Microsoft: Xbox Series S and X only next-gen consoles with full RDNA 2 feature set

[Pemalite]

Hynad said:

shikamaru317 said:

https://www.pczone.co.uk/hardware-vs-software-ray-tracing-whats-the-difference/

Both the PS5 and Series X rely on their CUs to achieve Ray Tracing. RDNA2 doesn’t have dedicated RT and Tensor cores like Nvidia’s RTX approach.

Not entirely accurate.
AMD has included a dedicated "Ray Accelerator" in every single CU with RDNA2. - It's essentially a fixed function Ray Tracing "core".
AMD may be using FP16 compute (Leveraging Rapid Packed Math) instead of tensor cores considering how much better their GPU designs generally are with general purpose asynchronous compute anyway.

We need to remember what a CU is... It's essentially a grouping of processing cores/functional blocks, some specialized, some general purpose.

chakkra said:

Pemalite said:

It's not just about performance, that is a fallacious line of thinking.

Often a feature gets introduced not because of performance reasons, but because it may also reduce development burden on game developers.
Remember what runs on top of graphics hardware... Games.
nVidia and AMD both work closely with developers and various API's to extract as much ease-of-development as possible with various development tools and optimizations.

I.E. Case in point TressFX. - It allows for advanced simulation of hair, grass and fur by leveraging various middle-ware libraries that just happened to be GPU accelerated. - It greatly expedited development time, but enabling it? There was certainly an impact to performance and efficiency, but that was worth the trade-off for the visual gains.

So no. It's not just about performance, it's often just about reducing development time and increasing visuals.

Okay, let's see:

Sampler Feedback Streaming (SFS) – Is a feature that allows games to load into memory, with fine granularity, only the portions of textures that the GPU needs for a scene, as it needs it. This enables far better memory utilization for textures, which is important given that every 4K texture consumes 8MB of memory. = Performance

Variable Rate Shading (VRS) – Increases GPU efficiency by concentrating shader work where it’s most needed and reducing shader work in areas where it won’t be noticeable. With minimal developer effort, VRS significantly improves GPU performance resulting in more stable and higher resolutions and frame rates with no perceptible loss in visual quality. = Performance

Mesh Shading – Mesh shading will enable developers to dramatically improve the performance and image quality when rendering a substantial number of complex objects in a scene. As an example, mesh shaders could enable the player to experience asteroid belts and fields of flowers in more pristine detail without seeing a loss in performance. = Performance

DirectStorage – Is an all new I/O system designed specifically for gaming to unleash the full performance of the SSD and hardware decompression. Modern games perform asset streaming in the background to continuously load the next parts of the world while you play, and DirectStorage can reduce the CPU overhead for these I/O operations from multiple cores to taking just a small fraction of a single core; thereby freeing considerable CPU power for the game to spend on areas like better physics or more NPCs in a scene. = Performance

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/03/16/xbox-series-x-glossary/

Now let's see what Anandtech have to say about these features in specific:

"Meanwhile variable rate shading and mesh shaders are going to be less visible to end users, but they offer tangible performance improvements, and in the case of mesh shaders will eventually dramatically alter the geometry pipeline for games designed with mesh shaders as a baseline feature. Finally, sampler feedback will allow game developers to get a better idea of what textures and texel blocks within those textures are being used, allowing developers to better manage what assets are in VRAM and what needs to be pre-loaded."

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16202/amd-reveals-the-radeon-rx-6000-series-rdna2-starts-at-the-highend-coming-november-18th/2

None of that refutes anything I have said prior.