Xbox One X

[rafaqat]

9 minutes ago, Fully Aspel said:

6 times as powerful as the base model?!?!? Does that make it next next next next next next gen?  Even if it is, it can still only play the same games as the base console anyway.  Not being funny with ya man, but you say your current purchases will run better/smoother for no extra money. You do realise you have to buy the Scorpio yeah?

 

Sure nit pick all you like. I'm saying no remasters needed. My digital library is safe. It plays better when I get the next machine with no further software purchases to be made. All this talk of base consoles holding games back suggests a deep lack of understanding of how software works.

 

[rafaqat]

Over 40% compute advantage over a PS4 pro. 

The thing's a fucking beast. 

[Boozy The Clown]

 

XBeast

[Dimahoo]

32 minutes ago, Fully Aspel said:

I beg to differ, true gamers do care about this shit. They mostly care about the actual gameplay itself. I know I do anyway. It's the games that ultimately define my choice of whether to buy a console or not. It's not how powerful the hardware is, how whizz bang the graphics are or how ultra hd the audio sounds. If hasn't got anything decent to play then it's useless! Just to point out, I've never played on PC, unless you count the C-16 and Amiga!  I've always been an arcade/console gamer, so have never experienced upgrading outside of buying a machine that jumps a generation.

 

I also care about having to pay £400 for a console, only for it to be superseded with a slightly better version that costs another £400 a couple of years later and where that whole business model could end up leading to. Especially when up until fairly recently I've bought all of the consoles from each gen. This whole practice is far more likely to end up with me just picking one and sticking with it. Oh dear, they're losing sales already! Hahaha. 

 

Having said that, if it's a brand new "next gen" console then that changes things a fair bit. Because the power and whizz bang graphics can provide developers with possibilities to make games that are above and beyond anything that has gone before. They provide new experiences and new ways to play and that's partly my problem here. An upgrade is always going to be limited by the base console. You're not getting anything new outside of slightly whizzier graphics, 'cause at the end of the day the game still has to work on the base model. So, ultimately, you're getting shortchanged for the money you spend, compared to buying a true next gen machine with next gen games. The simple fact is that, this whole upgrade thing isn't needed at all. It's just a way for companies to rake even more money in and drive sales of their other products (that aren't really needed either) such as 4K TVs.  

Or put another way.......

 

 

You are certainly not going to get a collection of crap games though. That just not going to happen.

Gameplay very rarely suffers these days and hasn't been the case since the Amiga days. Then you had rip off games taking on the big guys doing arcade stuff (stuff like Body Blows Vs Street Fighter 2).

Now the big guys make the games on both machines AND you have the benefit of teams who make solid titles. Its arguably the case that gameplay has been standardised now and even where its questionable, for whatever reasons - you rarely get a bad game. I'm an ex arcade gamer too.

I'm used to smooth animations and 60fps translating too solid gameplay and have argued that for years but most people will admit that even 30fps gameplay experiences are pretty damn good and hell if we get 60fps from this then thats a bonus. 

Cases in point are titles like Dark Souls (the orignal), the EDF series and GTA V - sloppy in certain respects - but amazing games.

 

Even the bland o mattic' Ubisoft titles like some of the Ass Creed series, Wildlands or the Division have enough elements to make you forget about their average gameplay.

 

Forget the PC - if you want shit, thats where it is. 

Here look...the latest Hockey game on Steam....

 

Of course it has great titles too, but it should be accepted theres a lot of shite on there.

 

The fact is we generally know the devs to avoid. They're few and far between, and even then they occasionally knock out a solid game.

Plus we have the benefits of reviews anyway. Its just not an issue.

[Dimahoo]

3 minutes ago, Boozy The Clown said:

 

XBeast

 

Four'K...za!

[Yoshimax]

5 hours ago, metallicfrodo said:

Which backs up the point I was making. That image showing the 65% usage is the straight xbox one port, it's not the full shines version. They knew they could do the full shines version because of that. I was just pointing out it wasn't running at Ultra PC setting with that GPU usage which was what King A appeared to be suggesting.

 

From under the image

 

Ah yes - signal to noise ratio in here at that point was extremely low. Running at 4K/60 with ultra PC settings and 4k assets it is using around 88% of the GPU unoptimised.

 

"This is us. This is ForzaTech running 60 frames a second, 4K," says Turn 10 Studio Software Architect, Chris Tector. "We're still running with settings that we would have used in Forza 6... but this is also including 4K content... we've got authored assets for this set of the models, cars, tracks everything. We pushed it through and made sure the 4K textures were flowing through. We've got them all there at the right resolutions and they're not giving us enough of a bandwidth hit to offset that. If we drop back to when we originally ran and we didn't have 4K assets, it was maybe one per cent different. We were very much bound on a different point than memory bandwidth. It's been awesome and this is the point it's at."

The demo stacks up the maximum amount of cars and runs the full AI and physics simulations. It's a highly taxing stress test, used to enforce the strict budgets in Forza Motorsport to ensure the locked 60fps the series is famous for. The ForzaTech port to Scorpio took two days to complete and was fully performant from day one. In fact, the team can push ForzaTech to the equivalent of PC's ultra-level settings and we're still sitting at 88 per cent GPU utilisation; in terms of system utilisation, this is ballpark with Xbox One at 1080p on its default settings. Clearly this is just one game, but the point is that Scorpio doesn't just scale Xbox One engines to 4K. For the Forza engine at least, there's overhead, and plenty of it.

"The awesome part about the whole story [is] that we can spend all this time heading into the future," enthuses Tector. "Instead of saying, 'How are we going to wrestle to get the performance on this?' we're actually saying we can make this quality trade-off or this quality trade-off and spend that time iterating, heading towards much better image quality. So instead of stressing about getting to a final resolution or a final frame-rate, we can really drive it all into quality."

Of course, if you're going to show off a game on a new Xbox, choosing one of the most visually accomplished, well-optimised first-party engines we've ever tested is the way to go, but Microsoft is insistent that the results and scalability Turn 10 demoed to us is "not atypical". The fact that the studio got great results from Scorpio hardware so early perhaps also explains why Microsoft is ready to unveil the hardware to the users so far ahead of release. With everyone we met there's a genuine, infectious excitement and confidence about the new box. And the fact that the platform holder is willing to share so much so early also suggests that E3 2017 is going to be one to remember."

[rafaqat]

Saw some discussion earlier about what settings they used in the Forza demo running at 4K @ 60fps. The ran it at Xbox one equivalent settings at first and then PC ultra level settings with 4K textures. 

The fucking thing STILL has headroom to do more.  

 

My mind is blown by the engineering feat they've managed here. 

Quote

In fact, the team can push ForzaTech to the equivalent of PC's ultra-level settings and we're still sitting at 88 per cent

GPU utilisation

[Boozy The Clown]

Guys but Forza/Gears/Halo....

[Clipper]

its just TOOOOOO powerful can't you see?

 

it should be only be able to run a last gen remaster at 4k native and all other stuff checkerboard otherwise it is just too much power.

 

The gap is too big - Devs aren't used to scaling stuff - on PC stuff never gets scaled and gaps only work if lowest spec is just the right distance from upper spec... something like the difference between PS4 and PS4pro

 

[Boozy The Clown]

Clearly only MS first party devs are talented enough to use all that power. Such a waste.

[Clipper]

it is the most boneheaded argument I have heard. In the PC market games work (albeit on low settings 30fps) on a 750ti and they also work on a 1080ti. Does anyone say that the 1080ti is not using its potential because it is being held up by being compatilbe with a 750ti? no it can just do more frames and 4k native and and and

 

Scaling has gotten alot better as well over recent years a vast range of PC specs can play the same games from the cheap and cheerful 750ti setups to the monster 1080ti "rigs".

 

In this instance they have to target two specs and yeah they are quite far apart (something like a 750ti vs a 1070 as I recall) but most PC devs do this already and more.

 

And yes sometimes that will translate into 1080p for Xbox One (or dynamic res) and 4k native for Scorpio and some will think that is a waste. Other times they'll throw more shinies on the Scorpio or a higher framerate etc and other people will think that is a waste.

 

 

 

[Boozy The Clown]

I didn't understand a word of that and by God I never want to but this new Xbox doo dah is mighty impressive if it's got them high falluting playstation cats losing a bit of the swagger they sport when it doesn't even have any games yet.

[Yoshimax]

On 05/04/2017 at 15:57, Stanley said:

Put it another way, I doubt when the next PlayStation arrives that the games for it will run on a PS4 Pro. 

 

Game developers don't want to have to start from scratch for radically different architecture anymore for relatively low sales at and around console launch. All of this gravitates around what makes developer and publishers lives easier and lets them maximise profits. Build your game targeting the base console, we will make sure it works and scales as effortlessly as possible on the others and PC. If Sony do take that approach I think they can kiss goodbye to a lot of 3rd party support and goodwill.

[Karzee]

6 hours ago, Boozy The Clown said:

 

 

This is fucking brilliant.

 

 Fuuuuuuck.

 

Thank you for posting this, it's clarified so much. It's good to hear some actual facts from someone who has seen/understands what the Scorpio will do rather than all the bollocks conjecture people have been spouting on here. To hear the Digital Foundry guy say things like no more screen tearing, more stable framerate,  reduced chance of jaggies, faster loading times,  etc is exactly what I wanted to hear, and not just for future games but improvements to existing games in my library. The DF guy genuinely sounded impressed. 

 

Everyone should watch that. If like me you're non-techie and found the DF articles hard going then watch this for a clearer description. There's even comparisons to the PS4 Pro which I found useful to gauge the Scorpio against.

 

One thing seems very clear.....the Megabone is a serious bit of kit.

[Superunknown]

Something many people might have missed is a key improvement the Scorpio Jaguar CPU benefits from compared to the Jaguar found in the PS4 Pro, above and beyond a simple 10% clock speed boost.

 

MS have implemented the DX12 instruction set in hardware within the command processor; this handles instructions sent by the CPU to the GPU. Instead of a request for the GPU to draw something requiring thousands of CPU instructions to be sent, Scorpio only requires it to send eleven. That frees up the CPU to do other things, so whilst the CPU speed is only 10% faster than the Pro's it's going to have significantly more time to do other stuff; suggestions are a 50% reduction in time spent telling the GPU what to do.

[Superunknown]

I don't really get the argument that MS will be hamstrung by the Scorpio's specs in a few years time. The suggestion that the cut-off of support for older hardware enables developers to do amazing new things (beyond graphics) hasn't really been borne out by what we've seen this gen. We've gone from 720p to 1080p but we're still seeing mostly the same game experiences just with shinier graphics. There's no reason why MS couldn't put out a new Xbox in three years, and ask developers to support Scorpio with scaled back graphics, world density, AI etc. based on the profile of the machine the code is running on.

[HarryBizzle]

Isn't that just for DX12 games, though?

[Superunknown]

Yeah, but I assume that MS will also be making it easier for developers to use DX12. It's presumably more attractive now.

[Mr. Gerbik]

Numbers are what they are and Microsoft are gonna ForzaHaloGears until the end of time, but the most important realisation is about RDR2. The pc version will probably come out a year later, so the MEGABONE version of RDR2 will definitely be the definitive version! Going by those aforementioned numbers it should look amazing on the MEGABONE.

[rafaqat]

Morning fellow rllmukers. What a time to be alive. Scorpio is only 6 months away. It's a monster at every level. An engineering masterpiece. 6 months from now we're gonna be playing that thing. Everything is going to be faster, stronger, better, smoother than anything else out there.  The world will rejoice. 

[Isaac]

Or you could just go out and get a 1080Ti and be playing it now. 

 

MS are still hamstrung by the utter lack of interesting exclusives - the correct combo is still a shit-hot gaming PC and a PS4 Pro for Sony exclusives / Japanese oddities.

[footle]

18 minutes ago, HarryBizzle said:

Isn't that just for DX12 games, though?

 

I suspect that if you're writing an xbone game that's trying to push the console, you're going to be using an engine with an xbone dx12 backend. And you certainly would factor it in if you free up a whole load of additional cpu.

Big OpenGL games of the last few years: Doom.

[Mr. Gerbik]

1 minute ago, Isaac said:

Or you could just go out and get a 1080Ti and be playing it now. 

 

MS are still hamstrung by the utter lack of interesting exclusives - the correct combo is still a shit-hot gaming PC and a PS4 Pro for Sony exclusives / Japanese oddities.

RDR2 isn't out yet and tge correct combo for me is having all of the consoles. Yeah, the Small Bone has been gathering dust for a while now, but the Megabone could change that.

[HarryBizzle]

5 minutes ago, footle said:

 

I suspect that if you're writing an xbone game that's trying to push the console, you're going to be using an engine with an xbone dx12 backend. And you certainly would factor it in if you free up a whole load of additional cpu.

Big OpenGL games of the last few years: Doom.

 

What about multiplatform games? Devs will need to keep the PS4 in mind but I don't know about its DX12 capabilities. I would imagine it can do it but it would be rubbish at it. 

[Wallace]

You sound creepy as fuck. 

 

Edit: quotes didn't work. Was referring to the use of bones 

[Radish]

16 minutes ago, rafaqat said:

Morning fellow rllmukers. What a time to be alive. Scorpio is only 6 months away. It's a monster at every level. An engineering masterpiece. 6 months from now we're gonna be playing that thing. Everything is going to be faster, stronger, better, smoother than anything else out there.  The world will rejoice. 

 

Interesting. That's what the point of the DF article was then: one single, carefully selected tech demo (based on an incredibly well optimised first party engine) is all it took to convince people it's the second coming. Feel free to quote me on this in the future, but I'd be utterly amazed if this ran The Witcher 3 at 4k/60 fps as people here have suggested. Even a £500 GTX 1080 jumps between 42 and 49 fps. Plus, it will run into the same problems that the Pro has: devs are reluctant to go back and re-optimise games that have already been released. It may well be the second coming but we still don't actually know what any of that power means for games. 

 

7 hours ago, rafaqat said:

 

Sure nit pick all you like. I'm saying no remasters needed. My digital library is safe. It plays better when I get the next machine with no further software purchases to be made. All this talk of base consoles holding games back suggests a deep lack of understanding of how software works.

 

Of course base consoles holding games back is a thing. Stan (I think) even gave you an example of how Crackdown 3 could be being held back by base level of hardware. Another example is the difference between current gen versions of Shadow of Mordor and previous gen versions (worse hardware meant no Nemesis system). 

[rafaqat]

Ah don't worry man.  Of course a really well optimised engine is going to perform awesomely well on the Scorpio.  I don't expect every game to do the same it's encouraging to see what's possible when devs hit that sweet spot with their game engines though.  Even more so when the other middleware engine peeps tweak things.  I'm just a tech nerd that's geeking away on new hardware.  I'm still super pumped to play my Switch out and about but a leap in power like this and talking cpu and gpu architectures always floats my boat.  This reveal on DF was right down my street.  

[T Pot]

21 minutes ago, Isaac said:

Or you could just go out and get a 1080Ti and be playing it now. 

 

MS are still hamstrung by the utter lack of interesting exclusives - the correct combo is still a shit-hot gaming PC and a PS4 Pro for Sony exclusives / Japanese oddities.

 

So I'd have to but a £700 you, a new PSU to power it, and then if likely be bottle necked by my i5 and DDR3 Ram. Then after all that I'm tied to my desk where my PC is. Not exactly what I want aft spending 8 hours at a desk at work.

 

Also regarding Sony exclusives, I don't care for them exceot wipeout and drive club. It's not enough for me to want the machine again.

 

I'd rather grab a Scorpio.

[simms]

I thought I clicked on the Building PC thread by accident.  

 

I look forward to the Play anywhere titles on my PC.

[Isaac]

Just now, King A said:

 

So I'd have to but a £700 you, a new PSU to power it, and then if likely be bottle necked by my i5 and DDR3 Ram. Then after all that I'm tied to my desk where my PC is. Not exactly what I want aft spending 8 hours at a desk at work.

 

I'd rather grab a Scorpio.

 

I'll give you the price issues (if cost is a factor), but I use a controller with my PC and have it HDMI'd up to my TV - means I can use it for media / streaming too.

 

PC gaming ≠ sitting at a desk.