Forbes thinks the Switch is a Scorpio killer

Or, rather, that the Scorpio's design philosophy is a Scorpio killer while the Switch is a more shrewd hardware model.

Linkage

The long and short of it: their argument is that Scorpio offers nothing to the industry but better graphics - better graphics that a) will still not surpass existing capabilities for consumers (PC)*, and b) hinge on a game development philosophy that is too expensive and soul-sucking on the industry as it is. They note that AAA blockbuster development is killing itself under the weight of its own development cost, and this is the crux of their view that the Scorpio's focus is outdated and ultimately risky.

*point A is my own addendum to their narrative

For the first time in god knows how long the most powerful console is winning. Microsoft seem to think that's the way to go. They're in for a rude awakening.

@xantufrog:

They argued the following

1. "Scorpio offers nothing to the industry but better graphics - better graphics that a) will still not surpass existing capabilities for consumers".

2. "They note that AAA blockbuster development is killing itself under the weight of its own development cost".

Point 2 is flawed since games that runs existing capabilities for consumers (PC) are already in development!

Rename Xbox Scorpio as Xbox Surface Pro.

Weren't graphics the most important thing about 6 months ago?

So releasing a system that is weaker than the current gen and cost more and offers less is the future. OK.

I just spotted this under the author's name

"I write about video games and pop-culture from Japan."

That explains the nonsensical article.

"Exclusives" wise, It could be during the holiday season, it could also kill the PS4 (for that quarter).

The Wii U was an absolute flop.. but most idiotic consumers thought of it as a PS4 Pro (minor upgrade, not worth the 300 dollars)

The Wii was the last true Nintendo console to enter the market with a new name, and it destroyed in sales.

I feel the Switch will have massive momentum, especially with shortages during the early stages of launch, by holiday season you will see a Mario/Zelda Switch bundle(plus the critical acclaim Zelda is getting) that will absolutely give way to a frenzy of parents trying to acquire the console like the NES classic this past holiday season. (it will be on MANY kid's list)

The Scorpio may end up being 3rd, but I have no issues, I'm happy with my xbox and look forward to my future 4k player and fantastic all Xbox machine (hope they make the OG xbox BC.)

both are gonna flop just as hard

Interesting analysis. While I don't know if the Switch itself is a Scorpio killer, I think the mentality and philosophy behind the Switch is on to something big. I would not be surprised to see similar functionality in the next PlayStation (and subsequently, in the next Xbox to follow after, too)

Regardless, this industry is big enough for three.

Ignorant, it's the way MS has always gone.. XB > PS2 in terms of power, and 360 > PS3 in terms of power.. it's the only MS route they knew, but guess what the weakest console owned the trend so they tried something new.

They're basically going back to the OG formula.. it's nothing that shocking.

@FLOPPAGE_50: 360 wasn't exactly more powerful than PS3.

Oh, you believe in "teeh power of teh cellzz" where the PS3 never had the better looking nor running game over the 360.

@FLOPPAGE_50: They were even. Just good in different areas.

Xbox 360 was not more powerful than the PS3. They were equivalent in functional terms, with the PS3 winning in raw CPU power, the Xbox 360 winning out in terms of RAM and easier to crack architecture. Theoretically, the PS3 should have been more powerful, but the Cell was so eccentric it never worked out. The result was we were left with two roughly equivalently capable consoles on the market.

The original Xbox, meanwhile, ran circles around the PS2 (as did the Gamecube, for that matter).

Xbox 360's GPU was functionally stronger than NVIDIA RSX.

From https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/1460125/

------------------------

"I could go on for pages listing the types of things the spu's are used for to make up for the machines aging gpu, which may be 7 series NVidia but that's basically a tweaked 6 series NVidia for the most part. But I'll just type a few off the top of my head:"

1) Two ppu/vmx units

There are three ppu/vmx units on the 360, and just one on the PS3. So any load on the 360's remaining two ppu/vmx units must be moved to spu.

2) Vertex culling

You can look back a few years at my first post talking about this, but it's common knowledge now that you need to move as much vertex load as possible to spu otherwise it won't keep pace with the 360.

3) Vertex texture sampling

You can texture sample in vertex shaders on 360 just fine, but it's unusably slow on PS3. Most multi platform games simply won't use this feature on 360 to make keeping parity easier, but if a dev does make use of it then you will have no choice but to move all such functionality to spu.

4) Shader patching

Changing variables in shader programs is cake on the 360. Not so on the PS3 because they are embedded into the shader programs. So you have to use spu's to patch your shader programs.

5) Branching

You never want a lot of branching in general, but when you do really need it the 360 handles it fine, PS3 does not. If you are stuck needing branching in shaders then you will want to move all such functionality to spu.

6) Shader inputs

You can pass plenty of inputs to shaders on 360, but do it on PS3 and your game will grind to a halt. You will want to move all such functionality to spu to minimize the amount of inputs needed on the shader programs.

7) MSAA alternatives

Msaa runs full speed on 360 gpu needing just cpu tiling calculations. Msaa on PS3 gpu is very slow. You will want to move msaa to spu as soon as you can.

8 ) Post processing

360 is unified architecture meaning post process steps can often be slotted into gpu idle time. This is not as easily doable on PS3, so you will want to move as much post process to spu as possible.

9) Load balancing

360 gpu load balances itself just fine since it's unified. If the load on a given frame shifts to heavy vertex or heavy pixel load then you don't care. Not so on PS3 where such load shifts will cause frame drops. You will want to shift as much load as possible to spu to minimize your peak load on the gpu.

10) Half floats

You can use full floats just fine on the 360 gpu. On the PS3 gpu they cause performance slowdowns. If you really need/have to use shaders with many full floats then you will want to move such functionality over to the spu's.

11) Shader array indexing

You can index into arrays in shaders on the 360 gpu no problem. You can't do that on PS3. If you absolutely need this functionality then you will have to either rework your shaders or move it all to spu.

Etc, etc, etc...

Also,

Xbox 360's GPU has tessellation unit which doesn't reduce compute resource.

@ronvalencia: Great. So they were evenly matched, and the Xbox 360 was easier to work with.

On weekends he moonlights as a freelancer for Nint3ndoFanatica ;-)

RSX has access to both 20 GB/s XDR link and 22.4 GB/s GDDR3. Minus 2 SPUs for 2 core PPE work, four remaining SPEs re-employed as shader support for RSX.

Xenos has access to both 30 GB/s EDRAM and 22.4 GB/s GDDR3.

Both machines has 8 ROPS.

---

Real life for PS3

It's faster for SPEs to write it's results 9(.g. vertex) to XDR main memory and have RSX read the SPE result from XDR main memory.

On Xenos and unified shaders, processing from vertex shader to pixel shader stages enables the data to stay within the GPU longer.

Xbox 360's Xenos has decoupled and multithreaded with 64 ultra-threads (GPU's SMT/Hyperthreading). On NVIDIA CUDA GPUs, these are called Gigathreads.

Xbox 360's Xenos includes DX10's 3DC texture compression formats.

This place is just getting worse by the day.

Forbes has opinion writers that contribute these kinds of articles. They will have the opposite article in a few days.

This has been the norm for them for years.

Well known on these boards.

Wow that writer is completely missing the point of what microsoft is trying to do with the xbox devision. It's not about creating the most powerful console. It's about creating a range of devices that will keep improving over time, just like with phones. More importantly games will always be playable on the new devices, and that's a huge plus. If Microsoft is able to do BC forever just like on PC than that would be amazing, and a game changer in console gaming. Hopefully Sony will follow with the PS5, so that you can run your current games on it.

It maybe a Scorpio/Pro killer, but it may also be that the Switch will be a Nintendo killer?

Scorpio - 6000 GFlops (6 TFlops)

Switch (docked, as a console) 393 GFlops.

Whether or not Switch is more successful than Scorpio (or not) Switch has about 1/15th the GPU performance in console mode compared to Scorpio.

Scorpio is nothing right now. Its just words from a company that tends to lie.

@FastRobby: Yep agreed.

Yay, a blogger on Forbes lol. Yeah it's just a contributor, it's not actually a Forbes writer.

That article is all over the place. Not entirely wrong, but eh.

And sure, the idea works for me. Scorpio offers me nothing. My PC will still run circles around that thing both in terms of power and game selection. On the flip side, Switch will offer me much more in the way of games and functions that my PC doesn't share.

But in reality I just don't see the two consoles going at each other. Very little overlap imo. For console gamers who aren't interested in a PC (tons of them), the Scorpio will be the latest greatest thing. Scorpios real threat is the PS4 Pro and its broader library of games. The Switch just won't be competing in that arena.

As for the death Spiral of AAA budgets, I don't think this writer understands how that works as applied to Scorpio. Scorpio isn't increasing that bar at all. It's going to be getting the same games with the same assets as PS4/Pro and PC are getting. Just with lower settings than a maxed PC version and higher settings than the Pro version.

Agreed aside from the bold. Almost nobody here knows lol. You wouldn't believe how often things are taken as fact strictly because a random blogger on Forbes wrote it.

Like the whole "Kojima was running Konami into the ground and MGSV will never make a profit!" deal. All started with a Forbes blogger. Even though the game turned a profit for them immediately, and the engine is still being used to turn profits today.

http://wccftech.com/amd-rx-580-crossfire-ryzen-4k-aots-benchmarks/

The Radeon RX 580 graphics card was tested on an Intel i7 5820k hexa-core processor with a base clock of 3.3 GHz. The RX 580 manages to score an average framerate of 72.3 fps. The performance shown here is significantly faster than the RX 480 and roughly in the same league as the GTX 1070. The performance bump that we can see here leads me to suspect that this is probably a cut-down Vega core (Vega 11) and not a revised version of the RX 480. You can’t really hope to gain multiple double digit performance bumps from simply an improved revision or better binned GPU

Vega 10 along with whole new SoC (System On Chip) with the same Graphics IP v9.0 generation.

Man you really are going to be OWNED in June lol

I think Forbes is bias against MS. Do you think MS should have made the Xbox One S similar to the PS4 pro and called it a day? Also if Sony was making Scorpio do you think it would get this much backlash from the bias media?

They're right, the power difference between The pro and the Scorpio is less than the difference between PS4 and Xbone. No need to buy that overpriced PoS when you can get a Pro and a switch for cheaper and have access to all the multiplats, Sony exclusives, VR, AND Nintendo exclusives. Scorpio is gonna be a dud. Lemmings need to get their butthurt cream ready.

You see this? This is your Scorpio.

Here's my intake on this. MS is so focusing on raw power and lack of any killer app exclusive games. I'm sorry but with the way MS has been going for them this gen, the Xbox One isn't something I could recommended to a friend if that person doesn't have PC gaming, then I guess your okay with Xbox One but from a gamer who owns multiple consoles & PC, the Xbox One itself is just a bad console and I just don't see Scorpio doing well without exclusive games to back it up. I can see Switch somewhat doing minimal damage to Scorpio mainly because Nintendo always deliver quality of exclusive games, if you want everyone to buy your consoles, you gotta also provide exclusive games to back up your console.

MS is just putting all of there eggs into Scorpio and not into there games development. Cancelling both Fable Legends & Scalebound really hurt MS reputation, I can see why Forbes may think Switch is Scorpio killer and they could be right since Nintendo is launch first for a next-gen console.

Graphics are gimmicks. And AAA is still dying. Just look around you at all the flops. Look at all the AAA games lowering budget as much as they can.

Forbes thinks the Switch is a Scorpio killer

Nothing like a good laff to start a day.

I don't think so at all. This gen started with the PS4 being the most powerful console and now this year that is going to change, so why are people saying Power doesn't matter all of a sudden? Most of MS games are Multi-player and not single player only games. It takes more time to make those types of games compared to single player only. Third Party support was big in the rise of the PS4 this gen so that might change in 2018 with Scorpio taking over in having better multiplats since it is more powerful. Blaming MS because Platinum couldn't get the game right is wrong.

@silversix_: On June 11 you are going to see this..... A lot ..... OWNED Pics!!!!!!!!

i agree but it should also be noted that the same arguments can be levelled at the pro.

neither of these consoles should exist. they are just mucking things up even more. AAA development is in pretty bad shape with the number of publishers and IP that can sustain it being countable on pretty much one hand (even creed has shown cracks though and COD is showing issues). it isnt sustainable and the best thing consoles can do is limit them.

scoprio (like the pro) doesnt solve any problems and just introduces more problems. power isnt going to get MS any major sales. the PS4 didnt win just because its more powerful. it won because it cost less then the X1 at launch, was more powerful and sony cut out the nonsense from the PS3 screw up. lack of power didnt work againt the PS1, 2, or wii...they still made boat loads of money.

it has nothing to do with the switch though (but good SW worthy title :-) ). the switch, as with all nintendo devices, is made by nintendo for the requirements of nintendo and only nintendo. they know how much they want to spend on development for different titles. they know they cant sustain 70-120million development budgets on big games. they dont want massive teams from around the world just working on one title. the switch (and staying out of the hardware race in general) facilitates all this. its a well documented, developer friendly and industry standard device that does what they need it to do.

I find it hard to believe AAA games are dying, look at AAA games like Nioh, Pokemon Sun/Moon, Forza Horizon 3, and Horizon: Zero Dawn, those are AAA games that everyone is raving about, not much of a dying AAA games to me. Let's just be glad the gaming industry is still alive and well.

While having the most powerful console maybe something to brag about, the first Xbox was indeed powerful but PS2 still remain dominate despite it's lack of power, the quality of exclusive games is what made PS2 famous for, more games means more popularity. Though it'll be interesting to see what MS has in stores for E3 2017, other then Scorpio, they need more exclusive games to back up Scorpio cause as of now, PS4 has lots of exclusive games going for it. I don't care about raw power on consoles, if I wanted power, I can get that on my PC.

Here's another intake.

@davillain-: Thats because your only looking at the ones that didnt flop.

@davillain-: given the context of the discussion AAA refers to production budget rather than score. pokemon is not AAA in terms of production budget (and i suspect nioh isnt either). a modern AAA production budget is around 55million+.

so games like COD, creed, battlefield, GTA. these are all AAA games. the summer blockbuster basically. its that segment of the market thats in big trouble.

not all games that score AAA are AAA.

@ConanTheStoner: Come on Conan, I'm a Nurse Practitioner, not a Mech Guy XD

NOT.FORBES.BROS.

Again, Forbes "contributor". A blogger who posts their stuff up on Forbes site.

Do you believe power alone is what put the PS4 in such a great position this gen?

lol

Though I wouldn't be surprised if you're secretly a mech.

No I disagree, they are not targeting the same audiences overall. Also it's amusing seeing people focus so much on Scorpio's power. Microsoft isn't the one who decided to make the Scorpio uber-powerful, the consumers did.....it's partly based on the blowback from the Xbox One and their research, everything that happened this gen.....the message from customers has been loud and clear : "We don't want gimmicks like Kinect, we prefer raw power instead". They're simply going back to standard console design, that is all. Except this time it will have more forward/backward compatibility in mind from the get-go, which is a game-focused feature.

As far as games are concerned, they have their hits and misses just like other companies. They're trying different things with their online-heavy games, most notably trying to keep engagement up and I'm seeing it in games like Forza Horizon 3 and Gears 4, they have events every weekend to keep you coming back, some of them are tournaments you can register in. They are pushing the E-sports scene a lot as well. As someone who plays online a lot, I'm digging these initiatives because it keeps the online populations more active and engaged overall. Lot of competition in that space today. There might be a bit of overlap with the target audience of the Switch(Play Anywhere gaming on tablets and laptops), but overall I think the Scorpio and Switch will not really be butting heads.

@Alucard_Prime: Of course they wont compete. But that wont stop people from comparing the sales numbers. And just like consumers love that raw power, they love them big numbers.

No it won't kill Scorpio, they both offer a different experience. I see where they're coming from though. Eventually the main focus point has got to shift from graphics onto other features. The issue here being, we don't actually know what the Scorpio is going to be.

@Kusimeka: I think theyre claiming Microsoft will play it safe. Xbox One was suppose to be a pretty innovative device. But gamers ripped that shit to shreds.

If the focus towards power is considered a failure then ps4 pro is also a failure.

I don't see Microsoft's focus towards power as a failure.

The thing is that scorpio is not targeted towards those who thinks "PC is better since no exclusive" but towards those who want performance similar to PC without having to deal with the complexities that come with PC.

The only ones who are hating are those who buy console for just exclusives. Anyone else doesn't suffer.

I agree with you, for the moment a focus on power (to a certain extent) is worthwhile. However, there's no denying that power has its diminishing effects, unless we get some new tech (like VR massively taking off).

@iandizion713: Yeah and I can see how both consoles will compete in some spaces, but overall I just don't see Nintendo ramping up their 3rd party support focus like Sony and Xbox does, it seems to me once again Nintendo is doing their own thing and not directly competing with either Microsoft or Sony.