There are a lot more optimizations built into the DX apis. Supposedly xbox one games are still running natively. The below states how less ram could be used.
But again this is all just theories but this thread is just based on theories as well.
This is it. After months of teaser trailers, blog posts and even the occasional leak, we can finally reveal firm, hard …
www.eurogamer.net
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Asset streaming is taken to the next level, but Microsoft wasn't finished there. Last-gen, we enjoyed a 16x increase in system memory, but this time it's a mere 2x - or just 50 per cent extra if we consider Xbox One X as the baseline. In addition to drawing more heavily upon storage to make up the shortfall, Microsoft began a process of optimising how memory is actually used, with some startling improvements.
"We observed that typically, only a small percentage of memory loaded by games was ever accessed," reveals Goossen. "This wastage comes principally from the textures. Textures are universally the biggest consumers of memory for games. However, only a fraction of the memory for each texture is typically accessed by the GPU during the scene. For example, the largest mip of a 4K texture is eight megabytes and often more, but typically only a small portion of that mip is visible in the scene and so only that small portion really needs to be read by the GPU."
As textures have ballooned in size to match 4K displays, efficiency in memory utilisation has got progressively worse - something Microsoft was able to confirm by building in special monitoring hardware into Xbox One X's Scorpio Engine SoC. "From this, we found a game typically accessed at best only one-half to one-third of their allocated pages over long windows of time," says Goossen. "So if a game never had to load pages that are ultimately never actually used, that means a 2-3x multiplier on the effective amount of physical memory, and a 2-3x multiplier on our effective IO performance."
A technique called Sampler Feedback Streaming - SFS - was built to more closely marry the memory demands of the GPU, intelligently loading in the texture mip data that's actually required with the guarantee of a lower quality mip available if the higher quality version isn't readily available, stopping GPU stalls and frame-time spikes. Bespoke hardware within the GPU is available to smooth the transition between mips, on the off-chance that the higher quality texture arrives a frame or two later. Microsoft considers these aspects of the Velocity Architecture to be a genuine game-changer, adding a multiplier to how physical memory is utilised.
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