General Hardware Discussion Thread

[cinste (Pete)]

@Louay

hmmm is the cpu getting enough power ?

Very astute to pick up on the crucial role the CPU plays in all this but slightly misaimed at the xbox series consoles.

The article highlights the thermal impact the CPU uplift causes in the new consoles, the series consoles are architected to allow for this so CPU can run hotter than GPU with sufficient cooling where as the PS5 was designed to balance the frequencies of the CPU and GPU to manage thermal density so that it is the same across CPU and GPU.

So in this case we do see one of the consoles where the CPU is limited by thermals by the nature of its design - PS5. the CPU performance is limited to keep it’s thermals in line with the GPU.

This would also explain what we see with current game performance analysis, all console game engines are currently balanced for the jag. cores of last gen so CPU loading is much less than GPU by a significant margin so for cross gen titles PS5 can downclock CPU significantly to uplift the GPU allowing it to in most cases stay close to series x performance. Note in some PC centric engines where CPU is more utilised e.g. hitman we do see a significant difference. And I expect this difference to grow larger as engines are updated in line with the next gen consoles increase in CPU.

[LifeForms]

Part of PS5 CPU is cut down from standard zen2 (and seriesX)

Later in the gen perhaps there could be a bigger gap then expected if PS5 GPU is cut down.

[Louay]

@cinste

…same across CPU and GPU. So in this case we do see one of the consoles where the CPU is limited by thermals by the nature of its design - PS5. the CPU performance is limited to keep it’s thermals in line with the GPU. This would also explain what we see with current game performance analysis, all console game engines are currently balanced for the jag. cores of last gen so CPU loading is much less than GPU by a significant margin so for cross gen titles PS5 can downclock CPU significantly to uplift the GPU allowing it to in most cases stay close to series x performance. Note in some PC centric engines where CPU is more utilised e.g. hitman we do see a significant difference. And I expect this difference to grow larger as engines are updated in line with the next gen consoles increase in CPU.

thank you i was just wondering, that zen 2 cpu still have some power in it i wish we could overclock cpu in consoles like PC haha

[No-1HoloLens-Fan]

So here a GTX 1650 running Minecraft’s Ray Tracing world

I thought it wouldn’t have been possible

Minecraft Ray Tracing with a GTX 1650 | FPS test | i5 2400

[OneBadMutha]

@euV2

This is from the 4a dev interview with Wccftech.

Currently, we use DXR 1.1 inline raytracing and VRS. I like sampler-feedback - I’ve asked hardware vendors about this for years and it will be utilized for our future projects. Not sure if we’d go for mesh shaders in the future as we are not that dependent on traditional vertex/primitive/raster processing anymore on recent architectures. Our current frames are only about 10% raster and 90% compute on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. And raster pairs well with async compute.

I wonder if this is the same for other studios/engines and we might not see mesh shaders be widely implemented. Nice to see that Sampler feedback and VRS are going to very important features.

Developers use different engines and features all the time. How much something matters depends on what they’re trying to do and how they’ll try to do it. The X factor in all the hardware is the APIs. Easier it is for something to be leveraged by a developer and the better the results, the more likely they’ll be to use it. Good news is this time Microsoft has a huge 1st party and a lot of investment in tools. 1st party will only help those tools advance faster which will mean more 3rd parties will be likely to leverage things as the generation moves along and APIs get better.

[No-1HoloLens-Fan]

@OneBadMutha

Developers use different engines and features all the time. How much something matters depends on what they’re trying to do and how they’ll try to do it. The X factor in all the hardware is the APIs. Easier it is for something to be leveraged by a developer and the better the results, the more likely they’ll be to use it. Good news is this time Microsoft has a huge 1st party and a lot of investment in tools. 1st party will only help those tools advance faster which will mean more 3rd parties will be likely to leverage things as the generation moves along and APIs get better.

MS will be the biggest publisher of games in coming years.

The tech that they will use, will be the industry standard by default because of shear number of studios supporting it as a group.

Collaboration is also a high point inside Xbox game studios as mentioned by Matt booty several times.