Next Generation Hardware Speculation with a Technical Spin [post E3 2019, pre GDC 2020] [XBSX, PS5]

They said less than Cerny is the Wired interview. Also, the video had that "highest quality pixels" feel.

 

From the Xbox E3 2019 briefing:

Let's Talk about our Next Console.
Reducing Load Times
Zen 2 and Navi technology from AMD
4x more powerful from a processing perspective
GDDR6
8K Capabilities
120 FPS capabilities
Variable Refresh Rate
Next Gen RayTracing, RealTime
SSD, more than 40 times improvements
4 Generations of Content
Project Scarlett
Holiday 2020
Co-Engineered and Custom Designed with AMD

 

Where do they mention hardware RT?

From E3,
4x XB1X CPU and GPU.
40x XB1X drive performance.

At face value, that's kinda unbelievable. Sony's been talking about a 20x improvement and we've debated how realistic that is, so short of a battery backed up RAM cache, how is 40x possible? And 24 TFs for the GPU?? Only if it releases in 2025 (announced for 2020), or costs $2000.

Those numbers are...marketing. Some sort of arbitrary relative performance. We have quite a ways to go to determine what the real hardware is.

 

Maybe Microsoft knows a thing or two about device drivers, file systems, and operating systems.

 

Wow, it's like PS5 and Scarlett will basically be clones of each other. It makes me wonder what actual kind of customization there might be that you may not find in the other system. Though I'm going to assume Scarlet will likely be closer to the Navi PC implementation because of DirectX commonality.

Edit: While not stated specifically, the 4x number was probably referring to the CPU.

 

Yea, glad it wasn't just me that heard 4x 1X, thought I misheard.
Hardware RT was mentioned

 

I'm positive I heard one of them say hardware ray tracing when they were bouncing between the people talking about the next Xbox.

 

Are they really claiming FP16 numbers to get that 4x? Seems way underhanded.

Yes I distinctly heard it.

 

lol, 24 tflops here we go!.

 

Them being relatively close tech wise was always the safe bet. It always came down to customizations and how far willing to push costs etc

 

Is it possible to guess the gddr6 memory configuration from the pictures?

 

API agnosticism does give Sony more freedom to customize though. They did it with both the original PS4 (more ACEs) and even PS4 Pro (focus on image reconstruction for psuedo 4K). I'm going to postulate that Sony will once again go for compute specific enhancements for GPGPU.

And any "4x graphics" claim could come from a combination of general compute and RT hardware theoreticals a la Nvidia's "RTX-OPS".

 

Apple used FP16 to advertise that the Mac Pro GPU reaches 56TFLOPS. I thought it was pretty scummy

 

Didn't think of that, but would that make it 4x more powerful, even stretching truth can't see how could claim that.
Maybe it's factoring in zen, and giving an overall system comparison. That would make more sense to me.

 

4x performance in some benchmark and not a paper spec is what they are likely saying.

 

Except the only way to get a drive that fast is to shun all that and just write data directly.

I suppose there are cases where the XB1X is extra slow due to some overhead, and the these could be accelerate up to 40x. That's generally how these numbers work. "Up to 60% off!" in a sale means two $5 items down to $2 and everything else 15% off if you're lucky.

It's marketing. Numbers should never be taken at face value, especially in great big advertisements like E3. Use the biggest true number you have available rather than a realistic benchmarking for a fair comparison. It's just the way it is and no-one should be surprised or irked by it. Just ensure when you get a number, you run it through appropriate reality-checks before accepting it.

 

"Up to 4x" sounds like FP16 marketing speak.

 

Except Xbox One X has the fastest drive performance of all current-gen consoles.