Started up a new thread for the Gamasutra GameDev perspective discussion, since it should be worthy of it's own thread and have it's own set of caveats and quibbles: https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/...n-of-microsoft-xbox-scorpio-2017-04-12.60025/
maybe the CPU contention lowers a lot now that draw calls are almost "free". True test for bandwidth is seeing how many games run at 4k60. I remember one of the best games in history, Ninja Gaiden Black on the original Xbox and I couldn't believe it. It made you wonder ... how can the Xbox be moving these graphics at 60 fps? Yet it ran almos flawlessly. I guess that smart developers like sebbbi and so on could make games run at 4k60 and fine graphics, a la Ninja Gaiden. A 60 fps game competing against the best 30 fps games back then..was awesome.Another thing to throw into the mix is the possible hit from contention with the CPU. PS4 developer slides showed CPU prioritised accessed slicing up to 40 GB/s from the PS4's real world BW figures. If that were to scale with clockspeed, and there were no mitigating factors, could we be seeing PS4 Pro losing up to ~53 GB/s and Scorpio losing up to 58 GB/s from real world available BW for the GPU?
As I understand it (or potentially misunderstand it), in addition to higher total BW, a wider bus might be more likely to keep at least some needed data flowing to the GPU and therefore avoiding stalls ... though I'm not certain, and have even less idea if a potential theoretical advantage from additional width would make a real world difference.
Whatever, based on BW alone, Scorpio would seem to be in a better place to keep the CUs in the GPU busy even under adverse conditions due to CPU conditions. Speaking theoretically. And naively. And possibly ignorantly.
Another point I'm curious about is the bonus feature of forcing all filtering to AF (ed: for older titles), in case some code using bilinear and trilinear is actually depending on behaviors from that level of filtering.
maybe the CPU contention lowers a lot now that draw calls are almost "free". True test for bandwidth is seeing how many games run at 4k60. I remember one of the best games in history, Ninja Gaiden Black on the original Xbox and I couldn't believe it. It made you wonder ... how can the Xbox be moving these graphics at 60 fps? Yet it ran almos flawlessly. I guess that smart developers like sebbbi and so on could make games run at 4k60 and fine graphics, a la Ninja Gaiden. A 60 fps game competing against the best 30 fps games back then..was awesome.
Direct comparisons to Scorpio is not very useful, DF states that only settings that affected the GPU were set to Ultra on the Scorpio. CPU centric settings were not set to Ultra owing to the much weaker Jaguar CPU. Also don't think they ran with any MSAA at all.direct comparisons are difficult but at the same Ultra 4K, 4xMSAA settings I seem to be getting around the low to mid 80's
There are CPU centric settings on Apex? I thought they showed maxed cars in that demo?Direct comparisons to Scorpio is not very useful, DF states that only settings that affected the GPU were set to Ultra on the Scorpio. CPU centric settings were not set to Ultra owing to the much weaker Jaguar CPU. Also don't think they ran with any MSAA at all.
Direct comparisons to Scorpio is not very useful, DF states that only settings that affected the GPU were set to Ultra on the Scorpio. CPU centric settings were not set to Ultra owing to the much weaker Jaguar CPU. Also don't think they ran with any MSAA at all.
"The crazy story here is that we've gone over our PC ultra settings and for everything that's GPU-related, we've been able to max it - and that's what we're running at, 88 per cent," says Tector, pointing to the utilisation data at the top of the screen. Right beneath it is the anti-aliasing setting - 4x, or rather 8:4x using the Radeon EQAA hardware AA.
At the end of the BC article there's an interesting comment:
"Some of the enhancements may cause compatibility issues on a very small percentage of titles, meaning that certain improvements listed above may not apply to all games."
Andrew Goossen specifically mentions the number of CUs in play as an example, but perhaps they have tools to detect how data is being used so they can avoid problems of the kind you're describing?
There are CPU centric settings on Apex? I thought they showed maxed cars in that demo?
Oh. They've got these on XBO as well. Not sure if ramping up their skill levels and their aggressive/collision behaviour consistutes as additional CPU load. If true I never noticed frame dips for all these features on for XBOYou can change the skill level and aggressiveness of the AI as well as collisions on/off. I guess all that would have an impact on CPU.
Oh. They've got these on XBO as well. Not sure if ramping up their skill levels and their aggressive/collision behaviour consistutes as additional CPU load. If true I never noticed frame dips for all these features on for XBO
good finds!I've just checked and conveniently the game tells you what each setting impacts (it really is a superb port). So Reflections quality apparently has a "significant impact on both CPU and GPU". That's pretty interesting as it potentially means that there is a lower GPU load in the xbox demo than max PC settings if they have that dialled back.
There may be much better solutions for communicating between modules available to MS from AMD. Looking at how much inter CCX latency drops with faster memory (why - is it tied to the same clock?), MS might have had options to really work on pushing down latency and increasing IPC for any workloads that required off module cache access.
There is also Mirror Quality and WindShield reflection quality beside the general Reflection quality setting (which I suppose controls reflections on the surfaces of cars). Another option which I believe has an impact on CPU is Particle Effects Quality, which controls the density and number of particles.I should try these features out myself LOL, I have it installed but never bothered to try it yet.
Nothing was mentioned, but the ID buffer was specifically pointed out as a custom feature added to the PS4 Pro in Mark Cerny's interview with DF, so I think that specific form of primitive tracking is not likely to show up.
Has this already been addressed in this thread? As for PS4 Pro, checkerboard rendering is patented and the ID buffer has patent application.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.
Yeah they used "AMD hardware EQAA" I think at 2x or 4x.Direct comparisons to Scorpio is not very useful, DF states that only settings that affected the GPU were set to Ultra on the Scorpio. CPU centric settings were not set to Ultra owing to the much weaker Jaguar CPU. Also don't think they ran with any MSAA at all.