Spec analysis: Durango vs. Orbis

The next console war has yet to begin but the battle lines have already been drawn and the processing firepower available to Microsoft and Sony is now a known quantity. It's Durango vs. Orbis, and it's a console head-to-head quite unlike anything we've seen before. The raw technological building blocks powering each next-gen console are designed by the same people, and the raw architecture is almost identical in nature as a consequence. The differences between the two consoles are less pronounced than in any preceding console generation: fundamentally, Sony and Microsoft faced the exact same challenges and went to the same people to find the solution, resulting in very similar end-products. However, there are differences between Durango and Orbis, and they reflect how the platform holders envisage the evolution of the home console.We won't dwell too much on the known similarities between the two consoles, but we've already mentioned that both the next generation Xbox and its PlayStation competitor feature the same CPU - an eight-core AMD offering running at 1.6GHz and based on its forthcoming low-power, high-performance architecture, Jaguar. From a graphics perspective, AMD is also offering the same tech to both manufacturers: the GCN core, as found in the highly popular Radeon HD 7xxx graphics cards.Here's where we see our first point of divergence: GPU rendering is all about spreading the computational load across many cores and we find that the new Xbox has 12 of these "Compute Units" (CUs), while Orbis has 18 - a 50 per cent advantage. These numbers have been hotly contested in the last couple of weeks but our Orbis sources confirm the Sony side of the equation, while SuperDAE's leak - in combination with proof of his claims supplied to us behind the scenes - confirms the Durango CU count. The information there is around nine months old, hailing from Durango's beta period - in theory, the hardware could be improved, but practically it's almost impossible for this to actually happen. You can't just slap on some extra hardware without setting back your production schedule significantly by many months.

Can you believe the rumours?

Since the turn of the year, the next-gen stories have been coming at you thick and fast. The question is, can you believe anything you read about machines that have yet to make it into production? After all, neither Sony or Microsoft have even announced their new hardware, let alone revealed the technical specifications. How can you trust the information you are reading? Perhaps we should assess the quality of the data we have available and explain why we have confidence in it.
From our perspective we see three different unique sources of information all saying much the same thing. Firstly, and most importantly, there are our own contacts in the games business, some of whom are working on next-gen console titles as we speak. Then there's the online "rumour network", where developers and ex-developers spill their secrets on online forums or share information privately where it eventually leaks onto the same message boards, often introducing inaccuracies or misinterpretations. Such sources need to be treated with caution, often influenced by wish fulfilment.
And finally there's the wild card - SuperDAE, arch-leaker extraordinaire, undeniably in possession of early dev kitsand the crucial documentation that goes with them. From talking with him directly in order to verify his leaks, we know his information - typically posted onvgleaks.com - is entirely accurate, the only question being how old it is, and whether the hardware has improved since he received his data. He also has - somehow - hands-on access to non-final next-gen dev kits and his pictures of an older Durango dev kit having been verified by trusted sources.
In the case of the brush-strokes of the Durango and Orbis specs, not only do we have double-sourced information of our own, but we also have an extra form of backup in the form of these other leaks. Therefore, our belief is that the specs we are discussing are not only accurate, but very, very close - if not identical - to the make-up of the final hardware.

So does the GPU difference translate into as large an advantage as it sounds? VGleaks' Orbis spec, again derived from platform holder documentation, suggests that four of these CUs are reserved for Compute functions, conceivably bringing the PlayStation's raw advantage down from 50 per cent to just over 16. However, while Compute is often used for elements like physics calculations, there's nothing to stop coders hiving off specific graphics features to this hardware - Just Cause 2, for example, used NVIDIA's own Compute solution, CUDA, for enhanced water effects, while a core element of Battlefield 3 - the deferred shading solution that power its beautiful lighting - is handled via DirectX 11 Compute shader code.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/df...rango-vs-orbis