Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2013]

[ERP]

Well the issue I see is what do they mean by "10%" of the resources reserved to begin with.

Unless they have some additional hardware in there, it's not a real reservation, it's an assumption that the OS will eat upto some % of your frame time. Any system that has to draw overlays (notifications etc etc etc) on a game has some impact whether or not it's stated as a "reservation".
They probably just picked 10% because it's easy to understand and is considered safe.

 

[zupallinere]

From the DF article:

"We've chosen to let title developers make the trade-off of resolution vs. per-pixel quality in whatever way is most appropriate to their game content.

Seriously ?

To quote the Black Adder, MS engineers have a Cunning Plan. How to answer this ??

How was MS gonna stop devs from doing just that.
or
How about giving devs more resources so they don't have to make that choice.

I bet they would like that quote back again.

 

[liolio]

From the DF article:



Seriously ?

To quote the Black Adder, MS engineers have a Cunning Plan. How to answer this ??

How was MS gonna stop devs from doing just that.
or
How about giving devs more resources so they don't have to make that choice.

I bet they would like that quote back again.

I see nothing wrong with that statement, clearly the policies they enforced early on in the 360 life proved counter productive.
You could give devs "more" though it comes at a price, there is a ceiling in how much CPU power they could provide the devs with, the amount of bandwidth they could feed the GPU with (you don't want it to be starved). They pushed the bar pretty high wrt the amount of RAM which got Sony to follow suit a pretty nice change from previous generations where RAM was taking the back seat to paper FLOPS (or whatever was the flashy metric of the time, It was MIPS at some point and then polygon per second).

 

[3dilettante]

As the platform owner, Microsoft has the perogative to deny certification for a game if requirements are not met.
If it had required a higher minimum resolution, it would eliminated a set of possible tradeoffs.

 

[zupallinere]

I see nothing wrong with that statement, clearly the policies they enforced early on in the 360 life proved counter productive.
You could give devs "more" though it comes at a price, their is a floor in how much CPU power they could provide the devs with, the amount of bandwidth they could feed the GPU with (you don't want it to be starved). They pushed the bar pretty high wrt the amount of RAM which got Sony to follow suit a pretty nice change form previous where RAM were taking the back seat to paper FLOPS (or whatever was the flashy metric of the time).

Devs will always balance resolution vs pixel quality, it's not like MS engineers are allowing anything, just having fun with that sentence really. Obviously this is the case but why say it that way since my 2nd part of my OR statement comes to mind very quickly. We don't know what Sony has for CPU resources and we don't know that either system is going to be CPU limited in any case. Both will end up balanced depending on the game but at different levels.

They should have gotten rid of the We Allow It cause it's whiffs of PR.

 

[SlimJim]

I see nothing wrong with that statement, clearly the policies they enforced early on in the 360 life proved counter productive.
You could give devs "more" though it comes at a price, there is a ceiling in how much CPU power they could provide the devs with, the amount of bandwidth they could feed the GPU with (you don't want it to be starved). They pushed the bar pretty high wrt the amount of RAM which got Sony to follow suit a pretty nice change from previous generations where RAM was taking the back seat to paper FLOPS (or whatever was the flashy metric of the time, It was MIPS at some point and then polygon per second).

Both PGR3, as well as PD:Z were both rendering below 1280*720
Not to mention that not every game had 4xMSAA.

MS never enforced any policies.

 

[warb]

Devs will always balance resolution vs pixel quality, it's not like MS engineers are allowing anything, just having fun with that sentence really. Obviously this is the case but why say it that way since my 2nd part of my OR statement comes to mind very quickly. We don't know what Sony has for CPU resources and we don't know that either system is going to be CPU limited in any case. Both will end up balanced depending on the game but at different levels.

They should have gotten rid of the We Allow It cause it's whiffs of PR.

This is PR, they're representing MS, but I don't think it's possible to convincingly spin such a reasonable statement that way.

 

[liolio]

Devs will always balance resolution vs pixel quality, it's not like MS engineers are allowing anything, just having fun with that sentence really. Obviously this is the case but why say it that way since my 2nd part of my OR statement comes to mind very quickly. We don't know what Sony has for CPU resources and we don't know that either system is going to be CPU limited in any case. Both will end up balanced depending on the game but at different levels.

They should have gotten rid of the We Allow It cause it's whiffs of PR.

Though early on in the 360 the devs (most devs as some exclusive or important games were allow to ignore requirements) devs had to run games at 720P, which means that they had to lower the pixel quality.
Now what they say is that they think it is wiser to let the devs decide the best compromise it is a departure from their previous policies.
Now it is unknown what most devs will do, be it on the xb1 or the ps4, I agree. But you post sounds a lot like "that won't ever happen on the ps4 so they should better stfu", that is unknown.
The PS4 has bigger GPU and lot of bandwidth so they could do lesser compromise (or not the same) but that different from they won't ever have to make compromise.
Look at some benchmarks in the PC world, it is pretty easy to spot the impact of CPU on perfs, I would bet both will be CPU limited quite often even the XB1 with its slightly faster CPU.

Shortly to put it bluntly I believe that your post is a bit trollish, MSFT engineers are giving lots information, more to come, they don't claim hardware superiority or dismiss Sony work, they are not throwing flame bait around.
It clearly won't have an impact on most people on the web but I do appreciate that they are doing it even though I may not buy a console this gen even less an expensive one.
What they are saying is pretty clear, the contest is clear too, there is not much to argue about.

 

[zupallinere]

Though early on in the 360 the devs (most devs as some exclusive or important games were allow to ignore requirements) devs had to run games at 720P

I am sorry I didn't see any question about whether or not Devs would be forced to do anything on the XB1 in the article. Was that in the article ?

 

[zupallinere]

The PS4 has bigger GPU and lot of bandwidth so they could do lesser compromise (or not the same) but that different from they won't ever have to make compromise.

Surely the PS4 isn't going to be without compromises but there will be fewer and farther between, barring some new techniques using ESRAM that aren't known about as of yet. There may be an alleged major difference in CPU but again that is not known and that certainly depends on the game.

MMMm I see the mandate thing later in the piece so if they were trying to tie those things together then fine. It wasn't all that clear on my first read through since I would have expected

A.) In the past we made mandatory resolution demands
B.) This time "We've chosen to let title developers make the trade-off ...

Don't know if that was an editorial thing or what

 

[zupallinere]

This is PR, they're representing MS, but I don't think it's possible to convincingly spin such a reasonable statement that way.

It's PR and they are doing a fine job as they should although as I said they could have worded that phrase better. There was no hint AFAIK that MS was going to mandate* anything so when they say

"We've chosen to let title developers make the trade-off

it comes off as a weird statement. Why wouldn't devs make the trade-off since MS isn't forcing anyone to choose a resolution or whathaveyou. If something is said that isn't logical or makes sense most of the times it's a PR thing.

* There was a discussion of a 360 mandate later in the piece but I wasn't making that connection as it wasn't all that specific.

 

[taisui]

It's PR and they are doing a fine job as they should although as I said they could have worded that phrase better. There was no hint AFAIK that MS was going to mandate anything so when they say

it comes off as a weird statement. Why wouldn't devs make the trade-off since MS isn't forcing anyone to choose a resolution or whathaveyou. If something is said that isn't logical or makes sense most of the times it's a PR thing.

Thought the context was that the 360 initially had requirement for being 720p or above?

 

[expletive]

How closely related are ROPs to resolution? Is that going to be the trade off or could there be others if the 16 isn't enough?

MS even bringing the GPU optimization up is puzzling. Even if they give 5% back, there's a lot of people who didn't even know about the reservation and now net see the XBO as 5% weaker. the only reason that makes sense, aside from total transparency or stupidity, is the ps4 reservations are more than thought,they know this, and they're trying to drive the conversation there?

 

[zupallinere]

The issue would be if PS4 titles start matching 900P, then where does this game end?

You could see some fine looking titles one would assume. I would think that "this game" ends when someone revs their hardware first and then another game begins. I'd be quite happy with well scaled sub 1080p games with more of everything else.

 

[Rangers]

How closely related are ROPs to resolution? Is that going to be the trade off or could there be others if the 16 isn't enough?

MS even bringing the GPU optimization up is puzzling. Even if they give 5% back, there's a lot of people who didn't even know about the reservation and now net see the XBO as 5% weaker. the only reason that makes sense, aside from total transparency or stupidity, is the ps4 reservations are more than thought,they know this, and they're trying to drive the conversation there?

It's such an esoteric subject. Even less people will learn because of this article that plan to reclaim some reservation than that they have one. And the number of the latter is infinitesimal overall.

 

[Jay]

They will not get stomped. I think the fire sale scenario if everything's going bad, is to rip Kinect out and sell a games focused box at 399 or even 299 if absolutely necessary (shouldn't actually be terribly difficult on a DDR3 based box, and a willingness to take some profit lumps).

The truth is I see very little reason to remove Kinect even in those circumstances.

Currently their selling at pretty much even or slight profit from what we've been told.

So they could take the same hit on it as the competing platform takes and it would only be say be $50 or something more. (as you say)

They could probably price cut more aggressively than competing platform can also, after the initial year of release, etc.

As long as the games come along and the games are competitive visually which so far have little reason to not believe that will be the case.

 

[zupallinere]

How closely related are ROPs to resolution? Is that going to be the trade off or could there be others if the 16 isn't enough?

MS even bringing the GPU optimization up is puzzling. Even if they give 5% back, there's a lot of people who didn't even know about the reservation and now net see the XBO as 5% weaker. the only reason that makes sense, aside from total transparency or stupidity, is the ps4 reservations are more than thought,they know this, and they're trying to drive the conversation there?

There would be even less need for PS4 reservations though and of course one would like to think neither side knows for sure what the other side is doing. I think MS will go back to "it's all about the games and the experience" and it's a good chance that all of this single digit back and forth will amount to nothing in a couple of months.

 

[warb]

It's such an esoteric subject. Even less people will learn because of this article that plan to reclaim some reservation than that they have one. And the number of the latter is infinitesimal overall.

Yes, and not everything has to be 100% versus nonsense. It's just nice to get more information.

 

[astrograd]

Why are ppl here pretending like the reservation is news? We've known about it since the reveal in May. :/

 

[Jay]

Why are ppl here pretending like the reservation is news? We've known about it since the reveal in May. :/

From my own perspective its interesting as I believed it was either 2 CU's or 10%.
So I was being conservative and thought 2 CU's, so I'm actually surprised it's only 10%, just above 1 CU if you want to see it that way.
So it was confirmation for me. I wonder if the percentage was changed after the upclock?

It will be interesting from a technical standpoint if they could actually optimise it to be less, not because I believe it will give it some sort of super boost.