Middle Generation Console Upgrade Discussion [Scorpio, 4Pro]

[iroboto]

It seems to me that HBCC refers to a feature that enables using the higher performance local video memory that is on board a graphics card or GPU package more intelligently. Since Scorpio is probably not going to have a separate pool of memory dedicated to the GPU, this feature probably doesn't apply.

RPM will almost certainly be in there, though, if it's what I think it is, since it's in the PS4 Pro's APU.

Hmm, but from what I see and read the Cache and the Controller are 2 separate items. HBCC touches both system and video ram, and network storage... it's writing the values it wants to the HBC -- at least this is my understanding. If it's just a controller without a cache I would agree on your statement without conflict.

 

[iroboto]

http://www.dsogaming.com/news/amds-...mprove-performance-by-almost-100-minimum-fps/

I get what you're getting at and the point is well made but... in another perspective Isn't this more reason to have it for consoles trying to push 4K when you really think about it.

edit: hmm maybe not.
I guess you won't get a stall if you've optimized around it. You'd get a stall when you're vram limited and pulling from system ram. You'll get a terrible stall if you have to pull from HDD or from network storage (I assume this would include HDD).

edit2: but then again, if games are moving to 4K, ultra level textures aren't enough. You need UHD/4K textures to really make that difference everyone is looking for. hmm..

 

[MrFox]

I'm thinking, in the context of Vega for PC, this addition might be necessary for HBM2 cards to compete with GDDR5X/6. There's still a major issue putting a large amount of HBM2 as the cost goes up exponentially (it impacts yield of the whole GPU). I'm guessing we'll see HBM2 cards having half as much memory as their GDDR5X/6 competitors for the same price target. So HBCC would bring them to parity, giving AMD the best of both worlds.

For Scorpio, maybe this could have allowed a 6GB pool of GDDR5(x), and 8GB DDR4 on a narrow bus? It would have reached closer to the PS4 Pro BOM but with an effective 14GB instead of 9GB. It doesn't fit with the motherboard we saw though. And it's a mess to code for. And too many I/Os on the SoC. Oh well.

 

[iroboto]

I'm thinking, in the context of Vega for PC, this addition might be necessary for HBM2 cards to compete with GDDR5X/6. There's still a major issue putting a large amount of HBM2 as the cost goes up exponentially (it impacts yield of the whole GPU). I'm guessing we'll see HBM2 cards having half as much memory as their GDDR5X/6 competitors for the same price target. So HBCC would bring them to parity, giving AMD the best of both worlds.

This part certainly resonates well with the situation at hand.
lol not too sure about the other half of your response, it would be easier to for 12GB and forgo HBCC entirely if this is all HBCC is really meant to do. Which I've begun to lean towards. I guess the question becomes, how much memory do you actually need if we move to hi-res textures, and can the HBCC do wonders if you have to pull textures off the HDD (looking at open world games at 4K textures)

 

[function]

Would be amazing for APUs with a single 2GB pool of HBM2 though... come on Low Cost HBM, you are needed ....

For Scorpio, perhaps a pool of nvram to texture from could add some capability for a relatively low cost. 64 GB eMMC to get around lousy laptop HDD performance?

 

[iroboto]

Would be amazing for APUs with a single 2GB pool of HBM2 though... come on Low Cost HBM, you are needed ....

For Scorpio, perhaps a pool of nvram to texture from could add some capability for a relatively low cost. 64 GB eMMC to get around lousy laptop HDD performance?

lol sounds costly in terms of yield. But I suppose that they have several years to get it right if this was indeed the direction that they want to head.

 

[Jay]

if I remember correctly, the HBCC can stream from hdd also, it's a way to keep from ballooning Gpu mem. Especially as we move into 4k assets etc.
until they go into detail about how HBCC works I think an aspect of it is like tiled resources.
tiled resources v2, as I'm sure that the version we have now has limitations that possibly has limited it's uptake or didn't make it worth while to implement into the engine.

if I remember wrongly and it can't stream from hdd, then it would still allow for lower mem usage overall, but would have to stream a bit more into memory than otherwise would have to.

I was disappointed by Caspian, that they didn't go into more details about the things they've already announced. Maybe there's other talks about it this week. Can't remember what amd has lined up.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Well Scorpio looks more and more like a new generation and not a mid generation update at all...

I agree but that's not Microsoft's narrative. That said I could easily believe they'll begin treating Xbox One as a second class citizen as Scorpio's launch approaches; Microsoft have never been sentimental about products that aren't as doing as well as they'd like and developer policies are easy to change. If Microsoft think they can one up Sony by throwing Xbox One under a bus, they'll do it.

 

[function]

lol sounds costly in terms of yield. But I suppose that they have several years to get it right if this was indeed the direction that they want to head.

I suppose it would be expensive, but I was thinking for the high end APUs...

Go for a single stack, perhaps only one dram die (for 1GB), maybe integrate the logic die from under the stack and into the APU (single 256-bit interface). That way you're only stacking one dram die and one APU die, so hopefully that'd help yields ....? *shrug*

Just seems a pity for an APU potentially as fast as the PS4 to be stuck on a 128-bit DDR4 interface.

 

[function]

I agree but that's not Microsoft's narrative. That said I could easily believe they'll begin treating Xbox One as a second class citizen as Scorpio's launch approaches; Microsoft have never been sentimental about products that aren't as doing as well as they'd like and developer policies are easy to change. If Microsoft think they can one up Sony by throwing Xbox One under a bus, they'll do it.

I don't think MS will have the power to get developers to switch away from PS4. That, more than MS's loving and nurturing nature for their products (WP7, WP8, WP10, Zune, Nokia/Lumia, Zune, XNA ...) will be what secures a medium term future for X1, I think.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I don't think MS will have the power to get developers to switch away from PS4. That, more than MS's loving and nurturing nature for their products (WP7, WP8, WP10, Zune, Nokia/Lumia, Zune, XNA ...) will be what secures a medium term future for X1, I think.

I agree entirely, but Microsoft sometimes.. increasingly more often it feels.. do things which they think is a good idea but which actually don't pan out how they'd predicted.

 

[mpg1]

take with a grain of salt but Jez Corden, a Windows Central writer, who says he recently received some Scoprio info believes Scorpio will run BF1 @ 4K...

https://twitter.com/JezCorden/status/837001516485656577

 

[MrFox]

This part certainly resonates well with the situation at hand.
lol not too sure about the other half of your response, it would be easier to for 12GB and forgo HBCC entirely if this is all HBCC is really meant to do. Which I've begun to lean towards. I guess the question becomes, how much memory do you actually need if we move to hi-res textures, and can the HBCC do wonders if you have to pull textures off the HDD (looking at open world games at 4K textures)

Ha, yeah sorry it's just my mental diarrhea.

At this point we know enough to guess most of the specs with reasonable certainty, but I'm trying to explore anything that could be surprising. It's fair to expect MS kept something under secrecy to unveil at E3, at least something to counter balance Sony's ID Buffer because they still act very confident they'll take the performance lead in a noticeable way. I remain unconvinced 40% more memory and TFLOPS is enough for a significant visual advantage unless they have something more up their sleeve.

So anything new being unveiled about Vega is at least a potential candidate.

 

[KirkSi]

take with a grain of salt but Jez Corden, a Windows Central writer, who says he recently received some Scoprio info believes Scorpio will run BF1 @ 4K...

https://twitter.com/JezCorden/status/837001516485656577

Hope he's right, Battlefield is my most played game franchise since BF3 and I'm really enjoying BF1 so far. In that twitter thread though he's talking about 4K PC ultra equivalent settings. While I would love it to be true I flippin' doubt it. It's got to be 60fps for a start as the XBox One version is (supposed to be anyway, think it averages 50+ most of the time). I'd be very happy if it could do 4K, 60fps with PC high equivalent settings, but unless MS have kept something very significant up their sleeves for the Scorpio reveal I doubt it could do ultra.

 

[mpg1]

Hope he's right, Battlefield is my most played game franchise since BF3 and I'm really enjoying BF1 so far. In that twitter thread though he's talking about 4K PC ultra equivalent settings. While I would love it to be true I flippin' doubt it. It's got to be 60fps for a start as the XBox One version is (supposed to be anyway, think it averages 50+ most of the time). I'd be very happy if it could do 4K, 60fps with PC high equivalent settings, but unless MS have kept something very significant up their sleeves for the Scorpio reveal I doubt it could do ultra.

yeah in that thread I couldn't tell if he meant "both" when referring to 4K and ultra settings... or 4K and 1080p ultra settings....

the only thing is....I'm skeptical EA would go back and do a Scorpio version of BF1...so he may just be applying other knowledge he has that that game could run at 4K on Scorpio

 

[Rangers]

I agree but that's not Microsoft's narrative. That said I could easily believe they'll begin treating Xbox One as a second class citizen as Scorpio's launch approaches; Microsoft have never been sentimental about products that aren't as doing as well as they'd like and developer policies are easy to change. If Microsoft think they can one up Sony by throwing Xbox One under a bus, they'll do it.

Too be fair, PS4/XB1 will be 4 years old in fall 2017. Console generations used to last 5 years, and original Xbox lasted 4 (so Xbox One until Scorpio is just as long). Slowly beginning some sort of phase out of XB1 in 2018+ wouldn't be all that egregious. The Xbox 360 lasting eight years and PS3 7 was an outlier.

I'm skeptical EA would go back and do a Scorpio version of BF1

Wouldn't 4k (changing nothing else) be criminally easy? And doing basically a PC max setting version should be just twiddling some knobs as well to some extent. In essence, all these consoles+PC are just different PC's anymore.

Of course for later games I'd want far more substantive changes.

 

[Rangers]

Jez ‏ @JezCorden 46m46 minutes ago
Starting to look like Scorpio will be called "Xbox One Something."

@JezCorden
@Ells144 Xbox One Pro, Elite or something like that

Jez ‏ @JezCorden 46m46 minutes ago
@SamuelTolbert They keep referring to it as an Xbox One family device o:

Also apparently Phil said this on a podcast today

Phil did confirm they plan to sell more S units than Scorpio, but he knows the hardcore will migrate to Scorpio and that that's where a majority of games will be sold. Fifa/Madden/Minecraft casuals will stick with S.

Probably lost in translation but he expects MORE games to be sold on Scorpio than S?

Hey, I'm desperate for news here.

 

[mpg1]

So he is insinuating that we will see/get info of the new Star Wars game on Scorpio sooner than next month??

 

[MrFox]

"Fifa/Madden/Minecraft casuals will stick with S."

It's possible some people might perceive this the wrong way... Like the filthy casuals they are.

 

[Jay]

Probably lost in translation but he expects MORE games to be sold on Scorpio than S?

something I never really gave any thought to.
the hardcore gamer buys more games, and their the ones that are more likely to pick up a Scorpio.
their likely to buy more variety of games apart from the cod, FIFA, maddens.
attach rate for them is much higher.