Digital Foundry: Microsoft to unlock more GPU power for Xbox One developers

This 'article' is the biggest waste of fucking bandwidth the world has ever known.

There's nothing new, intelligent, or worthwhile mentioned.

It's literally nothing but mindless garbage made to make the Xbox One sound like it's running off of magic unicorn farts.

That 10% reserved is permanently gone for the UI. Yay, the UI will be smooth! That's how it's fucking designed. This isn't article worthy. At all. You're spending $500 on this fucking box. It better be smooth. That 10% isn't going to magically become freed up one day. This article is pretending losing cycles actually makes the Xbox One faster. What in the unholy fuck stupid logic is that?

Is this all because they're fucking scared about the performance gap? That's sad.

You know what this is like?

It's like the movie Dumb and Dumber.

Lloyd: What do you think the chances are of a guy like you and a girl like me... ending up together?

Mary: Well, Lloyd, that's difficult to say. I mean, we don't really...

Lloyd: Hit me with it! Just give it to me straight! I came a long way just to see you, Mary. The least you can do is level with me. What are my chances?

Mary: Not good.

Lloyd: You mean, not good like one out of a hundred?

Mary: I'd say more like one out of a million.

[pause]

Lloyd: So you're telling me there's a chance... *YEAH!*
Click to expand...
 
mangochutney said:
Wasn't there some guy on here recently claiming to be an intern at MS who worked on Kinect stating that there were special chips in the console and Kinect itself to avoid it taking up resource available for games?

This kind of suggests that guy was telling porkies or Kinect is damn hungry.
Click to expand...

There are special chips to aid Kinect, like SHAPE (audio), for example. But there's also a gpu reservation.
This article is just more confirmation that some amount of power on the xbox one, and some of the custom hardware it has, is needed to drive Kinect and the OS features (like snap), which are "always on". Which isn't exactly news.
 
AdmiralPain said:
Good news indeed. With the recent PS4 news and now this, it seems that the difference between the platforms is shrinking. Don't get me wrong, the PS4 is still clearly more powerful, but it seems it will be a close race.
Click to expand...

You do know if you train wreck this thread with defunct information in a thread that was closed by mods what will happen right? Nothing has changed with PS4 edge so stop the BS before it's to late, just saying.
 
Thrakier said:
Wait, when I read that headline I thought "oh that's good news" and then I read the actual news and thought "well that's shit news". It means that there is currently a 10% power reduction on the GPU, so it's even LESS powerful than we thought before?
Click to expand...

it's really something new, we just didn't have official confirmation.
 
Skeff said:
What? the esram has to be specifically managed...
Click to expand...

Just because your access is virtualized it doesn't mean you can't tell where you want to put it :P. It means that for any single resource, it doesn't mean where is stored.

That will probably make more sense if you factor in the DMEs moving data around. Imagine they taking a buffer that currently resides on the DDR3, and copying half of it to the esram. Now when the gpu wants to read a portion that was copied the address translation table will give the esram page address, instead of the DDR3.
 
astraycat said:
There is probably some GPU reservation as well. Games are rather complicated beasts, and they can't just be "suspended to RAM". First of all, they are already in RAM, and the game is already going to be using as much of its allotment as it can. Second, a game needs to know is being kicked off. That's no longer a trivial task in the age of asynchronous compute.

However, if there was some sort of GPU reserve that the OS was guaranteed, then it would be much easier for the OS to show up snappily while the game moved into its own suspend mode. Instead of the OS doing some sort of heavy game suspend in this scenario it just signals the game that it's lost focus, but it continues to run in the background. It's easier that way, and the reserve likely doesn't need to be as large as it is on the XB1.
Click to expand...

Probably? yea, I expect 1-3% but to say that the video posted is proof is wrong.

To your two points, the allocation in RAM for the game would likely not change whilst it's suspended, also that would not prevent the OS from using the 2gb or whatever is reserved for the OS. Second the game can be told it is being kicked off by the CPU reservation the OS already has. The Vita already does this.
 
Quadraphonic said:
This 'article' is the biggest waste of fucking bandwidth the world has ever known.

There's nothing new, intelligent, or worthwhile mentioned.

It's literally nothing but mindless garbage made to make the Xbox One sound like it's running off of magic unicorn farts.

That 10% reserved is permanently gone for the UI. Yay, the UI will be smooth! That's how it's fucking designed. This isn't article worthy. At all. You're spending $500 on this fucking box. It better be smooth. That 10% isn't going to magically become freed up one day. This article is pretending losing cycles actually makes the Xbox One faster. What in the unholy fuck stupid logic is that?

Is this all because they're fucking scared about the performance gap? That's sad.

You know what this is like?

It's like the movie Dumb and Dumber.
Click to expand...
Wow.
 
The article is simply spun in a way to follow the recent "we're closing the gap" line. Just look at the title.

The take home message is that the "current gap" is actually worse but they might reach status quo (as in, come back to "current gap", not improve it) further down the line.
I don't see this happening, unless they eventually allow developpers to block the snap feature, thereby freeing up what should normally be reserved for it.
 
Freki said:
You still owe me an explanation for the 30% Power difference you stated earlier in the thread... I even took the time and layed out the math for you...
Click to expand...
He got the 30% number from Penello. These kind of PR articles are put out for the casuals and the "core" gamers see through this bullshit.
 
nib95 said:
Posters like pixlexic and IT Slave certainly do Xbox fans no favours. This thread is going places. People seemingly just not reading or not understanding the different caveats at play, but blindly defending or critiquing none-the-less.
Click to expand...

Eh, they're not that bad. Sure they probably didn't look at the article and just saw the summary in the OP or the current conversation happening at the end of the thread but they at least are not slinging overly ridiculous theories. You know who embarrasses me as an Xbox fan, MisterX, and neither pilexic or IT Slave stoop to his level.
 
Quadraphonic said:
Is this all because they're fucking scared about the performance gap? That's sad.
Click to expand...

It's like on one hand they say "look at the games", "The games speak for themselves" then the engineers on the other-hand give us incremental, small upgrades.

It's a head scratcher. Just leave the specs as they are and really do leave the games to speak for themselves.
 
Evidently, IT Slave either has a bad memory or chooses to continually ignore well versed explanations and rebuttals to his claims...

Re-record not fade away...

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=83506749&postcount=1734

nib95 said:
IT Slave said:
My point was that if there's ever the need for the OS and a game to be running at the same time, you'll have to be able to guarantee that there will be GPU resources available for the OS. The only way to do that is to allocate some up front. There's going to be that one person that pauses Killzone to bring up a how-to video on Youtube.

The same is true for memory resources. That's why both machines have a set amount reserved for the OS.
Click to expand...

ElTorro answered this already in response to DieH@rd.

DieH@rd said:
Because OS always need to have some piece of GPU at its desposal. We already have confirmation that you can access game livestreams, game videos from friends pages, store, web browser and entertainment apps [Netflix] while PS4 gaming is active. Same as MS, Sony needs to think about "worst case usage scenario" and carve appropriate ammount of HW resources for that [% when game is fullscreen, % when game is in background, % when game is not loaded].
Click to expand...


ElTorro said:
Why should the PS4 reserve any non-trivial GPU time for anything other than the game when the game is the only application rendering graphics during gaming? The XBO runs snapped Metro apps concurrently with the actual games, and since Metro is a hardware-accelerated UI and the WinRT-based apps have access to rendering capabilities, GPU time reservation is necessary. This does not apply to the PS4 which simply doesn't have the snap feature. As others already said, background tasks are much better put on the CPU.
Click to expand...

ElTorro said:
This is marginal, and, most importantly, there is no need to reserve a fixed amount of resources all the time for such things. Most probably, notifications are just part of the game's process and handled by the overall game framework, whereas snapped applications not only are running in different processes, but in a different virtual partition.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
LukasTaves said:
Just because your access is virtualized it doesn't mean you can't tell where you want to put it :P. It means that for any single resource, it doesn't mean where is stored.

That will probably make more sense if you factor in the DMEs moving data around. Imagine they taking a buffer that currently resides on the DDR3, and copying half of it to the esram. Now when the gpu wants to read a portion that was copied the address translation table will give the esram page address, instead of the DDR3.
Click to expand...

You need all the Gbuffer in eSRAM, you're not going to move Gbuffer from and to eSRAM, it will be really bad for performance.
 
~~Hasan~~ said:
correct me if i am wrong. but doesnt the PS3 have more TF than xbox 360 ? i dont think that means anything. at all.

i am not dissing any of them systems. as i might probably buy both of them next month " already have them both pre ordered"
Click to expand...

It'd be GigaFlops not TeraFlops and it's complicated. The basics are the 360 has a 5% GPU GF edge on the PS3 and most games through the generation reflect that. The 360 also had a high bandwidth edram which was used as a frame buffer, a single pool of memory and universal shaders which were easier to keep busy. Those things added up to much less bottle necks in general and better performance in general.

The PS3 had an odd CPU which could crunch floating point almost as well as it's GPU however using that capacity was hard. It had a smaller bus to the XDR VRAM and it's exotic and complicated to think about. You needed a lot of time and work to use that processing power for anything. You had to work with it on a lower level than most studios are capable of.

This led to multi-platforms on the PS3 being outright garbage early on because they didn't' have any documentation, didn't have any best practices, and Sony viewed outside studios as competitors. Sony was in the mindset that mastering this complicated set up would give them an advantage making content and assumed they'd win the generation through momentum from the PS2 era. It ended up hurting them pretty badly when non-Sony teams struggled.

As the generation went on engine programmers closed the gap using the Cell as Sony wanted. You got roughly parity towards the end on multi-plats. Mostly because the machines were roughly equal in a lot of ways. 5% GPU isn't a lot. With careful planning the PS3 bottlenecks could be coded around and stuff that needed the fast frame buffer you could manage with less optimal algorithms.

The next gen is different, the architecture is almost exactly the same, the performance edge isn't a complicated story. The situation is different and we likely won't see the rough parity we have this gen because the machines aren't as close in raw GPU performance and exclusives won't be that different from multi-plats because the technical wall to tap that power isn't so high.
 
Vol5 said:
It's like on one hand they say "look at the games", "The games speak for themselves" then the engineers on the other-hand give us incremental, small upgrades.

It's a head scratcher. Just leave the specs as they are and really do leave the games to speak for themselves.
Click to expand...

Well they probably know that the games will speak for themselves and not in a favorable way. Hence why they're doing all these last minute minor HW tweaks. Which is weird, because the cloud is supposedly able to make the Xbone blow the PS4 out of the water.
 
Regarding MS activating the extra 2 CU's vs 6% increase in clock speed, it looks like the extra 2 CU's really wouldn't be utilized because of the setup of their system. They're ROP limited. PS4 has 32 ROPs which is overkill for 1080p, but it's better to have more unused than less and running into issues w/ just 16 ROP.

The downside of the Xbone's memory setup also limits them to 16 ROP. They couldn't have the same 32 ROPs as PS4 because they wouldn't even be able to utilize them due to a lack of memory bandwidth.

"The relationship between fill-rate and memory bandwidth is a good example of where balance is necessary. A high fill-rate won't help if the memory system can't sustain the bandwidth required to run at that fill-rate," said Goossen.

"For example, consider a typical game scenario where the render target is 32bpp [bits per pixel] and blending is disabled, and the depth/stencil surface is 32bpp with Z [depth] enabled. That amount to 12 bytes of bandwidth needed per pixel drawn (eight bytes write, four bytes read). At our peak fill-rate of 13.65GPixels/s that adds up to 164GB/s of real bandwidth that is needed which pretty much saturates our ESRAM bandwidth. In this case, even if we had doubled the number of ROPs, the effective fill-rate would not have changed because we would be bottlenecked on bandwidth. In other words, we balanced our ROPs to our bandwidth for our target scenarios. Keep in mind that bandwidth is also needed for vertex and texture data as well, which in our case typically comes from DDR3."
Click to expand...
 
Vizzeh said:
Someone correct me if im wrong, bit of surmising but there is a secondary custom chip for background audio and tasks, possibly an ARM processor to alleviate all non-game essential processing,
Click to expand...

The XB1 audio chip is mostly for kinect related commands (MS reps said so). Both have a secondary chip to manage downloads and updates in the background.
 
nib95 said:
Posters like pixlexic and IT Slave certainly do Xbox fans no favours. This thread is going places. People seemingly just not reading or not understanding the different caveats at play, but blindly defending or critiquing none-the-less.
Click to expand...

the difference is if it were the other way around I would still speak up. There is no need for the types of replies we see in these threads.
 
Bodde said:
That headline is the most misleading one I've ever seen on Eurogamer. What the hell is going on there recently ?
Click to expand...

They eventually edited the title of the "4.5GB of RAM" article, also from Leadbetter.

It was originally: PS4 devs can only use 4.5GB of system's 8GB RAM
And later changed to: PlayStation 4 gives up to 5GB of RAM to game developers

That was also awesome...especially when neither was accurate.
 
The headline for the DF is quite misleading. It's not that developers can access 10 percent of GPU assigned to kinect and apps its that as a basis 10% the GPU power is not available to developers unless they not utilize Kinect and apps alongside the game.
 
IT Slave said:
You need some GPU resources to render a decent quality dashboard. If both the OS and game are running at the same time, you don't want a game using up 100% of the GPU and the user trying to switch to the OS at the same time (worst case scenario).
Click to expand...

Once again, you don't understand how multitasking works.
 
This article confirms Xbone is even weaker than we were thinking...

low RAW power, low ROPs, less ACE/Queue, Kinect/OS holding game performance, etc.

Is it suppose to be a pro-MS article?
 
ethomaz said:
This article confirms Xbone is even weaker than we were thinking...

low RAW power, low ROPs, less ACE/Queue, Kinect/OS holding game performance, etc.

Is it suppose to be a pro-MS article?
Click to expand...


I guess you could equate it to a monthly Sony NPD press release.

@Tsundere

Let's all hope for the best!
 
Militant17 said:
What about online MP? Serious question.
Click to expand...

you die, then respawn, then die again, or D/C, What would happen if you paused online multiplayer this gen?

Essentially, the PS4 multi tasking is pausing the game then not rendering it. freeing up GPU resources for the OS.
 
vpance said:
Not shrinking. Only confirming what we expected. Everyone was running with PS4 at 40% GPU advantage with 1.84TF vs 1.31TF. Now we know it's actually 1.18TF that's available for Xbone.
Click to expand...

It has been known for a while, since, as I already said many times, snap necessarily requires GPU resources. This was a direct implication of the XBO's feature set. People just chose to ignore reality.
 
Skeff said:
you die, then respawn, then die again, or D/C, What would happen if you paused online multiplayer this gen?
Click to expand...
No but basically people are saying the ps4 won't need to reserve GPU because the game will suspend when you go into the menus. But what about playing online. Shu did it at gamescon he took a pic online and shared it on twitter. You can't suspend an online game while using the menu right? Wouldn't both the OS and the game need to run concurrently? So some small amount of reserve would be necessary wouldn't it? Probably a lot smaller the 10% I'm thinking, but it would still be needed wouldn't it?
 
Seems pretty obvious the people now running the Xbox division post Mattrick don't like the power disparity between the One and the PS4. They are doing everything they can to eke out as much extra power as they can without the risk of another RROD fiasco.

But it's a battle they can't win. And their continued pursuit to highlight specs slight improvements makes that glaringly obvious.
 
I actually didn't even think about the fact that the GPU would have to have a small chunk reserved for the OS/apps since it has the snap feature and would most likely be doing GPU rendering. That's too bad. I guess that's one good thing about the way PS4 is doing multitasking (without two things open on the same screen).
 
So if that article is true and Xbone does have 10% reservation of GPU for OS then:

PS4 - 1.84
Xbone - 1.18 ?

PS4 would be then 60% more powerful than Xbone in pure flops power ?

From 40 to 60 in one article.
 
Militant17 said:
No but basically people are saying the ps4 won't need to reserve GPU because the game will suspend when you go into the menus. But what about playing online. Shu did it at gamescon he took a pic online and shared it on twitter. You can't suspend an online game while using the menu right? Wouldn't both the OS and the game need to run concurrently? So some small amount of reserve would be necessary wouldn't it? Probably a lot smaller the 10% I'm thinking, but it would still be needed wouldn't it?
Click to expand...

That's up to developers not the OS. OS will suspend the game, developers have to design their game around that.

Also if dashboard is showing it will take more than 10% gpu.
 
Perkel said:
So if that article is true and Xbone does have 10% reservation of GPU for OS then:

PS4 - 1.84
Xbone - 1.18 ?

PS4 would be then 60% more powerful than Xbone in pure flops power ?

From 40 to 60 in one article.
Click to expand...

It's not 60 but 56 - but nevertheless not what you'd expect after reading the headline...
 
Militant17 said:
No but basically people are saying the ps4 won't need to reserve GPU because the game will suspend when you go into the menus. But what about playing online. Shu did it at gamescon he took a pic online and shared it on twitter. You can't suspend an online game while using the menu right? Wouldn't both the OS and the game need to run concurrently? So some small amount of reserve would be necessary wouldn't it? Probably a lot smaller the 10% I'm thinking, but it would still be needed wouldn't it?
Click to expand...

The game will remain loaded on the RAM (this doesn't mean suspended/stopped), but the GPU won't be rendering the game. So as far as reserving GPU for the OS I don't think that would mean anything.

I'm like you though, I'm not certain, just giving my 2 cents.
 
Looks like that rumor was true. This is why with a 41% GPU advantage, devs were seeing a ~50% advantage for the PS4.

I could see them reducing it to a 5% reservation.
 
Militant17 said:
No but basically people are saying the ps4 won't need to reserve GPU because the game will suspend when you go into the menus. But what about playing online. Shu did it at gamescon he took a pic online and shared it on twitter. You can't suspend an online game while using the menu right? Wouldn't both the OS and the game need to run concurrently? So some small amount of reserve would be necessary wouldn't it? Probably a lot smaller the 10% I'm thinking, but it would still be needed wouldn't it?
Click to expand...

Well the game wouldn't need to use the GPU to render. the best way to show this would be to open an MMO on your PC fullscreen whilst tracking the GPU usage, then alt tab out of it, the game is still running and the online world is happening, you still get sound, but the GPU usage is much much lower.
 
ElTorro said:
It has been known for a while, since, as I already said many times, snap necessarily requires GPU resources. This was a direct implication of the XBO's feature set. People just chose to ignore reality.
Click to expand...

do you think PS4 uses at least a couple of % of it's GPU for the OS also?

I'd venture a guess that they would use at least 3-4%. Is that unreasonable?
 
Wow the news for X1 get worse and worse but on the other hand MS is trying harder and harder to spin the power gap. These articles sound like moneyhated PR from MS to make X1 power look on level of PS4. But the smart readers can smell the BS from far away.

MS going with the bloated pos W8 OS for X1 is one of the worst decision IMO. But then again, they always wanted to push metro any way they could.
 
ElTorro said:
This is marginal, and, most importantly, there is no need to reserve a fixed amount of resources all the time for such things. Most probably, notifications are just part of the game's process and handled by the overall game framework, whereas snapped applications not only are running in different processes, but in a different virtual partition.
Click to expand...

With the CPU have to bare the load of the snap features.... is it correct to assume that perhaps the CPU upclock by microsoft was not a NET gain over the PS4 and simply an increase to match it whilst unburdening their own processes??
 
Spongebob said:
Looks like that rumor was true. This is why with a 41% GPU advantage, devs were seeing a ~50% advantage for the PS4.

I could see them reducing it to a 5% reservation.
Click to expand...

I could see PS4 using that much because their OS doesn't need to do the Skype while watching Movies, while there is a fantasy score update.
 
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