Xbox One (Durango) Technical hardware investigation

I viewed it more as a revised guess, not confirmation that MS had April down but needed a change.

 

was about the same time the revealed Xbox 360 as well in 05

 

^ I seem to recall more notice and hype over the '05 reveal though. We still have zip from MS, which is fine, but no teasers even?

/kidding - maybe VG leaks is MS and it was all planned.

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Oh they matter, but you live with what you get.
There are always going to be performance gotchas you won't know about until you get something running on silicon.
And early titles aren't so much in optimized as they are optimized based on a premise that may not entirely be accurate.

 

Well from that patent it seems like tile based rendering will be a good fit for durango, or atleast they might optimize it and provide tools that makes tile based rendering well suited for the system. I suspect the DMEs will play a large part in making this work efficiently what with their tile and untile functions. They will probably be used to quickly swap and move data from the eSRAM and the DDR3. The Feb 2012 durango doc does suggest that dev should look into tiling their resources along with a link to a paper/presentation on using tiled resources on dx11 and 360.

 

It also confirms that MS are still expecting to launch this year...

Also, from his comments there's going to be a lot of Xbox stuff after May 21st.

Regards,
SB

 

That tile based rendering patent is most interesting. Maybe there's something to that. Sounds like a good fit for Durango.

 

Yeah, the more I read it the more I am sure it was written because of durango. What with mentions of fast, low latency on chip smaller memory, data copy functions etc.

 

I don't claim to be an expert, so please feel free to correct me, but from what I understand that patent reads like a fairly standard implementation of a TBDR, enough so that I would think existing products, like powervr's, would bar MS from being granted it (prior art and all). What exactly makes it seem especially more suited for Durango beyond the prior discussions about Durango being potentially tbdr focused?

 

Interesting, Paul has actually caught himself a few times when being asked about what the final hardware is, name of the console etc. He definitely knows why the event was pushed back, he's just not going to tell us. lol

 

As a whole it just makes a ton of sense with relation to how Durango is designed. All 4 Move Engines can perform tiling and untiling.

This seems like a very decent idea of how the eSRAM might be used to possibly help Durango.

The above sounds like a dead ringer for what Durango's display planes do. In fact, they might as well be talking about a transparent game UI where the game world is visible through the transparency in one of those sentences, because that's more or less what it describes.

The talk of specialized hardware, although they reference a GPU, we have to keep in mind things like the move engines and display planes are considered parts of Durango's GPU. They are specifically stated in vgleak's information as helping in the area of improving utilization of resources, such as power and memory consumption. The move engines, display planes and esram all seem to fit perfectly with the goals and desires laid out in this patent. It's just a nice looking fit that seems to match up pretty well, and it helps that it's a Microsoft patent.

Also, the part about the number of times pixel values brought into memory possibly being reduced also sounds like a very good indication of ways in which the eSRAM may help Durango. As one implication of eSRAM is that certain data doesn't need to be put into system ram in order to be read by the GPU, because the ESRAM's flexibility helps in that regard. Everything that can technically be done with the DRAM can also be done with the ESRAM, which can cut down on the need for certain kinds of memory access. I mean, a rough and rushed explanation, but I think it's close enough.

 

This.

 

The business deals that must be in place for people at DICE and Crytek to be pretending like PS4 don't exist are pretty crazy. Polygon did a video interview with a Crytek rep today and Gies couldn't even get the guy to say "PS4". Arthur also commented on Crytek's struggles getting CryEngine licensees outside of Europe, but the way they are treating PS4 and the way Epic have reacted paint a pretty good picture of what is behind their relative success. If you want customers to license your tech it may not be a good idea to let a business deal with one platform holder prevent you from even acknowledging a major system that's already announced. Rein is out there for every new platform proclaiming, "Fuck yeah, Unreal supports it!" while Crytek is at GDC pretending like they don't know what a PS4 is.

 

Pretty sure I've mentioned it (and other patents) numerous times here.

Hmmm. This is kinda interesting. Found this in the most recent Mejdrich patent. The patent is pretty fresh. What is interesting is the graphics rendering pipeline Mejdrich et al chose to include in the patent as an 'exemplary embodiment consistent with their invention'...

http://www.google.com/patents/US20130046518?dq=ininventor:%22Eric+O.+Mejdrich%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=p_1UUb-OJKry0QG4xoGIAg&ved=0CD4Q6AEwAw

Scratch memory, 'DMA engines', texture compression/decompression...sound familiar?

Another recent patent by Mejdrich. No idea what this one says, but others here may be able to explain it:

http://www.google.com/patents/US201...a=X&ei=mf5UUdCFLOSq0AH-14CoDA&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAA

 

For everyone to watch
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncORtSTpEAI
Yeah Crytek probably has a serious deal with Microsoft

 

Or Crytek has been a source of leaks and are now being more careful.

 

Doesnt sound like that in that interview...

 

Eh, the interviewer specifically goes on a mini-speech about how almost no developers he has talked to will acknowledge the existence of the PS4. Not just Crytek.

Regards,
SB

 

Are you sure that's up to Crytek and not EA?

 

Well, Crytek are making a game for MS. I think it's called Rise, or something similar, so maybe it's not middleware business shenanigans so much as being in an odd position to talk about a competitor platform when they're going to be one of the first games shown off in MS's introduction of Durango.