Xbox One Silicon Talk


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They should of really gone into this stuff with a more marketing spin because some of the features there are massive, seriously. 

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I kept bringing up the new tiled resources in hardware feature of DX11.2 over and over but people wanted to ignore it and just focus on theoretical raw numbers like that's all that matters.  It's clear to me that MS is doing this custom work on the Xbox One first and then using it as a stepping stone to bringing better performing high quality gfx to lower end hardware like tablets.  The same tech is core to Windows 8.1 for example. 

 

It's also interesting to find out that they've done custom work on the CPU cores as well and not just the GPU.

 

Anyone who witnessed Xbox 360 launch should already know this. They did the same thing with 360 and added new features to DX9 that eventually trickled down to DX.

 

They should of really gone into this stuff with a more marketing spin because some of the features there are massive, seriously. 

 

Their messaging was/is seriously ######ed up with Xbox One. I can't imagine how they went from one of the best MS PRs to one of the worst.

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Their messaging was/is seriously ****ed up with Xbox One. I can't imagine how they went from one of the best MS PRs to one of the worst.

Exactly. For the people who says that the CPU's are just the same between consoles need to get their brain checked because this just emphasizes the point MS made for these SoC's, they're custom in-house built. To have a CPU with 8 cores and 15 special processors is insane. Its a huge powerhouse chip with 5 BILLION(!) transistors. Essentially the CPU doesn't have to do any of the tedious tasks which take its effort away from the games. 

 

Its completely different compared to a more off the shelf model of Sony's. 

 

One point: Stop comparing them to equivalent spec'd PC's because they're NOTHING like a PC. Just because the CPU is x86 doesn't mean its a computer, the two don't link. Consoles run way faster on much less. It was the exact same case for the 360, raw paper specs where not up to equivalent PC's but they pretty much set the bar for 6-12months. /rantover

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I kept bringing up the new tiled resources in hardware feature of DX11.2 over and over but people wanted to ignore it and just focus on theoretical raw numbers like that's all that matters. It's clear to me that MS is doing this custom work on the Xbox One first and then using it as a stepping stone to bringing better performing high quality gfx to lower end hardware like tablets. The same tech is core to Windows 8.1 for example.

It's also interesting to find out that they've done custom work on the CPU cores as well and not just the GPU.

lol... So true. People look at spec sheet (or whatever is told to them) don't understand the Tech Jargon, but see a BIG numbers at the end of the specs listed. and assume bigger is ALWAYS better.

I had to do a little diggin on some of this.

"We've made some alterations to the CPU clusters to support coherent bandwidth between clusters...and other processors," Sell said.

"These have been customized to significantly reduce the amount of time, the amount of work, that the CPU has to spend when assembling graphics commands," Sell said.

It's like the Xbox One is like a symphony under the hood, every part hitting its note right on time. And perfectly hit at that.

While I read upon this information, all I can think is, the Xbox One is like the Soundtrack to Star Wars under the hood.

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Exactly. For the people who says that the CPU's are just the same between consoles need to get their brain checked because this just emphasizes the point MS made for these SoC's, they're custom in-house built. To have a CPU with 8 cores and 15 special processors is insane. Its a huge powerhouse chip with 5 BILLION(!) transistors. Essentially the CPU doesn't have to do any of the tedious tasks which take its effort away from the games.

 

Amd's jaguar cores must perform especially poorly if they felt they needed 15 special chips to bail out the cpu.

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Amd's jaguar cores must perform especially poorly if they felt they needed 15 special chips to bail out the cpu.

How do you even come to that conclusion?

 

The 15 special cores are to take tasks which are usually handled by software into dedicated silicon so they extract the load from the CPU so they can focus more on games. For example, the massive one, audio processing. Something the PS4 is going to struggle with massively with GDDR.

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Amd's jaguar cores must perform especially poorly if they felt they needed 15 special chips to bail out the cpu.

... have you looked a PC? a PC has CPU and GPU or APU, then, outside the package has ethernet adapter, sound card, southbridge... etc. Having separated components it's actually better than just putting them together, unless they are bandwidth constrained. even the reason because they went APU is because it saves costs. Please do inform yourself properly before making nonsensical remarks.

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How do you even come to that conclusion?

 

The 15 special cores are to take tasks which are usually handled by software into dedicated silicon so they extract the load from the CPU so they can focus more on games. For example, the massive one, audio processing. 

 

Something the PS4 is going to struggle with massively with GDDR.

 

Unless we get some ridiculously big improvement in game audio this gen, which we likely wont, audio processing wont be some "massive" thing.

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Unless we get some ridiculously big improvement in game audio this gen, which we likely wont, audio processing wont be some "massive" thing.

This makes my mind hurt. Audio is one of the most CPU intensive tasks in a game, with its real-time nature it really can bog a CPU down. Without the CPU doing audio, its having the time of its life.

 

Just evidence which shows a lot of the people who make "educated conclusions" on these articles, have no idea.

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This makes my mind hurt. Audio is one of the most CPU intensive tasks in a game, with its real-time nature it really can bog a CPU down. Without the CPU doing audio, its having the time of its life.

 

Just evidence which shows a lot of the people who make "educated conclusions" on these articles, have no idea.

 

Really? I just ran a quick benchmark on one the relatively few modern-ish pc games that i have installed that has hardware audio support(they're rarer than you may think nowadays), dirt 2. The difference between hardware and software audio was 103.0 fps, vs 100.3 fps, a mere 2.6% difference. So it's like i said: Unless we get a HUGE improvement on audio in games, a dedicated chip wont make a massive difference on modern hardware like you think.

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I kept bringing up the new tiled resources in hardware feature of DX11.2 over and over but people wanted to ignore it and just focus on theoretical raw numbers like that's all that matters.  It's clear to me that MS is doing this custom work on the Xbox One first and then using it as a stepping stone to bringing better performing high quality gfx to lower end hardware like tablets.  The same tech is core to Windows 8.1 for example. 

 

It's also interesting to find out that they've done custom work on the CPU cores as well and not just the GPU.

 

i guess you were right. looks to me like the gpu is tailor made for dx 11.2, and some of these features are built into hardware, exactly like i said in the past when i referenced how on the 360 microsoft used the edram die with the ROPS to have it do aa and other things penalty free.

 

 

Really? I just ran a quick benchmark on one the relatively few modern-ish pc games that i have installed that has hardware audio support(they're rarer than you may think nowadays), dirt 2. The difference between hardware and software audio was 103.0 fps, vs 100.3 fps, a mere 2.6% difference. So it's like i said: Unless we get a HUGE improvement on audio in games, a dedicated chip wont make a massive difference on modern hardware like you think.

 

what kind of cpu do you have? i bet its pretty fast. we're talking here about jaguar cores. the custom audio chip will basically give 1 extra core of processing power for audio. thats 13% more free cpu processing resources. that could be feeding more jobs to the gpu, and that means higher gpu shader utilization.

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Really? I just ran a quick benchmark on one the relatively few modern-ish pc games that i have installed that has hardware audio support(they're rarer than you may think nowadays), dirt 2. The difference between hardware and software audio was 103.0 fps, vs 100.3 fps, a mere 2.6% difference. So it's like i said: Unless we get a HUGE improvement on audio in games, a dedicated chip wont make a massive difference on modern hardware like you think.

Your PC has a sound card.

 

Don't compare anything like this to PC, they don't correlate, seriously.

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Your PC has a sound card.

 

Don't compare anything like this to PC, they don't correlate, seriously.

 

And what is a sound card? It's a dedicated audio processor. So the comparison is just fine.

 

 

what kind of cpu do you have? i bet its pretty fast. we're talking here about jaguar cores. the custom audio chip will basically give 1 extra core of processing power for audio. thats 13% more free cpu processing resources. that could be feeding more jobs to the gpu, and that means higher gpu shader utilization.

 

 

I did that same benchmark a while back, when i still had a much slower AMD Athlon x4 instead of my core i5. The results weren't much different.

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And what is a sound card? It's a dedicated audio processor. So the comparison is just fine.

Exactly, you've proved my point. You've ALWAYS got a dedicated audio processor. When you hardware accelerate, it just moves some tasks over to the sound card. It depends on the engine, the circumstances and the architecture. Its why you don't compare consoles to PC's because they're not a like.

 

Just to be clear, the 360 also had a dedicated chip for audio, so this is nothing different. I was just using it as an example because its most understood.

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Well all PC's have a hardware audio chip, usually someat by Realtek but its the quality of the audio which is the difference, obviously many ppl wont care but having a decent audio solution - if it is a good one will make playing films especially better, itll probably use an spdif for digital audio

 

I watched the thing on forza 5 and the xbox does seem really powerful, dx11 game engine, running at 1080p 60fps, on a GPU (although custom GPU) based on performance, stream processors and compute units which on PC basically translates to a about a sub ?100 gfx card with those draw differences at the speed your flying around in a car running off eSRAM and ddr3, or. Cant see the proper detail without d/l a 1080p version of the demo but i could see a PC struggling to get any where near 60 fps. So definately worth the wait, itll definately match PS4's performance i reckon if not beat it, dont give me the crap with raw performance numbers cus with custom built hardware with games designed solely for that hardware youll get the best out of it. But like always the only real way any of us are going to settle the x1 vs ps4 gfx battle is when we see them and see which one handles things like lighting and particles better and the level of detail of the games solely designed for the platform.

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Amd's jaguar cores must perform especially poorly if they felt they needed 15 special chips to bail out the cpu.

PS4's jaguar cores must perform especially poorly if they felt they needed special GPU to bail out the cpu. :rolleyes:

 

So dedicated hardware is bad now?

 

Unless we get some ridiculously big improvement in game audio this gen, which we likely wont, audio processing wont be some "massive" thing.

And what is a sound card? It's a dedicated audio processor. So the comparison is just fine.

 

 

 

I did that same benchmark a while back, when i still had a much slower AMD Athlon x4 instead of my core i5. The results weren't much different.

You should read your own posts to realize how wrong you are.

 

FYI, Some 360 games reserve up to 1 cores (and it only has 3) for their audio processing. You make it sound like Microsoft engineers are idiots and put a jaguar core worth of "SHAPE" because they don't have a clue to what they are doing.

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Really? I just ran a quick benchmark on one the relatively few modern-ish pc games that i have installed that has hardware audio support(they're rarer than you may think nowadays), dirt 2. The difference between hardware and software audio was 103.0 fps, vs 100.3 fps, a mere 2.6% difference. So it's like i said: Unless we get a HUGE improvement on audio in games, a dedicated chip wont make a massive difference on modern hardware like you think.

And Dirt2 is a fpu intensive game. And as I explained in another thread, due to the very difficult nature of simulating racing AI racing games cheat so even the AI in that game requires little.

Instead of looking at meaningless FPS numbers on a game that relies mostly on GPU when you are taxing the CPU. look. A your CPU load graph instead.

Audio processing is heavy, use a USB headset and you'll notice the extra load on the system and the extra dpc latency generated.

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Some posts from beyond3d for reference,

 

Audio processing on the 360 would often use an entire core, it's not lightweight.

On the 360, there is hardware for decoding XMA files, which is a much simpler subset of WMA. XAudio2 allows decoding of xWMA files too, but that's CPU side software only. The XMA decoder chip is rated at 320 channels, but in reality it generally maxes out lower than that. The 256 audio channels was calculated using a full core I believe, and that's using a very simple linear interpolation SRC, and possibly a filter and volume per channel.

All audio on the 360, other than XMA decompression, is software and uses the main CPU. Party chat, including codecs and mixing, happen in the system reservation. Game Chat, Kinect MEC and voice recognition, and all game audio happen in the game process and use game resources, including memory and CPU. Game audio frequently uses an entire hardware thread, and I've seen games where it uses 3 hardware threads. Car racing games, in particular, can use upwards of a hundred voices on a single car.

IIRC, XB1 gives 6 cores to games, which is same as PS4 and if not for SHAPE, it would have had only 5 CPU cores for games.

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Some posts from beyond3d for reference,

 

IIRC, XB1 gives 6 cores to games, which is same as PS4 and if not for SHAPE, it would have had only 5 CPU cores for games.

I just went on beyond3d and looked at the discussions around the architect panel and my mind now hurts, so much information to take in around it.

 

The architect panel went quite deep into cloud technology also, regarding the memory gates and how the GPU doesn't always need artifacts in the RAM at all times. The X1 is an architectural beast.

 

If anyones bothered: http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=63929

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Pretty much what i've been saying since E3, that PR raw figures are useless to us, this is the sort of detail we needed. Where's that guy that endlessly argued with me and labelled me an MS fanboy for pointing that out?

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Pretty much what i've been saying since E3, that PR raw figures are useless to us, this is the sort of detail we needed. Where's that guy that endlessly argued with me and labelled me an MS fanboy for pointing that out?

I believe he is an ex-member now...but still posting similar crap on NeoGAF.
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Pretty much what i've been saying since E3, that PR raw figures are useless to us, this is the sort of detail we needed. Where's that guy that endlessly argued with me and labelled me an MS fanboy for pointing that out?

probably the same kind of guy who thinks Ghz defines the overall speed of a chip.

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probably the same kind of guy who thinks Ghz defines the overall speed of a chip.

The X1 and the PS4 are slower than the 360 & PS3 you know.

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