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Digital Foundry: PC Gaming on the Xbox Series X CPU

DaGwaphics

Member
For consoles, they're a big jump over what has gone before, which seems to be last on many. Never mind 3 years in there's still only a couple of games where a PS5 or Series X owner could say 'this' game couldn't be done on a One or PS4.

I also like to go back to the days of a separate GPU and CPU. So we get monster GPU's like the old Xbox or 360 days

No question that they are a lot better than last gen. The consoles are a great value for sure.

Using multiple dies definitely gave them a lot more flexibility, I assume the monolithic approach saves them quite a bit however. With AMD supporting chiplets maybe things will swing back this way.
 

winjer

Gold Member
Whaaaat? First time i hear that one, is he in prison?

When I said stock manipulation is not in the illegal sense.
He was just buying and selling Intel stocks to increase shareholder value. Instead of investing in R&D.
It got so bad, R&D budget dropped to the single digit percentage.
And this is why Intel lost its huge lead to TSMC, Apple and AMD.
 

PaintTinJr

Member
Not everything fits in caches. Especially in a CPU that only has 4MB+4MB of L3.
Zen2 has good branch prediction, but this does not negate memory accesses. And it does not negate cache misses. And an L3 cache miss in these consoles CPUs, is very expensive.
It doesn't matter much what the OS is doing in these consoles, because they have dedicated threads, it doesn't impact much the game that is running.
Although there is a good deal that programmers and a good compiler can do to avoid cache misses, these will still exist. And even the predicted accesses still have to occur.

But my previous point was not about the latency on the consoles. It was about the terrible latency that DF has on their 3600.
A normal 3600 has much lower latency than that. And this invalidates their benchmarks with this CPU.
They must be running it at such low speed and high timings, that it's underperforming by a very big margin.
I do take your point, but the specific numbers aren't an issue for my point, just the scale of those numbers, and I didn't pay much heed to the games running other than the curiosity of the dev board doing reasonably well running games with a bloated inefficient and cache crippling desktop Windows OS.

I think I'm failing to make my point about the latency hiding because I didn't mention the decision mathematics technique of critical path analysis, to formally solve the latency hiding problem.

On the consoles with first party games critical path analysis will be getting done, and in context of intended throughput from the CPUs, either to hit a 8.3ms, 16.67ms, 33.3ms frame time, where all possible cache resources being used by the console OS for general purpose OS branch prediction will have been eliminated to provide a OS environment that allows optimised games to run code on the CPU deterministically,, inline with the formal critical path analysis solution.
IIRC there was a really good article last -gen about how hiding the latency of cache snooping the alternative CCX L1 cache was being done on the PS4's Liverpool APU, that gave great insight into the lengths of CPU optimisation afforded to console games.
 

Buggy Loop

Member
When I said stock manipulation is not in the illegal sense.
He was just buying and selling Intel stocks to increase shareholder value. Instead of investing in R&D.
It got so bad, R&D budget dropped to the single digit percentage.
And this is why Intel lost its huge lead to TSMC, Apple and AMD.

Ah, I thought he would short Intel stock because he was making the value of company bad and then he would get rich from that move.
 

winjer

Gold Member
Ah, I thought he would short Intel stock because he was making the value of company bad and then he would get rich from that move.

He had Intel shares so he also profited.
But the issue was the lack of investment in R&D. Something Pat Gelsiger criticized when he became CEO.
 
No question that they are a lot better than last gen. The consoles are a great value for sure.

Using multiple dies definitely gave them a lot more flexibility, I assume the monolithic approach saves them quite a bit however. With AMD supporting chiplets maybe things will swing back this way.
I hope so, I think if we're to see big advancements in Ray Tracing on the consoles we need a separate CPU and GPU. That said, Im more than happy with the Series X and PS5
 

deriks

4-Time GIF/Meme God
no. devs need to stop using console as budget pc and start using it's bespoke features and optimizations
Still, there's a thing there

- Console gets launched, devs work with this in mind on "y" game. Game gets released. Company that made the console discovers better methods to develop games, then they share with game developers to future games have better stuff
- PCs gets "x" GPU, devs work with this in mind on "y" game. Game gets released and probably two or three gens of GPU above got launched, and since could run better, they're fine.

Since the GPU company invest more on the direct evolution of the hardware, the developers gets some kind of free pass. On consoles, that's not really a option - even thou the Pro consoles are a thing to get in mind
 

twilo99

Member
The 4090 is not mainstream. It's impossible to find a $250 or even $400 GPU today that can best the base consoles by the same percentage the 1060 was for $250 last gen.

I think that is what he is getting at.

I understand that so the only way a $500 machine can keep up with a 5x more powerful and more expensive PC is thanks to the software, in this case games, being specifically developed for the $500 box.

We need games specifically developed for high end GPUs , otherwise one could say that the consoles are holding the whole industry back.


It would be interesting to to see them pair it with as close to the consoles GPU as possible and see how games run, investigating the mystical "console optimization" angle vs just running the same hardware on PC

5700xt would work just fine..
 

Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
lmao good luck recouping development costs on a game targeting $1600 GPUs.

It'd also likely result in games that although they'd look amazing, would perform similarly to console titles because that's what you get when you aim for the best possible visuals for the hardware spec!

Console games ported to PC are running on tech way more powerful than what they were planned for, excess that typically smoothes off all the rough edges in the performance profile. Its kinda funny when people flip this relationship on its head and think that anything that doesn't run flawlessly on their high-end rigs as being evidence of unoptimized code. When all its actually demonstrating is that if you push the power requirements to the bleeding edge, inevitably cracks will start to show.
 

Killjoy-NL

Member
It’s really curious why people are that desperate for a PS5 Pro. Are they not happy with Cerny’s magic this fast?
Just look at the discussion about PC vs PS5 performance with R&C, while R&C was merely a PS5 launch-game.

A PS5 Pro isn't needed.

The only reason PS4 Pro was released, was to boost PSVR performance. There is no reason to do the same this time.
 
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PaintTinJr

Member
lmao good luck recouping development costs on a game targeting $1600 GPUs.
In a relative way, it did sort of happen back in the day - with 3dfx games like Turok, Shadows of the Empire, etc - because Glide was a vendor specific API, and because 3dfx had succeeded in delivering a great product at the right time and with cutting edge API software. So companies frequently partnered to 3dfx/Glide.

In today's money that £180 Voodoo 3dfx is probably more like an £500-800 GPU, maybe more as it was top tier. But obviously Microsoft's loan to Nvidia with the OG xbox project let Nvidia foreclose 3dfx in a patent suit that 3dfx were then too poor to fight, and patent law allowed such foreclosure techniques back, so that's when first party styled PC gaming died IMO when 3dfx(patents & tech) got bought from bankruptcy by Nvidia.
 

FoxMcChief

Gold Member
no. devs need to stop using console as budget pc and start using it's bespoke features and optimizations
No fucking shit. The devs need to stop trying to use brute force from the hardware and actually optimize to each console. This goes for exclusives too. Third party devs are the most guilty though. Star Wars, Remnant 2 and Final Fantasy 16 should have been way better optimized.
 
It's selling more than the 4080 and the 80 series was the main seller for the higher end. Its selling millions.
The 80 series was the main seller for the higher end back when the higher end could be had for 700 bucks. That is no longer the case. People looking to spend that much got prized out of the market.

Access to the high-end segment is now limited to those able and willing to spend four figures on a graphics card, and at that point you're largely dealing with a clientele for whom the price never really mattered to begin with, so it's not surprising that they'd choose the 4090 over the 4080.

By the way, do you have a source for those sales figures?
 
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Hydroxy

Member



4800S is Xbox Series X APU made to work as normal PC platform by AMD (done much better than 4700S made from PS5), it looks like performance is lower than ANY Zen 2 CPU available in PC space and comparable to Zen 1 chips.

My laptop has 5500u and its Zen 2 and i think its slower than 4800S. Also there is 5300U that is quad core and even slower so its definitely not true that 4800S is the slowest Zen 2 chip
 

DeepEnigma

Gold Member
Don't we all want better looking games, etc. ?

We are basically moving much slower because devolpers are targeting low end hardware from 3 years ago instead of the latest tech available..
They're not going to design a game solely around 1% or less of the gaming population. That's financial suicide.
 
Don't we all want better looking games, etc. ?

We are basically moving much slower because devolpers are targeting low end hardware from 3 years ago instead of the latest tech available..
Nah, I'm good. I remember what it was like in the late 90s and 2000s, back when games cost so little to make that developers could afford to not only make them PC exclusive, but target high-end hardware. You'd spend two grand on a new PC and a year or two later you'd have a hard time running the latest games. Not at max settings with all the bells and whistles, mind you. But, like, at all. Some developers would go even further and release games that would only run properly on hardware that didn't even exist yet.

Thank god that shit became financially untenable after Crysis.
 

Nfactor_AF

Neo Member
This is the real way to look at it, if you bought a RTX 4090(like I did in Dec 2022) you already own the Playstation 6 performance wise. Because by the time 2027/28 rolls around, a 100Tflop GPU will be cheaper to buy and manufacture on a 3nm or smaller node for something like a console to use. $1,600 a full 6 years ahead of next gen consoles is a pittance considering the performance you get. It's all a silly mind game. Buy one when price drops for you enough, unlike the consoles the RTX 4090's price will come down over time.
 
Same shit since ps4 era. Low power this, low, low power that. I'm gonna get a 4090 in the next 6 to 12 months and gonna put console gaming second. The experience on my game laptop is quit good.
 

hlm666

Member
because Glide was a vendor specific API, and because 3dfx had succeeded in delivering a great product at the right time and with cutting edge API software.
You keep saying this shit but it wasn't microsoft and nvidia that fucked over 3dfx because api's. Carmack moved to opengl so he didn't have to support multiple different api's for rendition/3dfx and any possible ones coming with other hardware. Do you think mantle got dropped, used as a base for vulkan because of big bad ms/nvidia. No it's because no devs want to have multiple code bases for their projects for a single platform, Dice only used it because AMD paid them. 3DFX were betting big on their next hardware (rampage) and they fucked up very similar to commodore before them.

 

PaintTinJr

Member
You keep saying this shit but it wasn't microsoft and nvidia that fucked over 3dfx because api's. Carmack moved to opengl so he didn't have to support multiple different api's for rendition/3dfx and any possible ones coming with other hardware. Do you think mantle got dropped, used as a base for vulkan because of big bad ms/nvidia. No it's because no devs want to have multiple code bases for their projects for a single platform, Dice only used it because AMD paid them. 3DFX were betting big on their next hardware (rampage) and they fucked up very similar to commodore before them.

It isn't "shit" that the foreclosure would be blocked by courts today, because with a big bag of money from a Microsoft loan, Nvidia were able to refuse to settle and license contentious patents on fair market terms to 3dfx, as is required, today. 3dfx would have been able to continue with their own glide API and use opengl, and directx too, but instead they were forced out the market and all their patents and tech bought by Nvidia, massively to Nvidia's gain, and customer loss of first party style PC gaming ,and loss of better competition in the market.
 
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Same shit since ps4 era. Low power this, low, low power that. .
It's called consoles, it's always been the case since the move to when consoles needing cooling on board. Its not like the PS2 or XBox CPU's were super fast or they could handle the latest PC games at 60 FPS and it wasn't that much better in the 360 era.

It be nice to go back to consoles having separate CPU and GPU's mind
 

Zathalus

Member
It isn't "shit" that the foreclosure would be blocked by courts today, because with a big bag of money from a Microsoft loan, Nvidia were able to refuse to settle and license contentious patents on fair market terms to 3dfx, as is required, today. 3dfx would have been able to continue with their own glide API and use opengl, and directx too, but instead they were forced out the market and all their patents and tech bought by Nvidia, massively to Nvidia's gain, and customer loss of first party style PC gaming ,and loss of better competition in the market.
3dfx was doomed because of the acquisition of STB, delays in product launching, and then those products just simply being bad. Even if by some miracle they were not bankrupt the chips they had in development were simply uncompetitive. Rampage couldn't even compete with the GeForce 256 and Nvidia was already on the GeForce 3 series by the time it would have launched. The Voodoo 6000 had some impressive performance but was hamstrung by its 4 chip design simply being too expensive to be feasible.

The back and forth patent spat between 3dfx and Nvidia (that 3dfx started) was a drop in the bucket compared to the technical and business mismanagement that plagued 3dfx.
 

PaintTinJr

Member
3dfx was doomed because of the acquisition of STB, delays in product launching, and then those products just simply being bad. Even if by some miracle they were not bankrupt the chips they had in development were simply uncompetitive. Rampage couldn't even compete with the GeForce 256 and Nvidia was already on the GeForce 3 series by the time it would have launched. The Voodoo 6000 had some impressive performance but was hamstrung by its 4 chip design simply being too expensive to be feasible.

The back and forth patent spat between 3dfx and Nvidia (that 3dfx started) was a drop in the bucket compared to the technical and business mismanagement that plagued 3dfx.
I think you are being totally short sighted by how that market was working.

The patent spats were normal until Microsoft loaned Nvidia so much money they could easily foreclose 3dfx, and it is no surprise it was patents that 3dfx owned that are the basis of Microsoft's BC texture formats in DirectX,, today.

3dfx absent of bankruptcy in the patent suit, leading to them owing Nvidia damages, leading to the acquisition would have been acquired by one of the other companies near the point of failure and competition in the market would have been better and the potential for the 3dfx first party PC gaming might have continued. But obviously this divergence in topic has probably outstayed its welcome so that's all I'll say on the topic for now - unless you want to reply by DM.
 

SHA

Member
Dude, STFU with this low key bait. The world is moving fast and it's clear that 6-7 year old generations no longer work like intended. Mid-Gen refreshes are more than welcome and does not mean anyone is unhappy with the original PS5.
I prefer a silent pro, not a loudy jet, a loudy console actually harms the worth of having a beast in closed box.
 

ChiefDada

Gold Member
We need games specifically developed for high end GPUs , otherwise one could say that the consoles are holding the whole industry back.

Mobile aside, there wouldn't be as vibrant a high end gaming industry without the consoles. Majority of casuals would rather bow out all together instead of dealing with the negatives of PC gaming (not saying there aren't positives but the console only consumers have already calculated pc as net negative).
 

twilo99

Member
Mobile aside, there wouldn't be as vibrant a high end gaming industry without the consoles. Majority of casuals would rather bow out all together instead of dealing with the negatives of PC gaming (not saying there aren't positives but the console only consumers have already calculated pc as net negative).

Its an unfortunate situation because we basically never get to see what the latest technology can do... we are basically lagging ~10 years behind
 

ChiefDada

Gold Member
Its an unfortunate situation because we basically never get to see what the latest technology can do... we are basically lagging ~10 years behind

I agree. I wish there was an economically feasible way for ultra high end PC cards to have much more software developed specifically to leverage the tech. Cyberpunk overdrive is just a taste of what could be done.
 

MikeM

Member
Its an unfortunate situation because we basically never get to see what the latest technology can do... we are basically lagging ~10 years behind
Relax. There will always be the lowest target box. Can you imagine a gaming world where only the latest hardware is targeted? You’d be alienating probably half the budget PC community alone. Not a good way to get a solid ROI.
 
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