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Ars Technica: Penello's XB1 Numbers, Ars "Sniff Test" Analysis

Flatline

Banned
WE GET IT. PS4 IS FASTER. What in fuck's name is the point of this all ? Albert WORKS for Microsoft, its his job to make the difference seem as marginal as possible. He will never come out and say "chucks guys, you got me". Xbone fanboys will try to downplay the difference tooth and nail. Do we have to do this each and every day ?


So wait, people are supposed to not react to or disprove bullshit because that person is supposed to lie? By that logic we shouldn't complain about politicians either, right?
 

ElTorro

I wanted to dominate the living room. Then I took an ESRAM in the knee.
The funny thing about him talking about the diminishing returns of the CUs is that he mentions that they are ROP/bandwidth limited. In these cases, the PS4 has twice the ROPs, and 3x the bandwidth to main memory -- the performance difference would much more heavily favor the PS4 in these cases.

Most important, he isn't addressing Albert's original argument at all. Albert said that a higher number of CU in itself, not in the context of the entire GPU, leads to a relevant loss of efficiency because that is supposedly an inherent property of multi-core architectures in general. As a general statement that is just not true, and especially not for GPUs.
 

Skeff

Member
Another one of these threads I see.

It would have been nice of Ars to actually respond with something insightful instead of just spouting off the cuff remarks.

Whatever pleases their readers, I guess.

To be honest off the cuff remarks are all that deserves to be said to that post of Alberts, it was wildly inaccurate and does not need or deserve a full tech write up.
 

netBuff

Member
Glad to have you on board, Penello, you're doing great work silencing the doubters!

*laughs*

Personally, I think it's cool to have execs show their fanboy sides.

Penello is a marketing person, not a "fanboy". He is trying to sell us a product by any means necessary, that includes misrepresentation of facts and bizarre misdirection (like his "we invented Direct Compute/DirectX" comment).

It's also why he is trying to "buddy up" on the forums.

How reliable is Ars when it comes to understanding this kind of stuff though?

They are understanding things just fine, Penello is in PR damage control mode - trying to marketing spin the low-powered nature of the Xbone compared to the PS4 out of existence.
 
The funny thing about him talking about the diminishing returns of the CUs is that he mentions that they are ROP/bandwidth limited. In these cases, the PS4 has twice the ROPs, and 3x the bandwidth to main memory -- the performance difference would much more heavily favor the PS4 in these cases.

Read his whole quote. He basically stated that there are inefficiencies in core scaling and that he doesn't know if the ESRAM overcomes other bottlenecks. Time will tell but he is on the side the PS4 is more powerful, but not anywhere near the 30-40% thrown around.
 

p3tran

Banned
To quote myself.

Not everyone will understand all that but it was a damned good post.
I just tell my niece this when she wanted an explanation.
You run faster than I do right? But I'm stronger right?
So what goes faster, you running back and forth from the car and taking two shopping bags at the time or me taking all eight at once?
And she usually gets that better than all technical explanations but she is getting there, can't expect a 13 year old to understand everything, heck even I have to Google up bits of info nearly every damn day since I forgot something....it sucks getting old folks.
so, ps4 is faster, but xbone is ..stronger? :)



and op, who da fuck is dat 'ars' dude? never heard of him. :)



seriously now, i cant wait for next gen multiplats
although looks like I'll be playing them on pc haha
 

le.phat

Member
So you're okay with him posting bullshit PR claims on GAF and don't want him to be held accountable for them?

I'm all about shutting down the PR spin, but how exactly is the over analyzing of every single sentence, or this poor excuse of an analysis helping in holding him accountable ?

I just feel that we should let the guy do his job. As long as he doesn't come and pull this shit here on gaf anymore. And if he does, savour his quotes for when the inevitable head-to-heads roll in. But right now, all these samey threads amount to nothing, except giving him a bigger podium.

I mean, is there anyone on this forum that truly believe ps4 won't be blowing the xbone out of the water in the upcoming gen ?*

*except for theKayle.
 
Except GPU benchmarks usually don't support this view. Even if you compare GPU's in the same line, performance never scales perfectly. For example, look at Anandbench for a comparison of the 7870 vs 7970. The Tflop difference is +48% in favor of the 7970, yet in benchmarks it performs on average ~30% better.
Yes - this is due to not all things being increased across the board by your 48% figure.

I'm glad Ars took the time to make that article.

I get that Albert wants to defend his console, but to lie when doing so is not something that should be accepted.

He admitted he doesn't know the internal workings of the PS4, and nor do we all, but based on that there is just no way he can then sit there and claim as a fact that the "performance delta" is minimal. If he doesn't know how the PS4 performs it is impossible to compare to how he knows the Xbox One performs.

Only if the Xbox One version is nearly on par or even better.
To be honest, I think we'll get a fair few games being on par. I'd imagine studios right now are more concerned getting their game up to an acceptable level on both platforms rather than working to push the boundaries on each.
 

netBuff

Member
Read his whole quote. He basically stated that there are inefficiencies in core scaling and that he doesn't know if the ESRAM overcomes other bottlenecks. Time will tell but he is on the side the PS4 is more powerful, but not anywhere near the 30-40% thrown around.

It seem the PS4 is more in the range of 50% more powerful than the Xbone, so 30-40% are probably inaccurate.

To be honest, I think we'll get a fair few games being on par. I'd imagine studios right now are more concerned getting their game up to an acceptable level on both platforms rather than working to push the boundaries on each.

Publishers/developers also like creating artificial parity whenever possible.
 

Garryk

Member
Albert must be sure because he is going all in with his boss.

A7EENMg.jpg
 

Hoo-doo

Banned
I'm all about shutting down the PR spin, but how exactly is the over analyzing of every single sentence, or this poor excuse of an analysis helping in holding him accountable ?

I just feel that we should let the guy do his job. As long as he doesn't come and pull this shit here on gaf anymore. And if he does, savour his quotes for when the inevitable head-to-heads roll in. But right now, all these samey threads amount to nothing, except giving him a bigger podium.

I mean, is there anyone on this forum that truly believe ps4 won't be blowing the xbone out of the water in the upcoming gen ?*

*except for theKayle.

Have you seen Penello's post? It was a point-for-point breakdown of highly technical specs of the both consoles, attempting to spin them in their favor. Ofcourse people are going to analyze his statements. They left nothing to the imagination and were stated as fact.
 

Archaix

Drunky McMurder
I am shocked...shocked to learn that a Microsoft PR mouthpiece at GAF is full of shit. Can we get Major Nelson to comment?
 
Incredible rebutal!


Ars: "What the hell does that even mean?"


Ars: "Maybe true."


Ars: "Who cares about the API? It really doesn't make much difference."


Ars: "I don't know if that's even true."


Exactly, the only thing they rebutted was the 18 CU vs 12 CU =/= 50% more power, and I still consider this a half rebuttal, why? because what Albert is saying is that with equal GPU speed (Both running at 800Mhz) a GPU with 18CU vs 12CU will run 50% faster, but Albert is implying that XBO GPU is running at 853Mhz which is basically 6% faster for every CU so they're not equal.

The only true and clear rebuttal is adding all the bandwidth together but we already knew that :p
 

Lord Error

Insane For Sony
Would be ironic if Albert, (who I love), went to the distinguished engineer, and the engineer said the same thing as Ars Technica.
Well what else he would say, seriously? The only things I see that are under some contention there is the 30vs10GB/s which he may be correct about, but I think it's more like 30vs20, or it's just plain wrong altogether. That and the CPU speed which Sony never announced, so people are using the best guess, (and discounting the possibility that they could ever bump it up through firmware).

Exactly, the only thing they rebutted was the 18 CU vs 12 CU =/= 50% more power, and I still consider this a half rebuttal, why? because what Albert is saying is that with equal GPU speed (Both running at 800Mhz) a GPU with 18CU vs 12CU will run 50% faster, but Albert is implying that XBO GPU is running at 853Mhz which is basically 6% faster for every CU so they're not equal.
Yeah, they're not equal - they are 6% faster, but there's still less 50% more of them on PS4, so since they scale linearly, it's not exactly some mystery math. Also, I never understood Albert's point with API either. Presumably they both have excelent APIs, I wouldn't doubt MS on that, but SCE has more than proven their worth there as well with PSSL and LIBGCM, and tons of good graphics research and implementation they've done in Ice group.
 

Freki

Member
Albert must be sure because he is going all in with his boss.

You can be sure that every activity of Albert here on GAF is sanctioned by his bosses and checked by PR.
Him and MN being on message is no coincidence - never forget that this is about a multibillion dollar company launching a new product...
 

p3tran

Banned
It seem the PS4 is more in the range of 50% more powerful than the Xbone, so 30-40% are probably inaccurate.

Publishers/developers also like creating artificial parity whenever possible.

hahaha sorry, but i have to laugh at this.
IF there is 50% MORE POWER there, it is ABSURD to even think about PARITY
:D
 

netBuff

Member
Yeah, I noticed this earlier today. Can't wait for the AMA thread (if it actually happens). If it's good or bad news for MS, it doesn't matter because it's sure to be VERY entertaining.

Corporate AMAs are marketing avenues like any other, not places where you'll get truthful answers out of corporate mouthpieces.
 

astraycat

Member
Read his whole quote. He basically stated that there are inefficiencies in core scaling and that he doesn't know if the ESRAM overcomes other bottlenecks. Time will tell but he is on the side the PS4 is more powerful, but not anywhere near the 30-40% thrown around.

Read my post again. I don't even mention inefficiencies in core scaling -- I'm just talking about the straight up difference in where he said cores were blocked.

Suppose only 12 cores were used for both the PS4 and the XB1, but both were blocked by either ROPs or by bandwidth to main memory (as his vertex-heavy case seems to imply). In the former case, the PS4 has 2x the ROPs, so should perform roughly 100% better. In the latter, the PS4 has 3x the bandwidth to main memory, so should perform roughly 200% better.

My comment was specifically to point out that the cases that he pointed out were actually some of the worst-case scenarios for XB1 vs. PS4. ESRAM's latency can only possibly help in the ROPs case, but it's not going to nullify a 2x advantage in ROPs. There's also no evidence that there's going to be a significant advantage of latency to ESRAM. Logic says there should be some, but evidence based on L1/L2 latencies say it's not going to be very big.
 

Dragon

Banned
Exactly, the only thing they rebutted was the 18 CU vs 12 CU =/= 50% more power, and I still consider this a half rebuttal, why? because what Albert is saying is that with equal GPU speed (Both running at 800Mhz) a GPU with 18CU vs 12CU will run 50% faster, but Albert is implying that XBO GPU is running at 853Mhz which is basically 6% faster for every CU so they're not equal.

The only true and clear rebuttal is adding all the bandwidth together but we already knew that :p

So they rebutted two of the points with the other two points being so nonsensical that they made no sense anyway.

What am I missing?
 

netBuff

Member
I didn't say he was going against his boss, but rather he is willing to fall on his sword.

He's not falling on any sword: What matters to MS is good PR now, pre-release. Whether his assertions are strictly factual or not doesn't matter. Major Nelson didn't get fired for his ridiculous Xbox 360 performance charts either. These things are part of modern marketing.

hahaha sorry, but i have to laugh at this.
IF there is 50% MORE POWER there, it is ABSURD to even think about PARITY
:D

Well, not everything about the PS4 is 50% faster: The CPU is bound to be a bottle-neck for accelerating some game logic above Xbone standard.
 
So wait, people are supposed to not react to or disprove bullshit because that person is supposed to lie? By that logic we shouldn't complain about politicians either, right?


I agree with this, but I also understand that this specs war thing is beyond beating a dead horse at this point. We're never going to see MS come out and openly say their specs are weaker in comparison to Sony's, nor will they openly admit that they misled the public (neogaf) or lied.
 
Corporate AMA's are marketing avenues like any other, not places where you'll get truthful answers out of corporate mouthpieces.

We could still get quality posts calling out the non-truths, or we could also see some crow-munching. Either way... entertaining.
 

artist

Banned
This is what bish said in the other thread;

bishoptl said:
Are you kidding? I mean really - are you kidding?

This is part and parcel of the territory here. You have to answer for your statements, especially if you're here in an official capacity. People get banned for being out of line, but poking holes in the arguments of other posters is well within the rules.

I've had my work here both praised and eviscerated, called out by numerous forum folks both publicly and via PM when I got stuff wrong, and I'm a goddamn admin. Guess what - I wouldn't have it any other way. That is what makes NeoGAF what it is.

There are many, many people who are more than capable of assessing, vetting and debunking technical claims and they have every right to do so. That's the price of doing business here. If we had official Nintendo or Sony reps on board, they would be subject to the same process.

If you're scared, buy a dog.
 
To those who are asking why we people are posting yet again about this topic:

You can't go on a well informed forum representing a huge corporation and make "idiotic" claims in an official capacity. You will be called out on it, as one should.
 
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