Xbox Series X [XBSX] [Release November 10 2020]

[Jay]

Auto HDR is added for backwards compatibility mode. Typically, such modes are relegated to a subset of the CU and memory resources available to the full console. If everything is relative to the performance of the original title, there is no loss since the full console may not be used for the game.

Is it only available to BC?
If a game is patched or native XBS game but without inbuilt HDR, you don't have access to the system level AutoHDR?

 

[3dilettante]

Is it only available to BC?
If a game is patched or native XBS game but without inbuilt HDR, you don't have access to the system level AutoHDR?

All the stories I've seen about it indicate it's being done for existing titles that predate HDR or in the context of backwards compatibility titles.
At this point, I don't know of any testing that was allowed for non-BC, although there's a greater chance that a current game would have its HDR-era graphics pipeline stepped on by an attempt to auto-HDR the output.

 

[BRiT]

At this point, I don't know of any testing that was allowed for non-BC,

Just off the top of my head the following titles were non-BC and featured in more recent previews: Gears 5, Gears Tactics, Dirt 5, The Falconeer, The Touryst. No idea on the state of HDR-ness for them or if Auto-HDR applies to native titles.

 

[3dilettante]

Just off the top of my head the following titles were non-BC and featured in more recent previews: Gears 5, Gears Tactics, Dirt 5, The Falconeer, The Touryst. No idea on the state of HDR-ness for them or if Auto-HDR applies to native titles.

I didn't see any mention of auto-HDR, and I think there was discussion of actual HDR in some. I doubt auto-HDR on top of actual HDR would work well.

 

[thicc_gaf]

no, not necessarily. ExecuteIndirect allows for the GPU to call it's own kernels without the assistance of the CPU.

Ah okay. Maybe there's some benefit to some hardware dedicated to handling drawcall offloads, but it's something more to be explored in future designs. I'm thinking something where after you batch a list of instructions to hand to the GPU then there could be instructions packaged in the batch to tell the GPU segments of the original instructions to transform (with some kind of algorithm) to generate new drawcalls from that, so the CPU only needs to point to what parts of old instructions to transform and repackage to generate new ones right on the GPU instead of the CPU needing to repackage a batch of whole new commands to send to the GPU as a drawcall batch.

It's probably too fanciful an idea and it'd likely require a lot of stuff done (a lot of it beyond my understanding xD), but it was just an idea I had in mind while thinking about the next-next gen consoles. But, it's got no direct bearing on Series X so I'll stop it there.

I didn't see any mention of auto-HDR, and I think there was discussion of actual HDR in some. I doubt auto-HDR on top of actual HDR would work well.

Some of the BC games DF showed off with auto-HDR apparently didn't benefit too well from it, namely Dark Souls (don't know if it was 1, 2, or 3). The white balance ended up way too strong on those titles.

Not to privy if One X version of DS3 had an HDR feature already built into it but if so that could be an example in action of what you're describing. Confident MS will tune the algorithm over time so that edge cases like seen in the DF video fall further and further off of being a thing.

 

[AzBat]

Some of us, including me, don't want streaming services to decide when and what I can watch and even less to subscribe to half a dozen services to get decent coverage of different studios.

Digital doesn't preclude that. Digital isn't just streaming either.

Tommy McClain

 

[Kugai Calo]

Missing Dolby Vision on Blu-Ray playback? That could be easily added vs software update, as long as the display controller supports the format.

Ah okay. Maybe there's some benefit to some hardware dedicated to handling drawcall offloads, but it's something more to be explored in future designs. I'm thinking something where after you batch a list of instructions to hand to the GPU then there could be instructions packaged in the batch to tell the GPU segments of the original instructions to transform (with some kind of algorithm) to generate new drawcalls from that, so the CPU only needs to point to what parts of old instructions to transform and repackage to generate new ones right on the GPU instead of the CPU needing to repackage a batch of whole new commands to send to the GPU as a drawcall batch.

Metaprogramming on the GPU? GPUs are not good at that.

 

[AlphaWolf]

Missing Dolby Vision on Blu-Ray playback? That could be easily added vs software update, as long as the display controller supports the format

Software and a price.

 

[Kugai Calo]

Says Andrew Goossen. "For the Series X, this work is offloaded onto dedicated hardware and the shader can continue to run in parallel with full performance. In other words, Series X can effectively tap the equivalent of well over 25 TFLOPs of performance while ray tracing."

GPUs are pipelined, dynamic (AMD, static on Intel Xe and Nvidia GPUs) multi-issue machine. This means a GPU CU pipeline can start multiple instructions at once, each take multiple cycles, executing them in parallel, commit one each cycle.

So, while the ray tracing hardware is doing multi-cycle work, instead of blocking the execution, the shader pipeline can wait on it asynchronously while executing other instructions.

 

[scently]

AutoHDR has no impact on the system resources because the hardware responsible for it is in the display controller. EvilBoris at Resetera, who sometimes work with DF and HDTV Test and is something of an expert on HDR, and has communicated with the BC team on the feature, published a video on it when it was first announced. The feature was developed and the ML trained based on the work done by The Coalition on Gears 5. Here is his video on it:

 

[vjPiedPiper]

Yeah I was gonna jump in and say i would expect that the Auto HDR is part of the display controller.
It is essentially a large 3D LUT ( or several 3D LUTS), that they will be feeding custom values into to do the SDR -> HDR mapping.

Not to mention the fact the display controller is already possibly doing some RGB conversion and or YUV conversions,
depending on your hdmi interface it would be 8-bit YUV, up to 12-bit RGB, so there is plenty of conversation that happens in the display controller,
which makes it the correct place to do thee SDR / HDR conversion too.

it will be something like this...
https://www.aja.com/products/fs-hdr

 

[turkey]

huh very strange statement
companies have many multiple times over the past stopped letting ppl play game X because the servers or whatever have gone offline, 99% it has nothing to do with the company going bankrupt but for other reasons, usually its not profitable anymore

Do we know if Microsoft still does something similar to thunderhead from th Xbox One launch where all titles get a certain amount of free cloud resources in their platform. I think this was announced to allow companies to offload some responsibility for maintaining servers to Microsoft, Microsoft in turn gets longer life for its players. It seemed like an api with compute designed for Xbox live gaming, I am not sure if single player titles could use it but I don't see why not, only you probably use your allocation quicker if the work is per user not per lobby say.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1320722670170918912

Very strange if true maybe a later update

Interesting, Even revisiting the earlier tweet from Dolby, it seems specific too gaming:

@xbox, welcome to gaming in Dolby.​

Why?

https://twitter.com/x/status/1304132679324053511

 

[AzBat]

Do we know if Microsoft still does something similar to thunderhead from th Xbox One launch where all titles get a certain amount of free cloud resources in their platform. I think this was announced to allow companies to offload some responsibility for maintaining servers to Microsoft, Microsoft in turn gets longer life for its players. It seemed like an api with compute designed for Xbox live gaming, I am not sure if single player titles could use it but I don't see why not, only you probably use your allocation quicker if the work is per user not per lobby say.

Great question! Isn't that now known as Azure PlayFab?

Tommy McClain

 

[AzBat]

Interesting, Even revisiting the earlier tweet from Dolby, it seems specific too gaming:

@xbox, welcome to gaming in Dolby.​

Why?

https://twitter.com/x/status/1304132679324053511

Maybe because Xbox One X doesn't support Dolby Vision gaming? And the Xbox One already supports Dolby Vision in media apps? “¯\_(ツ)_/¯“

Tommy McClain

 

[AzBat]

Lot more here...

https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/27...on-5-photos-hands-on-xbox-series-x-comparison

Tommy McClain

 

[PSman1700]

The PS5 is competing with my later pc gaming bullds now in size The XSX looks like a early 2000's creative/cambridge longthrow subwoofer when on its side.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1321107091722018816

 

[BRiT]

I'm usually rubbish with 3d flying games, but I'm really tempted to pick up The Falconer, regardless of how huge my games backlog is.

 

[Allandor]

Don't know if this was already here

https://twitter.com/x/status/1316472591255826434

The first game to use Machine Learning to scale resolution, like Nvidia's DLSS, a exclusive feature to Xbox Series X on consoles.
...

#ProjectMara from Ninja Theory to fully utilize Ray Tracing, main character is a patient. Uses DirectML super resolution scaling. This game is reportedly named 'Cerebral Drift'. Has been in development since 2019.

A rumor so far, but it would be really the right way to reach 4k on next gen consoles. DLSS v1 was really disappointing, but v2 is much better and shows what can be done through good algorithms (I really don't want to call it AI because it is not intelligent ^^)