As long as Microsoft can’t show next-gen games on XVA, people will continue to trash it on social media. Already on a FoxyGamesUK video, a commenter said something to the effect that XVA is ‘defective’ because of how Halo Infinite looked.
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Power between the CPU and APU is very asymmetric. Total power dissipation has to be less than CPU+GPU+othersUnits. At 3.5GHz, the CPU would dissipate 35-40W. We also know, Sony stated, lowering GPU by a few % lowers power by 10+W (matches what we observes for 5700/XT. So, smart shift moves power from CPU to GPU (Sony never mentions other way). It does this by lowering voltage on the CPU rail and raising voltage on the GPU rail. To lower CPU power by 10W, the CPU probably runs at below 3GHz. That is much lower than XSS CPU will run!
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PS5 has a totally different approach to the same problem. They just brute force the issue with raw speed for the SSD. MS fixed a longstanding issue in rendering partially resident textures using hardware and reworking how I/O works entirely. Their result gets a several fold (x2-x3) boost to texture I/O. The reason I like their approach more is that ya get a lot better RAM utilization too, where as on PS5 ya won’t be able to get nearly as many unique assets stored in RAM at once. Artists love the PS5 solution since it’s super easy for them to work with and drastically reduces their work potentially. XVA requires some reworking of the way textures work in the games but the results are worth it as the titles then can work on PC and Xbox both and ya can somewhat easily just port over to PS5.
AMD is probably correct calling it revolutionary in the sense that it gets a huge multiplier boost from smart integration of hardware and software instead of just pure speed. Both approaches open up lots of new gameplay opportunities.
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Ya gotta keep in mind that a lot of those wannabe tech channels just make click bait vids, so no amount of good tech news for Xbox gets covered unless the Sony fan mobs watching their channels suddenly change their platform of choice. These channels just tell ppl what they wanna hear.
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It is way more elegant, more efficient, craftmanship opposed as SSD bruteforcing like some assumed the XSX was doing. Power + efficiency. Strong and smart ways to push the state of the art technology.
As you see AMD always follows the Xbox statements by a blog post congratulating MS. Big deep partnership. They cooperate sonce a very long while.
Did we see the same level of friendship between Sony and AMD.
Did they put the same kind of blogpost before with the same adjectives?
That doesn’t make sense because XVA has nothing to do with the game’s issues.
I don’t think they have to worry about people on social media trashing it when they show more games and 3rd party games are directly compared. It’s looking more more likely that Sony indeed plan to release the PS5 in 2019 because their titles look far along, well ahead in development compared to any MS title. MS has CGi trailers for the most part.
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OK so you are sure, but this is a discussion forum so please rather than a one liner explain why you are sure that PS5 has a similar arch. The MS guys have been completely transparent with their tech (even DF have stated this) we know all (apart from some small details) the tech they have in the box. But from the Sony side we have the bare minimum of technical detail. Even the promised tear down has not come.
So can you elaborate on why you are sure PS5 does things in the same way?
Unrelated unless clickbait tweeters have shown evidence (as above) tell me why I should care what foxygamesuk has to say?
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Yep. Agree with what you are saying. That initial 2019 release makes the case for how far along their titles have been in development.
Also Spidey and Ratchet and Clank will be reusing a lot of assets for the newer games, make the development much faster and easier.
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Previously
- New gaming experiences with seamless content paging from the SSD to the GPU based on the revolutionary Xbox Velocity Architecture
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It streamlines the i/o asset pipeline from the SSD to the GPU.
Right now you have to allocate memory, read with ancient file i/o apis from storage, decompress on cpu and then sent the decompressed assets over the pci bus to the gpu.
With future apis and technologies like DirectStorage you can initiate a async asset read from cpu (or gpu), stream the compressed data directly from storage over the pci bus to the gpu where its memory is allocated and the content is then decompressed.
This means less kernel-switches, less api overhead, less cpu involvement. Its faster and more direct.
Granted, we still haven’t seen the DirectStorage api so we don’t know all details. But it’s not “pure marketing speech”, it is real technology.
How can Sony have the same architecture when they are not making the API for all GPU vendors? Microsoft defines the API for DirectStorage and all vendors (Nvidia, AMD, Intel) implement it in their drivers and games can use this on pc. Future games from Sony will certainly use DirectStorage on pc, how else can this work?
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Keep in mind Sony has always focused on the old tradition of vertical slice gameplay demos for their conferences. MS abandoned those long ago when devs started moaning about it. In a way, that has helped PSX and hurt Xbox imho. Being able to announce a game with a stage demo is super helpful for generating interest.
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Yep agree with what you say.
So far MS has checked all the boxes. Only one thing they need to improve upon is how to showcase their games. Vertical slices is a must in today’s day and age as it generate conversations,excitement and builds up confidence to the customer. Doesn’t matter if they show 2 years earlier or 6 months earlier their vertical slices or actual gameplay needs to he elaborate.
They need to have/show some confidence in themselves if the game is unfinished and unpolished just state it, most of the developers do that.
They need to get out of this stupid tech company squeaky clean, almost robotic PR type marketing hype and be grounded and real.
Look what has worked for them so far the highly rehearsed presentations or when they went to an organic approach to marketing when things just happened for them and they adapted.
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I think you can get away with CG ‘announcement’ trailers only really if it’s for some game whose mere existence is a megaton (FF7R, Half Life 3, KOTOR 3, Halo, God of War…that kinda stuff). For anything else, it needs to be a lot more than that. Even just showing a trailer for the game engine and what it can do with some game scenes tossed in is a huge help imho. Gotta give gamers something to use their imagination on. CG trailers don’t really do that. Gamers want to feel the studios are being open and transparent and candid with them instead of it being some choreographed presentation.
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If you have trailers like these you can get away with it 
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Do you remember which Sony engineer said that? I was going through all my bookmarks and I’m trying to find the source, and I’m only asking because I’m working on a deep dive for my podcast and try my best to write up citations for as much as possible.
I believe it was someone on twitter who DMed a dev and the screenshots were leaked and now he seems to be offline
He’s a big time Playstation Youtuber? What he says carries a lot of influence.
I really want to get into this topic but I fear it’ll derail this thread. Maybe we’ll see a thread in the future in regards to how MS is marketing their games… There’s a place for CG trailers, realtime gameplay, developer demos, developer interviews, etc…and it is interesting to see how big publishers, Nintendo, Sony and others in where they are successful and where they fail…
But back to XVA…(and I’m gonna tie the topic of marketing with this thread)… it’s interesting branding for tech that will appear on AMD and Nvidia cards. To say that their newest graphics cards support Xbox Velocity Architecture puts the Xbox in a positive light In the minds of PC players. It reminds them that they are playing on Windows PCs, a Microsoft product.
Maybe things should come first circle and Direct X is named “Xbox Graphics Architecture” or something like that? Instead of Nvidia getting on stage to announce “Direct X 13” support on their new 4080 card, they’ll announce support for “Xbox Graphics Architecture XIII”. It’s a branding thing but really drives home that Windows PCs are part of the Xbox family.
The other benefit of this is that it points to the reality that the graphics card, the CPU, memory, and how they all tie together are important in giving you great games performance on the PC. “Xbox Graphics Architecture XIII” is almost a certification that you’ll want for your cards, akin to saying to others that your card supports “DX12 Ultimate”.
So I find “XVA” to be interesting branding in a time like this where MS is redefining the consoles role (as they see it).
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Is it possible for someone to explain Velocity Arcitecture for a dummy like me in like 20 words?
XVA combines multiple technologies to make sure games get assets at speeds that will help games get larger, more detailed, & more responsive.
23 words 
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