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XBOX Scorpio: DX12 Built Directly Into GPU

I can tell by your comment that I have failed to communicate what the actual change is. This is my fault. Sorry

Look, the thing is, Scorpio is powerful enough without resorting to marketing speak (and let me tell you, first party companies will ALWAYS use it when announcing/describing their own hardware).

It is a massive leap over the paltry Xbone, and sensibly faster than a PS4 Pro, with a slightly higher CPU overclock, a few more CUs and higher GPU clock, and also pretty fast GDDR5 with a massive BW improvement over Xbone.

There is no need to paint the console as a revolution in the way hardware is designed. It won't be faster than a 1070 or 1080, but it doesn't have to. The CPU is still Jaguar, but that's fine because it will still run games designed for Xbone as the lowest common denominator. It will do it in 4k and probably with improved settings, but that's simply due to the fact that it's a Polaris GPU delivering 6 Tflops.
 

godhandiscen

There are millions of whiny 5-year olds on Earth, and I AM THEIR KING.
Words cannot express how horrible a mistake Microsoft made by revealing the hardware specifications for Scorpio at E3 '16. What on earth were they thinking? Sony intentionally remained silent about the final Pro specifications because they didn't want to reveal all their cards. They said it - Scorpio is not a next gen console. Their greatest priority, i.e., Microsoft and Sony would have been to ensure that their customer bases adopt Scorpio and Pro smoothly. By revealing the specifications and launch timeframe for Scorpio, Microsoft gave Sony the following advantages:
 
1) A frame of reference to work with which Sony capitalized on by underspec'ing the Pro. Majority of console titles are cross-platform. If cross-platform developers wish to maintain healthy sales across both console platforms, then they will have no choice but to tailor games with comparable IQ. Speaking of IQ, the human eye can't really discern the difference between native 4K and checkerboard rendered 4K. Before they revealed the final specifications for Scorpio, Microsoft only lost ground when it came to exclusives. They didn't really have an advantage with Scorpio. But because they revealed the specifications of Scorpio, they unintentionally gave Sony an advantage who cheekily used the concept of least common denominator to set the standard for 4K-capable console h/w specification.
2) By revealing the launch timeframe for Scorpio, Microsoft gave Sony a window of opportunity to ramp up production of the Pro. By launching earlier, Sony had sufficient time to ensure that a healthy portion of their existing customer base would smoothly transition over to the Pro by the time Scorpio launched.
 
Still think i'm wrong?
 
The writing is all there on the wall! In fact, it has been there since Sony announced the Pro in September 2016. Why do you think Microsoft tried convincing everyone that Scorpio was still more powerful than the PS4 Pro when we didn't need to be reminded in the first place? The day Sony announced the Pro was when Microsoft started sh***ing bricks by the truckload. Moreover, Leadbetter from DF didn't even seem excited today. Everybody who was looking forward to the DF analysis of Scorpio were expecting gameplay videos. We already know what to expect from the h/w. Instead, DF reported the same news about the h/w, no different from last year. Everybody was expecting FM7 and instead we were treated to a single screenshot of a souped up version of FM6 running on Scorpio! WTF!!!  :ko:
 
Want more indirect proof?
 
Check out the disassembly tutorials of the PS4 Slim and the Pro on iFixit. The quality of the components used to manufacture the PS4 Slim and PS4 Pro pass QC but are not as good as Xbox One S. This tells me that Sony has sacrificed QC to launch the PS4 Slim and the Pro as early as possible.

Stupid MS.For 499 only an Idiot Buys this when Pro is available far cheaper.

You need to take a shower to wash off all that salt.


Ahh I see the mods already sent you to the locker room.
 

Asd202

Member
Full DX12?

Time to use that gif again

kitta5q9o.gif

Good one.
 

JeffG

Member
No, the OP literally says:


Ah...I see

Game changer?

No

But as tech shit. Pretty cool

I could see some engineers sitting in a meeting. "Phil only gave us this CPU. We had to keep costs down, but its kinda weak."

"Yea...and we overclocked is a much as we can."

"How the frick can we squeeze some more performance out of it?"

"How about we remove processing?"

"What can we move?"

"Well...what software will be consistent over the lifetime of the machine that will give us the best bang for our buck..."


and MS thought of this solution. I think it is cool in a nerd fest way
 

LCGeek

formerly sane
Windows is like 20% latencies
RIP PC

If only the same company could make the software and OS not suck for utlizing game when it comes to pc space. Pathetic gamers and worse devs won't hold them accountable on this subject. The idea of highly tuned gaming OS for pc gaming will always be a pipe dream and yet the need couldn't be made any more clear on a day like this.
 

clintar

Member
If only the same company could make the software and OS not suck for utlizing game when it comes to pc space. Pathetic gamers and worse devs won't hold them accountable on this subject. The idea of highly tuned gaming OS for pc gaming will always be a pipe dream and yet the need couldn't be made any more clear on a day like this.

Isn't that mostly what we have in these consoles? They just don't run a generic OS and you can't just put a newer video card in them.
 
If you read the articles: the Xbox can push native 4K (not checkerboard) in one of the most demanding games on the system, Forza, with all settings maxed, and still have like 30% extra headroom.

If the Xbox One was a Geo Metro, the PS4 was a Honda Civic, and the Pro was a Honda Accord, the Scorpio is a Dodge Viper.

accord 4 cylinder vs an accord V6*
 

JeffG

Member
So does this mean anything at all or is it just pre-launch hardware mumble jumble?

It means something.

Its a interesting technique that free's up some cpu cycles. So from a comparison perspective, it looks like the CPU behaves like a faster CPU than its PC equivalent.

But earth shattering. No
 
I somewhat cringed at this part of DF's today reveal as it's basically a techobabble as in saying something pretty which doesn't really mean anything to be quoted by the fans further down the road ("but does this GPU moved to DX12???")

Without actual technical details it's really hard to say whether this is something unique to Scorpio or is already present in all modern GCN GPUs for example.
They are not saying they moved the gpu to Dx12, they are saying they moved Dx12 (from the CPU to this processor).

What they did is add a middle man in the cpu->gpu commands and that middle man frees up the CPU to do other stuff. And I'm guessing it has some treatment to avoid stalls from either side.
 

LCGeek

formerly sane
Isn't that mostly what we have in these consoles? They just don't run a generic OS and you can't just put a newer video card in them.

I'm saying I would like scorpio OS improvements in windows desktop myself. Mainly better offloading considering it's something ms tends to screw up and remove from their OS.

I don't want better hardware I want better efficient software and less bloat.
 
So, I am not a developer, but here's what I think Microsoft is talking about here: that draw calls, traditionally a CPU task, has been shoved to the GPU. Which, frankly, sounds similar to the hardware support for checkerboard rendering in the PS4 Pro: it sounds great in the context of a Digital Foundry puff piece, but in practice it's so much of deviation of how all the other platforms work that I can't see third party developers bothering with it.
 
Scorpio is so powerful it has turned an application programming interface into a physical element inside it's GPU core. This is some next level shit, tech from 2021 or something.

Forza 9 is going to look virtual reality.
 

dogen

Member
So, I am not a developer, but here's what I think Microsoft is talking about here: that draw calls, traditionally a CPU task, has been shoved to the GPU. Which, frankly, sounds similar to the hardware support for checkerboard rendering in the PS4 Pro: it sounds great in the context of a Digital Foundry puff piece, but in practice it's so much of deviation of how all the other platforms work that I can't see third party developers bothering with it.

Well, Xbox 1 already had some command processor enhancements, that gave you more flexibility with ExecuteIndirect calls(used to do scene traversal and culling on the gpu, also known as gpu driven rendering).
I think people are speculating that they've made further improvements.

I grabbed these images from a b3d thread from last year. They're originally from a dice presentation though.
EWmRYnx.png


cjqzd19.png


JTuvPcW.png


I don't think these enhancements are needed to reduce cpu use significantly with a gpu driven renderer though.
 

dogen

Member
In theory and the way it's described it seems like a cool addition to the SOC to free up CPU resources. As an enthusiast I want to believe. Either way, we'll get some developer impressions soon enough.

Matt - have you had access to the XDK and ran any tests?
 

therealjay

Neo Member
It's a shame they are using SoC's even on these superpowered consoles.

They need to split the CPU from the GPU if you ever want a console that approaches PC performance a la Xbox 360 in it's first year.

You just can't make a die big enough and cool it properly with the CPU/GPU together. You can split it and toss in a hulking power supply like they used to. Suppose they'd like to make money on these machines though.

People seem to miss that this is the reason this generation never had a Gears of War type of moment where a console had an undisputed best looking game out.
 
It's pretty cool as far as "secret sauce" or "wizards jizz" go. It'll be interesting to see how well the Scorpio CPU does in practice.
 

thelastword

Banned
Not just the talk about direct x12 hardware that's a bit strange, but pretty much all Polaris GPU's are somewhat more DX12 compliant than current NV offerings based on their GPU engines and their push for Vulkan and DX12 compatibility, or rather lower level api's.

Several wordings were strange in how the console was specified, like what's all this talk about reduced latency with the CPU, making it an evolved Jaguar? combined with a slight uptick to 2.3GHZ.... from 1.75GHz on the XB1 and 2.1 from the PRO.....

It wasn't as technical or explained well as I expected....It just seems to me that many of the features which are basic and common are being extrapolated to be bigger and more revolutionary than it is....First the DX12 hardware and the Evolved Jaguar bit...it's just an overclocked CPU that's been in everything from the XB1, PS4, PRO and 6 months from now, will still be resident in the Scorpio....

Right now, all I want to see are games and performance metrics and analysis, no PR screens of GPU utilization and the like.....I hope E3 delivers...
 

BigEmil

Junior Member
He's right tho

Edit: I totally quoted the wrong person
PS4 Pro stuff leaked months before it's reveal and also Pro released a year earlier than Scorpio so Microsoft can also learn from Sony after all this time and info of the pro out there.
 

KageMaru

Member
It's a shame they are using SoC's even on these superpowered consoles.

They need to split the CPU from the GPU if you ever want a console that approaches PC performance a la Xbox 360 in it's first year.

You just can't make a die big enough and cool it properly with the CPU/GPU together. You can split it and toss in a hulking power supply like they used to. Suppose they'd like to make money on these machines though.

People seem to miss that this is the reason this generation never had a Gears of War type of moment where a console had an undisputed best looking game out.

Give up on that dream. They will likely never go with a discreet CPU and GPU again. It's just too expensive.
 

dr_rus

Member
They are not saying they moved the gpu to Dx12, they are saying they moved Dx12 (from the CPU to this processor).

What they did is add a middle man in the cpu->gpu commands and that middle man frees up the CPU to do other stuff. And I'm guessing it has some treatment to avoid stalls from either side.

Again, what they actually said if you remove all the fanbase targeted PR talk is that they did *something* which results in lower CPU overhead on Scorpio when performing rendering. What this *something* is they didn't tell and thus all of you who are saying things like "moved DX12 to this processor", "encoded it into GPU", etc are just spreading BS.

To give you an example of what such *something* may be is DX12 itself which significantly lowers CPU overhead when compared to DX11. So is this what they are talking about? If not then what?

Another thing is - it's rather strange for a closed off and completely proprietary system to get h/w changes to better support some s/w (API) commands instead of changing the API itself to be more compatible with how the h/w functions. I find it very hard to believe that they've actually made any Scorpio specific changes to the GCN global scheduling (as in beyond those already found in Polaris and Vega revisions of GCN) when it would be miles more forward looking and easier / cheaper to just make a backend for DX which would output GCN binary code to the GPU, removing the need to perform shader compilation in the driver (mono or whatever it's called these days) which is the last thing I can think of in DX12 infrastructure which have any kind of CPU requirement.

I don't think these enhancements are needed to reduce cpu use significantly with a gpu driven renderer though.

These enhancements aren't actually enhancements, it's just exposing the h/w which is in each and every GCN chip out there in Xbox APIs. Same can be true for that DX12 babble.
 

samred

Member
I can't start my own thread, but a colleague of mine at Ars just asked questions about the biggest thing missing from today's reveal, which I think kinda-sorta ties into talk about DX12 benefits to performance.

As of press time, it's missing one of the things we expected. When Scorpio was first announced at E3 last year, Microsoft didn't just rattle off a list of specs—the 8-core CPU, 6 TFLOPS of GPU compute power and 320GB of memory bandwidth that were confirmed today. Xbox division chief Phil Spencer also made a bold proclamation at the time: "The next-step change for gamers and developers must deliver true 4K gaming and high-fidelity VR."

VR, you say?

Mixed reality apps on Windows 10 will be built on Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform (UWP), and Scorpio will be able to run UWP apps. Extending that VR headset support to Scorpio is logical and obvious, and we can't believe that Microsoft will want to cede the VR space to Sony—which just makes the lack of mention of VR, and the lack of any obvious way of connecting a headset to the Scorpio, something of a surprise.

Of course, plenty is still unknown (name, design, cost, release date), and Microsoft will be sure to drip-feed details before Scorpio eventually launches. But the hardware analysts at Digital Foundry who got their hands on today's reveal have spent a lot of time analyzing the wide world of VR performance. It's telling that they didn't get to answer those this week.

More at Ars; feel free to repost/new thread/ignore.
 

dogen

Member
These enhancements aren't actually enhancements, it's just exposing the h/w which is in each and every GCN chip out there in Xbox APIs. Same can be true for that DX12 babble.

Even what was mentioned in that dice presentation? Seemed like it was an xbox 1 specific customization.
 
I can tell by your comment that I have failed to communicate what the actual change is. This is my fault. Sorry

It's not your fault. The Microsoft quotes were deliberately intended to mislead and create the impression that this constitutes some incredible enhancement when it's just DX12 using the command processors that exist in all modern GPUs exactly how they're supposed to. No doubt it's a more capable command processor than what the original Xbox One had, but not in any way that could be considered game changing. It has to be by virtue of needing to dispatch work to a much larger GPU.
 

Metfanant

Member
I'm not trying to downplay this stuff, because just as with the PS4, or any console before it...Scorpio will punch above it's weight so to speak...

But let's slow our roll before we go calling things a game changer and swallow everything we hear hook, line, and sinker maybe?...

Have we not already been through this with MS already this generation? co-processors, and mono drivers, and DX12 updates...

And Sony with GPGPU, and "supercharged PC" architecture​?

These things all help for sure, don't get me wrong...but let's not get all excited about this thing being capable of running with GPU's that cost more than complete consoles...
 

Head.spawn

Junior Member
I can't start my own thread, but a colleague of mine at Ars just asked questions about the biggest thing missing from today's reveal, which I think kinda-sorta ties into talk about DX12 benefits to performance.

More at Ars; feel free to repost/new thread/ignore.

There's a lot of things missing though. Also, Bethesda has already stated that they're working pin bringing Fallout 4 VR toScorpio. I don't think it's coincidence that they both scheduled their e3 conference for the same odd day.
 

Head.spawn

Junior Member
Yup, sad that it's required though.

Bet most people getting banned are grown men..

I dont even know how they're managing to sift through all of these massive threads.

Hats off to them.

Sorry for the double, website is acting weird i though i saw other posts at the bottom before i hit submit.
 
If you read the articles: the Xbox can push native 4K (not checkerboard) in one of the most demanding games on the system, Forza, with all settings maxed, and still have like 30% extra headroom.
If anything, Forza is one of the least demanding games on the console. That's why it can run at 1080p60, unlike most Xbox One games.

he literally address this in the video, normally thousands of calls have been reduced to 11

(paraphrasing as I don't have time to watch again)
This is not what was said. They said the entire set of all draw calls typically requires thousands upon thousands of instructions to the GPU. They also said that in Scorpio, a single draw call takes only 11 instructions. They did not say how many instructions a single draw call takes on other hardware, or the total of all draw calls on Scorpio, so these two numbers are not comparing anything, or showing any improvement.
 

FacelessSamurai

..but cry so much I wish I had some
If anything, Forza is one of the least demanding games on the console. That's why it can run at 1080p60, unlike most Xbox One games.


This is not what was said. They said the entire set of all draw calls typically requires thousands upon thousands of instructions to the GPU. They also said that in Scorpio, a single draw call takes only 11 instructions. They did not say how many instructions a single draw call takes on other hardware, or the total of all draw calls on Scorpio, so these two numbers are not comparing anything, or showing any improvement.

I wouldn't say least demanding when talking about Forza. I'd say being one of the most optimized games on the console is probably accurate though,
 
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