GPUs & CPUs & Enthusiast hardware: Questions, Discussion and fanboy slap-fights - Nvidia & AMD & Intel - Separe but Equal. Intel rides in the back of the bus.

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

Wasn’t it just a few weeks ago where that brown woman announced their partnership with AMD regarding their future hardware?

Yes, but there have been some schizo interpretations of what was said.

https://videocardz.com/newz/microsoft-confirms-multi-year-strategic-partnership-with-amd-for-next-gen-xbox-hardware

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2025/06/19/xbox-amd-next-generation-xbox/

Xbox unveiled that it has entered into a strategic, multi-year partnership with AMD to co-engineer silicon across a portfolio of devices, including future first-party consoles and cloud.

This work is part of Xbox’s commitment to deliver an enduring gaming platform that enables you to play across devices in entirely new ways, with an Xbox experience designed for players – not locked to a single store or tied to one device.

Sarah Bond, President of Xbox, shares how Xbox and AMD are working together to advance the state of the art in gaming silicon across the Xbox ecosystem, including our next-generation Xbox console – and how Windows and Xbox are partnering to ensure Windows is the number one platform for gaming.

Lisa Su, Chair and Chief Executive Officer of AMD, shares how Xbox and AMD are building on two decades of partnership, innovation, and trust. AMD will extend its console work to design full roadmap of gaming-optimized chips combining the power of Ryzen and Radeon for consoles, handhelds, PCs, and cloud.

• What is a "first-party console"? Not the ROG Xbox Ally... right?
• Are consoles in the "cloud" necessary to deliver on backwards compatibility?
• Xbox experience not locked to a single store (the whole purpose of our console business so far), or tied to one device (like an actual frist-party Xbox console). This could mean Steam is coming to Xbox consoles in some capacity.
• "our next-generation Xbox console" is pretty explicit, no way around that. Unless they just cancel it.
• "Windows and Xbox are partnering to ensure Windows is the number one platform for gaming." So Windows #1... will the first-party console be a PC?
• "consoles, handhelds, PCs, and cloud"... what is a console in this new vision, a streamlined x86 desktop PC?

Spoiler

https://preservetube.com/watch?v=kprpRvsOua0

Moving forward, AMD will go beyond building custom chips for Xbox consoles, to designing a full roadmap of gaming-optimized chips combining the power of Ryzen and Radeon for consoles, handhelds, PCs, and the cloud. And we're doing it all with backwards compatibility, so gamers can access their favorite titles across platforms, delivering on a promise to both gamers and developers. Together, we are building a vibrant open ecosystem that delivers the next generation of graphics and immersive gameplay, powered by AI that includes new foundational models to accelerate the state of the art in rendering. From console to cloud to handheld, AMD and Microsoft are building the future of immersive gaming. We are so excited to be working with Microsoft to bring all of this tech to gamers everywhere.

• Lisa brings up the ROG Xbox Ally handheld before the quote.
• "Go beyond building custom chips for Xbox consoles"? Does that mean you are doing it again, or doing something else in its place? This could be the "co-engineered silicon" mentioned.
• Why mention backwards compatibility? Does Microsoft plan to have old Xbox titles emulated on PCs, or streamed from the cloud? I posted a debunked story about a partnership with the Xenia Canary emulator team.
• "Open ecosystem" and "titles across platforms" imply that Xbox is moving away from its current model.

Something is obviously going on, and it could look very different from the current failing Xbox strategy.

Microsoft has been said to snake on AMD frequently by cancelling hardware. This is apparently where the SoC for the Steam Deck came from.

 

[Fcret]

"consoles, handhelds, PCs, and cloud"... what is a console in this new vision, a streamlined x86 desktop PC?

I'm assuming this given all the press they've been giving about their new Xbox game bar shit on PC which turns off a bunch of a system processes to free up resources for vidya gaemz.

 

[4090 Chad]

I'm assuming this given all the press they've been giving about their new Xbox game bar shit on PC which turns off a bunch of a system processes to free up resources for vidya gaemz.

Since apparently Microshit is obsessed with trying to become relevant with AI shit, I imagine Xbox is being looked at as an avenue to shove AI shit into it and use Xbox as a marketing tool for their AI bullshit, so making their next gen console essentially a PC makes sense.

I’m just curious what exact AI features they would shove into this new console that would make gamers even give a shit.

 

[StacticShock]

I’m just curious what exact AI features they would shove into this new console that would make gamers even give a shit.

easy bet it's upscaling and framegen.
hard bet is a localized processing that makes voice lines dynamic ala HL1's hecu lines.

 

[Fcret]

I’m just curious what exact AI features they would shove into this new console that would make gamers even give a shit.

They have some new AI shit that can give you game help in realtime and even play the game for you.

Not content with merely discouraging the purchasing of games, Xbox would also prefer its customers to not even play them.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

I’m just curious what exact AI features they would shove into this new console that would make gamers even give a shit.

AI text-to-speech would be great since you could conceivably compress gigabytes of voice data down to megabytes of text, and have unlimited amounts of voiced dialogue. Actors are already signing up to have their voice patterns licensed. Combine it with LLMs and you can have speech created on the fly, and interactivity (typing may be annoying, but you could do voice recognition with a microphone too). It may be possible to generate "quests" or any other structured data. Yes, the results may be horrifying.

Since LLMs need their own memory and potentially a lot of it, I'm wondering if we'll see more memory than expected (16 GB in XSX/PS5, 24-32 GB expected next-gen). These consoles typically have a small amount of DDR3/DDR4/etc. memory alongside the GDDR, so maybe that system memory could be vastly expanded and shared with an NPU. For example, 24 GB GDDR7 with 16-32 GB DDR5. The DDR5 is much cheaper per gigabyte, but doesn't have the properties you want for graphics.

 

[4090 Chad]

easy bet it's upscaling and framegen.

Yea that’s a given, but that would be attributed to AMD’s hardware and software suite, not something exclusive to Microsoft.

hard bet is a localized processing that makes voice lines dynamic ala HL1's hecu lines.

This is something that I could see, but is the tech here yet for that? If custom voice lines are being generated, that would require either a local machine with insane amounts of memory to generate at a decent time frame, or connected to a giant microshit dataceneter which would require immense amounts of power and hardware simply for gaymers to get a custom gaming experience. Neither option seems likely to happen.

Maybe that will be the future of gamepass, Gamepass will become like $60 per month, but include access to generative AI within games that support it.

 

[The Ugly One]

It's basically been all but confirmed that the Xbox console division is closing up shop. They won't say it out loud, but the current gen of Xbox consoles are becoming extremely difficult to find as Microsoft slashes production and pulls stock from retailers to recoup money. Anecdotally, I haven't seen one available for sale at my local Walmart for six months.

I dunno what their plan is for the Xbox brand when they leave the traditional console space, but they are leaving it.

They're not quitting yet.

I genuinely wonder how much of their problem is due to absolutely fucking up the branding beyond all recognition. Nerds plugged into the tech scene do not always grasp how you have literal milliseconds to communicate something with a brand name, and if you fail in those milliseconds, you just lost sales. "Series" is absolutely the worst brand name you could come up with. It's such a bad brand that it's not even obvious that's a brand. It's the kind of word that people will mistakenly add in on their own.

It's not trivial. Nintendo discovered after the fact that many people thought the "Wii U" was just a tablet attachment for the Wii. How many people didn't realize the "Xbox One S" and "Xbox Series S" were different products? You can find a ton of listings on various digital storefronts for an "Xbox One Series S," a product that doesn't exist (usually what is shown is an Xbox One S).

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

This is something that I could see, but is the tech here yet for that? If custom voice lines are being generated, that would require either a local machine with insane amounts of memory to generate at a decent time frame

I'm not sure about voice synthesis specifically, but the amount of optimization that is going on in AI is insane. Example: FramePack from a couple months ago, generating video on 6 GB laptop GPUs.

Real time isn't precisely needed because you can have a "thinking" pause for NPC LLM conversations with a player. Scripted text lines can be synthesized and loaded into memory before they are needed.

 

[Fcret]

I genuinely wonder how much of their problem is due to absolutely fucking up the branding beyond all recognition

Their problems stem from the Xbox One era. They sold half as many of those as the PS4 and people built massive game collections in the PS4 era that they're unwilling to move on from. The gap has only gotten worse in the PS5 era as Xbox people jumped ship to Playstation or PC since previously exclusive franchises started appearing on those platforms.

Short of massively undercutting the PS5 on price, outcompeting Sony on availability during the pandemic, and/or having some really compelling first-party exclusives, I don't think Xbox could have really done anything to win this gen. The name is the least of their problems (although it definitely doesn't help).

There's also things they've done that have slighted specific demographics with outsized attachment/spending:
1) Lack of physical releases. Digital is becoming dominant but consumers who primarily favor physical games often purchase a lot more games than your usual consumer.
2) Continued lack of engagement from Japanese studios. Whatever your opinion on weebshit, weebs actually put their money where their mouth is and buy fucking videogames.
3) Lack of some of the prominent live service games like Genshin Impact.
4) No pro refresh to cater to the enthusiast crowd

Xbox cut everything to purely focus on the least-common-denominator crowd. However, Sony also focuses on that while doing enough to keep the whales in the niches placated.

 

[Bogan]

It's impressive to watch how hard XBox has failed. Sony's lack of first party games for the PS5 is the most notable thing about it. And Microsoft has spent the last few years buying up every developer it can find, but decided to not develop any exclusives. They could have gone into the next-gen of consoles with dozens of launch titles and left Sony fumbling to find anything to entice people with.

 

[Mister Fister]

Who's ready for Miku GPU?

 

[Bogan]

Who's ready for Miku GPU?

Animefags are about to pay US$5000 for an Astral 5090 with anime on it. I'm surprised Asus doesn't do this more often really.

 

[StacticShock]

I'm surprised Asus doesn't do this more often really.

asus knows that the amount of weebs that aren't poorfags are but a minority.

 

[Bogan]

asus knows that the amount of weebs that aren't poorfags are but a minority.

If they really want some serious margins they'd have to put furry shit on it. They could charge $10k instead.

 

[Mister Fister]

If they really want some serious margins they'd have to put furry shit on it. They could charge $10k instead.

I miss the days when tech nerds only had yellow fever.

 

[Fcret]

View attachment 7636975
Who's ready for Miku GPU?

Miko is so passe. If they wanted to get the true and honest hardcore Japanophiles with voice synth characters, they'd use Zundamon (bonus points - Zundamon is also green like GeForce):

 

[Darkholme's Dungeon]

Animefags are about to pay US$5000 for an Astral 5090 with anime on it. I'm surprised Asus doesn't do this more often really.

Excuse me AMD used to do this all the time. At least ATI's ruby wasn't a high schooler.
First one was いきな (Ikina) (X/Twitter) which was supported but unoffical for AMD. You could get stickers from buying AMD CPUs.

They had 愛真田心 (Kokoro, Amanda) for AMD before Ryzen era Twitter/X. Official Website.

Set as a 16-year-old girl in the second year of AMD Academy, her birthday is February 4th. It appears to be a replacement for the old AMD unofficial cheerleader character Ikina.

Similar to Neon (音々), with the setting of 'beginners about computers', her older brother, whom she played with since childhood, likes computers, so she participated in the campaign because she wanted to learn about computers and communicate with her brother.

Ryzen has Ryfa and Zenka

Miko is so passe. If they wanted to get the true and honest hardcore Japanophiles with voice synth characters, they'd use Zundamon (bonus points - Zundamon is also green like GeForce):
View attachment 7641257

ASUS had a loli GPU card in the 2010s. Pretty sure it's a reference to Keion.


Chinese anime cards are pretty fucking common:

Spoiler: NSFW panty shot

 

[The Ugly One]

I’m just curious what exact AI features they would shove into this new console that would make gamers even give a shit.

Auto-disabling of your Xbox Game Pass when you say "nigger" on Kiwi Farms Dot Ess Tee.

It's impressive to watch how hard XBox has failed. Sony's lack of first party games for the PS5 is the most notable thing about it. And Microsoft has spent the last few years buying up every developer it can find, but decided to not develop any exclusives. They could have gone into the next-gen of consoles with dozens of launch titles and left Sony fumbling to find anything to entice people with.

The best part is them buying Activision right as all the Activision & Blizzard IPs have gone to total shit. Call of Duty will stay on PlayStation until 2033 (it's also gone to shit).

 

[Bogan]

Excuse me AMD used to do this all the time.

Excuse me my point was it's $3000 more for some anime theme than a regular 5090.