Xbox One (Durango) Technical hardware investigation

[bkilian]

For a machine that is supposedly having ESRAM yield problems, who's hardware situation is "behind schedule and a mess", who's tools situation recently went from 'shitty' to 'partly shitty' (thx bkilllian for that one), and has a 900 GFLOP GPU, I thought the XBO showed very well yesterday, particularly in-game with BF4 and with RYSE, at least as good as what was shown elsewhere.

Hey, to be fair, it was not the whole tools situation, it was just one small feature. And knowing the guy who posted the picture, had something to do with debugging.

 

[expletive]

Hey, to be fair, it was not the whole tools situation, it was just one small feature. And knowing the guy who posted the picture, had something to do with debugging.

Ok sorry, I don't want to get anyone in trouble, just building a case on the gloom and doom picture being painted leading up to yesterday.

BF4 definitely looked nice but then what makes you sure what they showed actually played on the XBone and wasn't just PC.

Peter Moore said it was running on actual XBO dev kits (EDIT: but was clear, for better or worse, it was not final hardware) during his interview on gametrailers.com yesterday. He was asked that exact question.

oh i agree with that.

still the specter of ps4 being more powerful is very real even if it wasn't on display yesterday.

the xbones 499 would be viewed very differently if it was the 1.8 tf box and ps4 1.2

Incidentally, if you go to MS' XBO page they are touting ESRAM as a benefit.

 

[HollovVpo1nt]

Who cares if it was beeing run on a PC. You could clearly see from the IQ that it was not a maxed out PC and it was delivering graphics representative of the Xbox One version. The moment the clip started I could immediately tell what the downgrades were compared to that 17 minute PC gameplay release a while ago.

 

[Silenti]

Idea/Question - feel free to burn it if it is stupid

XBone has smartglass. It also has multiple N transceivers. Any reason one couldn't have the controllers have the option of using the wireless network and I could play my game on any screen in the house that can run an app to receive the video stream from the Xbone?

 

[ERP]

Big issue is going to be Kinect, if it's actually used by games, it pretty much ties you to the primary display.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

It could be an optional/convenience feature, like in ME3 where you could use voice commands instead of the controller... haven't tried it in practice, though.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

These screens aren't ugly: http://www.gamersyde.com/news_e3_ryse_for_the_romans_-14142_en.html

They're certinly not CGI!

BTW - what's the line of discussion here? What technical aspect are trying to prove/disprove with reference to the E3 showings?

 

[loekf]

Incidentally, if you go to MS' XBO page they are touting ESRAM as a benefit.

Ouch.. Xbone has a well thought out "marchitecture" ?

 

[function]

the combination of its CPU, GPU and ESRAM is like having a supercomputer in your living room

Flawless.

But raw power is nothing without speed. So the Xbox One uses its power more effectively, creating lightning fast experiences unlike anything you’ve had before.

I don't even know what this means.

 

[MfA]

Big issue is going to be Kinect, if it's actually used by games, it pretty much ties you to the primary display.

I'd say the type of games for which motion controls work do that to begin with.

 

[Aeoniss]

For a machine that is supposedly having ESRAM yield problems, who's hardware situation is "behind schedule and a mess", who's tools situation recently went from 'shitty' to 'partly shitty' (thx bkilllian for that one), and has a 900 GFLOP GPU, I thought the XBO showed very well yesterday, particularly in-game with BF4 and with RYSE, at least as good as what was shown elsewhere.

Who said it had a 900GF GPU? It's GPU is 1.2TF last I checked..?

 

[Rangers]

that was a rumor a while back, it was said the gpu was downclocked to 800-900 gflops.

it's most likely false, i think he's exaggerating for effect.

 

[SenjutsuSage]

Flawless.



I don't even know what this means.

"lightning fast experiences unlike anything you’ve had before"

They've done a good job keeping the Thunder Clouds a secret up until this point. That's what that means

 

[XpiderMX]

I don't know if it is old but I found this in a SemiAccurate article (I know charly is not "accurate" xD):

According to the article, the 200+GB/s from MS PR is 166 GB/s (from esram) + 34.132 GB/s (from DDR3):

As a sidenote, when speaking about the bandwidth numbers, the memory bandwidth on Xbox One does seem to be at the same ballpark as Sony’s PlayStaton 4, right? While Microsoft touts over 200 GB/s memory subsystem bandwidth, so it should be better than the 176 GB/s number on PlayStation 4, right? All wrong. The devil is deep in the details, remember the large chunk of eSRAM for the graphics? So the Xbox One system uses 16 pieces of Micron “D9PNZ” DDR3 memory modules on-board, a little Google search give us the exact model number being MT41J256M16HA-093, which is 4 Gbit density modules running at an I/O frequency at 1066 MHz, that’s DDR3-2133 data rate for those who don’t know, and these modules will provide 34.132 GB/s bandwidth under a dual-channel configuration. And thus, the eSRAM contributes over 166 GB/s bandwidth. However, the two numbers were added up for obvious marketing purpose, and in reality the two numbers should be seen in parallel with each other because, as we mentioned earlier, the GPU will treat the eSRAM as a very-fast last level cache, so the bandwidth here doesn’t serve the CPU cores at all.

 

[MrFox]

The ram chips are 16 bit wide each, and there are 16 of them, so it's 256 bits.
DDR3-2133 is 68GB/s @ 256bit wide.

Charlie probably multiplied the frequency as if it was SDR... because that's the kind we should expect from him.
Otherwise he's saying Microsoft used a 128bit configuration, which doesn't match the memory parts width.

 

[XpiderMX]

The ram chips are 16 bit wide each, and there are 16 of them, so it's 256 bits.
DDR3-2133 is 68GB/s @ 256bit wide.

Charlie probably multiplied the frequency as if it was SDR... because that's the kind we should expect from him.
Otherwise he's saying Microsoft used a 128bit configuration, which doesn't match the memory parts width.

Then he is wrong with the eSRam b/w I guess.

 

[3dilettante]

I went and found the cited text, and it appears it is a different author.
Every other article and leak on the web arrived at a different number, so some corners may have been cut in deriving the bandwidth numbers, and this didn't get caught by whatever review process that was used. It's gone unmodified for some time.

 

[messyman]

Flawless.



I don't even know what this means.

Blast processor, obviously.

 

[warb]

Flawless.



I don't even know what this means.

100% efficiency of course.

Better when cloudy.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Incidentally, if you go to MS' XBO page they are touting ESRAM as a benefit.

Welcome to a new generation of games and entertainment. Where sentences are simple clauses. And we start with connectives. Where marketing firms once again cripple our beautiful language. And we look like numpties as a result.