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[wesleyshark]

New article that takes a deep dive on the engine that powers the Scorpio. It's a pretty long article, but I'll select some choice quotes for the OP and edit them back in.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2017-the-scorpio-engine-in-depth

"It's a completely unique design... you wouldn't be able to buy this anywhere else and really, we created this is in conjunction with AMD and it is a nice unique part for Scorpio," says Nick Baker, Distinguished Engineer, Silicon.

Years before any silicon arrived back from chip manufacturing giant TSMC, the Xbox team began by carrying a vast range of simulation and analysis. As Project Scorpio is effectively a mid-generation refresh - an extension of the existing console designed primarily for 4K screens - existing game code captured at a granular level via the PIX (Performance Investigator for Xbox) tool could be run on potential hardware designs, well before Microsoft went to AMD.

"We did multiple PIX captures from every single game and ran them on the emulator," Andrew Goossen, Technical Fellow, Graphics, tells us - a process that proved invaluable for validating Scorpio's back-compat capabilities. "We did over 30,000 emulator runs, which is a big contributor to Nick's total cycle count because we had to make sure that we were going to land with that 100 per cent compatibility [with Xbox One]."

According to Goossen, some performance optimisations from the upcoming AMD Vega architecture factor into the Scorpio Engine's design, but other features that made it into PS4 Pro - for example, double-rate FP16 processing - do not. However, customisation was extensive elsewhere. Microsoft's GPU command processor implementation of DX12 has provided big wins for Xbox One developers, and it's set for expansion in Scorpio.

"This has two wonderful virtues from my perspective - as you know, the clock drives all the various different parts of the pipeline so it raises all boats," explains Andrew Goossen. "I don't get imbalances in my pipeline or introduce new bottlenecks or anything like that. The second one is that for the pixel pushing power we didn't need as much area, we didn't need as many CUs to hit that. It saves area - a pretty important consideration. We were 853MHz in Xbox One, we dialed it up to 1.172 GHz (1172MHz). That's a 37 per cent increase in clock, more than our CPU clock relatively. The next big one: we have 40 CUs. When you take 1172 multiplied by 40 multiplied by 64 for ops multiplied by 2 FLOPS per op, you get exactly 6.0TF."

Compared to Xbox One, the amount of shader engines doubles, which combined with the frequency boost sees triangle and vertex rate rise by 2.7x. The GPU's L2 cache gets a 4x increase, which Goossen says is there for targeting 4K performance.

Certainly in the PC space, GPU performance tends to scale with bandwidth - the more you increase compute power, the faster the memory you need to get best performance. It's an area where Sony were constrained in the PS4 Pro design. Having settled on 8GB of RAM, the only way to increase bandwidth and maintain compatibility was to swap in faster modules. There's a 2.3x increase in compute power, but only a 24 per cent increase in bandwidth. Microsoft ditched Xbox One's DDR3 and ESRAM combo, and moved to GDDR5.

Baker explains that with those variables in place, the decision in targeting the amount of memory Project Scorpio would address is essentially made for you, and in our E3 2016 Scorpio speculation, that same logic led us to conclude that the machine would indeed deliver 12GB of capacity. Four gigs is reserved for the system (an extra 1GB there is utilised for a full 4K dashboard), leaving 8GB for game developers - a substantial increase over the 5GB used on Xbox One, and indeed PlayStation 4 Pro.

"We can do full fidelity, incredibly high bit-rate GameDVR recording of your 4K60 experience," says Andrew Goossen. "You'll be able to play back locally at full fidelity and when you upload to YouTube you can automatically transcode - you can send up the raw thing as well, but typically we'll be doing a transcode to h.264 as part of that. We're also supporting HDR and SDR GameDVR so you'll be able to enjoy the full fidelity of the HDR experience, the challenge being - as you know - getting more platforms so you can actually view these.

"We wanted [native 1080p Xbox One games] to run at full native 4K with a rock-solid frame-rate with a whole bunch of performance left over to showcase and actually improve the visual experience in many other ways beyond render resolution," Andrew Goossen tells us. "And then our other goal was that we wanted to get 900p games up to full native 4K. That's a little bit harder. Some of 900p games - day one port - they should be running fine, solid at 2160p. For other games it's going to be more work than you'll traditionally do in terms of console optimisation but we wanted to get those 900p games at 2160p."

This one really stood out to me:

"For the very small handful of titles that run at 720p today, our expectation is that they can checkerboard up to native 4K if they want to do that. I also expect variations of titles that are perhaps running at 900p at 30fps on Xbox One today that they can leverage the 31 per cent boost to CPU clock along with a bunch of other optimisations in conjunction with our D3D12 offload to potentially offer 1080p60 rather than 900p30. It's totally up to developers."

There'll be another article tomorrow about the construction of the retail console, so look forward to that as well!

 

[Hoo-doo]

You're late.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1360738

 

[wesleyshark]

Lock it up! Damn it space nut!

 

[SlipperyMoose]

If I'm reading this right, they tested every single game? That's a pretty big undertaking.

 

[Space_nut]

Haha sorry!!