We haven't had official Xbox One sales figures for 7 years:
Official Xbox One sales have largely been a mystery, but now Microsoft is finally admitting the obvious: the PS4 outsold the Xbox One — by a lot.
Microsoft stopped reporting its Xbox One sales figures at the beginning of its 2016 financial year, focusing instead on Xbox Live numbers. The change meant we've never officially known how well Xbox One was holding up compared to the PS4 after the Xbox One's troubled launch. Analyst estimates have consistently put Microsoft in third place behind Sony and Nintendo, and now documents (Word doc) submitted to Brazil's national competition regulator (spotted by Game Luster) finally shed some light on how the Xbox One generation went.
[...] The Xbox One might not have sold well, but Microsoft's work on the Xbox One generation laid some important groundwork for the Xbox Series S / X. Microsoft transitioned into the Xbox Series X with 1440p support, Variable Refresh Rate (VRR), and lots of 120Hz games all at launch thanks to testing these features on previous Xbox One consoles.
Microsoft's admission of weak Xbox One sales come as part of a broader debate between Sony and Microsoft over the Xbox maker's acquisition of Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. Sony and Microsoft are both arguing over Call of Duty, game subscriptions, and much more as Microsoft attempts to clear its acquisition in Brazil. Microsoft has also claimed in documents submitted to Brazil's regulator that Sony pays for "blocking rights" to prevent developers adding their content to Xbox Game Pass.
What is the reason for going to 120 Hz or higher? [hubie]
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday August 18 2022, @01:57AM (3 children)
"I feel ashamed that we couldn't meet the Playstation numbers. We gave Microsoft such a black eye."
"What about the Windows Phone team?"
"... You know, I've never felt better about myself. In fact, I'm going to go over there and make sure those guys are ok."
"If they're not in their cubes, they might be over at the Vista group providing them some consolation."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 18 2022, @03:17AM
If they were from Danger, they sat back, vested their options,
and got the Hell out of Dodge.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Thursday August 18 2022, @05:15PM
I read that last line as:
That might actually help them feel better...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2022, @07:43AM
They deserve whatever shit they're getting for the crap they produced. At our office we used to have a PS3 and people were regularly playing games on it. Very simple - just turn it on, wait a short while, then play the game.
Then one day it was replaced with an Xbox One. And that piece of crap required each player to sign in (if it detected that a different player had taken the controller it would interrupt the game), it required updates, it required all sorts of stupid shit before it would let you just fucking play the game. Maybe players needed a Microsoft Certified Xbox Expert cert in order to play games.
So most people gave up on it. And the side effect was that when every 6 months or so someone forgets how crap it is and tries to play a game, the Xbox would force you to do updates for the entire lunch hour, and before you could play the game it's time to go back to work.
I think that piece of shit has probably spent more hours doing software updates than playing games.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Thursday August 18 2022, @02:05PM (4 children)
People like higher framerates (for gaming at least) and can tell a difference between 60 vs. 120, 144 vs 240, etc.
A case can be made for 1000 Hz or even 10,000 Hz:
https://blurbusters.com/blur-busters-law-amazing-journey-to-future-1000hz-displays-with-blurfree-sample-and-hold/ [blurbusters.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by boltronics on Friday August 19 2022, @08:28PM (2 children)
Indeed. I just got the Samsung Odyssey Neo G8, which has all the bells and whistles. A curved 4K HDR2000 monitor using Quantum Mini LED technology with FreeSync and G-Sync compatibility, that runs at 240Hz. A big upgrade from my old BenQ XL2730 2K@144Hz FreeSync panel.
Unfortunately, there's the issue that DSC is required to drive the panel beyond 120Hz@4K, and it appears that GNU/Linux can't do this over HDMI yet. I think it may work over DisplayPort, but DP1.4a has a lot less bandwidth than HDMI 2.1 so didn't want to go down that path. Where is DisplayPort 2 when you need it?
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Friday August 19 2022, @09:37PM (1 child)
You were a little early to see the widespread adoption of DisplayPort 2.0, which should be happening late 2022 and 2023.
Ryzen 7000 desktop CPUs will include an iGPU capable of supporting up to 4 HDMI 2.1 or DisplayPort 2.0 outputs.
This is the situation for Rembrandt [arstechnica.com]. It was certified after launch for UHBR10.
It looks like you get 4 lanes with DisplayPort 2.0, with 40 Gb/s, 54 Gb/s, or 80 Gb/s (the max) based on the UHBR mode. And you need the full UHBR20 x4 (80 Gb/s) for 4K @ 240 Hz without DSC as seen in this table [wikipedia.org].
I think Raptor Lake, RDNA 3, and Nvidia Lovelace will support DP 2.0.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by boltronics on Saturday August 20 2022, @07:53AM
Thanks. I knew it was coming, but it also feels like that's been the case for a long time now.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2022, @07:30AM
If you can't see the difference then there's definitely no need for higher fps for you.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday August 18 2022, @02:50PM (4 children)
Two reasons spring to mind for 120Hz gaming.
First the obvious but mostly pointless one: it's a little visually smoother than 60Hz. Anything above about 24Hz isn't consciously detectable as individual frames, but our visual system is continuous, and just like you can tell a difference in texture between a uniform grey field and a checkerboard pattern with squares considerably smaller than you can actually see individually, so too can you detect a temporal "texture" difference between 60 and 120Hz.
But frankly, that's probably not enough for most people to pay for 2x as much rendering speed to keep fed.
The other advantage is much bigger, and happens even if you never actually render faster than 60Hz. It greatly reduces stutter.
Say you're playing on a 60Hz display in a particularly busy scene, and instead of the renderer getting each frame rendered in less than 1/60th of a second it takes a little longer - even 1/59th of a second. That means the frame isn't ready when the screen starts to refresh, and so the previous frame gets displayed twice - and suddenly your frame rate drops to 60/2 = 30Hz and you've introduced an extra frame of lag - maybe just for a few frames, but that sudden halving of frame rate is still enough to be be noticed as a "stutter" in the smoothness of the rendering.
If instead you're playing on a 120Hz display, then with the same rendering power you're still only updating the screen every other frame (120/2=60Hz), but when you hit that same slowdown and add an extra frame for extra rendering time you only degrade to 120/2 = 40 Hz. Instead of slowing down by 50%, you only slow by 33% and the stutter is significantly reduced. And with a 240Hz display it's even better - your framerate only drops from 240/4=60Hz to 240/5 = 48Hz, only a 20% slow down.
Of course variable refresh rate was invented to address the same issue even more gracefully, but it's not nearly as widely supported - instead of needing to get the frame rendered before the next screen refresh, you can delay the refresh until the frame is ready. That way if you can only render at 59fps the screen will automatically slow down to refresh at 59fps, and the smoothness always remains just as good as possible.
Up to a point at least - there's two standards for VRR, and one of them (Freesync, I think) only lets you delay the next update by a small amount, I want to say 20%. In that case the finer granularity of 120Hz still provides for a smoother overall experience.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday August 18 2022, @05:33PM (2 children)
Some people get migraine headaches from flickering light, and for some of them, 60Hz isn't fast enough to prevent it.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday August 19 2022, @01:16AM (1 child)
Isn't that usually more associated with the backlight than the screen though? Which is why they make 240Hz and flicker-free backlights even on some screens with much lower refresh rates.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday August 19 2022, @06:38PM
Could be.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2022, @07:32AM
Whatever it is, I've watched movies in a cinema and for panoramic pans the low refresh is really noticeable and annoying especially when you're used to playing games at much higher refresh.