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

PS4 also launched without the ability to use external drives, so maybe that was the reasoning behind that. I know the 80 MB/s number is thrown around a lot for the drives in PS4/XB1, but from personal experience, they usually bench over 100 when hooked up to a PC. I've only benchmarked about 6 drives, so my sample size is pretty small, but I would imagine that's a pretty common result.

 

On existing and past generations, texture/LOD pop-in was caused by slow I/O, you'd need to be pulling data for where the character would be in 10-20 seconds, which could be a lot of places in an open world game because they could go in any direction - so the slow I/O problem is compounded by also pulling data for a lot of places that character will not be (but might have) which increase memory usage. On nextgen, this will be much less of an issue because you can pull data much later, meaning very little speculative I/O. This is an I/O and memory win not just in the orders of magnitude for fast I/O, but in the amount of needless I/O saved and memory used.

 

It was a baseline target for some game (HZD?). 20 MB/s wasn't a hardware limit.

 

Though true, what's the relationship with the part of my conversation you quoted?

 

Spiderman I think.

 

Its not the hdd itself being the limiting factor, its the sata/io in the base ps4 that is.

 

Distant cousins. Your comment caused that thought to pop into my head.

 

20MB/s sounds right as a target for the engine. The smaller the tiles the more it sacrifices bandwidth if it spends a lot of time seeking. And they need the engine to allow the worst case seek at the worst case bandwidth at the inner edge. I think 512K tiles would lose 50% of the time seeking.

Was the cap removed later? It was speculated both companies set an artificial cap to 40 or 50MB/s to account for the outer edge to inner edge difference. I think it was around 40MB/s to 80MB/s back with the 500GB drive.

Without the cap, the first install would be twice as fast as the last install when the disk is almost full. Same for quick benchmarks which don't use the entire surface of the disk, it depends where the access happens.

 

hm... I'm not sure when it happened - maybe after 4Pro or whenever they changed HDD SKUs.

It does make me wonder if MS wanted a guaranteed spec on the XDK to reduce QA case testing, but given how prolific multiplatform development is these days, you'd think they'd just uncap it for consumers.

 

Wasn't sure where to put this.
Some insight into the HDR conversation that MS is doing for BC games from Evil Boris.

 

AI HDR "upscaling"... weeeird. Probably will have really uneven results. But hey you can turn it off or on, so, cool switch to have.

Thinking about it, kinda surprised Nvidia doesn't have it as some driver feature that's similar, seems like their kinda thing. Hell maybe they're working on it.

 

you can see from their ddsl or dssl or whatever they call it that machine learning can have really good results. So I doubt it will be a real issue

 

BBC click (uk news technology program) did an interview with Phil.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52961835

Video may be geo fenced though, don't know.

 

Wasn't geo-fenced here, at least.

 

Interesting statistic.

I'd imagine that much like me, there's a lot of subscribers trying games they never would have tried if they had to buy them. And in the process discovering that some of those developers they've never purchased a game from make REALLY good games. And some of those game genres that they've never tried in the past are fun genres to play. That potentially translates into future purchases of games by those developers in genres they never would have previously bought a game from.

Thinking more on this. In that sense, even if MS were losing money on their 1st party exclusives due to day and date release of Gamepass, those potentially work as advertisements to get people to try games they never would have purchased in the past. That potentially translates to future revenue increases as people buy games from those 3rd party developers due to the delayed release of 3rd party games on Gamepass. And that's even assuming that all games from those developers eventually make it into Gamepass.

Regards,
SB

 

From an interview with Technical Director at Codemasters David Springate about optimizing Dirt 5 for Xbox Series X:

Link: https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/06/10/inside-xbox-series-x-optimized-dirt-5/

 

hmm interesting. I guess I was wrong about dumping data in mid-frame. Then again, just because you can, doesn't mean you should. But interesting. Curious to see if there is more development into this area whether it's an ideal solution or design paradigm that everyone follows or not.

wtf. lol.

I just don't get it anymore. I tried. I honestly tried. But until someone can hand hold me through this process. His current setup is fast enough to just fly in textures on demand mid-frame. We haven't even gotten to talk about SFS or anything else. This is just Codemasters software here.

Nice nod to the CPU though.

Interesting, curious to see how they divvied the work up.

video

 

@iroboto virtual texture streaming, extra compression on disk, low latency access to disk, low latency decompression to RAM, probably sampler feedback to help reduce the load on memory consumption.

 

I am also a bit ??? at the idea of mid frame usage of something from the SSD. Like, how small is that chunk or texture that could realistically be used mid frame? For that matter a 16.6 or 8.3 ms frame for that game (60hz/120hz)?

Tying a mid-frame bit of used data to the slowest and largest latency hardware sub-component?

 

Zen2 does seem to perform better than Intel offerings in multithreading relative to it's single threaded performance in PC benchmarks. I assume that's what he's referring to although it seems quite a strange way to frame it. It's not as if the XSX is using a custom CPU that handles SMT differently to it's desktop counterpart, not that we've been made aware of anyway.