesn’t seem to have the extra HDMI port you’d expect for outputting specifically to VR, and it’s not even clear if MS will still partner with Oculus given that it is making its own push into low-cost VR headsets.
Can the Xbox One hit native 4K?
Digital Foundry’s conclusion is that some Xbox One games, if properly optimized, should be able to drive a title at native 4K as opposed to simply upscaling 1080p textures and detail settings. The one title Microsoft showed, Forza 6, was running a steady 60 FPS at 4K resolution. While that’s extremely impressive for any console, as always, we don’t recommend basing purchase decisions on the performance of a single, likely highly-optimized game.
Games that are bottlenecked by fill rate are much less likely to hit 4K resolutions, for example, because Project Scorpio’s GPU is limited to 32 ROPS. Games that put heavy pressure on memory bandwidth, on the other hand, could easily hit 4K on the Xbox Scorpio, even if they can’t maintain that resolution on a PS4 Pro — the Xbox’s 1.5x memory bandwidth advantage over Sony could be sufficient to make that happen.
Like Sony, MS has the option to use checkerboard filtering or other methods of scaling up to 4K, if they so desire. Just as with Sony, I expect there will be some games that actually hit native 4K and some that scale up to it. I’m not even sure that 4K targets are the best way to use the additional firepower — I’d prefer an upscaled 4K with better textures or possibly higher frame rates as opposed to a native 4K with a 30 FPS lock. We’ll have to wait and see how studios take advantage of the new capabilities to render a verdict on whether Microsoft’s approach works better than Sony’s. Redmond does seem fairly confident on this point; they’ve added support for 4K60p video capture with retroactive screen capture to the Xbox GameDVR app when running on Scorpio.
1080p goodies
Sony’s initial PS4 Pro messaging was almost entirely focused on 4K, to the point that you might have wondered whether the company was aware that the vast majority of TV owners (and PC gamers, for that matter) use resolutions far below that point. According to Microsoft, games rendered above 1080p resolution will be downsampled for 1080p televisions.
This is a particularly nice trait for Microsoft to offer. Downsampling and super-sampled anti-aliasing aren’t technically exactly the same thing, mostly because there are different methods to use for super-sampling (ordered grid, sparse grid, etc) and downsampling doesn’t necessarily conform to these specific approaches. At a very high level, however, here’s how this works:
Supersampling AA: Improves image quality and reduces jagged lines by taking additional subpixel color samples and renders the entire image at a higher resolution before outputting at the target resolution. The grid type chosen will impact final image quality — some grid patterns are more likely to produce blurred textures than others. If you hate jaggies, SSAA is the best way to eliminate them if your GPU can handle the much heavier workload.
Downsampling: The game is internally rendered at a higher resolution before being output at a lower resolution. This step is essentially identical between supersampling and downsampling, and in every game I’ve ever tested that offered both options, supersampling and downsampling have had practically identical performance hits and improved visual quality by the same amount.
A 1080p game downsampled from 4K still looks much better than a 1080p game rendered in 1080p — the only question is whether the GPU can keep up. The entire reason why alternate antialiasing modes like FXAA, SMAA, MSAA, CSAA, CFAA, Quincunx, TXAA and MFAA were developed is because game devs and GPU companies have continually pushed to find new ways of improving image quality while reducing the GPU workload. Each of these methods uses a different approach to improve image quality, with results that range from “Good,” to “Better than nothing,” typically with corresponding performance hits. Downsampling is the gold standard for image quality in a situation like this, and it’s encouraging to see MS standing up for it and enabling it by default, in hardware, when playing on a 1080p TV.
3200×1800 downsampling compared with native 1080p resolution. check the edges of textures to see where the downsampled image smooths them compared with 1080p. Click to enlarge, image by Gamrs.co user VooDooPC.
Overall, this looks like an extremely impressive launch for Microsoft. If it comes in at the expected price ($499) and can actually hit 4K60 gameplay in more than a handful of titles, this next-gen console should punch well above its weight class, even when compared with PCs. Honestly, that shouldn’t be viewed as a surprise. There was a time when brand-new consoles were more than capable of matching the graphics of equivalent PCs. The Xbox One and PS4 were less-capable (but more profitable) in this regard, but Microsoft, at least, intends to play a major round of catch-up. And Microsoft appears to have learned from Sony’s mistake and is offering features that all gamers, including those with 1080p televisions, can benefit from out of the box.
Remember how it was for Splinter Cell? It was day and night difference. Same with Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six.
I think it will be rare (if at all) to see that kind of difference. PS2 Splinter Cell didn't have the dynamic shadows OR bump maps. Those were some of the biggest game changers in graphics since the advent of 3D...
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