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Forums - Microsoft Discussion - Xbox Series Velocity Architecture detailed

Hmm, would like a bit more information and to see it at work.



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shikamaru317 said:
KBG29 said:
Anyone know the difference between Partially Resident Textures and Sampler Feedback Streaming?

PlayStation Shader Language already supports Partially Resident Textures, which I from what I understand, is very similar to what Xbox is doing with SFS.

According to Microsoft's document on SFS, SFS and PRT are the same thing. PRT was created about a decade ago by id's John Carmack, but was pretty much only used in their 2011 game Rage from what I'm reading. It works by breaking down a scene into tiles, and then the texture quality needed for each tile is determined by the distance from the player to the tile, so that for each tile, you only need to have a single texture loaded into the RAM, instead of having all possible texture resolutions for the entire scene loaded into the RAM at once, so that they can be accessed as the player moves through the world and texture quality settings change based on distance.

The main difference seems to be that Rage's implementation of PRT used CPU resources to decide which tiles need which texture resolutions, sapping a good bit of CPU power. This article from Microsoft seems to suggest that Series X has dedicated hardware for SFS built into the GPU, freeing up CPU resources. Not sure if PS5's GPU will have similar functionality, or if devs on PS5 will need to use CPU resources for PRT.

Very nice. Thanks for the detailed reply.

It will be interesting to see how Sony has handled this vs how Microsoft has. PSSL has had PRT since 2014, so I would have to believe Sony has been optimizing it through the years. We will have to see if any of the fixed function additions to the I/O or GPU in the PS5 will help accelerate this process, as it appears Microsoft has done with the XBS.

At any rate, both of these consoles are going to do some amazing things with storage and I/O, the likes we have never seen in the console space. Should offer devs a chance to really showcase their vision this generation!



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10/03/2010 

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Good read, nice to see things are efficient. “Greater then the sum of its parts” and what not



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