Current Generation Hardware Speculation with a Technical Spin [post GDC 2020] [XBSX, PS5]

[Metal_Spirit]

SFS can be done with tiles smaller than the entire MIP.

But you do have to transfer the whole mip, discarding the rest, right?

 

[iroboto]

But you do have to transfer the whole mip, discarding the rest, right?

Any proper streaming model should not do this. SFS or not

 

[AlNom]

Tier 4 ??? no clue wtf this is.

Maybe that's what SFS is? Have to imagine that being DX12 Ultimate means that these new features are shared on PC otherwise it makes them nearly useless to multiplatform.

 

[BRiT]

SFS/SF handle smaller than entire Mips. Pretty certain its been said as much in the various videos and should be shown in the DX Documentation link.

 

[zupallinere]

Thanks, I couldn't remember the details, hopefully the spec allows for more sizes that will cover more use cases.
have to admit i assumed when you upgrade the ssd on PS5 that you swap out the current one, not have an additional connector. But that does make sense.

Anyway we still haven't seen teardown to see if the PS5 is a simple module to upgrade.

Is the main SSD on the X Series X on a user replaceable module on it's mainboard ??

 

[Jay]

Is the main SSD on the X Series X on a user replaceable module on it's mainboard ??

Looks to be, but may be odd dimension module, hard to say.

Maybe that's what SFS is? Have to imagine that being DX12 Ultimate means that these new features are shared on PC otherwise it makes them nearly useless to multiplatform.

SF is what is shared across DX12U.
SFS is xbox custom bit.

From what we know so far anyway. Unless someone remembers whats in the DX12U spec differently.

So xbox you have access to the custom filter and possibly better latency with some of the tables being managed in hardware etc compared to having to manage it yourself.

 

[zupallinere]

Looks to be, but may be odd dimension module, hard to say.

Soldered though ? If so then it is just how much real estate you have to cover to desolder then.

 

[Allandor]

Is the main SSD on the X Series X on a user replaceable module on it's mainboard ??

You can see this on the official picture (saw this first in the series s video, but it is the same for both):

It looks like a m.2 slot or something like that.
Not that MS would actually advice to replace it, but if the SSD is broken in the future, at least it seems that it can be replaced quite easily.

 

[function]

You can see this on the official picture (saw this first in the series s video, but it is the same for both):

It looks like a m.2 slot or something like that.
Not that MS would actually advice to replace it, but if the SSD is broken in the future, at least it seems that it can be replaced quite easily.

I guess that would make a lot of sense. They could basically get their SSD built with an off the shelf controller (with custom firmware), with an off the shelf m.2 SSD PCB, and use an off the shelf connector on the XSS mobo / XSX IO board. Replacing it in the service centre would basically be a screwdriver job.

Hopefully there will be a way for customers to get their boxes repaired for many years to come. Too bad you can't buy them direct from MS and do it yourself. Or maybe you can disassemble an external add on drive and slap that in. Though you'd still need to get all the OS stuff and quick resume partitions onto it. Hmmm ....

 

[Jay]

Though you'd still need to get all the OS stuff and quick resume partitions onto it. Hmmm ....

Wouldn't be surprised hackers deal with formatting and installing os on to it.

 

[Silenti]

The problem with compression is, that you most times have to decompress a good part of the data to get just a bit of it. So at best you compress each tile individual.
Just think of a file system (well don't think we have something that can be called like this) just to get the idea:
Instead of texture1.zip you have texture1.1.zip to texture1.112.zip on the SSD and some kind of map-information (just basic metadata) to know which texture part is where, and you only load those you need.
The loaded tiles, than get decompressed (just the data-compression) and written into the memory.
Texture-compression is still active.

This is a bit oversimplified but I think you get the idea.

I fear this shall be a stupid question. I am not even sure I am asking it correctly. Do we know how granular this ability is? Meaning, how many pieces can the texture in question be divided into? Is it a predetermined number of say, 100 smaller files regardless of the size of the original texture, or can it broken into pieces of say 64KB (just for example) and the more the merrier?

 

[BRiT]

I would think at some point having more fragments becomes costlier due to overhead for each block.

 

[AzBat]

It looks like a m.2 slot or something like that.

Looks like the M.2 2230 form factor(with additional shielding) that is used in the Surface Pro X & Surface Laptop 3.

Tommy McClain

 

[iroboto]

Maybe that's what SFS is? Have to imagine that being DX12 Ultimate means that these new features are shared on PC otherwise it makes them nearly useless to multiplatform.

there's no description under it. May just be a placeholder for future content.

 

[iroboto]

I fear this shall be a stupid question. I am not even sure I am asking it correctly. Do we know how granular this ability is? Meaning, how many pieces can the texture in question be divided into? Is it a predetermined number of say, 100 smaller files regardless of the size of the original texture, or can it broken into pieces of say 64KB (just for example) and the more the merrier?

First off, not a stupid question, most of everything we discuss here, barely any of it has ever been straight forward, I'm more willing to bet I just got over the 50% accuracy mark with my comments on how things work And that's likely being somewhat generous. And unless you are a wizard at render programming, most of the intricate details that matter won't make much sense either.


As for how many tiles per texture, it is pre-determined by the system in place as I understand it. If you opt for your own Virtual Texturing system, you can decide how large those tiles are. Some will opt for smaller titles like 32KB or 16KB tiles. The hardware based tiling system uses 64KB tiles, volume tiles you get some options on sizing.

You cannot just take an texture and have it run through a SVT system, somewhere in that process (as I understand it) you must covert the textures you want into a Virtual Texture. For instance, Unreal documentation looks like this:

Converting Textures and Materials
Enabling virtual texturing for your project means that Textures and Materials require some setup to work correctly; the Texture must enable Virtual Texture Streaming support, and the Material's Texture Samples are required to use a Virtual Sampler Type instead of a non-Virtual one.

Choose from the options below to properly set up your textures and materials for use with SVT.

Conversion Menu Option

1. Select any Texture Asset in the Content Browser that you want to convert to use SVT.
   
   
2. Right-click to open the context menu and select Convert to Virtual Texture

It does appear in most cases you will have to do the texture conversion manually, or you have a specific tool to help you through the process. What it does is out of my understanding. Aside from changing how you sample the texture, which is to say you are sampling to select the right tiles, I don't really know much more on this subject.

Hope that sorta helps.

 

[Silenti]

First off, not a stupid question, most of everything we discuss here, barely any of it has ever been straight forward, I'm more willing to bet I just got over the 50% accuracy mark with my comments on how things work And that's likely being somewhat generous. And unless you are a wizard at render programming, most of the intricate details that matter won't make much sense either.


As for how many tiles per texture, it is pre-determined by the system in place as I understand it. If you opt for your own Virtual Texturing system, you can decide how large those tiles are. Some will opt for smaller titles like 32KB or 16KB tiles. The hardware based tiling system uses 64KB tiles, volume tiles you get some options on sizing.

You cannot just take an texture and have it run through a SVT system, somewhere in that process (as I understand it) you must covert the textures you want into a Virtual Texture. For instance, Unreal documentation looks like this:

...

Hope that sorta helps.

Thanks. It does. Piecing things together bit by bit.

 

[t0mb3rt]

I fear this shall be a stupid question. I am not even sure I am asking it correctly. Do we know how granular this ability is? Meaning, how many pieces can the texture in question be divided into? Is it a predetermined number of say, 100 smaller files regardless of the size of the original texture, or can it broken into pieces of say 64KB (just for example) and the more the merrier?

On Twitter, James Stanard said:

"A texture mip level is tiled into 64KB chunks--the same as the virtual memory page size. So you can reserve virtual memory for the whole texture and then commit one page at a time as needed."

 

[function]

On Twitter, James Stanard said:

"A texture mip level is tiled into 64KB chunks--the same as the virtual memory page size. So you can reserve virtual memory for the whole texture and then commit one page at a time as needed."

That sounds like the most efficient way to do it.

So with a 4bpp texture compressed down to 2bpp with BCPack, that should be 512 x 512 per tiles I guess. Smaller tiles if you had more bits per pixel, and/or zlib or no compression.

I wonder if BCPack allows you to pack tiles from different textures together if you'll use at the same time - e.g. colour and normal maps?

 

[iroboto]

Now that specs are released:
https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/16/21438782/sony-ps5-size-specs-dimensions-console-huge-large-big

PS5: Approx. 390mm x 104mm x 260mm (width x height x depth) 10546 cm^3
PSU: 350W
(excludes largest projection, excludes Base)
PS5: 4.5kg
Clockspeed: 2230 Mhz Peak
Processing Power: 10.23TF peak

PS5 Digital Edition: Approx. 390mm x 92mm x 260mm (width x height x depth) 9329 cm^3
(excludes largest projection, excludes Base)
PSU 340W
PS5 Digital Edition: 3.9kg
Clockspeed: 2230 Mhz Peak
Processing Power: 10.23TF peak

In comparison to Xbox Series X which is 300W and Series S that is
XSX: 301 mm × 151 mm × 151 mm 6863 cm^3
PSU: 300W
4.4KG
Clockspeed: 1825 Mhz
Processing Power: 12.10 TF

XSS: 275 mm × 151 mm × 65 mm 2699 cm^3
PSU: ? Help can't find
1.93 kg
Clockspeed: 1565 Mhz
Processing Power: 4TF

So bounding box volumes here, XSX is 65% the volume of PS5. XSS is 25%. The numbers are a little larger when comparing to the DE.
PSUs are about 20% better on XSX vs PS5. XSS is going to be likely much better probably in the 150 watt range
XSX is still lighter than PS5 as well.

I want to highlight in this thread, for some time, we talked about in great technical detail and length whether the high clocks leading to high power consumption and therefore more cooling required combined with the heat from high SSD and supporting cooling an external SSD at the same speed as well. The XSX ultimately is a larger chip by area, 20% more than PS5 and uses less power then PS5 due to much lower clocks. Therefore it's watts/mm^2 is significantly less and provides favourable cooling advantages combined with parametric yield advantages to XSX in this case. And I think the answer is clear, I cannot see another reason here but I think this discussion around this aspect is wrapped up.

It is likely that PS5 will cost more than XSX for these reasons on a straight BOM comparison. Packaging and shipping will also cost more given the bounding box volumes above.

 

[cheapchips]

XSX: 301 mm × 151 mm × 151 mm

The real question is why the XSX needs that extra 1mm cube of space. Gaaah, it's maddening!