News & Rumors: Xbox One (codename Durango)

[Zachriel]

I disagree, I think a dev that wants that will simply disable the snap portion of the Kinect. I read it was only for video, but that could be mistaken, im assuming the whole snap functionality will be lost, and you will get a disclaimer at the start of the game. It does open a little can of worms like I had previously said on this subject, but there will be a dev to do it or push it. Also Kinect GPGPU is also down with in this reservation as well. Im just thinking voice is going to be the only thing you are able to do. we shall find out, we are all speculative right now anyhow

Surely devs could be smart and maintain snap by scaling their render targets during snap? When you snap an app it takes up 25% of the horizontal resolution, also adding black bars on the vertical to your game, so a 25% reduction in the vertical as well. So the game is only displaying on 50% of the area of your tv.

A 1080p game could be dropped to 810p when snapped with no visible difference freeing up GPU resources for the snapped app. It may not be as seamless as you would be juggling resources more, but most snapped apps are either very simplistic, ie the party app, or rely on an internet connection, ie Machinima.

I imagine there are other hurdles to overcome by implementing something like this, it's just my layman solution

 

[Pixel]

Obviously its not very likely but in theory Microsoft could enforce a mandatory "snap mode". When in that mode the games that use these extra resources could run in a window at a lower render target or framerate for all games that use newly free'd resources. However forcing developers to develop and do additional QA on a separate mode that ran at lower render target or lower fps would likely irk many developers.

Switching to a different render target would also possibly introduce some additional delay in snapping, so it wouldn't be as seamless as before.

edit beaten to the punch

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Although the question arises, if the snap system can operate by scaling the game down to fit in the snapped app, why isn't it done that way in the first place? I expect the faf of development is the major bottleneck. The current system I assume uses the hardware scaler to shrink the full-res game and overlay the OS. It's also worth noting that the shrunk game should be of a little superior IQ as it'll gain downsampling AA across its small display. And some games are already sub 1080p, so the res drop will be not-insignificant.

What are XB1 user experiences with Snap like? Are you using it all the time, or is it a feature you wouldn't miss because you are more interested in the game when playing the game?

 

[Brad Grenz]

Obviously the whole point of the hardware display panes was so that the compositing could happen automagically and the devs would never have to think about it. Hand coding a Snap mode and having to tune performance to both resolutions is probably more work then they will bother with.

But I'm constantly being told that being able to Snap TV, Netflix or Twitch is a major advantage the Xbox One has over the PS4. Leaving that to developer discretion could be problematic. If the feature is really that popular what it will probably result in is developers NOT using the extra resources for their games in order to support the expected feature set. Conveniently that will mean MS can say they only reserve 2% even if in practice games still always leave 10% reserved for system features.

Actually, now that I think about it, Twitch streaming, Friends Lists, Party chat and Skype all rely heavily on snapped apps. I just don't see how MS can leave that up to the developer's discretion.

Hell, famousmortimer never specified what system he was talking about. Maybe the rumor is about PS4 OS reservations!

 

[-tkf-]

Maybe someone with insight here can help, so according to the twitter dude it's now up to the developers if they want "snap" to work? So they can simply tell the XB1 OS that they don't want snap, the OS then frees the resource?
8% according to his updates (not 10%), the 2% is still used for voice.

Until i get a XB1 myself i am not sure how much i would miss snap but it seems somewhat strange to drop one of the main "selling" points for 8% more GPU. Though i can see that those that doesn't use snap wouldn't care at all and would much rather have a few frames more pr second

 

[Rangers]

If this rumor is true, it's funny to see MS scrambling around for performance NOW.

Why not add a few CU's in hardware back when it counted, and avoid all this mess.

I wonder if they had it to do over, if they would enable those two redundant CU's a few months ago.

 

[AlNom]

Why not add a few CU's in hardware back when it counted, and avoid all this mess.

I wonder if they had it to do over, if they would enable those two redundant CU's a few months ago.

What's an extra 30% yield anyway... right? *cough* (before anyone else says it ಠ_ಠ)

Shoulda woulda coulda (SWC). Dwelling on it isn't going to be healthy considering a lot of things that SWC been done.

edit:

Who's to say that the % reservation is ALU limited? It's a time slice of the GPU, so it's the entire pipe to consider.

 

[Brad Grenz]

If they could do it all over they'd bet on 8GB of GDDR5 being available and spend their ludicrous ESRAM transistor budget on a better GPU.

 

[BoardBonobo]

If this rumor is true, it's funny to see MS scrambling around for performance NOW.

Why not add a few CU's in hardware back when it counted, and avoid all this mess.

I wonder if they had it to do over, if they would enable those two redundant CU's a few months ago.

Maybe that's what old Albert was alluding to in his latest PR dead weight when he said he 'knows' things. Or perhaps the straw that broke the camels back was Tomb Raider or a sub 1080p Thief?

Sent from my Xperia Z using Forum Runner

 

[fehu]

If they could do it all over they'd bet on 8GB of GDDR5 being available and spend their ludicrous ESRAM transistor budget on a better GPU.

Yeah, let's just port the xbox os to the ps4

 

[Cyan]

Maybe someone with insight here can help, so according to the twitter dude it's now up to the developers if they want "snap" to work? So they can simply tell the XB1 OS that they don't want snap, the OS then frees the resource?
8% according to his updates (not 10%), the 2% is still used for voice.

Until i get a XB1 myself i am not sure how much i would miss snap but it seems somewhat strange to drop one of the main "selling" points for 8% more GPU. Though i can see that those that doesn't use snap wouldn't care at all and would much rather have a few frames more pr second

I think people are overestimating the resources consumption of the snap mode.

I have snapped quite a few applications while playing and I don't see the point of using more than 1% or 2% of the GPU for that. I firmly believe they could use part of a CPU core to do the job.

Also you can't play a game -even if you see it on the background- if you are prioritizing a snapped application, obviously.

When playing a game with something snapped -which I rarely tried, if ever-, even if you are watching TV, or listening to music, you are just actually interacting with either the game or the app.

That's a VERY important point because most snapped features don't use resources and are static.

There's something very cool, but also definitely bordering unplayable during snap mode for some apps, they can get slower with the current reservation, simply 'cos you are not actually using one of them as a priority.

Where Xbox One shines in snap mode is, for example, playing a game and having Internet Explorer at Gamefaqs and following the guide while you play.

But even so without snap mode you'd be fine, 'cos it's so immediate. If you are playing, saying "Go to Internet Explorer" -once you had loaded your webpage it will remain in memory- and then "Go to X Game", does the trick pretty well.

 

[DrJay24]

Why side by side in a thin box? Just swap back and forth and full screen both. Or just have a tablet nearby like sane people?

 

[AlphaWolf]

Yeah why do it on one device when you can do it on two.

Really you should have a tablet for every app so you don't have to switch, that would be even better. Multi-tasking is for lamers. One app, one device.

 

[DieH@rd]

GPU reservation getting decreased to 2 percent... per https://twitter.com/atPeteDodd

I wouldn't say that the total reservation will go to 2%. This is only for audio (2%) and video (8%) processing, most probably all Kinect-focused. Resources that are left for snapped apps are still untouched.

 

[joker454]

I think people are overestimating the resources consumption of the snap mode.

Yeah, 8% for snap sounds insane. Has it been confirmed that this is being used for snap, or is this Dude Confirmed (tm) false rumor #453,535? Because I'm finding it hard to imagine a 2d gpu feature like snap stealing 8% of the machines 3d computational units. It doesn't compute, pun intended.

 

[temesgen]

Yeah, 8% for snap sounds insane. Has it been confirmed that this is being used for snap, or is this Dude Confirmed (tm) false rumor #453,535? Because I'm finding it hard to imagine a 2d gpu feature like snap stealing 8% of the machines 3d computational units. It doesn't compute, pun intended.

I'm not following the 2% reserve for voice controls either, isn't that what the SHAPE audio block is for?

 

[Pixel]

Its a reservation, its not how much is used while idly residing on the OS desktop without additional apps running.
The % reserved isn't unreasonable:
Outputting the hdmi-in data may take % gpu resources as the data is processed. They may have also created that gpu reserve so people could run gpu dependent apps and browser content simultaneously in snap mode or in the background while a game is being played. Internet explorer has gpu acceleration, they may have wanted to implement that and create headroom for gpu accelerated apps as well.

Wired preview of X1 earlier this year showed the tv caption box was choppy and low fps in snap mode, so that seems to be a signal resources are used.

Outputting the signal from the hdmi in does pass through the southbridge and the apu before passing through he hdmi out.

Not saying the 10% or 8% rumors are accurate, as mortimer has been wrong about leaks before, just saying putting aside that amount of reservation does make some sense for a system that is designed for multitasking.

 

[Cyan]

Yeah, 8% for snap sounds insane. Has it been confirmed that this is being used for snap, or is this Dude Confirmed (tm) false rumor #453,535? Because I'm finding it hard to imagine a 2d gpu feature like snap stealing 8% of the machines 3d computational units. It doesn't compute, pun intended.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/d...unlock-more-gpu-power-for-xbox-one-developers

"Xbox One has a conservative 10 per cent time-sliced reservation on the GPU for system processing. This is used both for the GPGPU processing for Kinect and for the rendering of concurrent system content such as snap mode," Microsoft technical fellow Andrew Goossen told us.

"The current reservation provides strong isolation between the title and the system and simplifies game development - strong isolation means that the system workloads, which are variable, won't perturb the performance of the game rendering. In the future, we plan to open up more options to developers to access this GPU reservation time while maintaining full system functionality."

The thing is that using so much processing for snap mode isn't necessary because even with that 10% reservation some games or apps in snap mode can't be touched, or are borderline unplayable just because you are prioritising one of them.

Snap mode has various benefits but the resources can be used smartly. I mean, what's the point of using 100% of the resources in a game if you can't play it because in snap mode you are browsing a website using Internet Explorer?

It's not the first time that a game doesn't pause when I go into snap mode. That's okay for puzzle like games or games where you can take as much time as you want to do something.

But it happened more than once to me when playing sports games that another player or the CPU scored on me because I was paying attention to Internet Explorer or some other snapped app.

There is still a long way to go for the OS. For instance, HTML5 games run quite slow on Xbox One's Internet Explorer.

Even my laptop, which is light years behind Xbox One in processing capabilities, run then fine.

What irks me the most is that I am running Internet Explorer full screen. So the OS SHOULD react smartly and move some extra processing power over to IE, 'cos the rest of the apps/games/system are "idle".

 

[joker454]

They must have gone uber conservative then because most apps should only be exercising the 2d portions of the gpu hardware for what they need to do while snapped, except for Skype which can use the compute units for gpu for video decoding but I don't think that runs snapped does it? The rest should be leaning more on the cpu. Either that or it was mostly reserved for Kinect.

 

[AlphaWolf]

They must have gone uber conservative then because most apps should only be exercising the 2d portions of the gpu hardware for what they need to do while snapped, except for Skype which can use the compute units for gpu for video decoding but I don't think that runs snapped does it? The rest should be leaning more on the cpu. Either that or it was mostly reserved for Kinect.

skype does not run snapped.