DirectX 12 Might Not Have A Big Effect On Xbox One, Mostly Targeted For PC

[petalpusher]

zarx said:

selnor1983 said:

Interesting that they mention resolution difference then mention DX12. DX 11.2 was the update in February for Xbox One that bought the tiling technique for the console so the ESRAM can fit up to 6gb of data on 32 mb. And this is why 3rd parties arent hitting 1080p yet. They have to programme the ram differently and they arent taking the time to bother with it ( well at least some arent ). Games like Quantum Break which blow 3rd party games away are 1080p native. 

DX 12 will have some liitle effects on Xbox One, but the biggest changes we will see are from first party developers who use Tiling Techniques on the Xbox One fast ESRAM. I expect 1080p 60 FPS Halo 5 to look absolutely out of this world. As will Gears Of War 4. Quantum Break alreay looks best next gen visuals so far and appears 1080p native.

Tiled Resources or Partialy Resident Textures as AMD called it when they implemented it in their GPUs years ago. Has nothing to do with resolution. It is a technique for texture streaming, id Tech 5's Meagtexture is a software implementation of Virtual Textures which if you played Quake Wars, RAGE, or Wolfenstein you would know it has it's drawbacks along with it's advantages of lower RAM footprint. If you have a small cache for tiles then you will have lots of pop-in as you stream in textures. It doesn't make the textures any smaller it just allows you to more effeciantly break it up and stream into memory from disc.

And tiled rendering for the framebuffer which will effect resolution is also not a new technique. a few X360 games used it to manage the EDRAM there already. Frostbyte 2 (and I assume 3) for example uses a tiled rendering aproach there.

Oh a lot more games than that, pretty much every single x360 game not running at 1024x600 MSAA2x is tile rendered, mostly in 2 tiles for the majority of the games (in 720p with or w/o AA depending on rendereing complexity). A few uses more tiles, but at this point it becomes complicated (and not very effective)

It's kind of the same problem with the X1 but this time its embedded RAM is not only used for framebuffer, and not directly connected to ROPs, that's why we don't see much 1080p games (otherwise 32MB would be enough), it's still possible but again not very effective as it produces a lot of tiles. Basically after 2 tiles you get half the bandwidth, etc..

About PRT, i agree, nothing new it's one of the core hardware managed features of the GCN architecture.

I said it here a few times, DX12 is already in the X1 in some sens, so it's a bit funny to wait for something that is already there.