Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2020]

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AquariusZi said ~350mm for Arden back in October. We discarded, otherwise VERY good source because we thought Arden is bigger. Appears its 360mm2 actually. Wow...

https://www.ptt.cc/bbs/PC_Shopping/M.1570476662.A.7A0.html

Other than that
Arden progress is fast, OBR is still in the early stages of verification
And Arden is more than one size larger than the OBR (350 vs 300 mm2)

And then there is good ol' PCB leak for PS5...(316mm2).

 
RDNA2 sounds like a monster. Mesh shaders confirmed, thank god. I'm a little bit curious about the int8 and int4 capabilities. Is that part of RDNA2 in general or just part of Series X? I'm assuming RDNA2.

"We knew that many inference algorithms need only 8-bit and 4-bit integer positions for weights and the math operations involving those weights comprise the bulk of the performance overhead for those algorithms," says Andrew Goossen. "So we added special hardware support for this specific scenario. The result is that Series X offers 49 TOPS for 8-bit integer operations and 97 TOPS for 4-bit integer operations. Note that the weights are integers, so those are TOPS and not TFLOPs. The net result is that Series X offers unparalleled intelligence for machine learning."

Makes it sound like it's exclusive to Series X, but I'd be very surprised if it were.
 
Well, it looks like the have tons of hardware to handle decompression from disk so the cpu doesn't have to, and a new api to access the disk (DirectStorage) so the ntfs filesystem will not be an issue. The display output stuff to minimize input lag sounds fantastic, and the whole dev pipeline with time stamping of inputs and frames so they can be tracked for input lag is also great.
 
Yeah, it also can be useful for timing games (gitar hero, etc) lag calibration to be easier.

Or maybe to simply display a warning "your TV is laggy as fuck, enable game mode or pc mode" warning in shooters.
 
Interesting memory setup. :yes: Pre-ordering for launch, regardless! My first Xbox console! :runaway:
 
Don't want to derail thread, but curious, why?
What had made you decide to jump in?
Microsoft have demonstrated themselves to be more friendly to modding. The modding situation for Fallout 4 in PS4 was abysmal compared to the Xbox approach. XSX sounds mostly really friendly, apart from that unknown proprietary external SSD which I feel is going to sting. 1Tb storage for a nextgen console feels tight.

edit: to clarify, also getting PS5 on launch day. This is going to be an expensive year because I also want to upgrade my iPad Pro, my MacBook and my TV. Fortunately I've already saved.
 
@Dictator hoping you might be able to answer this question about part of the video related to Xbox Velocity Architecture: Game packages accessible as 'Virtual Memory'.

It's mentioned (paraphrased) "The game package sits on the storage and it acts almost like extended memory allowing 100 GB of game assets to be instantly accessible by the developer". Is the 100 GB a limit imposed by the Microsoft API or is that just rough estimate provided or derived by using typical game install sizes?
 
I'm really curious about Sampler Feedback Streaming. So you have a 4k texture (for example) sitting on your ssd. That game image is now directly addressable like a page of virtual memory. The GPU then needs to sample the texture, so that means it decides which page table entry of the texture it needs to sample and loads it from the ssd, somehow, instead of loading the whole texture. I wonder what the page table entry size is, and how fast their new system can stream that table entry into RAM. That's more of a per-frame operation than I was expecting the SSD to be relied upon for.
 
Are you actually watching from their 4K Patreon feed or just the common plebeium YouTube feed?
Might just be the bad post-AA implementation messing with some of the edges. There's a weird pixel artefact on certain edges, but it's present in the original as well.
 
Obviously posted elsewhere, but what a cracking scoop and job from the DF crowd.


it's more of a huge beast than I expected, good work there. And it seems efficient. My best concern regarding consoles was the use of the APU, shared resources for the CPU and GPU, but they are using a similar approach in comparison to PCs where both the GPU and CPU have their own memory pool.

Other than that, I don't see any of the more exciting features than RT which Metro Exodus developers mentioned time ago
 
Interesting that the XBSX development kit basically looks exactly the same as the XBO-X kit.

Had Microsoft wanted to, they could have released the XBSX in the same console shell as the XBO-X. :D That said, I imagine the dev kit is a fair bit louder under operation than the design that will be commercially available.

Regards,
SB
 
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