Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2020]
- Thread starter BRiT
- Start date
- Status
cheapchips
Veteran
It has 2bn more transistors than the XSX apu without the CPU and other bits. It has half the RAM, no storage and still only costs $100 less. That's before you get to Nvidia not having an x86 solution and the business aspects of dealing with Nvidia again. It's not a better solution for a $499 console than what MS did with AMD.
Unified cache in cpu makes developers life easier. Less exceptions to optimize for. This is similar to having all memory work at same speed and other conveniences like fast ssd with hw based decompression. In the end it's all about development efficiency. Similarly good ray tracing can boost developer and artist efficiency as less need to find special solutions for this type of light, that type of shadow or do hand tuning with light probes/wait for baking.
It's incredibly expensive to make triple a games. Anything to boost productivity is a win. Less time spent on tinkering around limitations leads to higher quality games with same budget or same quality game on lower budget. Even if ray tracing and rasterization could produce same result if one solution is quicker to implement, easier to maintain and easier to design game worlds for that leads to better games or same game while using less effort.
It's incredibly expensive to make triple a games. Anything to boost productivity is a win. Less time spent on tinkering around limitations leads to higher quality games with same budget or same quality game on lower budget. Even if ray tracing and rasterization could produce same result if one solution is quicker to implement, easier to maintain and easier to design game worlds for that leads to better games or same game while using less effort.
Last edited:
Yes a 3060Ti would have been a better solution in every possible way (same for ps5). Atleast if the console still had a shared 16GB ram. But much more expensive, and theres where the biggest problem lies. The console would never have been 499, the amd solution made that possible.
We were discussing AC Valhalla.
Game is graphically impressive in many areas. The characters and motions at times looks very human/real as if I was watching a live basketball game. Impressive indeed.
BillSpencer
Regular
That is true, I was watching it non fullscreen and for a split second I believed they were showing the game tested against a real life, thinking, "wow the graphics are pretty good for PS5" (looking at the PS4 footage) but it's small things like how the animations don't really blend that break the illusion often, or that players cannot move in 360 degrees but rather into 64 directions
ChuckeRearmed
Regular
So again XSX has some issues with alpha effects or something?
It seems the issue is on both series X/S when using the parametric angle, which requires more draw/pixels because of the wider view. John mentioned that it could be GPU related, but I don't believe that to be the case. If it was, then series X wouldn't have the same issue (within the same place) as the S because X has far more GPU compute on resolving such an issue. IMHO, I think its simply a bug in this case.
No I think John is right. XSX has to render it at native 4K here, 4 times more than XSS (1080p) while having 3 times more GPU. And it also drops in that mode on XSS so that sounds about right.
This is typical scaling however. ~3x more power often does lead to 4x more resolution at least looking at trending from other video cards when comparing video cards 1080p to their larger chips at 4K performance. It seems to be an workable. You don't need 16 TF of power to do 4K from 1080p, when by comparison PS5 is barely above 10 which is only 2.5 more than XSS.
I do believe something is GPU related on Xbox that is causing a form of bottleneck/hitching, but the power scaling argument you bring forward doesn't seem applicable outside of this particular scenario.
XBSX (52CU @1.825GHz) shouldn't have this issue against XBSS (20CU @1.565GHz) since it offers 3x performance over it. We seen other games where XBSS struggles with dips in certain scenes running @1080/1440p, but aren't present on XBSX @4K. I just don't see the GPU being the issue in this case, regardless of XBSX higher resolution. This really looks like a bug or at the very minimum something that could be easily fixed without sacrificing on-screen assets and IQ.
Yeah it's a bit of a puzzler. It's not the transparency IMO, because there are times when there is lots of transparent coverage and the FPS is a solid 60, and times when there's very little and it's down to 56 or so. I've attached a couple of screen grabs that should show this.
Little transparency, but consistent frame rate drops:
Even the damn hoop and backboard frame is transparent here, but it's still 60:
To me, the drops might seem to be when there are large numbers of the crowd in view, and in particular when multiple blocks of the audience come in to view (left, far, right, and the matching upper tiers).
There's something to do with the way the audience are handled, possibly in batches, that coincides with drops on the MS consoles IMO.
The most similar spec of the S and the X is the CPU. Incredibly crude CPU culling and / or high overhead submissions to the GPU?
Whatever the reason it's seems to be a CPU bottleneck on XSX, like in AC Valhalla. Hypothetically, if PS5 had a unified L3 cache, then it would be easier to explain PS5 edge here without invoking the usual bug or bad tools excuses.
There are certain third-party games that I do feel XBSX is running into cache and/or memory penalty issues which are causing certain latency issues and sudden frame drops. But with NBA 2K21 this isn't one of them.
- Status
Similar threads
