News & Rumors: Xbox One (codename Durango)

[zupallinere]

What is up with these MS engineers not understanding that wonders that 12 gb brings since they were looking at 8 gigs all this time ?

I guess my question is why didn't MS make it 12 before ? Did they think it would be too costly for the benefit ? It would seem to be the case unless this has been a long con all along !!

I thought being the LCD was going to benefit the XB1 compared to the over done PS4 ? Will the PS4 now benefit from being the LCD ???

added:
Maybe it's just for the bullet point. Of course the bullet point is still 8 for both unless someone is geeky enough to wonder about the 1 to 2 gig difference in RAM allocation.

 

[Strange]

8GB vs 12GB=50% increase

800mhz vs 900 mhz =12.5% increase

Intuitively you're getting a much more significant increase in the parameter in the former, probably why it would be better if you could only choose one.

At 68GB/s, 30fps is a working set of 2.3 GB per frame.
I don't see how upping the game portion all the way from 5GB up to 9 GB will have large impact on games really, as you can't use what you don't have the bandwidth for.

I say that the ridiculously large 3GB reserve that everybody has come to accept was chosen because they don't see any additional RAM to be that big of an impact due to the already limited bandwidth.

 

[Kb-Smoker]

Edit: lol beaten....

8GB vs 12GB=50% increase

800mhz vs 900 mhz =12.5% increase

Intuitively you're getting a much more significant increase in the parameter in the former, probably why it would be better if you could only choose one.

Unless they increase bandwidth it a very small increase in term of performance. It would be more for cache then anything else.

Nowhere near 50% improvement. GPU clock increase would give more performance improvement.

At 60FPS you can only access 1.13 GB per frame.

 

[ERP]

At 60FPS you can only access 1.13 GB per frame.

While this is true, it's largely irrelevant.
what matters is how much data you need to keep resident, in order to be able to stream whatever you are going to see next, and that is limited by the speed of the secondary storage, not the primary memory bandwidth.

IMO the memory would give a bigger visual improvement that a < 10% GPU speed change, but I don't think either are going to be dramatic.

 

[Strange]

While this is true, it's largely irrelevant.
what matters is how much data you need to keep resident, in order to be able to stream whatever you are going to see next, and that is limited by the speed of the secondary storage, not the primary memory bandwidth.

IMO the memory would give a bigger visual improvement that a < 10% GPU speed change, but I don't think either are going to be dramatic.

But after taking away the bandwidth that you need to use for pretty much every frame (render targets, etc) how many multiples of your currently viewable environments do you actually need for a seamless, loadless experience?

And as others have pointed out, game design does dictate the amount of extra RAM beyond the working set you actually need.

 

[Rangers]

What is up with these MS engineers not understanding that wonders that 12 gb brings since they were looking at 8 gigs all this time ?

I guess my question is why didn't MS make it 12 before ? Did they think it would be too costly for the benefit ? It would seem to be the case unless this has been a long con all along !!

I thought being the LCD was going to benefit the XB1 compared to the over done PS4 ? Will the PS4 now benefit from being the LCD ???

added:
Maybe it's just for the bullet point. Of course the bullet point is still 8 for both unless someone is geeky enough to wonder about the 1 to 2 gig difference in RAM allocation.

It's still 8 AFAIK. We're just discussing a far-fetched rumor.

Anyways, who knows, if they are considering it. The biggest factor might have been originally it seemed like they would have 8 vs PS4's 4. Now it's 8-8 and they are theoretically deficient in GPU too.

PS4 would benefit from being the LCD in that scenario probably. Lets say PS4 had 6 for games and XB1 has 9. Most multiplatform games will probably still look about the same on both.

Just as of now it's assumed it's XB1 5GB and PS4 7GB, but I doubt you'll see too much difference.

 

[Rangers]

But after taking away the bandwidth that you need to use for pretty much every frame (render targets, etc) how many multiples of your currently viewable environments do you actually need for a seamless, loadless experience?

And as others have pointed out, game design does dictate the amount of extra RAM beyond the working set you actually need.

This isn't a tech thread but you're completely ignoring the ESRAM can take a huge load off the main bus, making the 68 GB/s much more effective.

 

[temesgen]

Edit: lol beaten....



Unless they increase bandwidth it a very small increase in term of performance. It would be more for cache then anything else.

Nowhere near 50% improvement. GPU clock increase would give more performance improvement.

At 60FPS you can only access 1.13 GB per frame.

Which is likely why the engineers originally decided 8GB was sufficient, their decision was the product of technical factors and the function of the priorities and merits of the design.

People are not giving the design team enough credit; they know what the true bandwidth is, the OS reservation and the amount of computational power available locally and by way of the cloud and have likely made tradeoffs which make the most sense based off the over intended market for the machine, their financial models and so on. Its us who are viewing the specs compared to PS4, unaware of their vision that think we know better. If you remove PS4 and replace it with what we know about MS's business model for XB1 things start to make sense.

 

[zupallinere]

. If you remove PS4 and replace it with what we know about MS's business model for XB1 things start to make sense.

Absolutely. It's job is to entertain and jam as much MS Live services into the living room as possible. As such it's a tidy package.

 

[warb]

This isn't a tech thread but you're completely ignoring the ESRAM can take a huge load off the main bus, making the 68 GB/s much more effective.

and GB/frame as the metric to determine the worth of having more system memory is really quite silly. I wonder how many MB/frame we'll get from the HDD.

 

[dagamer]

A moment for some perspective:

I cannot remember the last time a console won because it was more powerful than the other one. I can remember several times when one console beat the other because of better games.

Microsoft would do better to make the system price competitive or invest more in exclusive top notch games. As such, I really think they shouldn't play games with minor spec bumps or board revisions, they should focus on getting costs lower, not increasing them when they have little hope of making up a theoretical 600GFLOP gap (which really, I have yet to see any screenshot comparison to show off the fruit of that difference).

 

[Strange]

This isn't a tech thread but you're completely ignoring the ESRAM can take a huge load off the main bus, making the 68 GB/s much more effective.

The eSRAM taking a load off the main bus doesn't in any way magically allow the system to utilize any more than 2.3 GB per frame .

We're not comparing with GDDR5, we're comparing 32MB eSRAM + 8GB ram against 32MB eSRAM + 12GB ram.

In the former case, with 5GB game memory you're talking about 2.7GB that's not accessed per frame.

In the Latter case, with 9GB game memory you're talking about a whipping 6.7 GB not accessed every single frame given the best case scenario (which is not going to happen).

This comes back to sebbbi's post about having a ton of ram no necessarily adding anything to the performance.

So there's really little incentive to go beyond 8GB if you don't have the bandwidth to do much with it other than filling it up with cache.





Or you can simply up the whole memory system to ~32 GB and cache the entire freaking game and say that'll help with performance.

 

[Strange]

and GB/frame as the metric to determine the worth of having more system memory is really quite silly. I wonder how many MB/frame we'll get from the HDD.

You're effectively dismissing this whole conversation as silly.

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1653878&postcount=1

 

[Rangers]

The eSRAM taking a load off the main bus doesn't in any way magically allow the system to utilize any more than 2.3 GB per frame .

We're not comparing with GDDR5, we're comparing 32MB eSRAM + 8GB ram against 32MB eSRAM + 12GB ram.

In the former case, with 5GB game memory you're talking about 2.7GB that's not accessed per frame.

In the Latter case, with 9GB game memory you're talking about a whipping 6.7 GB not accessed every single frame given the best case scenario (which is not going to happen).

This comes back to sebbbi's post about having a ton of ram no necessarily adding anything to the performance.

So there's really little incentive to go beyond 8GB if you don't have the bandwidth to do much with it other than filling it up with cache.





Or you can simply up the whole memory system to ~32 GB and cache the entire freaking game and say that'll help with performance.

Devs wanted more than 5GB it's been said by interference many times. So you are factually wrong.

Also, how quickly we forget 360 had ~half the main bandwidth of PS3 yet outperformed it due to EDRAM...main memory bandwidth is not even close to the whole story in a EDRAM design unless you know nothing about technology (but it seems a lot of people conveniently forget. MS added 1.6 billion transistors for no purpose no doubt).

Also, read this

http://www.psu.com/forums/showthrea...lopers/page6?p=6132276&viewfull=1#post6132276

 

[Rangers]

You're effectively dismissing this whole conversation as silly.

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1653878&postcount=1

Sebbi is backing up more memory as much as anything...so I'm not even sure why you use that post unless you havent read it, or dont expect the recipient to read it.

Basically no component in our game required more than 10x memory compared to its working set. Average requirement was around 3x.

On a 30 FPS game (which vast majority are, such as Killzone Shadowfall) you can access 2.27 GB/frame on XB1. Using Sebbbi's example, you need anywhere from ~6.8Gb to ~23GB for his example.

Which I'm sure varies wildly by game anyway...but you can always use more RAM to cache, no exceptions to that!

Sebbi also says:

Of course another game might need for example average of 10x working set for caches,

So that's more like 20-22GB per frame...

 

[Strange]

Sebbi is backing up more memory as much as anything...so I'm not even sure why you use that post unless you havent read it, or dont expect the recipient to read it.




On a 30 FPS game (which vast majority are, such as Killzone Shadowfall) you can access 2.27 GB/frame on XB1. Using Sebbbi's example, you need anywhere from ~6.8Gb to ~23GB for his example.

Which I'm sure varies wildly by game anyway...but you can always use more RAM to cache, no exceptions to that!

Sebbi also says:



So that's more like 20-22GB per frame...

His working set isn't simply that figure. He rounds his 233MB/frame down to 200MB/frame.
Translating to Xbox One it is 2.23GB, and rounding the figure down a bit to we get 2GB/frame.
He also says that for his case "Average requirement was around 3x."
Of course he notes that have situations/games that eat up to like 10 times the requirement, but is that even the CLOSE to standard case?

Take Xbox 360 as an example. It has a 512MB RAM with 22.40Gb/s bus.

It's working set was effectively 746MB per frame in a 30fps game, and rounding it down quite aggressively you still would have a gigantic 500MB working set (in last gen terms). So is anybody even going to design a game around a 10 times requirement and require 5 GB of ram? I very much doubt it.

If we then use 3x as a good baseline using his game as a data point you end up with ~6GB for a 30fps game as being sufficient for his game.

We also shouldn't dismiss that Killzone Shadow Fall was working very well with 176GB/s => 5.86GB/frame@30fps and was running perfectly fine with 4.5GB.

I'm not dismissing the extra RAM as totally unneeded but as has been repeated again and again, the benefits level off after a certain point.
Just because Devs like more doesn't automatically translate to a benefit that you or I will notice.



Devs will always say more is better if given the choice.

Do you want more ram? hell ya
Do you want more power? hell ya

If you require 20GB+ for your game you have serious work to do. You're effectively storing the entire game inside your ram and that just tells me the programmer is extremely incompetent or lazy.

 

[warb]

Killzone Shadow Fall might see "176GB/s => 5.86GB/frame@30fps" if it wasn't rendering any frames.

Your access to unique memory/frame should be similar in reality for both systems. More RAM means potentially more unique textures and high quality meshes resident in memory. Can only be good for apparent detail and consistency whatever the game type.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

VGLeaks have a rumour/story that Microsoft may be entertaining the idea of letting indies self publish:

Microsoft is on its way to offer the same easiness to the indies. Gamereactor has exclusive info for this matter. A developer with a long and proven track record is currently in talks with Microsoft about self-publishing on Xbox Live. This developer would have leaked some points for the new Microsoft policy upon indie studies.

Not conclusive but "in talks" sounds better than "told no".

 

[Kb-Smoker]

Sebbi is backing up more memory as much as anything...so I'm not even sure why you use that post unless you havent read it, or dont expect the recipient to read it.




On a 30 FPS game (which vast majority are, such as Killzone Shadowfall) you can access 2.27 GB/frame on XB1. Using Sebbbi's example, you need anywhere from ~6.8Gb to ~23GB for his example.

Which I'm sure varies wildly by game anyway...but you can always use more RAM to cache, no exceptions to that!

Sebbi also says:



So that's more like 20-22GB per frame...

Having a working set that large is impossible. You are always limited by bandwidth. You have the bus speed itself and you also have the HDD speed. Your working set is going to be limited by one of those speeds.

Even the top of the line 2.5 HDD is limited to around 100 MB/s. So you are limited to 3.3 MB per frame at 30fps of new data from the HDD if you have perfect data layout with no seek times. Diminishing returns kicks in pretty fast when you are bandwidth limited.

 

[warb]

That slow HDD is why having more DDR3 would be impactful. The more RAM, the more dynamic your working set can be, once you've filled it up.