Digital Foundry Microsoft Xbox Scorpio Reveal [2017: 04-06, 04-11, 04-15, 04-16]

[turkey]

Reserving 4GB for OS sounds and most probably is bloated. Take away the dashboard and 3GB for OS sounds bloated too. Android and iOS devices have tens of apps always running in the background together with regular OS services and they do it within a fraction of that memory amount. Here's my Android phone's RAM usage:

Besides OS services I have facebook, facebook messenger, whatsapp, skype, telegram, hangouts, spotify, accuweather, dropbox, google maps and over a dozen more apps/services running in background.
All this is kept well below 2GB, and I know my phone is unnecessarily bloated with running apps. Scorpio isn't going to run even a third of this amount of apps concurrently.

Reserving 1GB for a 3840*2160*32bit dashboard sounds bloated as hell too, unless this dashboard is going to have tens of 4K layers (which would be just bad engineering regarding resource consumption).

Whatever is required for the OS to run will be massively over inflated out the outset, they will never be able to eat into the game allocation but can go the other way, 3gb instantly added to the game pool is more than enough at launch, I am sure if required they will go raiding the OS reserve but why put the OS under stress at launch?

I would say they probably also have game dvr taking memory, as well as game download cache to ensure a specific disk IO is available to the games when requested, plus any new services they are planning with the console we do not yet know about.

 

[Clukos]

I like how the mobo design is pretty much like Ps4 Slim, Ps4 and Ps4 Pro. Was the X1S similar too? In any case, it works and offers a smaller form factor, might be louder but it shouldn't be too problematic, my Pro is virtually silent 99% of the time. The mobo shot:

 

[Scott_Arm]

Reserving 4GB for OS sounds and most probably is bloated. Take away the dashboard and 3GB for OS sounds bloated too. Android and iOS devices have tens of apps always running in the background together with regular OS services and they do it within a fraction of that memory amount. Here's my Android phone's RAM usage:

Besides OS services I have facebook, facebook messenger, whatsapp, skype, telegram, hangouts, spotify, accuweather, dropbox, google maps and over a dozen more apps/services running in background.
All this is kept well below 2GB, and I know my phone is unnecessarily bloated with running apps. Scorpio isn't going to run even a third of this amount of apps concurrently.

...

I do think the OS reservation is probably going to be a waste, so maybe they can scale it back. From my point of view, it seems like they've attempted to match what most phones would have, maybe hoping that their app situation is going to pick up with scorpio. I have my doubts that the console will ever really take off as a platform for apps. A controller is just a bad interface for apps. They really need mouse and keyboard support if they want that part of the offering to take off.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a gig or two of that memory freed up for games in a couple of years.

 

[function]

Whatever is required for the OS to run will be massively over inflated out the outset, they will never be able to eat into the game allocation but can go the other way, 3gb instantly added to the game pool is more than enough at launch, I am sure if required they will go raiding the OS reserve but why put the OS under stress at launch?

I would say they probably also have game dvr taking memory, as well as game download cache to ensure a specific disk IO is available to the games when requested, plus any new services they are planning with the console we do not yet know about.

Yep, they'll need a substantial buffer to continue doing 4K recording into even during heavy parts of game IO from/to the HDD.

Game will have the lions share of HDD guaranteed while in focus, and dash writes will probably batched to avoid massive amounts of time thrashing the HDD head.

Edit: though personally I'd prefer they had a slimmer dash. Maybe they'll shave a GB off that in time ...

 

[mrcorbo]

Reserving 4GB for OS sounds and most probably is bloated. Take away the dashboard and 3GB for OS sounds bloated too. Android and iOS devices have tens of apps always running in the background together with regular OS services and they do it within a fraction of that memory amount. Here's my Android phone's RAM usage:

PS4/Pro uses the same (think Pro uses 3.5, actually, so they are a little leaner there than Scorpio). Two different companies having the same resource allocation for the same functions leads me to believe that that is the resource allocation required to provide those functions.

You expect but you really don't know.

Yep. Feeling comfortable enough with Occam's Razor on my side to be lazy. Burden of proof is on the more complicated explanation, so you can go find proof it's more expensive.

GDDR5X is only found on >$500 discrete graphics cards....Developing a GDDR5X memory controller (something AMD may not even have in their portfolio for semi-custom developments) just for Scorpio could have cost money and precious time.

Nvidia chose to implement GDDR5X on a 256-bit bus instead of GDDR5 on a wider bus. Why would they do this if it was more expensive?

These are two facts, but none of them proves the extra 4GB are essential for 4K rendering, or that Scorpio's GPU can even make proper use of them.

The fact that they actually did it and then said that that was why is pretty damn compelling evidence if you ask me.

 

[mrcorbo]

Going from 7 to 8 ghz GDDR5 has a relatively large increase on power draw though (from both the memory and the GPU), so in addition to the cost I think a power constrained system wouldn't want to go too far past the "knee of the curve" (I like that term, it sounds clever).

Is that enough of a concern that they would allow their system designed after careful analysis of the performance of games running on virtual hardware to get bottenecked on the speed bin of memory they chose.?

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Yep, they'll need a substantial buffer to continue doing 4K recording into even during heavy parts of game IO from/to the HDD.

Is it confirmed the console will do 4K recording and streaming?
Is there demand for 4K streaming Twitch and other stuff?

PS4/Pro uses the same (think Pro uses 3.5, actually, so they are a little leaner there than Scorpio. Two different companies having the same resource allocation for the same functions leads me to believe that that is the resource allocation required to provide those functions.

Mark Cerny says the regular PS4 Pro has 5.5GB available for the developers. The OS + video streaming takes 2.5GB.

Yep. Feeling comfortable enough with Occam's Razor on my side to be lazy.

I think you're half right. You do have the lazy, but not the Occam's Razor on your side.

Nvidia chose to implement GDDR5X on a 256-bit bus instead of GDDR5 on a wider bus. Why would they do this if it was more expensive?

Because that way they can create a cheaper SKU that uses GDDR5. Which they did.

 

[iroboto]

Is it confirmed the console will do 4K recording and streaming?

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/d...-five-ways-your-existing-games-will-be-better

4. Scorpio GameDVR support
Microsoft's plans for GameDVR on Scorpio are impressive - the hardware team is leveraging the new console's next-gen media block to provide 4K60 video capture with no performance hit, utilising the highly efficient HEVC codec for pristine visual quality. GameDVR works for back-compat titles too, which has some key benefits.

"Even though a lot of this content will be 1080p, we'll have the benefit of HEVC, the ultra high bit-rate, so we'll be able to do those retroactive screen captures at a really high quality."

Retroactive screen captures are a new featuring coming to the Scorpio GameDVR - users will have the ability to scan through their captures with 'to-the-frame' precision, allowing them to extract the precise screenshot they want. You won't be able to capture at 4K - there's no point for 1080p content - but our take on this is that Microsoft will be able to use the same level of video encoding bandwidth on 1080p video, meaning better quality.

Is there demand for 4K streaming Twitch and other stuff?

Still waiting on news on whether Scorpio will be able to 4K stream to streaming services.

 

[mrcorbo]

Is it confirmed the console will do 4K recording and streaming?

Yes. It's in one of the articles.

Mark Cerny says the regular PS4 Pro has 5.5GB available for the developers. The OS + video streaming takes 2.5GB.

There's 1GB of RAM attached to the secondary SoC, so the sytem has 9 total GB of RAM. 9 - 5.5 = 3.5. From the PS4 Pro interview on DF with Mark Cerny.

"We felt games needed a little more memory - about 10 per cent more - so we added a gigabyte of slow, conventional DRAM to the console," Cerny reveals, confirming that it's DDR3 in nature. "On a standard model, if you're switching between an application, such as Netflix, and a game, Netflix is still in system memory even when you're playing the game. We use that architecture because it allows for a very quick swap between applications. Nothing needs to be loaded, it's already in memory."

Some might say it's an extravagant use of the PS4's fast GDDR5 memory, so the extra DDR3 memory in the Pro is used to store non-critical apps, opening up more RAM for game developers.

"On PS4 Pro, we do things differently, when you stop using Netflix, we move it to the slow, conventional gigabyte of DRAM. Using that strategy frees up almost one gigabyte of the eight gigabytes of GDDR5. We use 512MB of that freed up space for games, which is to say that games can use 5.5GB instead of the five and we use most of the rest to make the PS4 Pro interface - meaning what you see when you hit the PS button - at 4K rather than the 1080p it is today."

I think you're half right. You do have the lazy, but not the Occam's Razor on your side.

And yet here I've clearly read more material than you have and are therefore more informed on the subject at hand than you are. Maybe I'm just focusing my efforts on things that are worthwhile.

Because that way they can create a cheaper SKU that uses GDDR5. Which they did.

Makes no sense. 384 bit bus > 256 bit bus. There's your cheaper SKU.

 

[Rikimaru]

In any case, it works and offers a smaller form factor, might be louder but it shouldn't be too problematic, my Pro is virtually silent 99% of the time.

PSU cooling does not look optimal.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

4. Scorpio GameDVR support
Microsoft's plans for GameDVR on Scorpio are impressive - the hardware team is leveraging the new console's next-gen media block to provide 4K60 video capture with no performance hit, utilising the highly efficient HEVC codec for pristine visual quality. GameDVR works for back-compat titles too, which has some key benefits.

"Even though a lot of this content will be 1080p, we'll have the benefit of HEVC, the ultra high bit-rate, so we'll be able to do those retroactive screen captures at a really high quality."

Retroactive screen captures are a new featuring coming to the Scorpio GameDVR - users will have the ability to scan through their captures with 'to-the-frame' precision, allowing them to extract the precise screenshot they want. You won't be able to capture at 4K - there's no point for 1080p content - but our take on this is that Microsoft will be able to use the same level of video encoding bandwidth on 1080p video, meaning better quality.

First they say the media block provides 4K60 capture with no performance hit, but then they say "a lot of this content will be 1080p" and "you won't be able to capture at 4K", hum...

Better 1080p with HEVC at high bitrates definitely makes sense, but constantly recording at 4K60 doesn't IMO. Even if there's no performance hit, letting users save their footage at 4K60 would fill the 1TB drive very quickly.

Perhaps they'll allow caching into 4K60 when a game enters photo mode, so that users can select those screenshots at full resolution.

There's 1GB of RAM attached to the secondary SoC. They have leveraged this in PS4 Pro to lower the amount of system ram they need. From the PS4 Pro interview on DF with Mark Cerny.

Original PS4 has 256MB for the same effect, which is a small cache for app swapping (not for actively running apps in the background as you and other have suggested), and it's a measly single DDR3 chip using a 16bit bus, so 3.2GB/s maximum, connected through the southbridge.
That's 100x lower than Scorpio's GDDR5 bandwidth. Quite a bit different in both functionality and cost, wouldn't you think?

And yet here I've clearly read more material than you have and are therefore more informed on the subject at hand than you are.

Yet you didn't know the additional RAM chip already existed in the original PS4, nor what it was meant for.
If you're reading more, it seems you're just not paying enough attention.

Nvidia chose to implement GDDR5X on a 256-bit bus instead of GDDR5 on a wider bus. Why would they do this if it was more expensive?

Because that way they can create a cheaper SKU that uses GDDR5. Which they did.

Makes no sense. 384 bit bus > 256 bit bus. There's your cheaper SKU.

Lol yes, you should send an e-mail to nvidia saying their GTX 1070 "makes no sense" and they should've created the GP104 with a 384bit bus instead.
They'll learn a lot from your wisdom.

 

[3dilettante]

The wording here:

would seem to suggest that the ID buffer (or at least something very similar) will be present, since there's not much else that would count as "hardware support" for checkerboarding.

The wording I'm going with is from Cerny about the PS4 Pro.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/d...tation-4-pro-how-sony-made-a-4k-games-machine

Our solution to this long-standing problem in computer graphics is the ID buffer. It's like a super-stencil. It's a separate buffer written by custom hardware that contains the object ID.

AMD has been generally consistent about not propagating elements the console designers consider to be their custom hardware to the competing platform, which is why I think it's less likely for a parallel back-end path alongside to the depth buffer to show up.

It's not clear if this tweak will necessarily show up in Vega, either.
Sony's front-end enhancements were later shared in AMD products, but I'm not sure that the PS4's volatile flag did.

Maybe if Sony and Microsoft had the exact same idea, AMD might not be in the position to tell either of them of the coincidence, but the odds of that seem low to me.

I already posted a quote from Mero 2033 dev
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/d...its-really-like-to-make-a-multi-platform-game

Are they talking about the same thing, besides this being D3D12 rather than 11?
The Metro devs are talking about writing buffer commands, while Microsoft was talking about CPU instructions. Writing to a buffer which would take at least a few instructions, and DX12's still higher-level than raw command packets. Some of its functions would break down into multiple commands, and items like pipeline state changes can involve more expensive synchronization routines if it requires back-and-forth coordination with the command processor.
Even so, that CPU-centric view means it's cheap for the CPU to fire off a lot of state changes. The GPU command processor's burden and the overhead in changing the context of the GPU would be more prominent as a result.

Why GDDR5 instead of GDDR5X, lower cost, probably bigger production now and in in future... and (I ask) lower latency on bigger bus that is better in emulating ESRAM ?!?

Is there a GDDR5X manufacturer besides Micron? Single-source can be a reason to avoid it, and then there's capacity/cost and the fact that Scorpio was going to be a decently large die regardless of bus width. GDDR5X justifies itself in the high Gbps ranges that GDDR5 can't really hit, but Scorpio seems to be operating in a range that doesn't suffer too much with GDDR5.

 

[BRiT]

PSU cooling does not look optimal.

That's not what @MrFox says.

 

[eastmen]

Just look how much room that bluray drive takes up. Damn optical media !

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Well that was a turbulent read.

 

[iroboto]

First they say the media block provides 4K60 capture with no performance hit, but then they say "a lot of this content will be 1080p" and "you won't be able to capture at 4K", hum...

Better 1080p with HEVC at high bitrates definitely makes sense, but constantly recording at 4K60 doesn't IMO. Even if there's no performance hit, letting users save their footage at 4K60 would fill the 1TB drive very quickly.

Perhaps they'll allow caching into 4K60 when a game enters photo mode, so that users can select those screenshots at full resolution.

It's poor English.

4. Scorpio GameDVR support
Microsoft's plans for GameDVR on Scorpio are impressive - the hardware team is leveraging the new console's next-gen media block to provide 4K60 video capture with no performance hit, utilising the highly efficient HEVC codec for pristine visual quality. <-- 4K 60 recording for XBOX titles/Scorpio titles


GameDVR works for back-compat titles too, which has some key benefits."Even though a lot of this content will be 1080p, we'll have the benefit of HEVC, the ultra high bit-rate, so we'll be able to do those retroactive screen captures at a really high quality." <-- Improved BC title recording, all BC DVR content will be at 1080p

Retroactive screen captures are a new featuring coming to the Scorpio GameDVR - users will have the ability to scan through their captures with 'to-the-frame' precision, allowing them to extract the precise screenshot they want. <-- Still referring to BC DVR screen capture feature.

You won't be able to capture at 4K - there's no point for 1080p content - but our take on this is that Microsoft will be able to use the same level of video encoding bandwidth on 1080p video, meaning better quality. <-- Still referring to BC DVR screen capture feature.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

That's not what @MrFox says.

You can't make any assessment without seeing the case and the intakes and vents. But this aspect isn't rocket science.

 

[mpg1]

You can't make any assessment without seeing the case and the intakes and vents. But this aspect isn't rocket science.

Apparently there are no vents on top. Air is to be pushed out the back.

 

[Scott_Arm]

First they say the media block provides 4K60 capture with no performance hit, but then they say "a lot of this content will be 1080p" and "you won't be able to capture at 4K", hum......

Current Xbox One titles that output 1080p.

Btw, it can also capture in HDR, which is cool.

Also integrated is the latest AMD media block, meaning that the Xbox GameDVR gets an upgrade to 4K60 using the next-gen HEVC codec - you can even capture your content in full HDR.

 

[AlNom]

Well that was a turbulent read.

Too much fan noise?