XBox Series S Could Be A Nice Bounce For Switch 2

[Jizz_Beard_thePirate]

DonFerrari said:

Captain_Yuri said:

Well there is a slight catch as of right now based on Xbox Series X RDNA2 specifications.

Tensor cores are very specialized cores that can accelerate INT-8 TOPS which is what's used to Render DLSS according to Digital Foundry. The thing is, the Series X and Ps5 and probably the Series S will have cores that can also do them however not as fast as Nvidia's Tensor cores. Now due to architectural differences and software differences and etc, maybe RDNA 2 might not need them to be as fast so who knows. I am not that technical into how DLSS works at a low level loll.

The point is though, with what we know now, if we were to port DLSS over to the Series X. It would take twice as long to Render DLSS compared to a 2060.

And there's a bit of an interesting article here too about it:

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-image-reconstruction-death-stranding-face-off

"There's an important point of differentiation between Nvidia's hardware and AMD's, however. The green team is deeply invested in AI acceleration across its entire business and it's investing significantly in die-space on the processor for dedicated AI tasks. AMD has not shared its plans for machine learning support with RDNA 2, and there is some confusion about its implementation in the next-gen consoles. Microsoft has confirmed support for accelerated INT4/INT8 processing for Xbox Series X (for the record, DLSS uses INT8) but Sony has not confirmed ML support for PlayStation 5 nor a clutch of other RDNA 2 features that are present for the next generation Xbox and in PC via DirectX 12 Ultimate support on upcoming AMD products.

Broadly speaking then, the Xbox Series X GPU has around 50 per cent of the RTX 2060's machine learning processing power. A notional DLSS port would see AI upscaling take 5ms to complete, rather than a 2060's circa 2.5ms. That's heavy, but still nowhere near as expensive as generating a full 4K image - and that's assuming that Microsoft isn't working on its own machine learning upscaling solution better suited to console development (spoilers: it is - or at least it was a few years back). In the meantime though, DLSS is the most exciting tech of its type - we're sure to see the technology evolve and for Nvidia to leverage a key hardware/software advantage. The only barrier I can see is its status as a proprietary technology requiring bespoke integration. DLSS only works as long as developers add it to their games, after all.

As exciting as the prospects for machine learning upscaling are, I also expect to see continued development of existing non-ML reconstruction techniques for the next-gen machines - Insomniac's temporal injection technique (as seen in Ratchet and Clank and Marvel's Spider-Man) is tremendous and I'm fascinated to see how this could evolve given access to the PS5's additional horsepower."

With that being said though, there are a lot more months for both Sony, MS and AMD to reveal more and more about their GPUs and other features so things could change.

Don`t forget the Unreal Engine 5 demo on PS5 at 1440p that Digital Foundry said they couldn`t really distinguish the pixels and that was basically making pixel count rather obsolete.

Also both MS and Sony have talked about half precision integer capability on their console that would support the temporary reconstruction technique.

Not to forget as well that PS4Pro made big use of single precision for their checkerbordered technique that since that time had DF saying their checkerbording from 1440p to 4k had almost the same level of clarity as native 4k for a fraction of the cost.

It is silly to think that everyone have been sleeping on the graphical forefront while Nintendo will be the one pushing that boundary by themselves, sure because Nintendo games are the ones that would mostly benefit from it with all their push for fidelity and photorealism right?

Personally and I could be wrong for sure on this but I don't think that RDNA 2 for consumers in general will have a direct DLSS competitor regardless of platform. Imo and looking at what we know about RDNA 2 for consumers, it's not being built around our Ai overlords and that's not a bad thing. I think the point of RDNA 2 is to catch up to Nvidia's Rasterization and Ray Tracing performance and it will do that just fine. I do think that Ps5 and Series X will have their own techniques like Insomniac's temporal injection and that will be fine since not everything needs to be Ai driven.

And it's not so much Nintendo pushing boundaries but rather, Nvidia pushing them and Nintendo is just there along for the ride. With that being said, I am not saying that the Switch 2 with DLSS > Series S or PS5 or Series X. Heck the first indication of the switch 2's GPU might be next year but even then, Nintendo could choose to tell Nvidia to not bother with Tensor Cores or Ray Tracing as those require additional wattage in an already very limited wattage scenario. Plus GPU is just one aspect. How is the CPU gonna perform? What's the Vram? Etc.

But I do think at the end of the day. Switch 2 vs Series S will be interesting. While I am not saying the Switch 2 will be as fast as the Series S, I do think the gap could be closer than Switch vs Xbox One.