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

Fortunately it is exposed as a User Setting that can be enabled or disabled as desired.

 

Yup but my mind casts back to all those poor souls trapped thinking Casablanca was a weird off pink colour will now be replaced by folks who think old games are an eye scalding blend of muted colours and hyper-bright highlights

 

Most people aren't electrical engineers or as technically inclined as those in here. As a wise man once said "Well, the world needs ditch diggers, too".

Tommy McClain

 

Oh I know I'm a madman in the desert screaming delta-E values to the wind but I'm right dammit!

 

Wasn't sure where to put that. Maybe in both this thread and the SSD thread?

 

Getting a lot of chatter regarding Series X heat. On Beastcast I said it was "toasty" and that's exactly what it was I've read stories that are using the Beastcast segment to support claims the Series X has a "heat problem" and I would disagree w/ making that assumption

If you are concerned with a story you read saying the 1TB expansion drive "appeared to burn my hand!!" you are of course perfectly welcome to watch the full Beastcast sequence starting here: https://youtu.be/GAFOZWz1S-o?t=1614… Hot to the touch, yes, but clearly did not *burn my hand*

A full preview video on Series X will be coming soon where I will cover my entire experience in more detail thanks and stay tuned​

 

People are using something I said on the podcast, clipped and out of context, where I said it was enough heat to warm up a room... except I go on to say that's like a high-end PC, Xbox One X, PS4 Pro, etc. Electronics make rooms warm unless you have AC.​

"we know it's cooling effectively ... because hot air is coming out of it."​

Spawn Wave nails it. This is how it's supposed to work. People conflate heat with overheating. Heat is inevitable. What matters is how the system manages the thermal byproduct. And the more heat you feel coming out means less heat inside the case throttling performance.​

08:31 but feeling the console itself when it's
08:33 in use running a game
08:35 um the console itself actually
08:39 like literally feeling it right now it
08:41 doesn't get very warm
08:42 the plastic doesn't feel warm and stuff
08:43 like that however
08:45 out of the top of it does feel quite
08:47 warm um
---
09:32 yeah out of the out of the top it does
09:34 feel pretty warm not gonna lie
09:36 uh only about as warm as the one x did
09:39 so it's not like it's any warmer or
09:42 worryingly warm it's not like i'm
09:43 putting my hand in fire and going oh my
09:45 god
09:45 my hands burning just feels like the
09:47 xbox one x did
09:49 roughly the same as that i think but
09:51 again don't have a thermal imaging
09:52 camera
09:53 i might have a look to see if i can
09:54 actually pick one up and compare how
09:57 how hot both systems get but you know
09:59 i'd say it's pretty standard
10:01 nothing nothing surprising but yeah the
10:04 console itself though weirdly is
10:06 re it's like cold like the actual
10:08 console i don't know if that's like
10:11 by design the by design that it just
10:13 pushes all of the heat out of the top
10:15 to keep the inside of it cool i mean i'd
10:18 rather have the heat coming out of it
10:20 than being inside it right yeah so i
10:22 think that probably now the cooling
10:23 because it's completely quiet
10:25 the console itself is cold and the
10:28 heat's just coming out the top
​

lots of people keep asking me about Xbox Series X heat. I’m under embargo. Just consider this, Microsoft wouldn’t send these consoles to 100s of journalists, streamers, and youtubers if they had heat issues. They just wouldn’t let people touch the console at all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯​

 

Its not doing it randomly. The AI is being trained by comparing SDR scenes with their HDR equivalent. As long as the algorithm is competent, built with good scenes and a large number of scenes, it should be readily able to mimic HDR scenes.

And most people don’t care for the vision of graders of movies because they aren’t trying to reproduce the type of environments most movies are mastered to accommodate.

People want more luminance because they tend to watch TVs in brighter environments. And if people were so sensitive to colors, chroma subsampling wouldn't be a thing.

Plus in the end, it might be better to let an AI do HDR than your average dev because a lot of devs HDR attempts haven’t been all that great.

 

Are the rules and guidelines for Grading Film the same as for HDR in video Games?
I think that probably yes, as in both situations you are trying to create feeling and connection from what is on the screen.

There has been a huge amount of research into doing good HDR in film, so it would be smart to apply similar rules to any Auto HDR, process.
And from what little i know of both, it seems like they are.
Perhaps the auto-HDR process is blowing out too many highlights, and making them too high.
Most film will have less than 1% of screen at Max brightness at any point in time.

I'd love to see a side by side comparison of the SDR and HDR gameplay, looking at the actual light values, not just a visual inspections.
But given how tricky it is to discuss and compare some of this stuff i think the above video was pretty good, And that Evil Boris guy seems to know his stuff?

Although i think that looking if a game uses ALL of the available range is not a good approach, and instead i would be looking at a few different things.
- Peak light values (nits) that a game hits in any situation ( not every frame should hit 100% )
- Take a couple of representative shots and compare amount of image that is in bottom 20% or range, middle 60%, and top 20%
- How much if any the contrast changes in a scene when comparing the SDR to HDR verisons of the images.

But hell I'm just a software engineer, albeit in Broadcast industry, and I used to work on a color grading application
Also while in Film we can depend that most uses have Pro level equipment, most consoles games end up being played on rather average TV's,
and accommodating for that probably has a whole lot of other concerns.

 

Yes you are

 

<conspiracy_mode>
If there aren't heat problems why is Tom Warren embargoed from talking about this?
</conspiracy_mode>

 

It's still incorrect. There is no way to do this and produce a correct image. I've already conceded it looks better than the worst attempts at this but that doesn't make it good. There are lots of ways to screw up an image to make it "pleasing" by some arbitrary metric e.g. "brighter" with blue push, pseudo HDR by using grayscale as a proxy for luminance, etc. They all have one thing in common, they are not the correct way to display the image. That Yakuza Zero footage looked genuinely awful to me, like someone had jacked the white level to 11. The only case where it worked was the best case scenario of hot neon lines against a pitch black field with Geometry Wars.

You can train an algorithm to call cats dogs all day long it doesn't make it so.

Edit: A key test will be games like FIFA, I cannot wait to see AutoHDR will do to a match with Real Madrid or Tottenham Hotspur with their white team kits, I suspect it will transcend football to turn the scene into a contest between beings of pure light (you can already see weird HDR highlights on Kazuma's white suit)

 

Know your joking, but as we know there's people out there that think this....

My understanding is that everything is embargoed until specific aspects when they say it's ok to report on it.
So it's not that the heat has a specific embargo, it's just convered in the general one.

 

Remember folks, this is the Internet at large, where "it's a bit warm to the touch but works perfectly" immediately gets translated to "this piece of shit will burn through to the centre of the Earth."

Fools will be fools. Giving them an Internet connection won't fix that.

Also, I find a console expelling heat to be quite useful. I live in a cold part of England and I appreciate the dual functionality of a games console/radiator. It's a bit of a bastard in the 17 hours of summer we get each year, but handy the rest of the time.

 

But why won't Microsoft put us all to ease by commenting on these rumours? certainly, tHeIr SiLeNcE sPeAkS vOlUmEs*.

*if this was happening on the PS5

 

If you always comment rumors you can't have secrets. If you start it once to comment on everything, the internet "community" will start to spread rumors just to get their answers.

 

I'm not sure what MS should say to be honest they literally gave out preview and retail units for review a month before launch. Everything about your device is absolutely a known quantity now, its not the same as Sony actually with holding information. You can't say anything that won't be refuted come the embargo dates end.

What's to comment when you had the streamers who signed an NDA to not talk about certain things until certain dates, break said NDA, talk about it and now need to resolve the fact that they spoke off the cuff without actually giving it much thought. The most they can say is: well don't it again. Streamers have their own credibility to manage as well, that's why we're seeing some streamers backtrack on their comments. It's the streamer's mess, not MS mess. They mess up, they may not receive units in the future.

 

edit I guess they felt the need to comment.

 

His mention of the One X is a good way to quash this nothingburger.
Other than concern trolls, it's likely people are only noticing the heat coming out of the top of the Series X because of the exhaust's convenient and "inviting" location. It almost beckons you to put your hand on top of that green grid to feel it.
But how many people ever reach around to the back of their Xbox One X? It puts out a lot of heat, but no one ever mentions it.

 

It's almost like you're supposed to hold the controller and not the console.