Can the architectural similarities between PS4, PS4 Pro and Xbox One X hurt the One and One S

[Metal_Spirit]

PS4, PS4 Pro, ans Xbox One X. All have a large pool of video memory with large bandwidths.
Xbox One and one S, on the other hand, require the use of the embeded eSRAM, a lot of memory management and moving data, using the move engines, between the slow DDR3 and this memory.
This forces Xbox One and One S to have special optimizations and extra care while programming, for better performances.
But now, having the large PS4 market, and a console on the Xbox size that can work with the same kind of code, do you believe this can hurt the development of Games for the original consoles, leading to more disparity between Xbox One and PS4?

 

[Pixel]

I don't think it will get much worse.
XOX is selling really well but at less than half the cost its pretty obvious XOS will continue to sell better than XOX, with prices dropping to sub $200 this blackfriday, and other future sales as well.

At this point a lot of developers are going to have their engines designed for XO builds and making good use of esram. And their graphics programming teams are going to be very familiar and have alot of experience already with fitting render targets/ back buffers and whatnot in esram. (Eg you listen to a guy like Sebbbi and he knows exactly the bit size to use for normals and depth etc) Plus the financial imperative XOS/XO user base is still present and large and an will remain an important and growing market. So yeah some issues may arise but with most big AAA titles I'd think you wouldn't need to worry.

You see a little bit of that right now however I don't think it will get much worse for the reasons listed above.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Probably, in so far as the big push to really maximise the hardware like other gens have seen towards EOL probably won't happen. There might well be financial short-cuts taken as the economy of eeking out a few extras vertical lines of resolution won't be seen as worth it considering XB1 owners are used to sub-HD resolutions. From a business POV you need a good case to justify the added expense. Some devs (first parties notably) will go the extra mile for pride, but the mainstream multiplats probably will be no more enthusiastic about maximising XB1 as they were making the most of Cell. The initial similar architecture references in the OP also ignores PC, which makes XB1 a drop in the ocean for multiplats.

IMHO.

 

[Rangers]

There is a similar thought I was thinking of making a post about, not exact.

Basically that Ms likely needs to make, to pull a number out, a 1.9-2.6TF, 8GB GDDR5, version of Xbox One S. No ESRAM. Slot this in directly at the current 249-ish the Xbox One sits at (doubt this similar architecturally, nominally more powerful than PS4 box would cost more to build, given the processing improvements since 2013). The original vanilla ESRAM laden Xbox S is then EOL. It still exists and is supported of course, but basically is going to be getting 720P versions of games going forward.

I see only one major "issue", that it might be fairly easy for Sony to simply slot in the 4.2 TF Pro to replace the original PS4 (and at a new lower ps4 like price), and leave the new Xbox S hurting again by compare. So you might have to target somewhere around 4.2 tf instead. For overall purposes of this idea though, you can disregard this caveat.

In this scenario you of course can leave the X box X alone at the top, it isn't affected.

Reasons? Just that I dont think current Xbox S is particularly appealing going forward, and already many ports look pretty dire on it. Xbox X looks like a great step forward for Xbox, but there's still a problem IMO at the bottom of the lineup.

 

[iroboto]

Sony or MS ain't going to bother with that. You want more power upgrade to the higher tier.

If you tie power to resolution/your TV set, then the system still works. You have 4K get the 4K console. Next gen is baseline 4K, so the real question is when "should" it arrive. If it arrives too early you are trying to sell next gen to customers that will won't be able to really experience it.

 

[Jay]

There is a similar thought I was thinking of making a post about, not exact.

Basically that Ms likely needs to make, to pull a number out, a 1.9-2.6TF, 8GB GDDR5, version of Xbox One S. No ESRAM. Slot this in directly at the current 249-ish the Xbox One sits at (doubt this similar architecturally, nominally more powerful than PS4 box would cost more to build, given the processing improvements since 2013). The original vanilla ESRAM laden Xbox S is then EOL. It still exists and is supported of course, but basically is going to be getting 720P versions of games going forward.

I see only one major "issue", that it might be fairly easy for Sony to simply slot in the 4.2 TF Pro to replace the original PS4 (and at a new lower ps4 like price), and leave the new Xbox S hurting again by compare. So you might have to target somewhere around 4.2 tf instead. For overall purposes of this idea though, you can disregard this caveat.

In this scenario you of course can leave the X box X alone at the top, it isn't affected.

Reasons? Just that I dont think current Xbox S is particularly appealing going forward, and already many ports look pretty dire on it. Xbox X looks like a great step forward for Xbox, but there's still a problem IMO at the bottom of the lineup.

The only real chance they had to do anything of the nature your suggesting was for the 1S last year.
Developing a new replacement now just isn't worth while for them.
The fact of the matter is that the XO (and now the 1S) is there and will still require support, so investing in a new budget console just isn't worth it now.
I doubt that even if it was the same price and slightly more powerful than the ps4 that it would sell much better. ps4 and the new console would pretty much look identical graphically also.

The Xbox One Super S ship has sailed, time for that was last year.

As for the OP, I think going forward that the normal divide will still be there between the XO and PS4, maybe one or two graphical downgrades compared to what we already see, but not much else. the ESRAM is well known, has better tools now and is supported in all major engines.

 

[Metal_Spirit]

Sonic Forces at 1080p on PS4 and 720p on Xbox One is a real surprise, and in my opinion, one of the games that reveal the lack of optimizations for the One. I wasn´t expecting in 2017, after the Kinect reserve removal, and DX 12, a 125% diference in extra pixels between PS4 and Xbox One, and this seems to indicate a lack of interest in optimization.
Wolfenstein 2 seems to be the same! 810p on Xbox One vs 1080p on PS4 and even with this difference we have lower fps on Xbox... Why? Lack of optimization for the original One... no doubt!

 

[Jay]

Sonic Forces at 1080p on PS4 and 720p on Xbox One is a real surprise, and in my opinion, one of the games that reveal the lack of optimizations for the One. I wasn´t expecting in 2017, after the Kinect reserve removal, and DX 12, a 125% diference in extra pixels between PS4 and Xbox One, and this seems to indicate a lack of interest in optimization.
Wolfenstein 2 seems to be the same! 810p on Xbox One vs 1080p on PS4 and even with this difference we have lower fps on Xbox... Why? Lack of optimization for the original One... no doubt!

Your going to get outliers, I see sonic forces as possibly one of those.

As for Wolf2, I don't know what the game specs of the ps4 and XO are, but I wouldn't put it down to lack of optimisation.
Are they both using dynamic res, and what are the top, lower, average resolutions.
I don't expect we will see 720p to 1080p divide much like sonic forces.
More so than lack of optimisation I could see it just being inherent in the horsepower and size of the ESRAM.

 

[turkey]

Do they have a choice?, it's Esram or no performance, DDR3 is dire bandwidth wise.

Compute algorithms such as temporal reconstruction seem to be the area of progression at the moment which would not preclude inclusion on Xbox one but do these techniques create more and more data artifacts that will need to join the Esram juggle? If so what is the easy way out, reduce the footprint by lowering resolution or cutting effects?

I wonder how many multiplats have shipped with different quality or quantity of buffers already and DF have only noticed a resolution difference.

 

[turkey]

Sonic Forces at 1080p on PS4 and 720p on Xbox One is a real surprise, and in my opinion, one of the games that reveal the lack of optimizations for the One. I wasn´t expecting in 2017, after the Kinect reserve removal, and DX 12, a 125% diference in extra pixels between PS4 and Xbox One, and this seems to indicate a lack of interest in optimization.

I think this is a real edge case and I am not sure we can infer anything about the Xbox one optimisations specifically.

PS4 Pro runs exactly the same as PS4 at 1080 even tho it's officially and enhanced build. Xbox One X runs some stages at 4k and others as 1080 with nothing in-between.

The game is simply not optimised to the fullest extent for whatever reason.

 

[Metal_Spirit]

Sonic Forces - 720p Xbox One - 1800p Xbox One x, 1080p for PS4.
Wolfenstein 2 - 810p Xbox One - 4K Xbox One X, 1080p for PS4.

As I see it... at least on these two cases, using the same code for the X and the One, results in heavy penalties for the One.

I don´t see this as normal. The X is not 525, or 711% faster than the One, And the PS4 is not 77 or 125% faster than the One.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Sony or MS ain't going to bother with that. You want more power upgrade to the higher tier.

Yup. And developers sure as hell don't want another console specification to target.

 

[Recop]

I don´t see this as normal. The X is not 525, or 711% faster than the One, And the PS4 is not 77 or 125% faster than the One.

Sonic Forces is badly optimized. It's obvious.

However, how can you know it about W2 ? In Doom, the PS4 resolution was already 70% higher with a much better framerate.

 

[HMBR]

I can see it becoming the 720P box while PS4 still targets 1080P

 

[phoenix_chipset]

Yeah. I can easily see the base Xbox one start to get the shaft as time goes by. I sort of expect sub HD resolutions at some point, considering 720p isn't too uncommon already.

 

[KitRoot]

Wolfenstein 2 and COD: WW2 already drop below 720p using dynamic res. scaling.

 

[Allandor]

I don't think that the esram is the problem with the performance of the xb1. It just adds much bandwidth. The bigger problem is that is has less hardware it could use the bandwidth. Just half the rops of the PS4, half the texture units etc. In the end, the XB1 doesn't half 720p-900p because of the bandwidth, but because it should execute the same code that is meant for more hardware-units the ps4 has. And because of the lower resolution it doesn't need that much bandwidth at all.
esram is still a small but high-bandwidth memory and the engines are already prepared to take advantage of that (if they didn't xb1 would really get a bandwidth problem).

On the other hand Xb1x and PS4 pro hurt the visual quality of xb1 and ps4 titles, just because they get less optimized since the new hardware is preferred. Resolution will come down quite fast in this generation. We knew it from the beginning, because neither xb1 nor ps4 were real power-houses. But resolution is not everything that makes a good image. It the artwork/assests, the lightning and so on what makes a good image. Increasing the pixel count increases the overall image-quality a bit but more pixels are really expensive. We can see this on the switch. You don't need super-high resolutions. Resolution helps, yes, but it is not the best way, just the easiest.

Half Life 1 for example, it looked incredible at the time it was released. But even a 4k resolution would only clean up some edges. The overall image quality would still suck from a current viewpoint.

 

[HMBR]

if bandwidth was not a problem, MS wouldn't have "wasted" die space with the ESRAM, if you exclude it you are looking at 68GB/s shared with the CPU, which is a bigger disadvantage to the PS4 (176) than the number of ROPs/ TMUs/ SPs (and they don't run at the same clock)

if you look at the typical GCN 1.0-1.1 Radeon on the PC they have higher bandwidth per TFLOPS than the Xbox One without the ESRAM, and no penalty for CPU sharing.
it was there for a reason!

the PC Radeon APUs were all badly bandwidth limited.

 

[Jay]

don't think many people are saying bandwidth is a problem with the esram. It would be one without.

I contest, it's not bandwidth or complexity but esram size that's the overall problem with it.
that's not taking into account that it's just overall less powerful than ps4.

seen it mentioned about the lower resolutions that XO has in some games now, but ps4 also is under 1080p in most of those games, apart from what I would consider outliers that you will always get.

the mid gens will probably make the base models drop in resolution and effects, not because there less optimised (probably will have more optimisation) but much like bf2 its the only way to up the quality per pixel, otherwise base models would look even worse, and studios still need to sell games to the largest market shares.