Middle Generation Console Upgrade Discussion [Scorpio, 4Pro]

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Even 8 and 9 TF cards "scrape by" for 4K rendering?

It depends. GTA V is solid for me, other games require scaling back the graphical settings. But as I said elsewhere, dropping 4K/UHD to 1440p isn't perceptible and nor is dropping game's graphics settings from Ultra to Very High or Very High to High. YMMV but for me, these compromises are in the zone of diminishing returns.

Then remember console APIs are flatter and leaner.
 

Well, from what I've gathered from Dsoup and other's comments the main difference here is that Tech blogs are benchmarking GPU's using "Ultra" settings and then saying that these cards, such as the 1080, can't run at 4k/60.

However, if you downgrade from "Ultra", then the cards can do 4k/60 just fine. Consoles have never run at the same sort of detailed settings comparative to PC's "Ultra" settings, so 6Tf should be just fine in that arena.

Feel free to correct me, Dsoup.
 
It will be very hard for some to do future comparisons. This is especially so when more game engines switch over to a more dynamic engine such as the latest Forza engine where every setting is dynamically adjusted on a frame by frame basis, and the gamers see no need to adjust away from the fully dynamic settings.
 
Well, from what I've gathered from Dsoup and other's comments the main difference here is that Tech blogs are benchmarking GPU's using "Ultra" settings and then saying that these cards, such as the 1080, can't run at 4k/60.

Generally tech sites at benching at the highest settings of a game but even then they're getting varied results, because the other parts of their test systems (CPU, RAM, HDD/SDD etc) are different. The bottom line is that I can run some games at 4K at a solid 60fps at their highest settings, however most games need to drop in resolution or a drop in graphical settings for a solid 60fps. I hope that helps.

I know it's difficulty not to compare consoles to PCs performance benchmarks because increasingly components share a common architecture but I don't think it's really helpful to do it for Scorpio, particularly as we know next to nothing about it.
 
Today's XBox One does 900p (or less) and is sold as a 1080p console. You will likely find a good number of Scorpio games at 85-90% of 4K and upscaled. At that pixel density, I can virtually guarantee almost no one will be able to tell a difference unless they sit in arms reach of their TV or they have an huge wall filling TV.

And as mentioned above, dynamic resolution appears to be the way forward for a lot of games anyway.
 
I'll take DOAX3 in 4K60.

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I assume MS is rolling with Rifty, so they have to hit 90fps for VR. They had better go to plaid with the CPU too. :rolleyes:
 
Plenty of games on consoles can't manage a solid 30fps, making 4K 60Hz a very stretching target but you know what I've learned from having a Geforce 1080-based gaming PC attached to my 4K TV for the past two weeks? Gaming on the TV with a controller at 8ft away the difference between 4K/UHD (3840x2160) and the step down 2560x1440p is imperceptible. I can see no difference between 4K and 1440p with solid AA.

So if Scorpio can't mange 4K 60H in all cases, dropping back to 1440p isn't going to be noticeable for most people. 1440p over 1080p is a dramatic reduction in perceivable jaggies.
How about 1080p with 4K user interface? Is it a possible choice for next-gen games?

1080p image still can have very good AA quiality (see uncharted 4, or even some CGI video). It can be resized 2x2 times to 4k without any blur
while 1440p can't because 4k is not an interger-multiple of 1440p. Besides 1080p images have more resource to improve image quility.

4K user interface can provide sharp texts and great detail of still images.
 
1440p scales well to 4K - at least it does on a X8505 Sony 4K TV, which is what I have. This TV will also do 50Hz and 60Hz in 1080p, 1440p and 2160p (UHD/4K). I've been diving into HDMI 2.0 here and there and the standard is surprisingly flexible with limits of picture and sound being predicated on the bandwidth of bus rather than arbitrary resolutions, frame rates or audio package.

Sony's X-series hardware is seemingly quite happy to take whatever you can throw at it, including resolutions that aren't part of the official standard like 1440p. When I get time I will see what else I can get it to do. Will it do 45Hz? 55Hz? Who knows.
 
There you go..another Spencer interview..but that at least make sense from beginning to end. Xbox is a platform in which Windows 10 PCs, Xbox Consoles (One, One S, Scorpio etc) are part of. The same exact game will run on everything at different levels of detail and resolution (besides VR which won't be One and One S compatible)

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articl...pio-and-xbox-one-s-sales-dont-actually-matter

GI.biz: Does Scorpio upscale those older games to 4K if you have a TV to play in 4K?

Spencer: So a couple things happen. Even on the Xbox One S, if it's plugged into a 4K TV, it is going to upscale the picture to 4K. It doesn't touch the pixels of the game. It just upscales everything. The video it supports is obviously true 4K. It has true 4K video streaming in Blu-ray. There are games that were written on Xbox One, and we continue to evangelize this tech of dynamic scaling - Halo 5's a good example - when Halo 5 runs it wants to max out at 1080p/60 frames per second or highest resolution/60 frames per second. As scenes get more complex, the vertical resolution will shrink... to keep the 60 frames per second. When that same game's running on Scorpio, because of the compute capability, it's effectively is going to run at its max resolution the whole time. And so you will see advantages like that when your Xbox One games are running on Scorpio. So that's why we continue to talk to developers about dynamic scaling because I think as compute capability goes up on the hardware, they kind of get it for free. Now, it's not going to make Halo 5 run with 4K pixels. The frame buffer is not a 4K frame buffer for the game. But it will run more solidly. And certain developers might go back and decide if they've built a 4K version for PC already for some of their games, they might go back and decide to enable a 4K version for the Scorpio Xbox when it launches.
 
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There you go..another Spencer interview..but that at least make sense
More or less although I've never seen a '4K version' of a PC game, they are designed to scale from minimum requirements upwards. But this re-enforces the statement from a few days back and this bodes well that in addition to upscaling, downscaling/sampling may be an option for 1080p TV owners. Render high, down-sample for a nicer output.
 
Seems like the most likely option. I doubt if you hooked up a 1080p tv to scorpio that it would actually reduce the framebuffer in the engine. The game engine will probably just run on "scorpio" settings, and the console will downscale as needed. Assuming that's what Xbox One does if you hook up a 720p tv.
 
There you go..another Spencer interview..but that at least make sense from beginning to end. Xbox is a platform in which Windows 10 PCs, Xbox Consoles (One, One S, Scorpio etc) are part of. The same exact game will run on everything at different levels of detail and resolution (besides VR which won't be One and One S compatible)

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articl...pio-and-xbox-one-s-sales-dont-actually-matter

Compute gets you a better looking bandwidth issue and bandwidth issues are a problem for VR I would think. Will there be a lossy standard of sorts needed for VR kind of like the psychoacoustics of MP3s ?

Uprezzing is the new Constant Bit Rate compression for games at 4k and dynamic scaling is the VBR version in a sense.
 
There you go..another Spencer interview..but that at least make sense from beginning to end. Xbox is a platform in which Windows 10 PCs, Xbox Consoles (One, One S, Scorpio etc) are part of. The same exact game will run on everything at different levels of detail and resolution (besides VR which won't be One and One S compatible)

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articl...pio-and-xbox-one-s-sales-dont-actually-matter

That is an absolutely massive delta between X1 and Scorpio. He used H5 as a example.... seriously, the IQ was all over the place and it was designed for that console. I can image how terrible something would look/perform on X1 that had NEO/Scorpio in mind.

Whenever I see min requirements on any title for the PC I know that min is 9/10 going to be an awful experience for anyone trying to play. Bringing that to the console with a grand canyon size gap in performance sounds nuts. Well, I guess I can read the postmortem on all this in 4 years time.
 
There you go..another Spencer interview..but that at least make sense from beginning to end. Xbox is a platform in which Windows 10 PCs, Xbox Consoles (One, One S, Scorpio etc) are part of. The same exact game will run on everything at different levels of detail and resolution (besides VR which won't be One and One S compatible)

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articl...pio-and-xbox-one-s-sales-dont-actually-matter

On that last point, it's become evident that the Xbox business is, ironically, no longer about selling Xbox units. Wrap your head around that - Phil Spencer does not care if you upgrade from Xbox One to Scorpio, so long as you're an Xbox user. Yes, there needs to be a certain number of boxes out there, but what matters most to Microsoft now is that you're an active user of Xbox Live and their ecosystem, purchasing games, DLC and playing online. Whether you're doing that through an Xbox One, an Xbox One S, Scorpio, a Windows PC or some other device is of little importance.


Duh. The fact that every word needs to be said specifically in order for people to finally realize this is astonishing.
 
how does it scale between xbone and scorpio? Say if you take the exact same assets and setting from a 1080p 30fps games but rendering at native 4K, is there enough processing power, bandwitdh and memory to do that job? Many people say a 1080 can't even do full 4k gaming on every game but xbone games compare to the pc versions don't runs at max settings. If Scorpio simply just take xbone games, which is like what they said 1 version of the game then brute force it to render at 4k.
 
Duh. The fact that every word needs to be said specifically in order for people to finally realize this is astonishing.

Unless Phil Spencer is an idiot (he isn't) it's also disingenuous to suggest Microsoft don't care what platform you own and buy games for. Xbox is obviously the preferred platform from Microsoft's perspective because they take a licensing fee cut on every new game sold, regardless of who made it, who publishes it or how it's sold. Windows 10 is preferable to somebody not having any Microsoft platforms but here Microsoft are a bit player next to Steam. Unless Microsoft also happen to be the publisher of a particular game, they get no revenue on Steam or other retail game sales. If you're on Windows 10 Microsoft want you buying games through their store so they get their retailer cut.

His statement is true for Microsoft published games but not true for games in general. But Microsoft never been shy about focussing on the ecosystem. Ecosystem lock-in will help with profit sustainability. In the old times of consoles, every new generation was huge gamble for everybody. You made the best product you could and you hoped for the best but you never really know if you'd bleed customers as they cut their investment and went to the other guy. Ephemeral software libraries were just how it was. Forwards/backwards compatibility will change that because consumers attachment to their games libraries will reduce this substantially.
 
Another interview with Phil Spencer to be over-analyzed
I'll bite. He is clearly blinkered if he thinks the PC is the platform where VR innovation should take place, unless Microsoft have already sided with Oculus/Facebook (which is quite likely).

Phil Spencer: “The best place for VR innovation is the PC,” Spencer says. “I think developers should still go focus on the PC, because I think that’s a great place to innovate. What we’re doing… is we’re able to take some of the PC innovation that we see… and bring it to the console space, to enable those magical experiences on Scorpio when it launches.”

It should be, but the reality is the high-end PC gaming market is small, and the VR market is already fragmented between two companies and one of them is clearly hostile to the other, which is very unfortunate given VR is still a hard sell for many and it really needs co-operation on selling the potential.

Of course there is zero console VR market right now, so I suppose he's technically correct by default (the best kind of correct!) in that the PC VR market is the only VR market! ;)
 
Well, on the pc if you own a vr headset you can write your own software, your own indie game. You'll probably see really fast iteration on ideas and concepts for VR even if they're not so-called AAA titles. So I think he's part right, but mass adoption of the hardware is really going to be a big thing in terms of how much money gets dumped into it, and I think that's where Sony will be a huge help to VR in general.
 
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