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

Mark cerny isn't an idiot, he and engineers know exactly what's happening in latest technologies, which have been going on a for a while.



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SvennoJ said:
sales2099 said:

Custom could mean anything. Most industry people connected imply it’s a “RDNA 1.5” but if we gotta wait we gotta wait. It’s amazing how people say power doesn’t matter but I’ve never seen a fan group cling to the power narrative quite like what I’m seeing this year. Not you but in general. 

Well now we going into other territory. That’s FUD imo regarding Series S. CPU and SSD parity mean that only resolution, FPS, and some graphical fidelity take a hit. Much like PC games on Ultra settings vs medium settings. It was designed with scalability in mind.  

Can you confirm the recent delay was due to last gen versions? Just seems like unusual circumstances of crunch coupled with working under pandemic conditions. 


Extra "optimisation" work was still necessary on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red told investors last night, and it was this which had caused the game's release to shift back yet again.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-10-29-cyberpunk-2077-delay-necessary-for-last-minute-work-on-current-consoles-dev-says
However, the dude that said that is not all that reliable, what happened to CDPR! Btw designed with scalability in mind, doesn't mean it will just work.

Having to scale with Xbox One and Series X is completely different then Series S to X scalability. We allready see plenty examples online of launch titles. Each with distinct resolution and FPS targets for Series S/X. 



Xbox: Best hardware, Game Pass best value, best BC, more 1st party genres and multiplayer titles. 

 

Hiku said:
sales2099 said:

Sorry I don’t read all posts. And I’m not a technical guy. It’s all up in the air I suppose but putting the various little pieces together it’s a odds-stacked-against-Sony bet that the PS5 RDNA is superior to what Xbox is packing. Seems to me they put most of their cost into the SSD and controller redesign where as MS simply has in-house tech that’s cutting edge. 

Well I wasn't suggesting that PS5's RDNA was superior to Xbox's. I'm just trying to point out that all three of these companies, Sony, MS and AMD, developed these chips together, at the same time, and chose what they thought is best for their system.

The only caveat is DirectX, because it's MS's patented technology.
So it is possible that Sony wanted to use it, but wasn't allowed to. It's also possible they didn't want to because it belongs to MS, and AMD were confident in developing alternatives for them.

Sony did put more money into the SSD and controller, and that's showing when you compare the compute units and clock speeds of some of the components.
But that's not a sign of cutting development short. For example, AMD just showed off their new CPU and GPU. In several different price ranges.
They're all based on the exact same technology, but they can hit different price ranges by altering the specs.

And it was the lower specs that in 2019 made some people speculate that PS5 was supposed to come out in 2019.
No one knew at the time that it would have an expensive SSD instead.

So what’s the take? When can Xbox fans be proud that they have the edge on specs without being challenged consistently on the slightest vaguest possibilities. Writing is practically on the wall. 



Xbox: Best hardware, Game Pass best value, best BC, more 1st party genres and multiplayer titles. 

 

Hiku said:
LudicrousSpeed said:

I don’t need to respond, I don’t care to respond to you. Feel free to quote me replying to someone else, I don’t need to reply to you in order to be engaged in “proper conversation”, whatever that means. Nothing you are saying is substantial anyway. You act as if you’re speaking with some authority on the matter or something. I don’t know why. 

If you read the rules, there's a reason why we emphasize that people need to explain their reasoning. Not just refute everything someone says without explaining, like you just did with "Nothing you are saying is substantial anyway".

6. SUBSTANCE -

  1. Do not say that item A sucks, or that item B is better than item C. Give reasons why, and provide evidence (articles, screenshots, technical information, even opinion etc.).

8. TROLLING - 

  1. Explain and justify your opinions. If you have nothing reasonable and/or relevant to add to a topic, then don't post at all.


And this is all the more relevant when someone explains their reasoning to you for why your logic is off, but you continue posting about it as if they never did.
That's why I asked you to respond, after three attempts, but apparently you don't have to follow the rules or listen to mods when they tell you to.

Oh, so now my posts are trolling? That's incredible. Can you please paste the rule in here that says that if the great Hiku quotes you from a different conversion with someone else and gives his own assumptions and speculation on a subject, you have to respond? Because it seems to me that you are just bothered that I am not taking the time to respond to you and address your assumptions on speculation. But the thing is, I don't have to. I've made two or three posts in the thread before you started down this course, and none of them were trolling or without substance. You act as if I have twenty posts in here and am just making goopy style nonsense console warz posts or something. It's ok, it's not the first time you've been wrong in that regard. If you truly feel my posts in this thread violate some rule, then well, as you said, you are a mod. Do something about it. Again, won't be the first time you've been wrong in that regard. Otherwise, continue to quote me all you want, you aren't getting a reply on the matter from me. And no, that doesn't mean I am TROLLING lol. Jesus Christ.

Wasn't it just recently that mods were saying Xbox discussion is supposed to be in a better place? And yet here you are, as a mod, basically throwing a fit because you want to shit in my cereal with your own speculation to downplay something I am not even trying to claim, and I won't let you. It would be great to see this sort of draconian pettiness applied elsewhere and not just in Xbox discussion for a change.



Pemalite said:
chakkra said:

But these features are all about performance, each and every one of them was designed with one thing and one thing only in mind; performance. If you were expecting something else, you're going to be disappointed.

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



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This is marketing of course they would say they have the 'full RNDA 2' feature set they created half of them in collaboration with AMD. Sony simply can't call it half of those since they've trademarked some of the names with Direct X. In addition people focusing on RDNA 1, 2, 3 feature as technobabble to one up each other is wrong. Both consoles are RDNA 2 based consoles one is just a but more customised and the other is designed with the 'full' features that work on DirectX.

PS5 does indeed have 'mesh shading' and 'VRS'. Sony has removed the standard VRS and customised the Geometry Engine for their needs.


FYI this guy is a developer and has a PS5 dev kit. These are the kind of customisations that people have been hinted at when talking 'RDNA 3' feature in PS5. Future AMD GPU's will most likely have a variation of this technology.

Both have the same or similar features sets. Different names and different way of going about it. Also a bit misleading of Microsoft since Series X/S don't have Infinity Cache, but there you go. Enjoy your consoles, both will be powerful machines. stop sweating the details :p

Last edited by hinch - on 30 October 2020

hinch said:

This is marketing of course they would say they have the 'full RNDA 2' feature set they created half of them in collaboration with AMD. Sony simply can't call it half of those since they've trademarked some of the names with Direct X. In addition people focusing on RDNA 1, 2, 3 feature as technobabble to one up each other is wrong. Both consoles are RDNA 2 based consoles one is just a but more customised and the other is designed with the 'full' features that work on DirectX.

PS5 does indeed have 'mesh shading' and 'VRR'. Sony has removed the standard VRR and customised the Geometry Engine for their needs.


FYI this guy is a developer and has a PS5 dev kit. This is what people have been talking about when saying 'RDNA 3' feature in PS5. Future AMD GPU's will most likely have a variation of this technology.

Both have the same or similar features sets. Different names and different way of going about it. Also a bit misleading of Microsoft since Series X/S don't have Infinity Cache, but there you go. Enjoy your consoles, both will be powerful machines. stop sweating the details :p

That is certainly an interesting read. I just can't help but wonder why Sony decided to leave the technology inside their chip out of their marketing strategy, and especially out of Cerny's presentation. You would think that saying "Hey, our chip might be smaller but it has all these cool technologies" sounds better than saying "smaller chips are nimble."



NDA's, most likely. He did go through some of the tech in The Road to PS5 conference which was intended for developers.



sales2099 said:
SvennoJ said:


Extra "optimisation" work was still necessary on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red told investors last night, and it was this which had caused the game's release to shift back yet again.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-10-29-cyberpunk-2077-delay-necessary-for-last-minute-work-on-current-consoles-dev-says
However, the dude that said that is not all that reliable, what happened to CDPR! Btw designed with scalability in mind, doesn't mean it will just work.

Having to scale with Xbox One and Series X is completely different then Series S to X scalability. We allready see plenty examples online of launch titles. Each with distinct resolution and FPS targets for Series S/X. 


Series S to X is the same as XBox One is to XBox One X. I doubt the problems are getting it to run on the ps4 pro and XBox One X, since Edge already praised the game for running well and the game was originally targeted for the current gen. Scalability only goes so far, and without you can do much more.



shikamaru317 said:

Some more fuel for the speculation fire, apparently Ubisoft is suggesting that Watch Dogs raytracing on PS5 is software ray-tracing rather than hardware raytracing:

How are you reading that they are suggesting it is software based raytracing on PS5?