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Digital Foundry: Xbox Scorpio

Kayant

Member
If a game can run 4k native on pro, you can best bet the additional power on Scorpio will allow better graphics. When it comes to taking screenshots there'll be a large difference in assets. No doubt about that
Sure it just seemed you were listing platform features.
 

Hermii

Member
...

Devs are talented and, as always, try to do the best they can with what they have. However, it's a basic fact that the Jags have both hurt performance and limited the ability of game devs to reach their goals since 2013. In fact, the Jags are weaker CPUs than both Sony and MS were hoping and planning for before the PS4 and XBO came out. It's just all that AMD could do, and still is (at least until Zen can be in a semi-custom).

Your logic here is flawed, and frankly your demeanor is a little abrasive.

What was Sony and MS hoping to use?
 
You'd have to ask AMD? I'm saying a certain timetable working a year prior for a different product in no ways means that same situation has to apply in the future.
That sounds strange certainly.Maybe MS was later in this console update game in contrast to what we thought?.
 
This thread is hilarious.
I can't wait for the comparison videos.

'I can't tell the difference now'
'Waste of power'

Do we have any devs here that are actually working with the hardware? 1st hand experience is the best opinion. I'm guessing they are all under NDA of course?
Endless NDAs, you better believe it. Devs have had kits for a while now, yes.
 

Matt

Member
That sounds strange certainly.Maybe MS was later in this console update game in contrast to what we thought?.
Or AMD was behind, or prioritized different things, or they could do it but the cost was too high, etc. I don't know AMD's inner workings.
 

Space_nut

Member
It is you that consider others that just see the logical upgrade and nothing more as downplaying.
It's your words considering ps4pro a higher res ps4 but claims the scorpio more than that.
I have a clear picture, as i said. 40% more powerful than pro. That's it. Maybe 37% or maybe 43% depending on the scenario but I'm that range, that is similar advantage than vanilla ps4 had over vanilla xbo.
One targeted 1080p easily the other not so much.
Scorpio will target 4k easily and pro not so much.
And by the way, you seem to forget selectively of course, that ps4pro , compared to ps4,also busts ram speed(23%), CPU speed(30%), memory (1gb more ddr3 to free standard ram for game usage) and obviously gpu flops. But hey, just higher res ps4.

Resolution isn't everything in graphics. When you look at pro and all the games that released espicailly horizon zero dawn, every face of graphics (textures, character models, draw distance) is exactly the same as base ps4. That makes sense since the improvements you listed for pro does just that. It can run a ps4 game at higher res. This is what you see in 99% of pro vs ps4 games.

Scorpio, as seen in ForzaTech demo, ran Forza 6 at 4k native, 60fps, dynamic weather added, 4k textures and assets (cars, track) using only 40%-60% gpu usage. With PC ultra settings it ran up to 88% usage. This with no optimizations done for Scorpio over base xb1.

The extra ram, bandwidth, and gpu resources will allow not just higher res for games, but other areas where graphics matter. When you see a game with 4k assets compared to consoles, there's a huge difference. You already see it with pc compared to consoles.
 
4 Steamroller cores were also in one of the revisions iirc.
Maybe they were too hot.I wonder if was true Sony thought in the possibility of update to a better CPU with PRO, and if it was in that case a Steamroller derivative...
Certainly for devs Jaguars are the worst part of these consoles.I still have to read one of them say good things about them.The branch prediction and L2 latency must be horrible.
 

Colbert

Banned
@Matt?

Is there a chance you can make one comment where you talk about Scorpio with some kind of excitement and positive vibes?

Just one?

Disclaimer:
I did not scan the complete thread and was looking for that kind of comment from you, so don't kill me if I ask for something you already did. Peace.
 

Theorry

Member
Endless NDAs, you better believe it. Devs have had kits for a while now, yes.

Specs would have leaked tho. So pretty smart of MS to get ahead of the leaks who were bound to happen really and tell the whole message. If only some specs would have leaked without all the extra info we have now. It would have been a mess.
 

tzare

Member
Well, not followed all game comparisons but while there are lots of 1080p games on both consoles, xbo has had a decent number of games running at 900p or lower or with performance issues, compared to ps4. That is more or less the expected difference due to
each console raw power.
The extra ram, bandwidth, and gpu resources will allow not just higher res for games, but other areas where graphics matter. When you see a game with 4k assets compared to consoles, there's a huge difference. You already see it with pc compared to consoles
Agree. So then why the extra ram, bandwidth, gpu of the pro compared to ps4 cannot provide that but the same extra things on scorpio can.
 

Matt

Member
@Matt?

Is there a chance you can make one comment where you talk about Scorpio with some kind of excitement and positive vibes?

Just one?

Disclaimer:
I did not scan the complete thread and was looking for that kind of comment from you, so don't kill me if I ask for something you already did. Peace.
I've made several positive comments on Scorpio. I'm not sure what it is you're looking for.
 

AmFreak

Member
...

Devs are talented and, as always, try to do the best they can with what they have. However, it's a basic fact that the Jags have both hurt performance and limited the ability of game devs to reach their goals since 2013.
So like in every other gen.
Would we hear the same amount of laments if jaguar stayed the same, but pc cpu-performance were on jaguars level?
Jaguar isn't up to pc performance and that's the real reason why we hear so much complains.
Games are made for consoles and devs will try to max out what's in there, so no matter what cpu you put in them it will always limit what devs can do.

In fact, the Jags are weaker CPUs than both Sony and MS were hoping and planning for before the PS4 and XBO came out. It's just all that AMD could do, and still is (at least until Zen can be in a semi-custom).
Zen wasn't impossible for Scorpio.
If they were so concerned they could have used 2 separate chips.
They didn't because costs would have shoot up without gaining much.
And that's the problem - as long as they continue to use a SoC aka for the foreseeable future console cpu performance will always lag behind pc performance.
 
Specs would have leaked tho. So pretty smart of MS to get ahead of the leaks who were bound to happen really and tell the whole message. If only some specs would have leaked without all the extra info we have now. It would have been a mess.
I agree. I'm glad they decided to do this with DF.
 

geordiemp

Member
Resolution isn't everything in graphics. When you look at pro and all the games that released espicailly horizon zero dawn, every face of graphics (textures, character models, draw distance) is exactly the same as base ps4.

From DF on Horizon ZD : But your right, Scorpio will look a bit better, especially in movement where checkerboard is not as good as straight up 4K.

With that in mind, we were really happy to see improvements to resolution on some textures. Also worthy of praise is a marked increase in texture filtering quality. Lower levels of anisotropic filtering on base hardware can stand out on a 1080p image - but the effect is much more pronounced at 4K. Thankfully this is not an issue with Horizon.

Also in same article

many similar titles struggle to maintain solid performance during traversal as the CPU needs to stream in and decompress open world data on the fly, while continuing to process game logic and prepare instructions for the GPU. It's for this reason that titles like Fallout 4 and Just Cause 3 can hitch and stutter when the player does nothing more than move from A to B through the environment.

One of the reason why Jaguar struggles in such games, you need to stop quoting racing games they are not as demanding (not even same ballpark), Wipeout was 1080p60 on a ~ 0.3 TF console in 2008.

Yes a 2.3 Gh Jag will be better than a 2.1 Ghz Jag, but for a game like RDR2 dont expect miracles from Pro or Scorpio, Jaguar will pull them both back to reality IMO.
 

Matt

Member
So like in every other gen.
Would we hear the same amount of laments if jaguar stayed the same, but pc cpu-performance were on jaguars level?
Jaguar isn't up to pc performance and that's the real reason why we hear so much complains.
Games are made for consoles and devs will try to max out what's in there, so no matter what cpu you put in them it will always limit what devs can do.


Zen wasn't impossible for Scorpio.
If they were so concerned they could have used 2 separate chips.
They didn't because costs would have shoot up without gaining much.
And that's the problem - as long as they continue to use a SoC aka for the foreseeable future console cpu performance will always lag behind pc performance.
1. Again, it's not about Jags being bad compared to PC chips, it's about Jags being essentially the weakest part of the systems they are in. They are giant bottlenecks.

2. They could not use Zen in Scorpio. Not using an APU wasn't an option.
 

Theorry

Member
Btw i Penello said in the podcast they improved the HDD also to help with loading times. Not sure what really. But its still gonna be a SATA right? Is a external HDD still gonna be a better option speed wise?
 

Space_nut

Member
Well, not followed all game comparisons but while there are lots of 1080p games on both consoles, xbo has had a decent number of games running at 900p or lower or with performance issues, compared to ps4. That is more or less the expected difference due to
each console raw power.

Agree. So then why the extra ram, bandwidth, gpu of the pro compared to ps4 cannot provide that but the same extra things on scorpio can.

Pro does but not in a way it uses completely different assets. Pro improves with better AF and such but not 4k assets.

When it comes to using native 4k assets, you need a good deal of extra ram and bandwidth. Pro doesn't go much further than ps4. What is it like 176 to 211 gb/s bandwidth? that extra ram is used for os when in sleep. ps4 uses 5gb for games and pro uses 5.5. That's not much to use 4k assets

From DF on Horizon ZD : But your right, Scorpio will look a bit better, especially in movement where checkerboard is not as good as straight up 4K.

Just as i was saying Pro uses the same assets. They're the same textures but Pro uses higher AF and res to make the same textures look better. I'm talking about Scorpio using 4k assets (assets that are in their original form as the artists create them in maya. The details and res for the assets are in higher quality without the 4k res taking into effect. If you use 4k assets in horizon zero dawn it would look so much better
 

Kayant

Member
Maybe they were too hot.I wonder if was true Sony thought in the possibility of update to a better CPU with PRO, and if it was in that case a Steamroller derivative...
Yh probably as they were running at 3.2Ghz at the time. " Playstation 4 architecture evolution over time", "World Exclusive: PS4 in deep (first specs)" on vgleaks are the sources if you're interested.
 

Colbert

Banned
Btw i Penello said in the podcast they improved the HDD also to help with loading times. Not sure what really. But its still gonna be a SATA right? Is a external HDD still gonna be a better option speed wise?

AFAIK it was never clearly answered what type of internal interface they used to connect the drive (SATA 2 or 3) in the Xbox One (S), so it can be that. Or they use now some kind of SSHD for the Scorpio. He has talked about 50% increase in speed by the hdd alone so my tip goes to the first which would double the theoretical peak transfer rates.
 

Syrus

Banned
AFAIK it was never clearly answered what type of internal interface they used to connect the drive (SATA 2 or 3) in the Xbox One (S), so it can be that. Or they use now some kind of SSHD for the Scorpio. He has talked about 50% increase in speed by the hdd alone so my tip goes to the first which would double the theoretical peak transfer rates.


I need this famn thing
 
AFAIK it was never clearly answered what type of internal interface they used to connect the drive (SATA 2 or 3), so it can be that. Or they use now some kind of SSHD for the Scorpio. He has talked about 50% increase in speed by the hdd alone.

I believe they are using the spare RAM when running old games as a buffer to speed things up.

I hope it has SATA 3 speed though as well. And a swap-able internal drive without having to void the warranty lol.
 

tzare

Member
Pro does but not in a way it uses completely different assets. Pro improves with better AF and such but not 4k assets.

When it comes to using native 4k assets, you need a good deal of extra ram and bandwidth. Pro doesn't go much further than ps4. What is it like 176 to 211 gb/s bandwidth? that extra ram is used for os when in sleep. ps4 uses 5gb for games and pro uses 5.5. That's not much to use 4k assets
Pro isn't aiming true 4k for most games so it does not need such level of assets. So memory and bandwidth are updated considering that. It can run higher quality assets than ps4, and Scorpio can run higher than pro.
If it does it will depend on the developers, and the same will happen for scorpio. Some will care, others won't. In the end the are mid gen experiments with limited use base, so if it does not make sense financially improvements will not squeeze these consoles full potential.
 

Colbert

Banned
I believe they are using the spare RAM when running old games as a buffer to speed things up.

I hope it has SATA 3 speed though as well. And a swap-able internal drive without having to void the warranty lol.

Do you really think? Memory in a console is a precious resource, so I am not so sure about such a solution, tbh.

On the other hand we have seen some benchmarks where people connected 5400rpm external hdds to their Xbox One or Xbox One S and had a bump in loading speeds when running their games from the external hdd. This leads me to the assumption that the internal drive still was connected to a SATA2 bus even it was a SATA3 drive.

Assuming that it would be the easiest to just put SATA3 in there to get the double performance out of those drives. While writing and thinking about it I also believe they may have combined that with some sort of SSHD approach.
 

Space_nut

Member
Pro isn't aiming true 4k for most games so it does not need such level of assets. So memory and bandwidth are updated considering that. It can run higher quality assets than ps4, and Scorpio can run higher than pro.
If it does it will depend on the developers, and the same will happen for scorpio. Some will care, others won't. In the end the are mid gen experiments with limited use base, so if it does not make sense financially improvements will not squeeze these consoles full potential.

I think we'll see a good deal of improvements for both Scorpio and Pro this year at E3 :)

MS did make a sdk where devs develop on Scorpio dev kit. They're also able to see in real time how it runs on XB1 and pc. This makes developing and optimizing for all MS platforms easy
 
If that additional performance doesn't really bring someone any more joy, then the additional expense is wasted.

Unless you've found an objective way of measuring joy per dollar, a platform's general value for money can only be determined by its performance to cost ratio.

Honestly don't remember the name, just know they were both very unhappy with final CPU performance.

All things considered, Jaguar isn't too bad. It managed to enable a number of 60 fps titles so it can't be complete crap.
 

Matt

Member
Unless you've found an objective way of measuring joy per dollar, a platform's general value for money can only be determined by its performance to cost ratio.
Were talking about the marginal value to an individual, and their joy can be pretty easily measured.

"How do you like the improved graphics?"

"Eh, I don't really care. Still the same game."
 

Colbert

Banned
Unless you've found an objective way of measuring joy per dollar, a platform's general value for money can only be determined by its performance to cost ratio.

That would be a great PhD or master thesis to look into it. Combined more than one area of science and research. Go!
 

Head.spawn

Junior Member
It's definately not as fully formed a product as what has been shown of Scorpio even this far.
2 really good examples of this are boost mode , which wasn't in at launch and Sony have washed their hands of in terms of support (by making it "entirely at your own risk). I mean , choices are good, but how about a little less of a wishy washy level of commitment to compatibility.

Second, video capture is still at 1080p and HDR captures are not tone mapped to SDR and don't play back in HDR when captured in that format, so always looks strange.

Not to get too off-topic, but I'm surprised this doesn't get talked about more. I'm sitting here playing these HDR games on PS4 for hours and hours, thinking I'm taking all of these wonderful shots for months. Upload them on PC only to find they're ALL shot-out, like wtf, how do you fuck that up? I pretty much haven't touched my PS4 Pro since, it was a bit disheartening, going to have to go and delete all of that shit.
 
I have to say I don't understand what the pre-reveal comments about surprising specs were based on. There was nothing surprising or unexpected performance-wise.

Were talking about the marginal value to an individual, and their joy can be pretty easily measured.

That's not how I understood that comment. The claim was "the PS4 is fantastic value for money" or something to that effect, presented not as a personal opinion but as a general truth. I find that claim to be unsubstantiated. Subjectively you can claim that triple Titan Xs are fantastic value for money because they bring you joy. That's not how you compare value.
 

melkier33

Member
I'm talking about Scorpio using 4k assets (assets that are in their original form as the artists create them in maya. The details and res for the assets are in higher quality without the 4k res taking into effect. If you use 4k assets in horizon zero dawn it would look so much better

What are 4k assets? I keep seeing 4k textures and assets used in the same sentence. You do realize 3D models and animations created in maya are resolution independent. Yeah 4k textures are a thing but I can't see many studios outside first party doing it, maybe a few huge multi platform games but not a lot. Honestly 4k assets seem like a PR buzz word to me, unless someone can explain better that I may be over looking.
 
Do you really think? Memory in a console is a precious resource, so I am not so sure about such a solution, tbh.

On the other hand we have seen some benchmarks where people connected 5400rpm external hdds to their Xbox One or Xbox One S and had a bump in loading speeds when running their games from the external hdd. This leads me to the assumption that the internal drive still was connected to a SATA2 bus even it was a SATA3 drive.

Assuming that it would be the easiest to just put SATA3 in there to get the double performance out of those drives. While writing and thinking about it I also believe they may have combined that with some sort of SSHD approach.

Yes all the older games are only using 5GB of RAM, that leaves 3 spare doing nothing. So they use them as a HDD buffer of some sort. I'm sure I read this or Albert said it on the podcast.

Of course that wont work for new games which will use the full 8GB, so then they would have to rely on actual HDD improvements.
 

gofreak

GAF's Bob Woodward
Just as i was saying Pro uses the same assets. They're the same textures but Pro uses higher AF and res to make the same textures look better. I'm talking about Scorpio using 4k assets (assets that are in their original form as the artists create them in maya. The details and res for the assets are in higher quality without the 4k res taking into effect. If you use 4k assets in horizon zero dawn it would look so much better

You're talking in far too general terms.

There's no such thing - really - as some arbitrary watermark of '4K assets', nor any standard mark that every game is going to reach with its assets across the board.

What you're talking about is higher res textures (which Horizon does use on Pro, in places), higher res meshes. Not necessarily at all the original uncompressed artist output, or even a consistent quality for all assets. The assets being used in 4K on Pro or Scorpio aren't going to reach some peak from where there's nowhere to go next-gen, for example.
 

i-Lo

Member
You're talking in far too general terms.

There's no such thing - really - as some arbitrary watermark of '4K assets', nor any standard mark that every game is going to reach with its assets across the board.

What you're talking about is higher res textures, higher res meshes. Not necessarily at all the original uncompressed artist output, or even a consistent quality for all assets. The assets being used in 4K on Pro or Scorpio aren't going to reach some peak from where there's nowhere to go next-gen, for example.

LoD transitions alone can use massive massive improvements. With higher resolution and better filtering these things have truly started to become the sore thumb.

Makes me wonder if we can switch to tessellation as a solution next gen.
 

Matt

Member
I have to say I don't understand what the pre-reveal comments about surprising specs were based on. There was nothing surprising or unexpected performance-wise.



That's not how I understood that comment. The claim was "the PS4 is fantastic value for money" or something to that effect, presented not as a personal opinion but as a general truth. I find that claim to be unsubstantiated. Subjectively you can claim that triple Titan Xs are fantastic value for money because they bring you joy. That's not how you compare value.
Again, if you are happy with the results you are getting paying one price, and don't get any additional happiness out of what you receive for paying more, then that additional expenditure is wasted, even if objectively you have gotten more for your money.

Think if you are going to the movies. You can pay one price to see a film in a normal theater, or pay more to see it in IMAX. Now I would always pay more to see it in IMAX, because to me that has value, but a lot of people just don't care about the quality or size of their screen past a certain level, so to them the increase in ticket price represents a poor value.
 

Matt

Member
You're a developer, right? Didn't its many cores mitigate its poor per-core performance somewhat? Or is it impossible to take advantage of that many cores?
It certainly helps, but the per core performance is bad enough to still represent a big problem. And of course not everything can be spread across the cores.
 
You're a developer, right? Didn't its many cores mitigate its poor per-core performance somewhat? Or is it impossible to take advantage of that many cores?
Certain tasks simply don't leand themselves well to parallelism and so the lack of clockspeed and poor IPC starts to rear its head.
 

Colbert

Banned
It's really bad. That it could be worse doesn't change that.

i think you are aware of the fact that hardware is designed based on requirements and the components actually used in a system need to meet those requirements. So talking about consoles Xbox or Playstation or Nintendo, whatever they put into their system has met those requirements that were defined at the beginning at the initiative to release new hardware.

Whatever you may personally think about those components, to the solution it doesn't matter because the component in question (CPU) provide the kind of performance combined with the other components it was targeted for. All of course under the constraints of budget and time (means availability of technology). In case of Scorpio they met the requirement to be able to create games native 4K with max. 60 fps just with a beefed up Jaguar core.

And there the story ends.
 
Again, if you are happy with the results you are getting paying one price, and don't get any additional happiness out of what you receive for paying more, then that additional expenditure is wasted, even if objectively you have gotten more for your money.

Agreed, as long as we agree that this is entirely subjective and it depends on the individual. Now on the topic of Jaguar, in what way does it limit development? Framerate for sure, but it seems like it's not a hindrance for creating open world games or crowds of people. I was really surprised by the crowds in Hitman and AC Unity for example, I thought those were out of the question for Jaguar-based consoles.
 

Matt

Member
i think you are aware of the fact that hardware is designed based on requirements and the components actually used in a system need to meet those requirements. So talking about consoles Xbox or Playstation or Nintendo, whatever they put into their system has met those requirements that were defined at the beginning at the initiative to release new hardware.

Whatever you may personally think about those components to the solution it doesn't matter because the component in question (CPU) provide the kind of performance it was targeted for under the constraints of budget and time (means availability of technology). In case of Xbox they met the requirement to be able to create games native 4K with max. 60 fps just with a beefed up Jaguar core.

And there the story ends.
I have made the exact same argument about the Jags in Scorpio being the best that MS could put in it. That doesn't change the fact that they have always been a pretty crappy CPU. The Jags haven't remained because they are the part that best fits, they are still there because they are the only real option.
 

Matt

Member
Agreed, as long as we agree that this is entirely subjective and it depends on the individual. Now on the topic of Jaguar, in what way does it limit development? Framerate for sure, but it seems like it's not a hindrance for creating open world games or crowds of people. I was really surprised by the crowds in Hitman and AC Unity for example, I thought those were out of the question for Jaguar-based consoles.
lol, yes I always speaking to the subjective mind of an individual and why someone might feel a certain way.

Anyway, they are a hindrance in many way. Just as a quick example, you mentioned AC Unity, where the crowd density was a big deal for Ubisoft. But if you look at Syndicate, that was massively dialed back in order to improve on performance.
 
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