Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2013]

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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.

Some of the policies were enforced, but not set in stone and immutable... I remember hearing back then that the developer could sway from them, but they had to make the case for it.
 
Some of the policies were enforced, but not set in stone and immutable... I remember hearing back then that the developer could sway from them, but they had to make the case for it.

FWIW, when I talked with J Allard in person at E3 before the release, he did said that all games must be 720p or above. At the time their goal might have been trying to force "HD" during the transitional period.
 
In light of this article, and the fact that the Xbox 360 (dunno about PS3) had a similar type GPU reservation, why would the PS4 not have something similar?

The argument i've heard against is that it "isn't doing anything related to Kinect or Snap"- ok, but then why did the 360 have a GPU reserve?
 
Some of the policies were enforced, but not set in stone and immutable... I remember hearing back then that the developer could sway from them, but they had to make the case for it.
You had to get a TCR exemption if you wanted to ship at lower than 720p (until they removed the requirement). TCR exemptions are a pain in the ass, and you have to jump through all sorts of costly hoops to get them.
 
You had to get a TCR exemption if you wanted to ship at lower than 720p (until they removed the requirement). TCR exemptions are a pain in the ass, and you have to jump through all sorts of costly hoops to get them.

All TCR and TRC's are "negotiable" if you have enough leverage, when I worked at EA I used to hate shipping after Madden, because the Madden team would ignore TRC/TCR's left right and center and just jam it down the throats of platform QA to ship it on time.
As a result if you shipped in the window following, you'd get hammered on every little detail by the same QA guys.
Usually though you want to pick the battles you choose to fight to get TCR/TRC exemptions.
 
FWIW, when I talked with J Allard in person at E3 before the release, he did said that all games must be 720p or above. At the time their goal might have been trying to force "HD" during the transitional period.

I think PGR3 and or some other launch games were sub 720.

MS may say it was a TRC, but AFAIK it was never enforced,
 
In light of this article, and the fact that the Xbox 360 (dunno about PS3) had a similar type GPU reservation, why would the PS4 not have something similar?

The argument i've heard against is that it "isn't doing anything related to Kinect or Snap"- ok, but then why did the 360 have a GPU reserve?
PS4 has a GPU reserve, I don't know what entire form it takes, but I know they reserve one of the command queues entirely. and it looks like one of the 8 compute pipelines. They could probably get away with just that, since it's the high priority queue, but that would mean developers couldn't rely on stable GPU performance if the OS has to draw something, so I'd suspect some small timeslice or something similar too.

The PS3 reserved a ton of GPU memory, but I don't know if they reserved any GPU time, they might have done all their overlay rendering using the reserved SPE.
 
but that would mean developers couldn't rely on stable GPU performance if the OS has to draw something


which hopefully would only occur when the user presses whatever OS interaction button, in which case they could care less about the game and want the OS
 
which hopefully would only occur when the user presses whatever OS interaction button, in which case they could care less about the game and want the OS
Or when a friend signs in, or when someone messages you, or when you want to stream your game, etc etc.
 
PS4 has a GPU reserve, I don't know what entire form it takes, but I know they reserve one of the command queues entirely. and it looks like one of the 8 compute pipelines. They could probably get away with just that, since it's the high priority queue, but that would mean developers couldn't rely on stable GPU performance if the OS has to draw something, so I'd suspect some small timeslice or something similar too.

The PS3 reserved a ton of GPU memory, but I don't know if they reserved any GPU time, they might have done all their overlay rendering using the reserved SPE.

I believe if the game had slowdown, and you pulled up the XMB, then the XMB would be laggy as well.
 
I believe if the game had slowdown, and you pulled up the XMB, then the XMB would be laggy as well.

If the GameOS slows and impacts the AppOS ... then there would be big problems indeed as the QOS(Quality of Service) design totally failed. And I believe QOS is fundamental to the Xbox One architecture. ...

This situation should not happen, but we wont know until the architects start explaining the 3OS design and/or we start getting our hands on it.

update: Ceger pointed out that this conversation was about PS4... I was replying about XB1 ... I apologize !
 
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If the GameOS slows and impacts the AppOS ... then there would be big problems indeed as the QOS(Quality of Service) design totally failed. And I believe QOS is fundamental to the Xbox One architecture. ...

This situation should not happen, but we wont know until the architects start explaining the 3OS design and/or we start getting our hands on it.

They were talking about the PS4 XMB and OS specifically, but the overall concern applies to both. We assume the concurrent render pipe takes care of this situation on the X1 though,

I'd like to read more details about it. Hopefully more about it all in the DF articles they will release this weekend.
 
They were talking about the PS4 XMB and OS specifically, but the overall concern applies to both. We assume the concurrent render pipe takes care of this situation on the X1 though,

I'd like to read more details about it. Hopefully more about it all in the DF articles they will release this weekend.


oops :) ... thx for clarification
 
They were talking about the PS4 XMB and OS specifically, but the overall concern applies to both. We assume the concurrent render pipe takes care of this situation on the X1 though,

I'd like to read more details about it. Hopefully more about it all in the DF articles they will release this weekend.

Both the consoles have 'concurrent render pipes' they are HP GFX pipes reserved for the system. Its called VSHELL on the PS4.
 
Or when a friend signs in, or when someone messages you, or when you want to stream your game, etc etc.
I would think a notification in the corner can certainly be handled by the CPU core reserved for the OS. Would the hardware display plane for the system make this practically free on the GPU side?
 
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.

I thought the correct wording was 10% of the GPU and 2 CPU cores? Both of these numbers should be relatively unaffected by the upclocks as they scale accordingly anyway.

1) Running: The game is loaded in memory and is fully running. The game has full access to the reserved system resources, which are six CPU cores, 90 percent of GPU processing power, and 5 GB of memory. The game is rendering full-screen and the user can interact with it.
http://kotaku.com/the-five-possible-states-of-xbox-one-games-are-strangel-509597078

I might be just outdated, refresh me if I'm wrong.
 
I could be completely off but what I took from the article was that 10 percent reservation will be available in to devs by prioritizing the data in a quality of service way. Meaning gpu data for rendering first and foremost while lower level data will be able to communicate everything else needed for snap kinect etc. Does Goossen infer this? Do you think its possible to actually do two things at once? He mentions two render pipes and prioritize and thats how I came to this conclusion. I know I might be completely off but thats how I took it as to how they will open the reservation to devs. Reminds me of the old days I had in telecom talking about how bits and bytes travel thru a pipe and how the traffic cop ie QOS prioritize s the data.
 
Both the consoles have 'concurrent render pipes' they are HP GFX pipes reserved for the system. Its called VSHELL on the PS4.

Yes I know. I was pointing out that the conversation point at the time was specifically on the PS4. I would imagine that MS has built the X1 architecture to work with the virtualized OS configuration, thus the X1 probably handles both as separate machines at the top level, squeezing the necessary requirement for the OS VM when necessary while the game VM runs with what it needs at all times. Assuming that, I imagine they are trying to figure out a way to have the game VM take more ownership from that reserve on demand and all they need to do is create that up date in the coordinating VM. This is not stuff that needs to be regulated to component drivers.
 
If the 10% reservation is a time slice of the GPU, does it mean the game code gets an average of 768MHz?
 
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