9 replies to this topic

[Mister Maf]

This article posted on the front page. I'm sure all you read it and got really excited. Six times as powerful? Multiscreen? Hot damn, that's great!

Except it isn't.

Y'all remember this article from late last year? Specifically, this graph:



Now, you can probably see where I'm going with this. In this report from last year, Nvidia calculated that the GTX 580, their most powerful card on the market at the time, was effectively ten times as powerful as the GPU (graphical processing unit) packed into your 'Box. The GTX 580 lies somewhere in performance between AMD's HD 6970 and HD 6990 cards. All three of them will run you a damn pretty penny, but that's not really much of the point. As you saw in the article, the next Xbox will likely be running something very similar to the HD 6670.

Warning: technical mumbo-jumbo ahead. Don't be afraid to ask questions.

For those of you uninformed in the ways of model labeling, be aware that higher numbers don't mean better. An HD 5970 would kick an HD 6350's ass, and would only be defeated by the upper models of the 6000 series (like the HD 6970 mentioned above). This is because each series (6000, 5000, 4000, etc.; Nvidia does this too with their 100, 200, 400, 500, etc.) is a brand new type of architecture - with each successive series, the engineers will come up with a new more efficient way of doing things, and this will be the new architecture. However, in GPUs, raw horsepower and memory make a bigger difference when you're only making the hop between one generation (i.e. 4000 to 5000). A jump between more than one (i.e. 4000 to 6000) will yield a significant difference, enough to where a newer mid-range card may match the older powerhouse card. In each generation, the company will come up with four classes of GPU on the new architecture: integrated (built into the motherboard, for everyday computing), entry-level (not good for much beyond HDTV), mid-range (play some games, speed up your work in Photoshop), and high-end (enthusiasts, hardcore gamers, and people who don't mind paying the electricity bill only). As with any piece of technology, when they release the new stuff, the old stuff gets less expensive. A new generation of GPUs will drop the price on all the previous GPUs once the supply is high enough of the new stuff.

So why did I explain all of that to you? To help explain that the HD 6670 is not a high-performance piece of technology, and it never was. It was designed from the get-go to be an accessible mid-range GPU that Joe Schmoe who likes to play TF2 on the weekends could go buy affordably at his local Fry's Electronics and plug into his computer without worrying about power consumption or anything like that and be good to go. You can get one of these things for as low as $70 right now. (Note: you don't need even approaching a 6000 series card to play TF2, but it'll let you run it maxed in comfortable framerate zones, which is nice.)

What's more, AMD just launched their new 7000 series of GPUs. The only one available right now is the HD 7970, and it's currently the #1 best GPU you can buy (unless you're like me and are an antialiasing whore, then you want to go with Nvidia's GTX 590 because of stuff you guys really don't care about, especially since next to no console games use antialiasing anyway). Needless to say, the 7000s haven't exactly saturated the market yet, so prices haven't really been affected, but once more of these things in the various ranges of the series come out (and Nvidia's response comes later this year), prices are going ever so slightly south.

What's more, the next Xbox won't be here until 2013 according to the IGN article. Late 2013. Let's go over some history. 5000 series debut: late 2009. 6000 series debut: mid 2011. 7000 series debut: early 2012. These things are on a cycle of anywhere from less than a year to two years. Late 2013 is in a little less than two years. Chances are there will be an HD 8670 out by the time you get your hands on an Xbox 720 swinging that swag HD 6670. It will be two generations old and being packaged as new and improved. Compare today to the HD 4670, which you can buy for $50. Tip: the 4000 series is kind of a joke today. In this benchmark, it only barely scrapes by an average 30 FPS (the bare minimum for shooter games) on good old Call of Duty 4 - on medium settings. To be fair, it's on a pretty damn big screen resolution - higher than any you'll see on your TVs any time soon. But you get the point, no? The HD 6670 can shrug CoD4 no problem, but it was the HD 4670 that had to bear it. In late 2013, the HD 6670 will be today's HD 4670.

Now, why am I bitching about this? "Maf, you're an elitist PC jerk who left the Xbox years ago! Why do you care?" Because on Microsoft's part, this is cheap and lazy. You all remember when the Xbox 360 came out - how AMAAAAAAZIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING the graphics were! Because the Xbox 360 used graphical technology that was well above that of the average computer at the time. (Yes, I see that in the graph that I myself posted above, the PC bar is higher - but note the margin by which it is higher and note that that represents the absolute creme of the crop from Nvidia's 2005 GPU offerings. The mid-range on the PC bar actually lies below the console bar.) It used the best of what was available and made it relatively affordable by making up for lost costs with an online subscription fee. Sony did the opposite by giving you a free online service but charging $600 a pop per unit on release. But they used advanced hardware and it extended the life cycle of their systems, probably well beyond what it should have but they did it. Remember back to before Battlefield 3 was released. While that game was being hyped, what did it seem like just about every dev team out there was saying? "We want to get on with the next generation of consoles! These ones are completely tapped out and we can't do any better!" Rumors of new systems were running rampant, and they're still here - thus, this topic exists. But according to this rumor, which was posted not by some gaming inquirer but by large gaming news outlet IGN, with no air of any uncertainty, that the next Xbox will arrive in two years packing mid-range hardware from last year. What?

This is my problem with that. Because this time Microsoft decided to be cheap, because one of the biggest and most profitable international corporations in the world decided that the $10 price hike on the XBL fee for their millions of users wasn't enough to make up for the lost money on individual Xbox systems and money spent repairing RROD'd systems, that I guess it'd be better just to just use modest technology next time around. Make the thing already facking obsolete from day 1. Again, as a PC gamer, why do I care? Because developers develop things multiplatform. Game technology is limited to the lowest common denominator. With the Xbox 360, that was actually the PC at the time of release before the PC eventually overtook it (again, midrange on the PC bar is below the console bar on the graph above). Then, as PC technology pulled further and futher ahead... nothing really that amazing happened. Most graphical improvements were the result of clever tweaks, shortcuts, and technomagic to make the same stuff look prettier and run on the same hardware as before. DICE was the first major developer in YEARS to build an engine focused on the PC's superior power, and look what that got us - the PC version is definitely prettier...but they're really pretty much the same damned thing. Particle effects are denser, shadows more detailed, and foliage and random little doodads on buildings get rendered beyond fifteen feet in front of your face on the PC. That's about it. And I can do this now. The computer I have right now that I got a year and a half ago is better than the Xbox that's planned for release in two years.

I realize that graphics aren't what make the game and gameplay is what makes the game. Why do you think I play so much TF2? Frostbite 2.0 beats the hell out of Valve's Source. But progress is progress, and it's a little bit... infuriating to be leashed to something slower. Without the ball and chains, the prisoner could run! We've all seen those videos of CryEngine 3 and Unreal Engine 4. Holy shizz, they look pretty, but PCs can already run that. They've just never made any games with them because consoles can't run that. But come 2013, there's going to be a brief burst in technological prettiness and a dip in decent games as developers make exploring the "new power" their focus. Except it's not new. It's not new at all. It's two years and two generations old and we could've already been there and moved on for everyone, console and PC users alike, if Microsoft weren't so stingy. And you know that Sony is going to have something comparable to make things competitive.

What if it wasn't my exclusive right as a PC user to have access to 64-man conquest in Battlefield 3 but rather everyone got to enjoy it? Conquest Large on some of the B2K maps have like seven flags or something like that, dude. I know none of you console users like not being able to experience that; whether it's fun or not, you'd like to try it, because someone else has it and you don't. Well, the way the next generation of consoles looks to be shaping up, the time between a race of improvement to obsolescence and desiring something new is going to be far, far shorter than it was this time around.

******* A, it's 4 AM. Good night, everyone.

Edited by Mister Maf, 25 January 2012 - 03:25 AM.

[TheBMT]

Nice post. Its too early in the morning for me to do advanced reading. But bravo for breaking it down. But I def agree with your last paragraph. Almost tempting enough to buy a PC to play BF3 the way its meant to be played in all its gloriousness.

[FlameX]

Finally someone who actually does his "homework" before claiming that [insert console/pc] here is better then [insert console/pc] here, also a one little note @ the Source Engine VS Frostbite 2.0 engine. the reason why most STEAM gamers favor the Engine is due to the fact it is easy to make HQ maps with it if you have the proper knowledge for it though.

I'm one of those people who develop mods/maps on the source engine , and currently it is my favorite engine (see above for the reason) , i have tried to learn to dev stuff in Unreal engine , but it is really too complicated to me , and there are not any good i found yet for it.

Before i stroll even farther away from the topic.

The only reason why i have Battlefield 3 on my PS3 is due to the fact that my PC is so idiotic slow compared to other PC's and can't handle BF3 (its a 2.5GHZ dual-core lol). And i believe is that you must buy it on PC just to get that real Battlefield experience , more people equals more fun.Oh well , i still play BF2 sometimes on my PC though.

[Mister Maf]

FlameX, on 25 January 2012 - 09:29 AM, said:

Finally someone who actually does his "homework" before claiming that [insert console/pc] here is better then [insert console/pc] here, also a one little note @ the Source Engine VS Frostbite 2.0 engine. the reason why most STEAM gamers favor the Engine is due to the fact it is easy to make HQ maps with it if you have the proper knowledge for it though.

I know that. Source and Unreal Engine are the most flexible engines out there for content makers, and from a design standpoint, Source is the easier of the two (though actually getting your content into the engine can be another matter with custom models sometimes). User-generated content is where it's at on the PC, but that's not the point. I was talking from a pure graphical fidelity standpoint, since Frostbite 2 is at the cutting edge of that and this post is about how if you think consoles have held back progress in the past (which they have), the next generation is going to do so even more because Microsoft is too cheap to put a decent GPU into their next one.

Also more players doesn't aways equal more fun. See: 32-man TF2 servers. With great power of customization comes great responsibility... I usually actually play 32-man servers in BF3 because the small maps are completely broken with any more than that.

Edited by Mister Maf, 25 January 2012 - 11:38 AM.

[THE RED DRAGON]

I really think with the cloud becoming more ideal - they won't need as much power as you would if you were running it on that machine. This way it gives them some wiggle room and a nice upgrade nonetheless.

[ParadoxPP]

Mister Maf, on 25 January 2012 - 03:00 AM, said:

This article posted on the front page. I'm sure all you read it and got really excited. Six times as powerful? Multiscreen? Hot damn, that's great!

Except it isn't.

Y'all remember this article from late last year? Specifically, this graph:



Now, you can probably see where I'm going with this. In this report from last year, Nvidia calculated that the GTX 580, their most powerful card on the market at the time, was effectively ten times as powerful as the GPU (graphical processing unit) packed into your 'Box. The GTX 580 lies somewhere in performance between AMD's HD 6970 and HD 6990 cards. All three of them will run you a damn pretty penny, but that's not really much of the point. As you saw in the article, the next Xbox will likely be running something very similar to the HD 6670.

Warning: technical mumbo-jumbo ahead. Don't be afraid to ask questions.

For those of you uninformed in the ways of model labeling, be aware that higher numbers don't mean better. An HD 5970 would kick an HD 6350's ass, and would only be defeated by the upper models of the 6000 series (like the HD 6970 mentioned above). This is because each series (6000, 5000, 4000, etc.; Nvidia does this too with their 100, 200, 400, 500, etc.) is a brand new type of architecture - with each successive series, the engineers will come up with a new more efficient way of doing things, and this will be the new architecture. However, in GPUs, raw horsepower and memory make a bigger difference when you're only making the hop between one generation (i.e. 4000 to 5000). A jump between more than one (i.e. 4000 to 6000) will yield a significant difference, enough to where a newer mid-range card may match the older powerhouse card. In each generation, the company will come up with four classes of GPU on the new architecture: integrated (built into the motherboard, for everyday computing), entry-level (not good for much beyond HDTV), mid-range (play some games, speed up your work in Photoshop), and high-end (enthusiasts, hardcore gamers, and people who don't mind paying the electricity bill only). As with any piece of technology, when they release the new stuff, the old stuff gets less expensive. A new generation of GPUs will drop the price on all the previous GPUs once the supply is high enough of the new stuff.

So why did I explain all of that to you? To help explain that the HD 6670 is not a high-performance piece of technology, and it never was. It was designed from the get-go to be an accessible mid-range GPU that Joe Schmoe who likes to play TF2 on the weekends could go buy affordably at his local Fry's Electronics and plug into his computer without worrying about power consumption or anything like that and be good to go. You can get one of these things for as low as $70 right now. (Note: you don't need even approaching a 6000 series card to play TF2, but it'll let you run it maxed in comfortable framerate zones, which is nice.)

What's more, AMD just launched their new 7000 series of GPUs. The only one available right now is the HD 7970, and it's currently the #1 best GPU you can buy (unless you're like me and are an antialiasing whore, then you want to go with Nvidia's GTX 590 because of stuff you guys really don't care about, especially since next to no console games use antialiasing anyway). Needless to say, the 7000s haven't exactly saturated the market yet, so prices haven't really been affected, but once more of these things in the various ranges of the series come out (and Nvidia's response comes later this year), prices are going ever so slightly south.

What's more, the next Xbox won't be here until 2013 according to the IGN article. Late 2013. Let's go over some history. 5000 series debut: late 2009. 6000 series debut: mid 2011. 7000 series debut: early 2012. These things are on a cycle of anywhere from less than a year to two years. Late 2013 is in a little less than two years. Chances are there will be an HD 8670 out by the time you get your hands on an Xbox 720 swinging that swag HD 6670. It will be two generations old and being packaged as new and improved. Compare today to the HD 4670, which you can buy for $50. Tip: the 4000 series is kind of a joke today. In this benchmark, it only barely scrapes by an average 30 FPS (the bare minimum for shooter games) on good old Call of Duty 4 - on medium settings. To be fair, it's on a pretty damn big screen resolution - higher than any you'll see on your TVs any time soon. But you get the point, no? The HD 6670 can shrug CoD4 no problem, but it was the HD 4670 that had to bear it. In late 2013, the HD 6670 will be today's HD 4670.

Now, why am I bitching about this? "Maf, you're an elitist PC jerk who left the Xbox years ago! Why do you care?" Because on Microsoft's part, this is cheap and lazy. You all remember when the Xbox 360 came out - how AMAAAAAAZIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING the graphics were! Because the Xbox 360 used graphical technology that was well above that of the average computer at the time. (Yes, I see that in the graph that I myself posted above, the PC bar is higher - but note the margin by which it is higher and note that that represents the absolute creme of the crop from Nvidia's 2005 GPU offerings. The mid-range on the PC bar actually lies below the console bar.) It used the best of what was available and made it relatively affordable by making up for lost costs with an online subscription fee. Sony did the opposite by giving you a free online service but charging $600 a pop per unit on release. But they used advanced hardware and it extended the life cycle of their systems, probably well beyond what it should have but they did it. Remember back to before Battlefield 3 was released. While that game was being hyped, what did it seem like just about every dev team out there was saying? "We want to get on with the next generation of consoles! These ones are completely tapped out and we can't do any better!" Rumors of new systems were running rampant, and they're still here - thus, this topic exists. But according to this rumor, which was posted not by some gaming inquirer but by large gaming news outlet IGN, with no air of any uncertainty, that the next Xbox will arrive in two years packing mid-range hardware from last year. What?

This is my problem with that. Because this time Microsoft decided to be cheap, because one of the biggest and most profitable international corporations in the world decided that the $10 price hike on the XBL fee for their millions of users wasn't enough to make up for the lost money on individual Xbox systems and money spent repairing RROD'd systems, that I guess it'd be better just to just use modest technology next time around. Make the thing already facking obsolete from day 1. Again, as a PC gamer, why do I care? Because developers develop things multiplatform. Game technology is limited to the lowest common denominator. With the Xbox 360, that was actually the PC at the time of release before the PC eventually overtook it (again, midrange on the PC bar is below the console bar on the graph above). Then, as PC technology pulled further and futher ahead... nothing really that amazing happened. Most graphical improvements were the result of clever tweaks, shortcuts, and technomagic to make the same stuff look prettier and run on the same hardware as before. DICE was the first major developer in YEARS to build an engine focused on the PC's superior power, and look what that got us - the PC version is definitely prettier...but they're really pretty much the same damned thing. Particle effects are denser, shadows more detailed, and foliage and random little doodads on buildings get rendered beyond fifteen feet in front of your face on the PC. That's about it. And I can do this now. The computer I have right now that I got a year and a half ago is better than the Xbox that's planned for release in two years.

I realize that graphics aren't what make the game and gameplay is what makes the game. Why do you think I play so much TF2? Frostbite 2.0 beats the hell out of Valve's Source. But progress is progress, and it's a little bit... infuriating to be leashed to something slower. Without the ball and chains, the prisoner could run! We've all seen those videos of CryEngine 3 and Unreal Engine 4. Holy shizz, they look pretty, but PCs can already run that. They've just never made any games with them because consoles can't run that. But come 2013, there's going to be a brief burst in technological prettiness and a dip in decent games as developers make exploring the "new power" their focus. Except it's not new. It's not new at all. It's two years and two generations old and we could've already been there and moved on for everyone, console and PC users alike, if Microsoft weren't so stingy. And you know that Sony is going to have something comparable to make things competitive.

What if it wasn't my exclusive right as a PC user to have access to 64-man conquest in Battlefield 3 but rather everyone got to enjoy it? Conquest Large on some of the B2K maps have like seven flags or something like that, dude. I know none of you console users like not being able to experience that; whether it's fun or not, you'd like to try it, because someone else has it and you don't. Well, the way the next generation of consoles looks to be shaping up, the time between a race of improvement to obsolescence and desiring something new is going to be far, far shorter than it was this time around.

******* A, it's 4 AM. Good night, everyone.

Thanks MAf, very infortmative, I started reading this at 3 p.m, now it's 3a.m, good night





***OF ******* COURSE I'M KIDDING***

[Mister Maf]

I started writing it at like 2:30 lololol

[Jedi Wombat]

Ok Maf, heres my question. Currently the 360 has a combined memory of 512 mb, even the barest bones of PCs come with 2gb with 4gb being more likely on a decent machine, would a memory upgrade on the new xbox to say 4 gb allow it to cache enough game information that the 6000 series based card would be enough for real time effects like lighting, AA and physics? I'm not sure how the gfx card/processor/memory relationship works so this might be completely up my ass but you said ask questions lol. Also the processor, it would require a fairly expensive processor not to bottleneck a higher performance gfx card yes? At retail (and amd lovers dont hate please) the i5-2600 is just over 200 bucks, and say a GTX 560ti for another 249, just those 2 components are 450, add MB, memory and a decent PSU and youre well over the 499 spot where people start to go "hell no". That being said, I think the processor I chose is one of the best available (in a PC I would get the "k" model go go OC!) while the GFX card is decent. This is now, in 2 years both of them will be terribly obsolete and theres no way to stop it.

While I agree with you that consoles being behind limits the development on PC, I dont see a way to ever keep up. Consoles have a life span of what, 5-7 years or so? while pc processors and gfx cards are updated and released on an almost quarterly basis is seems. Since PC components are plug and play provided you have a compatible motherboard its easy to keep current on the trends as long as you have a sufficient wallet. This ability to swap parts will always keep the pc ahead performance wise. Furthermore, from a business standpoint the PC markest is nowhere near as lucrative gaming wise as consoles despite the greater abilities, and since they cant make money on the software (1 person buys it, puts it on pirates bay or whatever and 10000 own the game now off 1 59.99 purchase) I guess that the cycle of newest latest greatest is how they get their scratch.

Hopefully Microsort wil go the 2 SKU route and have the less expensive home entertainment system with softer performance as well as a "hard core" gaming rig with better specs. While I dont have an issue paying say 499 for the big nasty, I wouldnt spend 999 so it could have the new GTX 1590 in it when it comes out in 2 years. That Nvidia sponsored graph you have is also a bit misleading. Im sure you remember the quality of a pci card back in 05, basically you could get the same results as the 6000 series from a monkey with an etch-a-sketch. It wasnt until the 8800 gtx with its 512mb of dedicated video memory that things got serious. I could be wrong, my memory is shaky cause I'm old and used to smoke a lot of herbal substances but thats what I recall. It also doesnt show the cost of that GTX 580. Even now, that booger is 500 bones on newegg, for that I can buy a used xbox and a 1080p tv! Hell, I paid 180 for my 8800 gtx oc back in 08, a little more would get me a 4gb new xbox today.

Please dont get me wrong, I agree with you, I would love to see the new xbox come with the kind of power that would turn my living room into a holodeck, but at the same time, I cant take out a 2nd mortgage to buy one. I understand and agree with everything you're saying, I just get my jollies from playing devils advocate. Thank you for an informative and clearly written post that makes people think without being a troll or flame job.

[Mister Maf]

The advantage that consoles have here is the standardization, which makes games much easier for developers to optimize for performance. If you put together a computer with relatively the same specs as the consoles, it would be a bit of a joke. The bottleneck would definitely be (as it definitely is) the RAM, but even if you added a little more to compensate for running the OS and other processes alongside your game, it's probably not going to run Gears of War 2 like the actual Xbox or PS3 will. Also, because of the standardization, the system does not need a "decent" PSU. Because the system is predesigned and tested and how much power the system will use at any given time is known, you don't need a powerful power supply. You want to know the wattage on that big gray block plugged in between your Xbox and the wall? 135 watts. An average computer will have somewhere from 250-400 watts, and a computer with power hog components or multi-GPU setups in mind will have upwards of that for safety reasons (it's best to have a wide margin when you're using that kind of power because faulty or overloaded PSUs can cause serious damage) as well as flexibility for upgrades. Consoles don't have to worry about that, so the price on a power supply is hardly part of the equation.

Adding more RAM would definitely help graphical performance in at least one way and that's that there would be more space for storage of LOD models, or progressively lower-polygon-count versions of the same models that are swapped out as distance increases to ease the burden on graphical processors. Currently one of the biggest problems in TF2 right now is the number of items. Even with the new dynamic model loading system that Valve added, the game will approach a gigabyte of RAM usage all by itself in a regular (not increased_maxplayers) match, and most of the items in the game, having been community submitted, don't even have LOD models, which puts the hurt on your framerates. So which is the lesser of two evils? If they added more LOD models, computers with weak GPUs but surplus RAM would benefit, whereas computers with competent GPUs but could use some more RAM would suffer. On a hypothetical standardized console with sufficient memory, this dilemma doesn't exist. Still, this is another one of those optimization things that is great to have but would be even better to have alongside some real progress. The concept of lowering detail at distance is far from new, it just gets costlier the more things you have to do it for.

The other advantage consoles have as far as hardware goes is that it's all designed specifically for that platform and never goes through a middleman before being assembled into a system (sort of...I mean Microsoft partners with electronics factories to actually put the things together for them but meh). This helps with price. The name brand on the system is the middleman, and unlike hardware manufacturers like Gigabyte or Corsair or system builders like HP or Dell, they make their money from owning the entire service. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo own the hardware, the firmware, the licensing, the online service, the online store, and they get a cut of all the profits from everyone who does business with them. In this way, they can sell their hardware systems for less because they have other sources of income, since their target market is the gamer who likes straightforwardness and is on a budget (which between PC and console gaming is more economically feasible is debatable [and a whole different debate at that] but making the PC option a good value definitely takes more time and knowledge). Corsair and Dell have to make all their profits from selling their product and nothing else (OK, a lot of computer retailers make extra income by making deals with software companies, hence all the preloaded bloatware, but that's entirely a different and smaller thing). At any rate, the Big Three (Nin/So/Mic) make deals with manufacturers to design and supply special components for their consoles which are then purchased in bulk for use in consoles. It will be cheaper for Microsoft to buy their Xbox 6670 than it will be for you to go buy a retail HD 6670, and they'll sell it for even cheaper, making marginal or sometimes even negative profits from the hardware, so that you own the platform to use and pay money on the rest of their service, where the real money is made.

Now, to clarify: I'm not saying that static consoles should be able to keep up with evolving computers as they evolve. That'd be silly. Users would have to send in their system periodically to get parts swapped out. If that were an option I think that'd be rad but that would also destroy the standardization and wouldn't have much purpose because developers would still develop for the base un-upgraded system (not to mention you just know such a service would be very overpriced). I'm just saying that it's asinine, stingy, and counterproductive to use such not only old but middle-powered equipment in your supposedly new product when the entire gaming tech industry's forward momentum rests on that decision. Microsoft is the only one of the Big Three that charges you to even use their online service. They also have the strictest publishing rules, especially with regards to postrelease DLC. More than anyone else Microsoft has ways to make money off of their entire console service, and here they've made an underpowered system anyway because I guess it was too expensive for them to push the boundaries that they pushed with the 360 (opinion, speculation, etc., but compared to how the 360 stacked up against the computers of its day, the 720 is most definitely underpowered).

I suppose with all my complaining, I should tell you how underpowered it really is (especially since you went and asked in your post). What better way for this crowd than a benchmark for Battlefield Bad Company 2? Everyone here is familiar with that game. It runs on Frostbite 1.5 and is pretty fine-looking graphically. What's even better is that the game was released less than a month after the HD 6670 went retail, so it should be a great comparison. The Overclockersclub 6670 review is perfect for this thread because of the particular settings they used on the BC2 benchmark:
-High detail preset
-4x antialiasing (edge pixelation smoothing; 4x is a popular setting for a balance between performance and quality)
-16x anisotropic filtering (counteracts texture quality distortion that occurs at angles and distance)
-HBAO OFF (Frostbite's advanced lighting)
At ~1080p (actually less, but it's the first graph on that page to see for yourself), the HD 6670 ran the game just shy of 40 FPS on average on the above settings. So the short answer to your question, if the RAM and CPU were sufficiently beefed up could the HD 6670 handle next-gen games with real-time processing effects? No. PC hardware benchmarks are run on computers set up such that everything but the part being tested is way beyond what is needed so the part being tested is the only thing that makes the difference. Modern console games, by the wide general, do not use antialiasing and don't actually run in 1080p but actually 720p. Depending on the game and the engine it might or might not have whatever special lighting effects such as HDR, HBAO, and/or color correction, as well as other effects such as depth of field (example, I'm pretty sure Borderlands on the console actually does have a lot of these things because the rest of the game isn't very graphically demanding - or at least it should because my old Nvidia 7600 GS from 2006 can run the game pretty well with some such effects). What will end up happening once again is these things will once again be foregone in lieu of new DX11 technologies and pretty particle effects. It's kind of unavoidable; it'd probably happen anyway regardless of how powerful the GPU was. As for the amazingly pretty graphic-processed physics as seen in such games as the PC versions of Mirror's Edge and Mafia II - forget about it. CPU-based Havok and others like it will continue to be the main physics system for a very simple reason - PhysX is proprietary of Nvidia and you need an Nvidia GPU to use it. Maybe it'll be on the PS4; who knows. Would be neat. Realistically flapping trench coat tails always make me go "OMG SO COOL!" Digression. The main point is that with a well-known game released within a month of the 6670 retail itself (it actually came out in Feb. as an OEM part; that is, only available to prebuilt computer retailers), it ran the game at about 40 FPS. It would have run faster on 720p and no antialiasing, perhaps achieving the 60 FPS that PC gamers target as the optimum-minimum, but it was a very current-gen game and Frostbite 1.5 is nowhere near as intensive as CryEngine 3 and Unreal Engine 4 (and as you all know, Unreal Engine is one of the flagship game engines that is licensed out by Epic Games to all sorts of developers for all kinds of games).

What did I miss? Oh, that pirating comment was unnecessary. :B Publishers lose just as much revenue from GameStop. Do I have any sources? No, but I think the fact that publishers complain about GameStop more than they complain about pirates might be one clue. Services like Steam and GOG are going in the right direction on the PC front by offering a better service than the pirates ever can. This is a wholly different subject, but there are a hell of a lot more PCs and Intel-based Macs out there around the world to game on than consoles. At this point we're leaving my realm of knowledge and it's irrelevant to the topic so I don't want to comment much on it.

Really the point I'm trying to make is how fail it is that game technology is going to be based around 2011 technology starting in 2013 for the following shy-of-a-decade when Microsoft could do so much better. It's especially bad if they charge you full-price for the thing when it's released as if it's cutting-edge when clearly it is not (as the price of new consoles release day has gone up with each successive generation).

I should write a book, honestly. I'll go back and bold the important stuff for tl;dr peoples.
Also I know that a presentation made by a hardware company about their own hardware and the future of the industry in which they are a leader is going to be biased, but it's one of the only sources out there on this. All up and down the big GTX 580 bar are other Nvidia and AMD video cards, some of which still manage to fall below the console bar. Pretending this wasn't the case would be like pretending a government-sponsored history of the founding of itself wasn't mega-idealized.

Edited by Mister Maf, 26 January 2012 - 03:28 PM.

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Hey Maf thanks for a very informative post my only question would have to be how reliable is the source.....
I know its IGN but it is quite common for large corps. to feed disinformation out though well known sources to keep expectations lower so that we get all exited when they do their big "reveal"....

Anyway just my 2 cents