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

So, this was confirmed in the DF Direct hands on video.

Series X supports USB drives but only for running legacy BC titles like XboxOne/X360/OriginalXbox or for storing SeriesX games (backup mechanism). You have to copy to SSD to run.


Quick Resume is variable number of titles, depending on how large the games are. I think they have a quick resume partition on NVME for this. It only ejects older game(s) when a new game is suspended.

 

I see quality troubles of future Multiplatform games , many downports from the PC

Its a good Question we dont know how complex and Memory hungry upcoming Games will be in the Future. And will the Game developers take the trouble to optimize the games on the new Xbox to get around the restrictions?

 

Raytracing can be pretty exciting for more realistic lighting so that's cool. This could be what really makes them stand out compared to the older consoles. Otherwise they aren't going to be that much of a tangible boost IMO. 3D hardware just hasn't moved ahead that much.

 

I haven't watched anything in full yet, but cooling wise, it doesn't look to be doing anything particularly special. Airflow out top, pulled in from holes at back, through a linear bunch of fins. Main point is a huge vapour-chamber to spread the heat. Were there dust filters on the intakes? The slots between find looked a bit narrow to me.

And the 'debug port' was an SSD expansion after all, and nicely done, though I imagine a fair markup for expansions.

 

They moved away from the radial fans of the current consoles. Axial fans tend to be quieter. 130mm with a high static pressure design I guess. 300W power to deal with though.

 

This was how I was planning on using my SSD with an external USB drive on a PC I was planning on building. It's the best way to take advantage of super fast SSDs but not having to buy a lot of expensive storage. Plus you can't play more than 1 game at a time, but with the instant resume tech I can see having no more than the 4 games Microsoft's research says a user plays at any given time.

Tommy McClain

 

This kinda shows the danger of cross platform games. A slightly gussied up Gears 5 (probably very barely improved over the PC version maxed) isn't blowing my kind.

That said it's just something preliminary to show, it's fine.

 

Wonder if I can just move my external drive over and have all my legacy titles ready to go or will they need to be installed again.

 

That should be the experience. That's what I did on my upgrade from launch- Xbox One to Xbox One X, unplugged from launch model and plugged into OneX. The first time I clicked on the title on the new system it said "Getting your game ready" and then it started the launch process of the game within 8 seconds. I assume it validated the license was still applicable and did whatever internal house-keeping was needing on the new console. I even took my driver over to my niece/nephew's and played games there with the same experience.

Of course you'll probably want to copy the game over to internal NVME SSD to take advantage of the speed.

It'll be interesting for me to see the speed difference between the internal NVME SSD and the external 2TB SSD I'm using on the OneX now.

 

An External SSD will at least make copying game backups back and forth much quicker.

 

I don't see shuttling games around saving all that much time in the long run. I might do it for a few games, but there's 4TB of games on there so I don't see myself buying a stack of SSDs.

 

Agreed, but for some that would be faster than downloading the game(s) all over again. The console could probably keep the game(s) up to date even when parked on external non-NVME storage.

I need to pair down what games I have on my drives as I'm running extremely low on storage even on the OneX and I have an 4TB HDD and 2TB SSD for my games. I had to even start moving some games to the internal 1TB HDD. The 4TB is for Upcoming Games. The 2TB SSD is for Currently Playing. Series-X is definitely going to force me to rethink my game installation strategy.

 

Not really sure if any devs would use 3.8 mode. Even if you can only get 25% performance per extra SMT thread (probably a worst case scenario of sorts), that performance will quickly dwarf an +200 mhz...

Maybe indie type devs who would rather have simpler development and aren't straining for every last ounce....

 

In the DF article and videos, Microsoft indicated they think more developers will opt for the 3.8 GHz mode in the beginning because they have engines tailored for the 7-Core current-gen consoles, so they may not have scaling capabilities beyond that.

 

I'm interested in a number of the infrastructure enhancements to the platform, such as the systems that gather metadata for texture residency and latency management. There's a lot of engineering in hardware and software that isn't directly measured in the headline specs, but can give a wealth of information to developers or even the hardware itself about the run-time behavior of the system. The additional API and system layers also hold promise in terms of flowing into the PC space, and perhaps other consoles because AMD does have some patents along the lines of residency and latency handling--which I only mention in this thread because I hope that makes things more likely to reach critical mass for adoption.

It's early days to know how much depth there is below the brief touches on these topics, but it is an encouraging sign for a broad engineering and design effort, and much of it has software and platform engineering which Microsoft has shown are powerful levers at its disposal. Its current-gen security framework is another example of how deep it can engineer its systems, if it chooses.
This time, there doesn't seem to be signs of the over-extension and dependence on outside actors, and at least so far no significant about-face in design eating into their efforts. At least from the OS and security side of the system, the switch away from always online was a major effort that showed a lot of good work and adaptability--even if it was effectively treading water to the outside world.

edit: grammar

 

So some thoughts after reading the DF article (https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-inside-xbox-series-x-full-specs ), dual purposing the Series X SOC for Xcloud provides a some advantages they may not otherwise have had.

• First, even for extremely bad chips they can likely salvage it for use. Instead of running 4 instances of an XBO game, it could instead run 3 or even 2 instances. No ideal from a data center power standpoint, but would allow them to use them temporarily if power consumption per XBO instance is important.
• Second, this allows for potentially larger economies of scale that may allow them to negotiate a better wafer price at the fab.
• Lastly, I wonder if MS has any plans for potentially using these SOCs for Azure?

Locking the speed of the SOC down without using boost clocks is the smart thing to do. I don't imagine many gamers would want to play performance lottery about how well their console will run performance hungry games. Even worse if you don't generally have air-conditioning and would be at the mercy of local temperatures.

Personally, I still hate that PC GPUs all now use boost clocks making their performance non-deterministic.

Looking at the work done on Gears 5, I suspect there may be enhanced versions of all of Microsoft Studio's recent games on XBSX as they should have plenty of time to make any necessary changes and potentially optimizations to have XBSX at the very least run PC ultra settings at 4k/60, possibly even 60 FPS for titles that were 30 FPS on XBO-X.

Will be interesting to see if any 3rd party studios also do something similar.

So, ML was a focus and hence CU's were modified to not only do 2x-16 bit ops, but 4x-8 bit ops and 16x-4 bit ops as well. Depending how and whether ML is leveraged, this may be a competitive advantage if Sony hasn't also worked with AMD for similar modifications.

• Important to note that this isn't the same as the dual 16-bit ops that PS4-P supported.
  • It's here from the start of the generation on the base XBSX console.
  • There's a clear plan for use in ML algorithms that can be leveraged across the entire generation of XB titles, unlike dual 16 bit OPs only benefitting PS4-P.
• Of course, this still depends on Microsoft or 3rd party developers finding a use case for ML.
• Also, it's possible that it's standard RDNA2. I know AMD mentioned support for Tensor operations in RDNA2, but I can't recall if they mentioned that was via Tensor Cores (like Turing) or not?
  • Andrew Goossen (Microsoft) mentions specifically adding support for this to the GPU, so it suggests it's a Microsoft requested change to the CUs.

So, developers will be able to create their own custom BVH structures and the SOC will accelerate that in tandem with whatever the rest of the GPU is doing. IIRC, this differs from NV's Turing in that the hardware accelerated BVH isn't customizable by developers?

Hmmm, no rasterization (other than the skybox and moon) in the Minecraft DXR demo? Or am I misunderstanding what DF are saying? Impressive if so. Thinking back to what 4A Games said about their next game having a full RT rendering engine, I wonder if that means they will go full RT with no rasterization?

I find it very interesting that they started development of the Project Scarlett back in 2016...and XBO-X (released in 2017) was part of the development of Project Scarlett.

The external SSD package for XBSX also looks suitably cute in a nostalgic console memory cart kind of way.

DLI seems interesting. Rather than the standard method of the system OS constantly checking the controller to see if there was any user input, it's been reversed so that the controller just immediately sends user input to the system whenever the user activates an input. Additionally each input is time stamped so that the game (developer) can see exactly what the latency is for user input.

OOOOOOOH. Full frame updates decoupled from display sync? So the benefits of faster response (Vsync disabled) without the drawback (screen tearing) even on non-VRR displays. This is something I'd like to see in action.

USB Type-A chosen specifically to ensure easy compatibility with past accessories. Not a bad choice as USB Type-A can support 10 Gbps speeds which is more than enough for most uses the USB ports will see. Unlike portable devices (laptops, tablets, etc.) you aren't going to be using the USB port as display out (lots of bandwidth required for 4k/60 or higher) or to charge the device which are things that USB-C would be needed for.

And back to the whole Machine Learning question...

I'm impressed, but also somewhat skeptical. If it actually works convincingly as a system level feature? I'd almost get one just to play something like Crimson Skies (in the BC list) in HDR. And I'm not even interested in console gaming anymore. But this is something that you can't do on PC (at least currently). Mind blown if they can pull this off.

If anyone hasn't read that article yet, you should. It's a great read. Huge kudos to Richard Leadbetter for an excellent article. Now, when do we get one for the PS5? I'd be EXTREMELY interested to see something of this caliber with this much information on PS5.

Regards,
SB

 

Hah, this was one my first experiences with Xbox way back in 2001. It was the demo title at Toys R Us Xbox kiosk. Before Xbox was out, you could experience it at kiosks, it all seemed so new exciting back then. Just a little aside.

 

Seems to be close to what many predicted
https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/...speculation-with-a-technical-spin-2018.60604/
though more storage but less memory

Seems like 10-15TF was what everyone thought, 12 being the most common number

Hardware raytracing has me most excited though

 

One of the reasons they may have been able to go with a fully enabled soc in the console. But guess didn't add up financially.
Could see them doing what you say though, then replacing them when yields are good.

Yea, Phil said that was the plan, so they worked with the azure team.

Since it will also be doing azure work, ML could actually be more beneficial there than in the console space.
This could be a nice side affect so console gets the OP's also.