Xbox One (Durango) Technical hardware investigation

[Aeoniss]

@Shifty

I think 8GB is really what's practical, and before pushing more money and heat\power at memory I'd have preferred they tried something with the CPU or GPU.

12 GB though is just a bit excessive and it just smacks to me as wishful thinking.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

If you look beyond just PS4 and XB1, B3D has a strong history in identifying likely hardwares IMO. This upcoming gen has thrown a couple of curve balls, but apart from a couple of oddities like an unexpected 8 GBs GDDR5, there's been a lot of right talk too; one should count the rumours shot down as successes as much as one should count predictions. You can't expect anyone anywhere to be 100% correct in dealing with rumours and speculation (otherwise we'd be fortune tellers, not speculators ), but you shouldn't be looking to anyone to be a seer to explain all anyhow. You should be asking questions and looking for sound answers. Those answers may be wrong in the end, but if your looking to know the future rather than reasonable debate and insight, you may as well poke around at fish innards and see what they're telling you.

A quick glance at the title tells me to agree with 3dilettente here anyhow. Discussing who to believe is a currently taboo subject. If I had more time I'd clean up posts, but I'll leave it here. If anyone wants to take "B3D's word for it" (of which there isn't one really, because it's a collective of individuals), they can, but all the technical smarts in the world won't make anyone, or any organisation, infallible. If one is looking for a source of unquestionable wisdom and truth, one may want to go check out any of a number of religious tomes that claim as much, but don't go looking for it on a public internet forum. There's no to discuss nor merit in discussing how right or wrong any source is, including the consensus of this forum.

 

[AzBat]

@Aeoniss The problem is if they are too late to add an additional 4gb of RAM then what makes you think they can spend that money on a better CPU or GPU? They can't.

IMHO if they did upgrade the RAM, it wasn't done after E3 or even the reveal. It was probably done after the PS4 reveal, which still would have been too late to do anything with the CPU or GPU. The only reason why I think they could have added more RAM is purely only _IF_ the dev kits had 12gb. If they didn't have 12gb then I don't think it's likely they could have easily added it.

Tommy McClain

 

[blakjedi]

@Aeoniss The problem is if they are too late to add an additional 4gb of RAM then what makes you think they can spend that money on a better CPU or GPU? They can't.

IMHO if they did upgrade the RAM, it wasn't done after E3 or even the reveal. It was probably done after the PS4 reveal, which still would have been too late to do anything with the CPU or GPU. The only reason why I think they could have added more RAM is purely only _IF_ the dev kits had 12gb. If they didn't have 12gb then I don't think it's likely they could have easily added it.

Tommy McClain

question: are motherboards really that difficult to rework to add in RAM?

 

[Silent_Buddha]

question: are motherboards really that difficult to rework to add in RAM?

If you have to add traces then you have to redo the PCB. That would then mean re-qualification. That last bit is quite large as Microsoft has spent a LOT of time in qualification of the hardware in order to make it as reliable as possible. That takes a fair bit of long term testing.

The GPU speed bump is easy, especially if after the bump it's still hitting the same thermal target they had when they designed the system. A bump in memory is only easy if the traces are already there (if Dev. kit has 12 GB of memory for example) or if it's just increasing the capacity of some or all of the existing chips.

Regards,
SB

 

[blakjedi]

Thanks.

 

[liquidboy]

Don't know for the PS4, but for the One, No. The apps run in a different VM, and the memory amounts allocated to the VMs don't change during normal operation.

I wonder thou ... if a game wanted as much memory/resources as feasible, would it be possible to suspend the "Apps" VM and give the memory/resources to the "Games" VM. (I understand that the "Games" VM may need to be restarted and reallocated the new resources..)


Just thinking out loud

 

[dobwal]

More ram doesnt mean much for gaming if you dont do anything to improve bandwidth. Or has AMD and Nvidia been wrong or have they used bandwidth increases as simply a marketing tool. If an apu can readily make use of 12 gb with just 68 GBps of bandthwidth then why have amd and nvidia been wasting their time and money with ulta expensive gddr5 and 384 bit busses.

A gpu with a bigger bus usually dominates the same gpu paired to more ram but a smaller bus. Bandwidth has always been the most prevalent metric when it comes to gpu memory.

The xb1 supposedly uses eSRAM to minimze gpu calls to main memory. So whats the point of expanding main memory under such circumstances. 68 GBps limits the amount of memory accesses available per frame and there is not enough frame to frame variability during a typical game to need oodles of ram but no expansion of bandwidth to increase the number of memory accesses per frame.

The lack of main memory bandwidth is one most obvious bottlenecks of the xb1 system. eSRAM serves as a tool to help deal with that bottleneck but it resides on one side of the bottleneck while main memory resides on the other.

 

[Averagejoe]

I don't think is possible is such a short time left.

I don't think it will help the xbox one aside from loading.

And i think that MS would not advertise on purpose 8GB of ram on E3 when they could have advertise 12 as an advantage all alone,so i don't think that after E3 there is time to pull this and make even half a million units for launch who knows if way less.

 

[zed]

Yes more memory is better but more expensive

Is there seriously anyone here than would prefer a console to of 8gb to have 50%more memory instead of 50%faster CPU or GPU. Nope. OK then

 

[eastmen]

More ram doesnt mean much for gaming if you dont do anything to improve bandwidth. Or has AMD and Nvidia been wrong or have they used bandwidth increases as simply a marketing tool. If an apu can readily make use of 12 gb with just 68 GBps of bandthwidth then why have amd and nvidia been wasting their time and money with ulta expensive gddr5 and 384 bit busses.

A gpu with a bigger bus usually dominates the same gpu paired to more ram but a smaller bus. Bandwidth has always been the most prevalent metric when it comes to gpu memory.

The xb1 supposedly uses eSRAM to minimze gpu calls to main memory. So whats the point of expanding main memory under such circumstances. 68 GBps limits the amount of memory accesses available per frame and there is not enough frame to frame variability during a typical game to need oodles of ram but no expansion of bandwidth to increase the number of memory accesses per frame.

The lack of main memory bandwidth is one most obvious bottlenecks of the xb1 system. eSRAM serves as a tool to help deal with that bottleneck but it resides on one side of the bottleneck while main memory resides on the other.

You are increasing the bandwidth.


Once the xbox one and ps4 exhaust their 4or 5 gigs for game assets then they are stuck at sub 100mb/s bandwidth. A xbox one with 12 gigs would have another 4 gigs or so of 68gb/s .

Even as just a buffer , it will still serve a benfit

 

[Xbat]

@Aeoniss The problem is if they are too late to add an additional 4gb of RAM then what makes you think they can spend that money on a better CPU or GPU? They can't.

IMHO if they did upgrade the RAM, it wasn't done after E3 or even the reveal. It was probably done after the PS4 reveal, which still would have been too late to do anything with the CPU or GPU. The only reason why I think they could have added more RAM is purely only _IF_ the dev kits had 12gb. If they didn't have 12gb then I don't think it's likely they could have easily added it.

Tommy McClain

If as you say they decided in february why would they anounce 8gb in may?

 

[HeLL]

Why would it want to? Load up really high res textures to enable smooth zooming. If I recall correctly, Rage had a 4GB texture. Load the whole thing == zero loading time waits. You could save a ton in production costs by reducing the complexity of your engine, or generating the LOD textures on the fly from a single always resident megatexture, etc etc. I can think of hundreds of things to do with extra memory that don't require me to be able to access all of it every single frame. More dynamic audio, uncompressed audio samples, Generated giant lookup tables for AI and physics. Almost anything you could use CPU for can be accelerated by using more memory instead. Stop thinking of things in such a limited way.

In fact, could be even better? Rage used software virtual texturing while next-gen consoles uses hardware implementation known as Partial Resident Textures.

According to Microsoft, in DirectX 11.2 Mars demo showing Tiled resources the terrain had massive 3 gb of textures using just a ridiculous 16mb of GPU memory. That's a lot of saved resources for other things. Maybe not at launch titles, but soon the major engines could implement it.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Is there seriously anyone here than would prefer a console to of 8gb to have 50%more memory instead of 50%faster CPU or GPU. Nope. OK then

If the cost of 50% more GPU and CPU was the same as 50% more RAM, you'd have a point.

 

[Rangers]

If you have to add traces then you have to redo the PCB. That would then mean re-qualification. That last bit is quite large as Microsoft has spent a LOT of time in qualification of the hardware in order to make it as reliable as possible. That takes a fair bit of long term testing.

The GPU speed bump is easy, especially if after the bump it's still hitting the same thermal target they had when they designed the system. A bump in memory is only easy if the traces are already there (if Dev. kit has 12 GB of memory for example) or if it's just increasing the capacity of some or all of the existing chips.

Regards,
SB

Supposedly the rumors i've heard claim, i guess, there are 12 and 8gb xone's (dev kits? prototypes?) floating around.

so they're both ready to go, according to this rational. nothing would really have to be done if they decided on 12, it'd just be one of two designs they pick (probably one assumes with mismatched chips or whatever).

Yes more memory is better but more expensive

Is there seriously anyone here than would prefer a console to of 8gb to have 50%more memory instead of 50%faster CPU or GPU. Nope. OK then

the latter two are not options at this late date.

so, it's not a question of x or y, it's x or nothing.

Also, "it depends". 8Gb is probably good for any feasible current system,. but there will come a day when it would VRAM limit a GPU. So at that point, you'll want more RAM, more than a 50% better CPU or GPU.

Anyways, if Xbone gets the upgrade, you'll more or less have a 7770 with 12GB RAM as one system and a 7850 with 8GB as the other. Interesting to look at it. The former sure is RAM weighted!

 

[Airon]

You keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means...
Highly unlikely, sure. Stupid, I'll give you. Crazy, even. Extremely difficult and expensive, absolutely. Impossible? It's definitely possible.

bikilian, I completelly trust you.
So if you said that we have at least 1 possibility out of million to have a system with 12Gb, or better that technically is still possible to add extra 4GB to X1, well, now you can count me with all of you that believe in this chance.

A 12GB X1 will be really incredible!!! A real game changer situation.

At this point finger cross till Gamescom!

 

[fehu]

You keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means...
Highly unlikely, sure. Stupid, I'll give you. Crazy, even. Extremely difficult and expensive, absolutely. Impossible? It's definitely possible.

And just in case, don't blink!

 

[Jay]

(Improbable) Less than 8GB - Net melts down, people take to the streets rioting across the world.

(Probable) 8GB - Everyone is yep, as we were told and expected.

(Possible) More than 8GB - Raised eyebrows, we discuss what lead to it and what actual use it will be in the immediate and long term.

 

[pMax]

(possible) xb1 sports 16Gb of ram.

(possible) I win a $5m lottery.

Yet, both very unlikely (the latter way more... still possible).

'possible' alone means little, unless you have a way at least to quantify its range.

 

[blakjedi]

I still im trying to understand the benefit 32MB of ESRAM at 109GB/s has over a general system RAM bandwidth of "only" 68gb/s?

If the spec bump included faster general RAM I would be ALOT more excited. Even it only doubled to 136 GB/s that would be a real boon.