Middle Generation Console Upgrade Discussion [Scorpio, 4Pro]

[Rangers]

Yes, nobody expected every 2 years either, he keeps repeating that it's not going to be like GPU cards. It was never the question people really want to ask, the question is whether it will be every 3-4 years, ad whether it will be overlapping and not just BC.
I don’t know what the next thing is past Scorpio right now… I’m not trying to turn consoles into the graphics card market where every so often Nvidia or AMD come out with a new card, and if I want a little bit more performance I’m going to go buy that new card’, he added. ‘I think for consoles it’s different. I think you have to hit a spec that actually means something in an ecosystem of televisions and games.’

However, he refused to guarantee that there wouldn’t be Project Scorpio exclusive games in three or four years time, saying only that ‘It’s not our plan’.
So overlapping generations is not their plan? Because that would require allowing developers to ditch support for the original XB1. Any answer to this question puts them between a rock and a hard place.

Phil probably isn't sure/full of corporate wishy washy shit TBH. They're probably feeling it out, and will continue to after release. Eventually I have a hunch we WILL see Scorpio only software. At least I hope so.

The good thing from my perspective is by shooting the moon with Scorpio specs every outcome is better off. It doesn't matter IMO as much what you chose to do with the great hardware, the important thing is it's there.

Man, I was just thinking/drooling in my mind about the announcement "Halo 6, Scorpio only" the other day. The internet would break LOL. Imagine the visuals. But, there would be just as much crying and backlash too. Or more likely "Halo 6, Scorpio and Xbox One, Halo: 'Sidequel X', Scorpio only"

For sure I would love to see MS task a first party studio, perhaps a superfluous one even, with "here, do a Scorpio only game and push the visuals as far as it will go". It doesn't have to be a mainline franchise.

If they're not going to do Scorpio software at least at first, then they need to make sure to differentiate, IE add more to the Xbox One version for sure, than what we have seem with Pro so far IMO. Of course I guess the problem is MS can only control what they do, not third parties.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

"What we do for the legacy games, if you want to play a game from 2-3 years ago that hasn't been patched or tested, is we just run that at 1.6 gigahertz". They have no solution for running PS4 games on newer x86 CPUs yet and as far as I know Sony has no track record in using software solutions for this kind of problems.

Except there's now Boost mode which runs the higher clocks. A quick Google suggests about a 4-5% failure rate. Boost was always an option but Sony didn't want to confuse people or suffer potential negative media arouns Pro's launch, so left it out at launch. What would be very nice to see is separate CPU and GPU clocks, to see if the CPU is the problem or not. And what they learn from PS4 Pro might be applicable to designing a PS5. I do find it doubtful that a CPU change could fail on so many titles. A few maybe such is the nature of computers, but assuming games no longer hit the hardware directly (which is daft for muiltiplats in this day an age all running on x86), CPU code should scale elegantly with CPU.

 

[mosen]

Except there's now Boost mode which runs the higher clocks. A quick Google suggests about a 4-5% failure rate. Boost was always an option but Sony didn't want to confuse people or suffer potential negative media arouns Pro's launch, so left it out at launch. What would be very nice to see is separate CPU and GPU clocks, to see if the CPU is the problem or not. And what they learn from PS4 Pro might be applicable to designing a PS5. I do find it doubtful that a CPU change could fail on so many titles. A few maybe such is the nature of computers, but assuming games no longer hit the hardware directly (which is daft for muiltiplats in this day an age all running on x86), CPU code should scale elegantly with CPU.

Boost Mode changes CPU clock?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

All Boost Mode does is run the PS4 part of the Pro's hardware in higher clocks. Basically same hardware as a PS4 overclocked.

 

[mosen]

All Boost Mode does is run the PS4 part of the Pro's hardware in higher clocks. Basically same hardware as a PS4 overclocked.

It's good news but then it's only a hardware solution using the same Jaguar CPU. It dose not change what Cerny himself said to EuroGamer about using newer x86 CPUs.

 

[Jay]

Man, I was just thinking/drooling in my mind about the announcement "Halo 6, Scorpio only" the other day. The internet would break LOL. Imagine the visuals.

Visually I don't expect x1 to hold Scorpio back at all.
If you was talking game play mechanics, types etc, then depending on cpu it could.
For example graphically, they can aim at 1080p dynamic with lower fidelity, or 900p dynamic. Nothing stopping Scorpio going all out graphically.
In regards to x1 it really depends how much compromises willing to take.
I don't see Scorpio (graphically) being anywhere a big enough jump to cause it to be hampered.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

All Boost Mode does is run the PS4 part of the Pro's hardware in higher clocks. Basically same hardware as a PS4 overclocked.

I'm interested in the next (post 4.5) firmware to see if Sony implement changes to Boost mode to improve performance by unlocking more hardware and/or improving compatibility. I think Boost mode coming after launch is a matter of timing and time can solve a great many problems. Sony kept plugging away at the software PS2 emulation in PS3 for a few years. I guess it depends how much of a technical problem it is to solve and Sony's perception of this being important to consumers.

 

[MrFox]

They have no solution for running PS4 games on newer x86 CPUs yet and as far as I know Sony has no track record in using software solutions for this kind of problems.

They certainly do have a solution.
http://www.freshpatents.com/-dt20170202ptan20170031732.php

Cerny's solution is scalable to newer x86 archs as long as they have equal of better features. It's the best of both worlds at the cost of custom modifications to the CPU. It can use all, or some, or none of the new features, which allows higher performance with patches, or just clock increase without patch, or a fallback to exact hardware performance profile for flawless BC.

They did this with the GPU, and they are planning it for the CPU.


Looking at Fig.2 :
220 is full featured, everything enabled
242 is hardware limitation of cache, and clock
244 is masking of hardware features
246 is software, or at least microcode changes
248 is also software or microcode changes

 

[Tkumpathenurple]

I don't know enough about CPU architectures to make an educated guess.

Could the above approach be feasible if the PS5's CPU is Zen?

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I'm not saying BC is out of the window. What Cerny said do not preclude backwards compatibility but it confirmed that BC on PS5 is not conclusive either.

My misunderstanding then, I thought you were coming at it from the BC is out position.

Cerny specifically talked about CPU problems : "The origin of these problems is that code running on the new CPU runs code at very different timing from the old one, and that can expose bugs in the game that were never encountered before.".

I don't think anybody is disagreeing, in an earlier post Shifty posted a Boost mode failure figure earlier which was actually lower than I expected.

It's not about generation leap, he clearly speaks about running PS4 games on newer x86 CPUs and because of these problems they decided to use Jaguar on Pro. Even in order to run PS4 legacy games on Pro they clocked Jaguar at 1.6 GHz: "What we do for the legacy games, if you want to play a game from 2-3 years ago that hasn't been patched or tested, is we just run that at 1.6 gigahertz". They have no solution for running PS4 games on newer x86 CPUs yet and as far as I know Sony has no track record in using software solutions for this kind of problems.

And the yet is important because there are many solutions to this problem. JIT fixes, dynamic recompilation at loadtime, virtualised processors - we use them all and more where I work. I'm pretty sure Sony's goals for Pro was what they could do easily and quickly, at their price point on their timeframe, but that also gave a sufficient boost on 4K screens - with little work for devs. As I posted in response to Shifty, it will be interesting to see where (if anywhere) Sony take Boost mode. Will they make it more sophisticated, opening up more of Pro's hardware to older games to Boost them further. We'll need to wait for future firmwares to find out.

 

[Nisaaru]

If Sony has serious problems with games breaking on more powerful hardware they should demand bug fixes from the game companies to sell their products as these are clear bugs.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Will they make it more sophisticated, opening up more of Pro's hardware to older games to Boost them further. We'll need to wait for future firmwares to find out.

They should certainly experiment as it'll be useful experience for future products.

If Sony has serious problems with games breaking on more powerful hardware they should demand bug fixes from the game companies to sell their products as these are clear bugs.

Only if the games aren't written to the technical requirements. Otherwise, these games were written without Pro in mind and so the games shouldn't be expected to run on Pro (or PS5, or any other system than the single box they were developed for). This is where and why forwards compatibility needs to be designed for and implemented.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

They should certainly experiment as it'll be useful experience for future products.

Yup. Opening up the additional CUs really shouldn't be that impactful.

 

[mosen]

They certainly do have a solution.
http://www.freshpatents.com/-dt20170202ptan20170031732.php

Cerny's solution is scalable to newer x86 archs as long as they have equal of better features. It's the best of both worlds at the cost of custom modifications to the CPU. It can use all, or some, or none of the new features, which allows higher performance with patches, or just clock increase without patch, or a fallback to exact hardware performance profile for flawless BC.

They did this with the GPU, and they are planning it for the CPU.
View attachment 1871

Looking at Fig.2 :
220 is full featured, everything enabled
242 is hardware limitation of cache, and clock
244 is masking of hardware features
246 is software, or at least microcode changes
248 is also software or microcode changes

I read part of it and overall it seems to be interesting. I'll look forward to see how they utilize this methods in Zen.

 

[Nisaaru]

They should certainly experiment as it'll be useful experience for future products.
Only if the games aren't written to the technical requirements. Otherwise, these games were written without Pro in mind and so the games shouldn't be expected to run on Pro (or PS5, or any other system than the single box they were developed for). This is where and why forwards compatibility needs to be designed for and implemented.

Only because the problem doesn't pop up before the Pro I would consider pure chance from what can be extrapolated here. That means code just worked by accident and that timing changes due higher cpu speed or cache misses/stalls expose a broken resource synchronization.

We don't talk here about single task systems with pretty much determined timing.

 

[Jay]

Only because the problem doesn't pop up before the Pro I would consider pure chance from what can be extrapolated here. That means code just worked by accident and that timing changes due higher cpu speed or cache misses/stalls expose a broken resource synchronization.

We don't talk here about single task systems with pretty much determined timing.

whatever the reason, could be bug in sony's api, developers code, middlewere, firmware, in the end it was within the tolerance that allowed it to work on the target platform, so unless they coded out of spec then they've not done anything wrong, and also doesn't even mean its a bug.
unless you've seen sony's guidelines etc, and your saying they specifically did something they was not supposed to

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I think it was in this thread that there was some discussion about how 3rd party developers feel about Xbox Play Anywhere and whether there would be interest outside of Microsoft in doing it. Made more sense in this thread back when it was more about Project Scorpio.

Looks like some Indie developers are joining Capcom (RE7) in offering Xbox Play Anywhere titles (buy once, play on either Xbox or PC).

• System Era Softworks - Astroneer
• Daedalic Entertainment - Silence: The Whispered World 2
• Eclipse Games S.C. - Spheroids

It's a F2P game, but Bethesda's Fallout Shelter is also an Xbox Play Anywhere title. I wonder if their next AAA release will be an XPA title?

I saw them by chance when I went into the Microsoft Store to pre-order Halo Wars 2 just now. I wasn't expecting smaller indie developers to jump on this before Project Scorpio came out, but it makes a lot of sense that they would do so.

Regards,
SB

 

[mpg1]

Actually if you listen to Phil Spencer here (start at 2:05):

...you get the sense that waiting the extra year was primarily for the GPU spec..nothing mentioned about cpu at all.

 

[iroboto]

I think it was in this thread that there was some discussion about how 3rd party developers feel about Xbox Play Anywhere and whether there would be interest outside of Microsoft in doing it. Made more sense in this thread back when it was more about Project Scorpio.

Looks like some Indie developers are joining Capcom (RE7) in offering Xbox Play Anywhere titles (buy once, play on either Xbox or PC).

• System Era Softworks - Astroneer
• Daedalic Entertainment - Silence: The Whispered World 2
• Eclipse Games S.C. - Spheroids

It's a F2P game, but Bethesda's Fallout Shelter is also an Xbox Play Anywhere title. I wonder if their next AAA release will be an XPA title?

I saw them by chance when I went into the Microsoft Store to pre-order Halo Wars 2 just now. I wasn't expecting smaller indie developers to jump on this before Project Scorpio came out, but it makes a lot of sense that they would do so.

Regards,
SB

It's certainly a new marketing vector that is good to take advantage of while it's relatively not supported. It's hard to get your name out there. But with all these people (myself) rabid for XPA titles, just putting your title there gives it way more coverage than if you didn't, this obviously has a large impact on indies, but even some titles I wouldn't buy like RE7, I am now considering because of XPA.

 

[Jay]

Given that Scorpio is meant to be a premium product then I think that other aspects of the machine needs to be performant.
I've seen videos of how long it takes for a game to load, and load levels, and as a premium device I would like to see that improved a lot.
Maybe m.2 ssd 64/128gb that stores os, 5 last used games, and 5 last used apps. That would give the overall system a big boost.
Not the whole game, just enough to load the game so say 8Gb per title.

Maybe 5gb available to devs as slow secondary memory, that can be used as hdd cache as they see fit, loading in a level etc.
Api would also work for x1 and pc, as it's not got a performance spec associated with it, it's just slower than ram and faster/equal to hdd.