Digital Foundry Microsoft Xbox Scorpio Reveal [2017: 04-06, 04-11, 04-15, 04-16]

[chris1515]

Cutting drawcall on CPU is not exclusive to Scorpio if I remember well the GPU driven rendering SIGGRAPH 2015 presentation of sebbbi they cut the number of draw call by 1 or 2 order of magnitude.

And if I remember well he said on this forum the Trials team arrive to have only 0,2 ms of one Jaguar core allocated to all things related to drawcall on Xbox One.

 

[Rodéric]

With low level API cutting on draw calls isn't nearly as critical as it once was.

 

[Rikimaru]

I already posted a quote from Mero 2033 dev

On PS4, most GPU commands are just a few DWORDs written into the command buffer, let's say just a few CPU clock cycles.

Let's put it that way - we have seen scenarios where a single CPU core was fully loaded just by issuing draw-calls on Xbox One (and that's surely on the 'mono' driver with several fast-path calls utilised). Then, the same scenario on PS4, it was actually difficult to find those draw-calls in the profile graphs, because they are using almost no time and are barely visible as a result.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/d...its-really-like-to-make-a-multi-platform-game

 

[Jay]

Now that we have the soc's size and expoded view of the whole console, what can be the size of the entire console?
It looks at least as small as the S

Jez (Windows central) I believe has said in the past that it's as small or smaller than the x1s.

But as someone else has mentioned it won't be long before someone gives us an approximate dimensions based on the expanded pic.

 

[HBRU]

7,000/5,7=22% bigger (on transistor count)
360/232=55% * 14/16 = 48% bigger ?!? (on die size... dont know how to convert 14GlobalFoundry to 16FF+)

The Playstation 4 Pro GPU is a high-end graphics card by AMD, launched in November 2016. Built on the 14 nm process, and based on the Ellesmere graphics processor, in its Ellesmere XT variant, the card supports DirectX 12.0. The Ellesmere graphics processor is an average sized chip with a die area of 232 mm² and 5,700 million transistors

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/2876/playstation-4-pro-gpu

 

[mpg1]

Jez (Windows central) I believe has said in the past that it's as small or smaller than the x1s.

But as someone else has mentioned it won't be long before someone gives us an approximate dimensions based on the expanded pic.

https://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/63x2eh/project_scorpio_size/

 

[Shifty Geezer]

This was always the risk of letting DF run with the reveal.
Whether you want to say it's for clicks or whatever this is standard to how they do their articles. I don't mind personally, everyone needs to get paid.

The articles are already way longer than the typical word-count their (and EG) readers will wade through. More, smaller articles is probably (felt) necessary to avoid scaring readers away with a 10 page dossier!

 

[babcat]

They need to do an apples to apples comparison with a CPU of similar cores/flops and a GPU of the approximately same flops and see to what degree MS's optimizations improved performance. Due to the fact that GPUs are so much more optimized than they were even a few years ago, I'd say probably only 10% but no way more than 20%.

 

[VitaminB6]

I have been reading through the B3D threads catching up since the DF Scorpio article was published and have to say I am kind of surprised by a lot of peoples attitudes about the Scorpio reveal. I personally would have loved to see Zen, but from the information revealed so far I think the console looks really promising. Does anyone think that if it had a Zen CPU in the reveal and everything else in the article stayed the same including the performance profile they showed in Forza that everyone would be saying its great? Ryzen would have been nice but if the box can run games in native 4k with solid frame rates, isn't that what we all wanted? I know it's fun to speculate and that's a huge part of this forum, but we still have more info coming from DF, and we have yet to see games... Just my two cents

 

[mrcorbo]

One could also think the extra 4GB could make a lot of difference, but I really don't see any developer complaining about lack of RAM in the other consoles, or lack of available RAM in the PS4 Pro. Seems that the biggest reason those 12GB are there is because Microsoft wanted a larger 384bit bus to guarantee full compatibility with the Xbone games that used the ESRAM in full-duplex, and for that the practical choice was either 6GB (obviously not) or 12GB.
The fact that Microsoft is blasting a whopping 4GB for the OS and 1GB on the dashboard actually makes me think they're having a hard time figuring out what to do with all that RAM.

Firstly, the way you're presenting the OS reservation makes it look like you think that the extra 1GB is added on to the 4GB. The 4GB for the OS includes the 1GB to render the dashboard in 4K. The normal Xbox One OS reservation is 3GB and this doesn't allow for enough memory to do this (which is why the One S renders the dashboard in 1080p and upscales despite being capable of rendering a 4K image).

Secondly, getting to that bandwidth number was achievable with 8GB of GDDR5X, which I expect would have been cheaper if that was the only concern.

Thirdly, better assets require more memory and unlike the PC, where you can page out to the pool of system RAM, there is no other pool to page out to. You have to flush the assets and then pull them off of the disk again.

 

[mpg1]

I have been reading through the B3D threads catching up since the DF Scorpio article was published and have to say I am kind of surprised by a lot of peoples attitudes about the Scorpio reveal. I personally would have loved to see Zen, but from the information revealed so far I think the console looks really promising. Does anyone think that if it had a Zen CPU in the reveal and everything else in the article stayed the same including the performance profile they showed in Forza that everyone would be saying its great? Ryzen would have been nice but if the box can run games in native 4k with solid frame rates, isn't that what we all wanted? I know it's fun to speculate and that's a huge part of this forum, but we still have more info coming from DF, and we have yet to see games... Just my two cents

Most of the arguments against Jaguar are an "how it looks on paper" argument more than a practical one.

If PS4 Pro and Scorpio are able to scale the resolutions as desired while maintaining the base console framerate then mission accomplished.

 

[HBRU]

In my opinion Scorpio has born and has been developed as an attempt (which seems also quite successful) to overcome the problem ESRAM of which MS suffered with ONE. Becouse of a corporate choice not wanting, or not being able to make a clean break with the past (which would have been better IMHO) but finding himself constantly under-performing and ugly compared to PS4 they have decided to go up to a considerable RAM bandwidth specification (to emulate the old ESRAM) with a big bus and (consistent with the expensive silicon lay out of this) and they can not opt for the 6 giga-as someone above has corectly written- so went on the 12 gigs of RAM (frankly almost a little “too much” IMHO). Same as for Jaguar, to keep XB1 compatibility keeped. I belive also CU are almost the same of XB1 (but will see ... although I hope not), I think Scorpio's CU are the same identical as XB1 but increased from 12 to 40 (and overclock). Probably these "old" CU reduced to 16FF + progress better to a higher clock and with good yields ... (Jaguar frequency instead was not so much increased) .... and maybe perhaps they have less latency of the most complex CU Polaris, Polaris + and / o Vega.... and that helps with the ESRAM trouble. At this point we can speak of a -I belive- of a Console just born but already old. Somone od DF talked about Polaris o Vega? I think not. Or did I miss ? If there were the "famous" Rapid Math FP16x2 that would be trumpeted. MS I belive has worked well on the metal in this integration of DX12 on low low level ... and that was probably easier and better managed on the old CU than on new.

 

[HBRU]

Why GDDR5 instead of GDDR5X, lower cost, probably bigger production now and in in future... and (I ask) lower latency on bigger bus that is better in emulating ESRAM ?!?

 

[BRiT]

Firstly, the way you're presenting the OS reservation makes it look like you think that the extra 1GB is added on to the 4GB. The 4GB for the OS includes the 1GB to render the dashboard in 4K. The normal Xbox One OS reservation is 3GB and this doesn't allow for enough memory to do this (which is why the One S renders the dashboard in 1080p and upscales despite being capable of rendering a 4K image).

Excellent point. I'd like to add that the extra Gig, for a total of 4 Gigs, is likely needed to allow for 4k Broadcast Streaming and Recording Game Clips of 4k games.

 

[Scott_Arm]

I would rather have the ordinary XBox One (not even the S) for another 3 to 4 years.

It's absolutely revolting in the console world to provide marginally improved consoles. One of the key benefits of buying a console is the fact that you know each generation is a leap and you won't have to be continually upgrading hardware like people do in the PC world. Sony and Microsoft have released consoles that are not a generational leap and do NOT offer any revolutionary technology. I would rather them release NOTHING for 3 to 4 years (until 5nm is available) than launch consoles that don't have exclusives and are simply designed for one specific purpose: to increase resolution.

This makes me wish horribly that another console would enter the market that would use some kind of revolutionary concept. For example, maybe one with a powerful NVIDIA GPU, embedded CPUs, and a ray tracer chip?

It's funny how these revolting mid-gen consoles are appearing, offering "only" a resolution upgrade, at the same time that millions of consumers are buying 4k tvs.

I guess what I'm saying is, there's now a market for 4k, so there are now product offerings to match. If you don't like it, don't buy it. Wait your 3 to 4 years and buy the next console. No loss to you. People who want a 4k upgrade can get it. Everyone wins.

 

[function]

But if they want the Scorpio to run 4K games, is 8GB enough for 4K textures? My understanding in the PC gaming world is that it is not.

There aren't 4K textures, as such, it's more that as resolution increases you need higher resolution textures to avoid an apparent detail deficit close to the camera.

Even with the "standard" PS4Bone textures, 4K will still make more texture detail apparent on surfaces away from the camera. (Remember that 1080p PS4 games use the same textures as 900p Xbone games.)

When people refer to "4K" textures they're normally referring to a 2 x 2 increase to the highest res mip map over those that ship with PS4Bone games. With mip maps in memory, this means 4X memory required. With around 2X the memory for assets, Scorpio can't do this. But the truth is that not all your textures will need to increase in resolution (depending on location and how good they already are - some textures are already overkill at 1080p simply because they can be), some textures will offer less benefit from increased resolution than others, and the highest res mip maps won't necessarily need to be loaded in simultaneously.

Long story short, 2X the asset storage used wisely will get you closer to the benefit of a blanket 2x2 increase in all textures than you might think. Start with surfaces that are most frequently operating at less than 1:1 pixel/texel ratio, because this won't be uniform across all surfaces at all times.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Firstly, the way you're presenting the OS reservation makes it look like you think that the extra 1GB is added on to the 4GB. The 4GB for the OS includes the 1GB to render the dashboard in 4K. The normal Xbox One OS reservation is 3GB and this doesn't allow for enough memory to do this (which is why the One S renders the dashboard in 1080p and upscales despite being capable of rendering a 4K image).

Reserving 4GB for OS sounds and most probably is bloated. Take away the dashboard and 3GB for OS sounds bloated too. Android and iOS devices have tens of apps always running in the background together with regular OS services and they do it within a fraction of that memory amount. Here's my Android phone's RAM usage:

Besides OS services I have facebook, facebook messenger, whatsapp, skype, telegram, hangouts, spotify, accuweather, dropbox, google maps and over a dozen more apps/services running in background.
All this is kept well below 2GB, and I know my phone is unnecessarily bloated with running apps. Scorpio isn't going to run even a third of this amount of apps concurrently.

Reserving 1GB for a 3840*2160*32bit dashboard sounds bloated as hell too, unless this dashboard is going to have tens of 4K layers (which would be just bad engineering regarding resource consumption).

Secondly, getting to that bandwidth number was achievable with 8GB of GDDR5X, which I expect would have been cheaper if that was the only concern.

You expect but you really don't know.
Do you have pricing info on GDDR5X chips compared to sub-7000MT/s GDDR5?
GDDR5X is only found on >$500 discrete graphics cards. GDDR5 at 7000MT/s is found on ~$90 graphics cards, and Scorpio is using chips clocking even lower than that.
AMD doesn't have any GPU out there with a memory controller capable of driving GDDR5X either. And from the weight they're putting into HBM2, they might not even use GDDR5X in any product at all and eventually just skip directly to GDDR6 for lower-end GPUs.
Developing a GDDR5X memory controller (something AMD may not even have in their portfolio for semi-custom developments) just for Scorpio could have cost money and precious time.

Thirdly, better assets require more memory and unlike the PC, where you can page out to the pool of system RAM, there is no other pool to page out to. You have to flush the assets and then pull them off of the disk again.

These are two facts, but none of them proves the extra 4GB are essential for 4K rendering, or that Scorpio's GPU can even make proper use of them.

 

[mrcorbo]

Why GDDR5 instead of GDDR5X, lower cost, probably bigger production now and in in future... and (I ask) lower latency on bigger bus that is better in emulating ESRAM ?!?

GDDR5 wasn't necessary once they settled on the wider bus to hit their bandwidth target. They didn't even choose as high of a bin of GDDR5 as they could have.

 

[function]

GDDR5 wasn't necessary once they settled on the wider bus to hit their bandwidth target. They didn't even choose as high of a bin of GDDR5 as they could have.

Going from 7 to 8 ghz GDDR5 has a relatively large increase on power draw though (from both the memory and the GPU), so in addition to the cost I think a power constrained system wouldn't want to go too far past the "knee of the curve" (I like that term, it sounds clever).

 

[iroboto]

It's funny how these revolting mid-gen consoles are appearing, offering "only" a resolution upgrade, at the same time that millions of consumers are buying 4k tvs.

I guess what I'm saying is, there's now a market for 4k, so there are now product offerings to match. If you don't like it, don't buy it. Wait your 3 to 4 years and buy the next console. No loss to you. People who want a 4k upgrade can get it. Everyone wins.

Oh it's adorable how quickly views shift.
tldr; My suggestion to everyone is to slow down, more information is coming many of you guys are getting all worked up over something that will be resolved in the near future.

Just a quick history lesson for everyone, the whole of 2013 to now was, "you console peasants can't even do 4K, or 60fps"; we had PC folks crapping on PS4 folks for not being able to do ultra; PS4 folks crapping on XBO folks for no 1080p.

We are now looking at a console that can compete in the same zones as high end (not the highest) consumer cards; the general response I've seen is that 4K Ultra @ 60 or 30 (asterisk) is now unsatisfactory, the goal post has shifted. New arguments like, when Scorpio comes out there will be a 12TF card, this isn't powerful enough! Like console folks are silly to even attempt 4K because Scorpio doesn't have Vega or Zen, or nvidia attached to its name or that Scorpio isn't at the most bleeding edge of PC technology.

When the goal post shifted, I have to ask is it because Scorpio arrived too late? Are there 8K TVs arriving that Scorpio has missed the boat on? Does 4K take more power than what Scorpio has?

Or is it because it doesn't fit your view of what Scorpio should have been? If Scorpio manages to play all games at 4K for it's entirety, regardless of how it may accomplish it, Scorpio met it's objectives and people who are in the market for a 4K TV will appreciate what Scorpio brings to the living room.

And yet people continue to forget that fact that the performance profile was hit; I'm reading that it doesn't do ID buffer (meant for checker boarding) or can't do half precision math (also meant to help with getting to higher resolution); all innovations required to assist/mock getting to 4K. A performance profile that Scorpio can accomplish without the assistance of, or perhaps through some other method it's able to achieve it.

The next set of arguments continue on this trend: fake customizations, fake draw calls etc, draw calls are already super slim!
Again the performance profile shows that any game on XBO that runs at 60, scorpio can do at 60. It's doing 4K @ 60
But I'm even more worried about the fact that everyone is comfortable with celebrating the idea that "we have no need for better slightly improved technology because it's already great!". Almost everything we've ever done in this world has been evolutionary, just because it's good enough we no longer need it? Is 2 dropping to 1 not a 50% improvement? You can do something 50x more.

Slow down, let the information come, it's coming. Nothing ever happens immediately or over night. Even if Scorpio was Zen/Vega; it wouldn't change anything. Read Dsoup's comments about it. You have the hardware sure, but you are locked in step with PS4, 4Pro and XBO until those consoles phased out, on the bright side, with what MS accomplished with Scorpio, at least it's certainly more affordable than a Zen/Vega combination would have been.