The xbox one's Game OS. Is it working right?

[mrconfused]

I have been trying to get answers to this question for months now on various forums, so i thought i would try here.

So MS say the XB1 has 3 operating systems, and as far as i understand one of those runs the apps and another is dedicated to running a game.

The game OS has access to 5 GBs of the systems Ram, this Ram is reserved exclusively for the game OS, i think MS refer to this as a game exclusive partion.
Basically the console, as i understand it, has resources that are set aside to run the game so they are not affected by the App OS.

This allows the user to use apps such as Netflix or youtube, for example, while the game continues running (albeit paused) in the background.

However, despite having a dedicated Game OS, the Xbox one is incapable of keeping a game running under certain cicumstances, and will terminate, or eject the game from the system.

Try these steps to see for yourself:

1.Load any game,

2.Now switch to any app and use that app for 30 minutes,

3. Now switch to and fully load 5 more apps (it also works by just switching to 3 more apps, but 5 apps guarantees game termination),

4. Go back to game you loaded in step 1 and it has been closed down.

My question is why does this happen?

We know that the apps can't touch the resources reserved for the game, so why does the system close down the game?

The above scenario only happens if the game has been suspended/running in the background for 30 minutes.

If the user switches between, say, 15 apps within a 10 minute window, the game will stay running, but switching between 3 to 5 apps after 30 mins of a game being suspended, it terminates the users game session.

I don't get the logic behind this, especially as MS marketing blurb boasts of the consoles ability to switch between multiple apps and come back to the game to find it "exactly where you left it".

I normaly get a hostile reaction from talking about this on various forums, so i'm hoping you guys and gals may be a bit kinder.

Thanks for reading.

 

[BRiT]

Perhaps it's working exactly as designed and implemented. Perhaps they only allow the game to sit idle for up to 30 minutes. Perhaps there's a setting that the games themselves set, and they're the ones setting it for 30 minutes.

As of now, you won't find any answers unless you go straight to Microsoft or an Xbox Developer.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The most obvious explanation is its intentional behaviour with a 30 minute time-out on games, for whatever reason. Clearly if you can swap 15 apps within a 10 minute window and the game remains, the OS is working correctly.

 

[dobwal]

The game OS allocated resources are determined by the state of the game. A suspended game OS isn't going to have access to the full resources available during its active state.

I don't know if the amount of RAM given to the game OS changes when you suspend but the amount of gpu resources definitely changes. And I think the number of cpu cores changes also. There is a MS patent that goes into detail about constrain mode in the Xbox One. And it states the main OS will terminate suspended apps to free up resources.

You app switching may cause the OS to target the game for termination but gives the game a 30 minute window to be quickly resumed.

I relatively never terminate a game unless I load up a new one. I never had a problem with a game being terminated within 30 minutes. However, from time to time I have to restart a game and at least once the game was unresponsive to the controller input even though I could readily back out and control the UI just fine.

I think its game dependent because D3 would sometimes have an audio issue which required me to go back to the UI and then right back into the game. The game didn't require closing and resumed with no audio problem, so it was no biggie. While, Sleeping Dogs had the unresponsive controller issue and suspend/resume won't last more than a day.

 

[Rangers]

I think its game dependent because D3 would sometimes have an audio issue which required me to go back to the UI and then right back into the game. The game didn't require closing and resumed with no audio problem, so it was no biggie. While, Sleeping Dogs had the unresponsive controller issue and suspend/resume won't last more than a day.

I've been having this exact problem with Destiny every time. A bit annoying. I thought it was maybe some problem with the install since it was a digital download, but I was gonna be damned to spend 6 hours redownloading the game especially since I'm so addicted to it.

They need to fix this bug...get on it Phil Spencer!

 

[mrconfused]

That's what's confusing to me.

You can have a game running in the background for hours with no game termination (e.g switch from game to Netflix and watch a film for 2 hours and your game resumes from where you left it), so there is clearly no time limit.

And i can switch between as many apps as i desire within a 10 min window, and the game continues running, so there is clearly no app limit.

Yet 30 mins of game suspension + app switching results in game termination.

I'm trying to understand the logic in that.

 

[Grall]

It's either some incomprehensible wacko MS (il)logic, or it's a bug which MS hasn't either discovered yet or hasn't thought serious enough to warrant fixing (thus far, anyway.)

I can't see a single reason why a games console should just unilaterally terminate the game you were playing, without either confirming with you first or even notifying you that it's doing it. That would be INCREDIBLY aggravating.

Did I ask it to quit the game? No. Then don't quit the game, EVER, for frag's sake!

 

[mrconfused]

Exactly.

A games console (one with 3 operating systems no less, one of which is dedicated to running games) shuts down the users game without warning under such arbitary conditions (took me weeks of testing before i discovered the pattern) just seems wrong to me.

MS engineers said during the live panel discussion that the 3 OS design was about ensuring apps never impact on the performance of the game.
That doesn't seem to be entirely true.

 

[BRiT]

You should submit feedback to them then instead of merely going about posting this on places that they do not read. You won't ever have a chance of having it fix if you never let them know about it directly. It's how a lot of the features added in the past months system updates have come to be, through user feedback.

 

[Rockster]

I believe the situation is a bit more nuanced than you describe. The app partition can actually gain access to all hw resources and isn't constrained to it's normal reservation when a game is not present. I think it may depend on the apps but usually the system will only support 3-4 apps running concurrently in the normal "app os" reserve with it's 3gb as you describe. You can test this by switching apps while a game is running and you will see when you loop through a set of 4 or so apps the initial app will have to restart instead of resuming. When the most recently used app list gets long and doesn't include a game title, I think they do drop the game after some period of time so more apps can run concurrently since you are giving the impression that you are more interested in running apps than playing a game. In this mode you can typically have 8 or more apps running concurrently and switch between without any of them being forced to reload.

While the technically inclined I'm sure would want to directly control this rather than having the system attempt to predict player intent; I think the goal of this particular system is to provide a avg. consumer the best experience possible by inferring when they have switched from playing a game to heavy app usage and automatically adjust hw resources accordingly.

 

[mrconfused]

MS official statement on this is the XB1 can suspend 4 non-game apps and 1 game.

NOTE that apps refers to any thing that isn't a game such as youtube, Netflix ,Twitch etc...

According to Albert penello (posting on Neogaf) suspended apps are stored in the systems 8GBs of flash ram, which is seperate from the systems 8 gigs of DDr3.
When a 5th app is suspended, the oldest of the 4 suspended apps is terminated to make room.

Interestingly he said that the 4 suspended apps don't run in the background, as the system can only run 2 apps at once , or 1 game plus an app (snap mode).

The only limitation MS have ever given for a suspended game is you can only have one at a time (that makes sense) and that opening another game will close your current game down.

So basically you can have an app running (or 2 in snap mode)in the app OS, plus 4 suspended apps which are resident in the flash ram and have 1 game running in the game OS.

I doubt very much you can have 8 apps suspended.

I have been posting on various forums about this since January including all the official xbox forums, user voice, xbox twitter support (the twitter guys were insistant that a game should never close down), directly contacting Major Nelson, Mr penello, phil spencer and, understandably, get no response (they are busy people), and with every monthly update i check hoping this has been fixed, but it persists.

Which got me to thinking that this may not be a bug after all, and i just wanted to try to understand why this happens.

 

[FarticusMaximus]

it's a bug which MS hasn't either discovered yet or hasn't thought serious enough to warrant fixing (thus far, anyway.)

This. It likely happens so infrequently to so few people that it simply isn't on anyone's radar. I've certainly never noticed the issue and this is the first time I've seen it mentioned anywhere.

I have had the same bug as Rangers described though, where switching from Destiny to apps and back can lose the sound. It could well be a bug in Destiny itself, as I've not had that problem on any other game so far and it doesn't happen every time I switch away from Destiny.

A workaround is to press the guide button and just go back in to the game and sound is restored.

I can't see a single reason why a games console should just unilaterally terminate the game you were playing

You make it sound like you get shut down during gameplay. If you switch away to actively using multiple apps for 30 minutes then you are not really playing the game are you?.


It does sound like a bug though. As others have stated, best bet would be to raise it with Microsoft. If nobody reports the issue then there is little chance of it being evaluated.

Edit: And it would also take a weight of bug reports for it to be looked at.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Hopefully now you've a reasonably understanding. Bug. It's a low priority fix because most folk aren't pausing a game for 30 minutes and opening a load of apps. I suppose that could happen if people come round to visit and you suddenly want the XBox doing something else than your game, but in general use it's likely a very low frequency issue, no? And given the system is shown to not pause perfectly, it's probably an imperfection, possibly a weird design choice.

If you have frequent need to pause the game for >30 minutes and launch apps, you're out of luck. But at least XB1 even has that feature for shorter spells!

 

[orangpelupa]

maybe they have memory management bug that make the system crash or unable to resume if many app running in BG or suspended. Then they found out that if they kill the game process in 30 minutes, the system is still stable.

there's lots of "fix" like this in pre-internet era of video game.

 

[FarticusMaximus]

maybe they have memory management bug that make the system crash or unable to resume if many app running in BG or suspended.

This is a distinct possibility. In the first few months of X1's life there was what seemed like a memory leak. App loading/switching slowed down gradually and I was hard rebooting the machine every couple of weeks to give it a good flushing.

 

[-tkf-]

Never noticed this problem before, i have so far been impressed with how solid the gaming standby feature was. Apart from Media Player which throws alot of errors at me, everything else feels solid.

 

[mrconfused]

Thanks for all the replies.

So i guess it is probably a bug after all.

I can understand why most people haven't been affected by this potential bug, and i am impressed with the system as a whole.

I shall continue my crusade to get this to the attention of Microsoft.

Thanks again.

P.S This is probably the friendliest, most intelligent forum i have ever visited.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

P.S This is probably the friendliest, most intelligent forum i have ever visited.

Clearly you weren't here during the console launches!

 

[Nesh]

Console launch? Did you say console........LAUNCH? I LL HAVE YOU FOR LUNCH!!!
*turns green and smashes everything*

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Clearly you weren't here during the console launches!

I dare say they were still the friendliest, most intelligent gaming fora on the 'Net.