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

Do we really understand the significance of fp16 on performance? Maybe it simply was not crucial or that beneficial... Certainly MS had this available as an option and decided it was not worth the floor plan space or cost.

 

30% overall improvement or only in some specific process?

 

Is it really not that obvious I meant the double rate option given we were talking about Scorpio lacking double-rate FP16 and that being the only advantage PS4 has in the context of comparing the two machines? :shrug:

I'll edit my post to make that clear.

 

Would have been better if they had detailed the feature set really. There's ambiguity to me with even Tonga features.

Edit: i.e. It looks like they grabbed features outside of the compute processing, thus ensuring compatibility on what things are run vs how they are shuffled around the processor.

 

30% on a specific process...and using FP16 not specifically Double-Rate FP16 so this would apply To Scorpio to..
http://www.frostbite.com/2017/03/4k-checkerboard-in-battlefield-1-and-mass-effect-andromeda/

In the grand scheme of things...this isn't much at all...and would apply to Scorpio.

 

Huh. Good catch @Ike Turner.

 

I'm still skeptical we will even see much checkerboarding techniques used on Scorpio...it mean it's ultimately up to the developer but it seems Microsoft created Scorpio in mind with scaling Xbox One games to 4K. I'd say we would see techniques like dynamic res before we see checkerboard.

 

Dynamic res would be more flexible and portable, certainly.

What would be nice is if MS developed something like nVidia Ansel for those folks who like taking screenshots, and offer a standard library of sorts for developers to plug into their games.

 

https://www.google.ch/amp/www.eurog...6-hands-on-with-mantis-burn-racing-on-ps4-pro

But dual fp16 helped mantis burn racing developer to have 4k native on PS4 Pro coming from a 1080p PS4 title but loosing 2xMSAA of the PS4 version.

It was before the gamasutra Mark Cerny Interview.

 

It seems engines will use more and more this FP16x2 as also Switch has and future AMD cards too... (as NVIDIA)... will see the differences between Scorpio and Ps4pro

 

I'm fairly certain that using double-rate fp16 on some shaders isn't the primary factor for the jump from 1080P to 4K...especially on a game that doesn't really have much going on display...and the Eurogamer quote is factually wrong:

PS4 (GCN1/2) doesn't have support for single-rate 16Bit ops..

 

He means compared to a single op ( which is naturally only fp32) on PS4.

 

The simulation material was very interesting. I think folks that haven't used extensive simulation for decision making may be sleeping on the value that this has. MS stated that they essentially see significant IPC gains in Scorpio compared to PC (unknown whether that is Polaris, NVidia, or Vega - likely Polaris). I just wonder in this context what "significant" means. I could see 10% being significant or something like 30%+. The 1 data point that we have is the Scorpio outperforms (perhaps slightly) 6.5 NVidia TFs.

 

MS loves Dynamic Resolution, so much that they helped DICE develop it for Frostbite (and they have one of the best implementation in Halo 5)

 

The Dev only talk about this and nothing else in the article and it was not a public information before Mark Cerny talked about it...

The confirmation arrive with the gamasutra interview.

 

It was an information under NDA...

 

Honestly what was Microsoft thinking. It would have been way better to release a 4.3Tflop console with a bunch of secret sauces. Idiots.

 

There's no dev talking here. It's all Richard Leadbetter reporting on what he might have understood. And there's only one mention of DR FP16 in the whole thing. I wouldn't concluded anything based on that..as a matter of fact the whole thing is a whole bunch of words that don't explaining anything about how things where achieved... They used Packed FP16 for a bunch of shaders.. that's Cool... I guess but that sure as hell didn't magically enable them to jump from 1080P w/2XMSSA to 4K no-MSSA.

 

It was not a public information at the moment. It is the Mantis burn racing who talk to him about this information and it was one element to help have a 4k native resolution coming from a 1080p 2xMSAA...

And it is very clear reading the article...

 

Exactly. One tiny element compared to dropping 2XMSAA for example and most probably tons of other optimisations.