Middle Generation Console Upgrade Discussion [Scorpio, 4Pro]
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the idea of a Neo Geo like console or something as "cool" as the Saturn or even the PS2/GC, classic retro consoles is my ideal of a console. Well, Scorpio isn't that though, 'cos I don't know what would be your ideal console, I wanted a tablet like console -even if it is very capable-, which you can use everywhere.It's a FANtasy by a FANatic.In other words, wishful thinking. Not something Microsoft are likely planning.
Regards,
SB
Where games are tailored to the type of use you give to your console. If you are in tablet mode you could choose a simple option saying 1080p 60 fps, optimised by developers. When you are at home you could play at 4k 60 fps whatever. 2 or 3 simple options for console gamers without the hassle of additional settings.
maybe NX will be that. Almost everyone loves to play Nintendo games, question is whether there will be support from other companies as well, or F-Zero, which is one of my favourite series ever --though I am not into Zelda or Mario and so on.
Neo's non announcement was a surprise for me and so was scorpio's. I never expected that tbh. I guess Sony was going to wait anyways, but the confidence with which the console was presented makes me think they knew Neo and NX are set to be launched this year, if that wasn't the case I don't see why they decided to announce it now, because the slim is going to sell less.
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I think Dave confirmed the image isn't fake, although his wording was puzzling --as a non native I had to re-read it several times and even so I am not entirely sure how to rephrase or rebuild his words. Still I don't think it is a 384 bits bus.Theories including HBM and/or DDR4 would mean the detailed render of the motherboard is completely fake, while the board they have shown makes a lot of sense and has all the credible details. What strategic advantage would they gain from doing this? If it was using HBM in any way, it would be a big PR win to show it, or say it. First console using an interposer.
I think it's a great B3D tradition, the search for the Secret Sauce!
They set the narrative that 6tflops was needed for true 4k gaming. If they come out with a 6.2tflop machine they will say they went even further. If something happens and they hit 7tflops that would obviously be better. But in reality anything over 6 would be a positive for them.
If ps4 neo is 4.4tflops and MS is able to hit 6.4 they can say they have 2tflops more of power than neo.
I am also sure Sony is following what ms says closely. While neo may launch this year based on newer rumors there may still be some time to tweak clocks if thy feel they have too and perhaps MS doesn't want to have to change clocks and disabled parts but want a large advantage anyway.
We have so many conventions between now and Scorpio launching that its silly to get hung up on 6tflops
There is a lot we don't know
1) That is certainly an option. But how much ram does scorpio have ? they haven't announced anything. Todays consoles have 8 gigs with 3 or 4 of it going towards the system reserve. So Quantum break has 4 or 5 gigs to use. If scorpio has 16 gigs , even if 6 of it is reserved there is still 10 gigs for the game, so it would double the ram. Which would mean much higher quality textures and more textures increasing the look of the game off the bat. If we get 24 or 32 gigs obviously they would be able to add a lot more . With today's graphics cards even at $250 coming with 8 gigs of ram I think MS will launch with at least 16 gigs but I'm thinking depending on bus size 24 or 32 gigs is more likely
2)I think 720p 30 fps is will be the floor . Obviously at some point the xbox one wont get ports of the games. I'm guessing in year 3 of scorpio which will be year 7 of the xbox one.
3)They already do this. They make high res models and textures and turn them into normal maps. They make multiple quality levels for consoles and pc already. For 3rd party games they already have to make textures and assets for the 40m+ selling ps4 and the xbox one is over 20m+ and both are growing. So I doubt the cost will be all that great
4) It really depends , you could have been playing 4k games at good settings since 2013 with the 290x.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10326/the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-preview/2
you can see the 290x up to the 1080 performance here. The games are all running at 4k and at much higher quality levels than the console editions of the games. So you can adjust accordingly. We don't know what scorpio will be based on. the 290x is very old in the gcn family. We don't have Polaris benchmarks yet (3 days to go) which may give us a clearer idea. But it could also be small vega which could offer more changes from Polaris.
5)Well if you stay at 1080p 60fps your looking at 3-4 times the power of current systems. That's just tflops. we don't know the rops or other specs , we don't know ram or anything else . But yes it should offer better fidelity and more graphical effects at 1080p. IT should offer a lot better.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
It won't be the Scorpio generation, but there's possibilities for the one a generation (or half-generations if we think of the traditional 6 year console cycle) or two after that.
There's the potential for an HBM equipped APU to be offered to OEM laptop/tablet manufacturers. The cost would likely be high (unsuitable for consoles) but the lower energy consumption and physical footprint of an HBM enabled APU could be appealing to certain segments of the laptop/tablet market. If that happens, and OEMs use it. It could potentially drive down the costs as volume increases and brings economies of scale into play.
In that scenario. It's possible that 1 or 2 consoles after Project Scorpio could see HBM (or some other 3D memory technology) come into play facilitating a living room console that is powerful enough and energy efficient enough to fit into a tablet.
However, I think it's unlikely except in a specialized case. As I think for the most part console manufacturer's are always going to want to make their device as powerful as they can with a 100-150 watt power budget.
However. That said, with consoles becoming scalable similar to PC. It's entire possible for a company to release a console that is, say a step or two down from whatever the current living room console is at the time. Being a tablet version of said console means it doesn't need to run games at 4k or even 1080p necessarily.
If we were to hypothetically insert one into the Xbox lineup at the end of 2017 it could be something like this in terms of power.
Project Scoprio
Xbox One
Xbox tablet
With the Xbox tablet being less powerful than the Xbox One. With dynamically scalable games, the game would just scale to the resolution and graphics settings that would allow it to run comfortable on the tablet device.
Then again, with Microsoft's "Play Anywhere," This is already something you'll be able to do using any mobile Windows device capable of playing a game. Which makes me wonder. Will the UWP version of Forza 6: Apex run on the Surface Book?
Regards,
SB
But that's not a critical mistake. 1.5 years to get their messaging right and the only people that know or care about it are enthusiasts. You are welcome to give MS a hard time about it, but it's pretty clear developers did not know Scorpio was coming. Most aren't following leaks, they found out at that event. To me that just means the discussion hasn't happened. The messages are mixed because it's still not defined. But we can't pre-order it yet. And it's not arriving for 1.5 years. Getting angry at them today seems immature to me when you have no stakes invested. I see it as confirmation bias, people don't like MS and they are looking for any reason to justify that opinion.Ah, you mean mistakes like mixed messages about Scorpio and 4k TV (etc)
It's very NOT like when people pre-ordered XBO and then found out about the policies around always on, DRM, etc, and MS began spinning to resolve damage control.
Real damage to Scorpio is limited unless they do not deliver what they promised. So I don't see a reason there to take risk on TFLOP messaging when they are already safely above margin on their nearest competitor.
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Great response, thanks.
I hope Microsoft drop support for the X1 sooner rather than later, because it's always going to be a limiting factor. My 5th question you answered, so if devs were to stay at the standard of 1080p/30fps, we'd get better fidelity than 1080p/60fps. This is an ambitious question but what would the visuals be like, close to CGI?
Is there any tech demos you could point me too that could estimate the result? The Samaritan Demo was said to be running on a 2.5tf system, do you believe that or believe it to be running on a more powerful system?
The Samaritan demo was on dual gtx 980 tis . So I certainly think it can be done scorpio could be what we need in a console.
Remember for the Samaritan demo the pc had
1) A much more powerful cpu , even the older intel core i5 quad core with 8 threads are much more powerful than the 8 jaguar cores in the xbox one /ps4 and running at almost double the clocks.
2) Total ram amount. The pc they ran it on would have had 16 to 32 gigs of system ram plus 4 gigs for the 980tis. The xbox one ps4 had 8 total gigs with some dedicated to app switching (4-5 of it)
3) A single one of those gpu's most likely used more power than the entire ps4 or xbox one.
So yea I could see Scorpio doing something like Samaritan demo. It will be based on newer gpu's and perhaps more ram for the graphics so some things may change but the over all look will be the same , some things may even be improved.
But in terms of CGI graphics what CGI graphics ? We have a thread here comparing games to Toy Story 1 . But each generation of CGI movies jumps greatly. I mean Finding dory , how to train your dragon 2 and so on are such leaps and bounds over the early cgi. Movies like Dispicable me and Minions are pretty close in budget to a Tripple A game now a days too.
But games will continue to look better. For me scorpio rendering at 1440p for games would be the great compromise. You downscale to 1080p and get better image quality. 1440p @ 60fps should be close to 1200p @ 90fps so you don't have to compromise to much for the current rift and vive if you enable plug and play for those. 1440p scaled to 4k will look better than 1080p scaled to 4k .
My interpretation is that it would be unusual to essentially lie to the press when they would be highly motivated to discover and report on Microsoft being caught in an easily discovered lie.
Theories including HBM and/or DDR4 would mean the detailed render of the motherboard is completely fake, while the board they have shown makes a lot of sense and has all the credible details. What strategic advantage would they gain from doing this? If it was using HBM in any way, it would be a big PR win to show it, or say it. First console using an interposer.
I think it's a great B3D tradition, the search for the Secret Sauce!
Would a 384-bit bus not be an even bigger ladle of secret sauce than DDR4 and HBM? It's a combination we know AMD have been looking at for their APUs and (I think) for APU HPC applications.
What about the render of the motherboard would be made completely fake by DDR4/HBM? Visible trace count is basically the same for the render as for the X1 (give or take one or two). Unless there's something about trace length proving it's GDDR5, I can't spot it. 8Gb modules for both GDDR5 and DDR4 should be close to the same size, afaik.
Is that affordable in a 2017 console? Sounds an awful lot to me, but it's probably about right for the years since the previous console (8x RAM in 5+ years, so 64 GBs expected in a 2018/19 console).
Depends on the price of the console and the type of ram ? If MS isn't using the fastest GDR and instead goes wider on the bus for more speed it could be quite possible.
Of course they can always go with 16 gigs of GDR and 4 or 8 of DDR if they don't mind a split pool of ram which may be cheaper than more GDR ram. Depends on how big the APU or if its an apu even. If they go with two chips a cpu and a gpu the new could see more ram. DDR 4 would be a fine match for a 8 core Zen . Put 8 gigs with that. 16 gigs of GDR attached to the GPU. Dedicate like 2 gigs from the cpu and 4 gigs from the gpu for switching apps . Would be a massive leap over the current consoles in just a 4 year gap
Erm. You got all the details wrong. The Samaritan demo initially ran on 3 580s, it later ran on a single 680. Ditto the Elemental and Infiltrator demos, both ran on a single 680. At the time these demos came out the 980ti was not yet a product seeing as it just came out last year.
On topic, I think if a game was made from the ground up for the Scorpio, and at 1080p, I think we will see graphics of the likes of Infiltrator demo in real-time.
I'm thinking that with 6TF from a reasonably clocked GPU (they must maximize yield) in addition to the CPU, the chip would be easily large enough for 384bits. I don't know what the limits are but AMD has GPUs with a 384bits on a 352mm2 die.
The render can only represent GDDR5 for two reasons:
- DDR3/4 requires trace length matching, which would be seen as wavy lines in open areas, there are none.
- The chips are the correct size and aspect ratio of GDDR5:
GDDR5X: 14mm x 10mm (rectangular)
GDDR5: 14mm x 12mm (almost square)
DDR4: 12mm x 9mm (rectangular)
Silent_Buddha
Legend
I'm not sure why? AMD has done a 384 bit bus before. Tahiti used a 384 bit memory interface. We also have no information on what Vega will use other than the fact that it will at least support HBM in at least one configuration. Polaris uses both a 128 bit and 256 bit memory interface. There isn't a reason they couldn't produce a 384 bit Polaris if they wanted to. Well other than the market segment Polaris is going into doesn't need a 384 bit bus.
You could make the argument that the XBO-T SOC with only 6 TFLOPs of compute wouldn't "need" a 384 bit bus, but it also has to service the CPU cores as well as deal with memory contention. IMO, XBO-T is probably overprovisioned with memory bandwidth just for that situation. Wider also allows them to use cheaper (slower) memory chips.
Regards,
SB
my bad ! I'm getting to old bro the details just fade
I think the chip will be big enough for a 384-bit bus too, but it does seem like a bit of a retro way to hit those BW figures. Nvidia's 1080 is supposedly 314 mm^2, so probably around 340 mm^2 if it had a 384-bit bus, yet they went with GDDR5X 18 months before Scorpio. Although, I suppose they want to be able to ship the cheaper GDDR5 1070 without paying for unused interface ....
If it is GDDR5 I can only assume they've got an awesome deal locked in, or else the size and power would seem overbearing. Potentially 30+ W for the chips and maybe another 15+ for the controller.
Although ... do you think GDDR5X can be used at lower clocks for far lower power consumption? LPGDDR5 was canned, but there might still be a middle ground between HBM and DDR4.
The trace lengths I was considering, but I was unaware of the memory dimension ratios. If the render is indeed representative, that's a clear indicator as you say.
GDDR5X is electrically basically like a higher clock GDDR5 on 1.35v. So might as well use GDDR5 at 1.35v for less money. In fact with their bandwidth figures, they might be doing this.
256bit GDDR5X seems ideal, but it must be a question of cost. Just like HBM, we see it appear only on the highest end cards. There must be a reason all midrange GPUs announced are GDDR5.
It also changes what capacity they can get. 320GB/s is 8 chips gddr5x, or 12 chips gddr5.
16GB GDDR5X would be too expensive, needs 11gbps parts instead of current 10gbps (clamshell reduced the speed grade by half a step)
12GB GDDR5 looks good, it's more memory than xb1, not too expensive. No clamshell.
8GB GDDR5X could be as expensive as 12 gddr5, for less memory.
256bit GDDR5X seems ideal, but it must be a question of cost. Just like HBM, we see it appear only on the highest end cards. There must be a reason all midrange GPUs announced are GDDR5.
It also changes what capacity they can get. 320GB/s is 8 chips gddr5x, or 12 chips gddr5.
16GB GDDR5X would be too expensive, needs 11gbps parts instead of current 10gbps (clamshell reduced the speed grade by half a step)
12GB GDDR5 looks good, it's more memory than xb1, not too expensive. No clamshell.
8GB GDDR5X could be as expensive as 12 gddr5, for less memory.
If so, that seems like a very reasonable way to balance cost and power. I've been a little obsessed with the effect of memory power on console design decisions recently, as I realised it's something neither I nor the majority of other forum bottom feeders had tried to consider when armchair console designing. The figure for GDDR5 + controller on graphics cards are a lot higher than most people seem to think.
Conservative (by late 2017 standards) clocks and lower voltages might be a pretty reasonable approach. So, like, cool.
True, but given the PR it was looking like GDDR5X had super ace yields and mega ramp and heroic clock increases coming imminently. It's easy to get carried away though ...
I suppose one other possible benefit might that - if I understand this correctly - for the same theoretical BW wider and slower can be more effective at serving a device than faster and narrower. At least, that's if I understood 3dilettante correctly.
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