Xbox One (Durango) Technical hardware investigation

What I want to know is why do people think Durango isn't going to be powerful enough when we see on tomshardware that the 7970M is quite formidable. That little card can almost play BF3 @ 60FPS on Ultra @ 1080p.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/df-hardware-radeon-7970m-alienware-m17x-r4-review

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/digital-storm-x17-radeon-hd-7970m-enduro,3345-6.html

 

Okay there are 3 blocks there. The audio block free up the CPU, the DMA engine hides the DDR3 latency by moving memory in advance and push it back later on (like the Cell DMA)... the third is a video codec block. I'm wondering what would a codec block help "every frame". What codec would that be, is there such a thing useful every frame in a game engine?

 

I see what he did there.

 

Yep, I try to discredit the Data Move thing as something that was already in the PS3, and not in the realm of pixie dust +50% speed modifier. (the other 2 don't even look like they are going to help gflops)

 

Umm, the 7970M has 66% more SPs than the Durango GPU?

 

Imagine in the years to come, with the RAM, CPU cores reserved and may be dedicated "saucy" hardware, what if MS can do enhancement like real time dubbing to the TV programs you watch?! Cross language voice and video chat!

 

Cool! I want!

Not only TV programs, GAMES!

 

But it isn't clear whether Durango hosts a PC GC version or a uniquely designed piece of sillicon. For all we know, they could have come up with a more agressive and forward looking architecture...

 

Ya the 7970m is 20CU's at 850MHz, making it almost 20% more shader power than orbis let alone Cape Verde assuming that's what is in there.

 

SPs? Pardon my lack of knowledge on the engineering aspects of these chips. What does that mean? And do you have a link that I could get more info on?

 

Texturing the scene - if you look back 12 years - a certain console shipped with a DCT-I-Frame decoder block running at 150MPix/sec. Which at 60fps would give you 10MB/frame (4bit textures), or enough to saturate mem->GPU bus.
Sure you can do the same with general-purpose compute resources, but these new console CPUs aren't looking very strong there.

Postprocessing isn't 2d - it's just general math(and memory bandwith) - why would you restrict the resources available to it, and worse, make them unavailable for other purposes? Especially for horrid features like SSAO.

 

Perhaps the data movers provide direct translation of index buffers to hw addresses allowing for faster state changes?

Or maybe they just allow buffered data streams to bypass main memory ala 360 L2 gather buffers that Jag cores don't have.

I got it, the data move engines power the data move cars.

LOL! I can keep this up all day. Durango is going to suck. Anyone else notice how many people seem to equate relative PPT diagram text box size to relative die size.

 

Wouldn't that be what HSA provides?

 

Why even look at the diagram, there's no evidence that it has anything to do with an MS product other than the fact it was created with PowerPoint.

VGleaks just put this thing together based on the rumors they've gathered right? Realistically speaking, why would a diagram like this even need to exist? Who would the audience be? There's nothing on here that wasn't either in xbox 360 or rumored already so its just a visualization of the most common Durango rumors. (which is why i wondered aloud why another 'unconfirmed Durango rumors thread' was needed when i was already happily subscribed to the other )

 

There's also no point in assuming the pixie dust doesn't do crap until there is some real information on it.

TBH, I think you're being overly dramatic. If the design methodology was, ""F" enthusiast-class performance" why bother with the custom logic? Ostensibly, the whole reason these functional units were designed was to mitigate the effect of having less CUs and lower available bandwidth. If you don't care about performance at all, what purpose do these units serve?

I can accept the view of the Durango as presented to be a "jack-of-all-trades, master of none". That as a result of design choices made to support non-gaming functions, Durango is logically not going to be as good of a gaming device as it would have been had that been the sole or even the overriding focus. But, I think it's giving in to the typical knee-jerk everything is great/terrible, win/loss, black/white internet reaction to say that since gaming isn't the sole or dominant focus of this device that it therefore isn't even an important focus of the device.

I'd argue that maybe, just maybe, that assessment is a bit premature given how much we still don't know about the system at this point.

Why cringe-worthy? I think that's great. This should be a boon for both platforms.

What little feedback we have that has filtered back to the public from developers indicates they are enthusiastic about Durango. Should this be discounted since it doesn't fit with your narrative?

I'm not clear on what you're railing against here. What control setups for Kinect games were you hoping for that didn't come to fruition because of MS's stubborn clinging to their marketing focus for Kinect? And, "spits in the face" reinforces my overly-dramatic assessment.

None of which prevents Durango from being a very good gaming device. Maybe not the best and if that's your only criteria, than perhaps Orbis would be a better option. Good for you, good for Sony. I don't see the problem.

If Durango doesn't represent as good of a value as a gaming device and the non-gaming functions don't add enough value in a consumer's perception to make up for that deficiency then there will be a viable option in Orbis. That's great. For those that do find value in those additional capabilities they will have a viable option, too. Everybody's happy.

 

SP = shader processor, although that's a bit of a misnomer, really. They are really just FMA units.

GCN GPUs compute things on units AMD calls CU's (compute units). Each of them contains 4 simd arrays of 16 scalar FMA units, which is where the actual computation happens. So, more CUs, more FMA units, more power.

A 7970M has 20 CUs, for a total of 20*64 = 1280 SP. Durango has 12 CUs, for a total of 12*64 = 768 SP. In addition, the 7970M runs at 6% higher clock, so in the end a 7970M has ~80% more raw power than Durango.

 

Well if there is truth to those rumors (for both Sony and MSFT) I wonder why people are searching "dust pixies" in Durango so it is going to match the PS4, imo it won't.

If lot of the RAM goes into the OS, the xbox won't have a significant advantage.
If a lot of cores are constantly used by OS, it may be at a disadvantage here too (depending on Sony choices on the same matter may be the sprcial sauce if there anything special to it be it one system or another).
Sony has more bandwidth and the system might be way more straigh forward, a "real" UMA design without tricks or speed bumps from embedded ram.
Sony has 50% more FLOPS than MSFT to play with assuming GPU architectures are pretty close. The other way around is MSFT has 33% less FLOPS to play with.

Imo if thoe number are true, it should be a no match as far as pixel counters are concerned. For costumer it is another matter, you have to take in account many factors among which the "almighty price of the system". I know geeks forget that one easily but most people don't.
There is the overall offering (/what the platform does), it is unknown but MSFT has lot of advantages here. Will they leverage them properly? Completely different matter though... and we have no clue.
You have the form factor too. Durango should be pretty "cool".
You have the accessories, standard or not, what do they do and so on.
You have the online, what is free what is not (and what are Sony policies on the matter).

Plenty of way more relevant factor than FLOPS and even realtime performances.
Ultimately you may face exactly the same games with same performances (as FPS) with one system rendering at 1080p and the other 960x1440 (I'm not sure the ratio is correct, I'm to lazy to check or do the math my self...). With motion blur, in both case particles and transparencies rendered at lower resolution (I would not be shocked if lot of devs vouched for 720p), and other post processing, only pixel counter with a magnifier x50 are going to be able to tell the difference.

Thing could get even weirder if devs manages (as in some crytech presentation) to render a frame using multiple resolutions and the up-scaling in different ratio different parts of the screen.
Say you render a significant part of the screen (the middle) at your target resolution and the borders left/right, up/down at lower one. Software then manage to get things together.
Things like dynamics change in resolution on could make things even tougher to call out for pixels counters.

But that for geeks, the average joe won't notice, it comes down to price and what the system does with and without a subscription, experience as far as game are concerned will be the same.

Imo Sony will claim the performance advantage and there won't be much point questioning it.

 

Thanks for the education.

 

I am saying that it's at at most 3GB. IMO this part is the most subject to change before launch and after launch.

Certainly more subject to change than clocks or other hardware specs.

 

To call SPs FMA units is oversimplifying things. Each SP supports many opcodes and contains GPRs. Multipliers take up a significant amount of area, but that's not all there is to it.