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

[orangpelupa]

Length of video doesn't matter so long as what you have already processed is written/flushed to storage media. It doesn't need to keep more than a second or two of video in memory, mostly only enough to process between key-frames.

Oh! That's probably the reason why most of my TLOU2 recordings are borked on PS4 pro. The hdd write speed can't keep up, so it skip frames, and taking ages to finish saving the video.

PS5 and xsx won't have that issue but it makes me wonder it's wear and tear or effects on ssd temperature (constant writes for a long time). Hmm, probably zero practical issue tho. Even My ancient Sony tablet use ssd that was tortured every day and it's still working just fine haha. It does stalls tho at rare times

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I don't know if it is written directly to storage though. I think the files I have saved tend to be 1.5 GBs, which fits nicely with the sizeable OS allocation. If the OS is reserving several GBs but not using it for video, what the hell is it using it for? Then again, I guess it'd take quite some time to save out a solid 1.5 GBs to these slow HDDs.

Going forwards, how much file saving could be performed on the fast SSDs factoring in wear? Looking at maybe 10 GBs writing an hour? Over the whole SSD, not a bad amount, but if localised to the same area once there are more installed games, that sounds like it could become an issue to me. It'd be better to have some cheap, slow DRAM or something.

 

[BRiT]

I don't know if it is written directly to storage though. I think the files I have saved tend to be 1.5 GBs, which fits nicely with the sizeable OS allocation. If the OS is reserving several GBs but not using it for video, what the hell is it using it for?

Seeing as this is an Xbox thread, we can only say what MS uses it for -- to allow for rapid switching between 4 apps and allow for streaming to Twitch or other services as well as playing background music or podcasts.

For the streaming aspect, if wear leveling becomes an issue I could see MS pushing people towards using external USB Thumb drives for that use -- rather have to replace cheap external media than more expensive NVME/SSD/Flash.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Microsoft virtualized the display controller for the Series X which has benefit of lower latency video streams. This could also allow for higher quality encoded streams and perhaps with lower resource usage too.

Can you explain more on this? Virtualising anything typically adds latency because this thing here, really isn't a thing here and it's being done by that thing over there.

 

[BRiT]

Can you explain more on this? Virtualising anything typically adds latency because this thing here, really isn't a thing here and it's being done by that thing over there.

Let me dig up the details, it was around the time of the new blog posts and interviews with Microsoft engineers. It also relates to customizations made for their server streaming offering xCloud. You may have skipped some of them because others write things off as fluff if it's not from Sony, but this was a new detail.

@DSoup here's an earlier post about this, around beginning of July --

Yeah i remember a quote from a video with Jason Ronald talking about how they made a huge bet by "Virtualizing the display controller" in the XSX .. They wouldnt of done this if it wasnt for the tie in with xCloud ..

Ive been trying to find out the significance of this virtualization effort, but couldn't find anything

quote from this vid (14:17 mark):

And the post by eastman which relates to external encoders being used on XBO, maybe that only relates to cloud use? -- https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/2137853/

And continues on to other posts such as -- https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/2138233/

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Seeing as this is an Xbox thread, we can only say what MS uses it for -- to allow for rapid switching between 4 apps and allow for streaming to Twitch or other services as well as playing background music or podcasts.

Doesn't XBox One have video saving?

 

[BRiT]

Doesn't XBox One have video saving?

A proper answer can't ever have video usage in it because you asked "but not using it for video, what the hell is it using it for?" [ie: What Else?].

 

[mrcorbo]

Can you explain more on this? Virtualising anything typically adds latency because this thing here, really isn't a thing here and it's being done by that thing over there.

You're not the only one this seems off to. Would love a detailed explanation.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

A proper answer can't ever have video usage in it because you asked "but not using it for video, what the hell is it using it for?" [ie: What Else?].

I don't understand. Does XB1 have video capture as standard like PS4? If it does, it might be using that RAM reservation for saving video. If not, it's clearly not using that reservation for video and has it for some other purpose.

Well, Google to the rescue:
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-record-xbox-one-gameplay?r=US&IR=T

So there's 10 seconds of constant capture which wouldn't require much RAM at all. There's up to ten minutes if you start recording. That could and is more likely to be operated saving direct to HDD than using a large reservation of RAM that otherwise would be unused. Oh, unless it then uses some app space in RAM and prevents apps being used while recording?

 

[BRiT]

I don't understand. Does XB1 have video capture as standard like PS4?

It does, but that wasn't the question I thought you were asking with your exact words of: "but not using it for video, what the hell is it using it for?".

 

[BRiT]

The Xbox settings under Capture Preferences has the following options for "Record what happened":

• 15 seconds
• 30 seconds
• 45 seconds
• 1 minute
• 2 minutes

As well as Game-clip resolution when connected to a 1080p display:

• 720p SDR
• 1080p SDR

Capture Location:

• Internal
• External if you have an external USB dedicated to it

An article from the time when they added support for dedicated external media drives for game captures: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-record-xbox-one-game-dvr-clips-external-drive

 

[AzBat]

Actually you can record up to an hour based on storage. The max duration will change based on resolution and storage size. With a big enough hard drive you could record up to 1 hour of 4K HDR content.

Tommy McClain

 

[BRiT]

Right. The key info there was the first part of allowing upto 2 minutes for the "record what happened", as that's their live buffer before being told to persist to disk. That's the look behind buffer.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Okay. in the case of XB1 the OS reservation isn't fitting in 1.5 GBs of video then, meaning it must be for appy stuff. Have we no word on more RAM being freed up like we had last generation?

 

[BRiT]

Okay. in the case of XB1 the OS reservation isn't fitting in 1.5 GBs of video then, meaning it must be for appy stuff. Have we no word on more RAM being freed up like we had last generation?

We do. At least for Microsoft. They have talked about their details, extremely early on. The system reservation for memory is only 2.5 GB. It is allocated entirely out of the 360 GB/s speed memory. From recent leaks on the Game Core Kit we know there is 32 Meg of 560 GB/s memory allocated as well. I assume that is used for video overlays for dashboard popups, for compositing to and from Video.

The other side has not talked about any sort of technical details. Not one bit. So it's likely safe to assume they have the same reservations as before with 3 to 3.5 GB. Theirs was a bit funky because of the virtual memory that was pageable/swapable on their current-gen system.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I meant for current gen consoles. Last gen we had several updates on how the OS footprint was shrunk. I don't recall any this gen. It's a case of trying to factor in current functionality into OS footprint and trying to understand why. XB360 was superbly efficient. PS3 was exrtemely crap to begin with but it had lots of improvements over time. This gen reserved a large chunk at the beginning and I was wondering if it ever got refined and more RAM was made available for games.

eg. You wonder how they cut 1GB for XBSX - was that 1 GB also cut from XB1 via refining the OS or removing unused features?

 

[BRiT]

I meant for current gen consoles. Last gen we had several updates on how the OS footprint was shrunk. I don't recall any this gen. It's a case of trying to factor in current functionality into OS footprint and trying to understand why. XB360 was superbly efficient. PS3 was exrtemely crap to begin with but it had lots of improvements over time. This gen reserved a large chunk at the beginning and I was wondering if it ever got refined and more RAM was made available for games.

eg. You wonder how they cut 1GB for XBSX - was that 1 GB also cut from XB1 via refining the OS or removing unused features?

I don't see it documented in the following thread: https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/...ne-x-and-xbox-series-x-2019-12-2020-03.61513/

I tried to get as much information as was available. The only part I remember about system reservation being decreased was about the Xbox One X when they freed up another 512 Meg to 1 GB (don't remember exact number). I think that came from them using a 1080p Dashboard instead of running it at 4K resolution.

I only saw details on CPU Core #7 being freed up on both sides, then the Xbox One GPU time slice being optimized to free up more of it for games as the "Snap" and Kinect functionality was removed.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I wonder if that 1 GB reduction for XBSX comes at refining the way apps work then? That is, perhaps XB1 had too much expectation of how side functionality was going to be used and budgeted a large amount to support that which ultimately proved overkill based on owners' actual use?

XB360 was so very efficient, I can't imagine subsequent XBOS's are bloated to support similar functionality so, as you say, it's curious how reductions are achieved. And it's clearly not by moving RAM video onto SSD because XB1 already doesn't use a large video buffer.

 

[BRiT]

If it were up to me, and it's clearly not, I would push for minimizing as much as possible the amount of memory background apps can use for Streaming or Playing Audio. I can't think of a reason to have a 3rd app running in the background to do anything else while gaming.

I would then use part of the Quick Resume space/partition for applications that are not run in the background. I might even entertain fully changing over to a tombstoning process for apps. If they're not running, they're not using live system memory. The app would be able to quickly resume. Microsoft demoed this with games, but I don't see why Apps wouldn't work the same way with the Quick Resume space/partition. They would/should be even quicker because they should be minimal compared to games, perhaps even smaller than X360 games.

 

[VitaminB6]

Doesn't Xbox One have 8GB of flash memory as well? Did MS ever disclose the exact purpose for that? I always assumed it was for storing saved states to switch between apps and if so shouldn't that also help cut down the amount of ram needed for the OS?