Xbox One Console Reviews
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Forza Motorsport on Scorpio: the full story
Just prior to Digital Foundry's visit to the Microsoft campus, Xbox's Senior Director of Console Marketing, Albert Penello, asked me what I needed to see on the day, what I thought was critical to the story. The answer was obvious and immediate: beyond the specs and the tech deep dives, I needed to see software running on actual hardware. Promises had been made concerning Xbox One engines scaling up to 4K and as compelling as the tech talks would be, only a real-time demo could really validate the claims made for the machine. Penello sat back confidently, nodded, smiled and the conversation moved on.
Less than 24 hours later, I'm talking with Chris Tector, Studio Software Architect at Turn 10 Studios. In common with every Scorpio presentation I've had that day, there's a sense of excitement in the atmosphere. He's genuinely thrilled to share the studio's role in Project Scorpio's development and yes, I will be seeing Forza running in real-time on the new console.
However, the 'ForzaTech' demo I'll be seeing won't be Forza Motorsport 7 - software announcements aren't typically tied into hardware deep dives - but clearly, Turn 10 and the Xbox team are confident that final software will match or indeed exceed the quality of what I'll be reporting on.
"ForzaTech is really the place to let us prove out platform features like Direct3D 12 [on PC] and also lets us help with internal things that nobody else gets to see - in this case, the modelling that happened with Scorpio," shares Tector. "We were really able to help prove that out... Our part in it - and an important part for us, because it's a two-way thing - we wanted to make sure that the hardware was going be able to do what we wanted, what we had as a vision, what we wanted in Forza next, but we also wanted to make sure that however it's being proved out, that the promise was solid, that the model made sense to us."
As we've already revealed, Microsoft's innovative technique in defining, refining and customising Scorpio's silicon design came from taking existing Xbox One game engines into the optimisation tool PIX (Performance Investigator for Xbox) and using that data to shape the design of new processor. Turn 10 were able to do more: to tweak the game engine as they saw fit, handing over multiple sets of profiling data for the hardware team to run on their emulators, way before any actual hardware was spun.
"We provided a ton of data with ForzaTech, where we actually rendered different stress scenes at different resolutions - 720p, 1080p, 4K - and then stressed different points in the engine: anisotropic filtering, multi-sampling, pushing heavy LODs through, just to try to get a feel for where the different bottlenecks where," says Tector.
"And by knowing that we had created those scenes and rendered them at each of those cuts, we were able to prove that the model actually scaled, because we could say that the model predicts that if you took this 720p scene and went up to 1080p with these options, you should get X performance. And we could actually check that against what we'd actually done on an Xbox One. That really gave us the confidence at the time of the model that we could actually scale up, and importantly it proved out the whole model."
This profiling was just one set of data that the Xbox hardware team had to work with. More data was coming in from other titles, and the scaling results in the move to 4K were looking consistent. "All the PIX captures and analysis and simulation they did proved it out for everyone, not just the people who were going to target 4K60, starting from a point at 1080p60 [like Turn 10] but even the people who haven't gotten to that point yet," continues Tector. "They have other reasons that they aren't going for native resolution maybe and so they've made other trade-offs in their engine and they have other bottlenecks than we would. I think it was great that the model hit such a broad set of different rendering types, it really helped prove it out."
Additionally, by working directly with the Xbox hardware team, Turn 10 is able to provide invaluable developer input, way ahead of time. "Importantly it feels like the right stage to be at, especially this early. It's like, we can evaluate it early before other studios get it and before they all have to go through that process as a group," enthuses Tector. "We can do it as a first party and help prove out the platform because we're not only trying to make the platform the best one for us, we're trying to make it the best one for all game developers."
"I can't stress enough how important it is for our platform team to have an asset like Turn 10 and Chris and his team," chimes in Kevin Gammill, Group Program Manager of the Xbox Core Platform. "Not only do they help provide the modelling, but they also keep us honest with the developer perspective as well as the consumer perspective in doing the right thing for our customers, so it's fantastic partnership."
"It's been so powerful to have a developer voice in the room. I'm sure there has been throughout history, but it was just a relief," adds Tector. "It said a lot about the Xbox organisation to bring that voice in even as early as the planning, everything's on paper, just trying to prove out, [to ask if] this is going make sense as a developer."
Gammill suggests that all of Microsoft's first party teams have been involved in the process of creating the Scorpio hardware. "[Turn 10] push us one way, 343 will push us a different way, the Coalition will push us a different way," he says. "Rare - they're pushing us a ton around Beam and some of the stuff that we may want to do there, so it's just great because we a super-strong relationship across the board with first party and it really benefits the platform, which ends up benefiting the customer."
Theoretical data and projections became very real with the arrival of prototype Scorpio hardware at the beginning of the year. In mid-January, Matt Lee from the Xbox Direct3D team arrived at the Turn 10 studio with a bunch of early components, eager to get Project Scorpio up and running with actual code.
"They wanted to get an early native title, one that was actually built for Scorpio," recalls Tector. "There'd been a ton of compatibility testing with previous titles but they really wanted to prove out one that was built against the XDK - and we could then do performance evaluation on it, running natively on the machine instead of through emulators and such."
Prototype Scorpio hardware at this point didn't really resemble anything that could recognisably pass as a console unit.
"He had a cardboard box full of parts and he starts getting them out on the desk and it's all loose motherboards, nothing's fitting together, it's debug connectors and it doesn't even have all the proper cooling, so there's just this huge PC fan - one of the bigger ones - and it's just sitting on the desk blowing across the top of it," laughs Tector. "It was comedy because it would start vibrating as the fan was running and it would slowly turn away and then it would point away from the memory and the whole system would shut down. We finally taped it down, that was our debugging rocket science! But all that, it was fun, really geek fun."
The process of getting ForzaTech up and running on the makeshift Project Scorpio hardware took just two days, and according to Chris Tector, the majority of that time was adapting the codebase from an earlier XDK [the PC-based development environment] that dated to just after Forza Motorsport 6's ship-date.
"There was one issue we had to deal with around memory alignment, then we were up and running on Scorpio. It was that fast. We were floored," he says. "We had this special room for [Matt], it was all locked away so he could be here for a really long time. It was two days and [on] the third day we were just playing around with all the options and re-doing all those stress tests and saying 'what if we turn on this MSAA or what if we turn on that'."
At this point I stop Tector mid-flow to clarify something that seemed to beggar belief. Was he really suggesting that the ForzaTech demo was fully performant straight away on this ramshackle collection of parts?
"From day one, yeah. We were floored... I mean, other launches haven't always gone that way, you're always fighting up until the final months... whereas now, from that second day we were able to say, 'well what are we going to do with all of this?'"
At this point, I'm ushered over to a work terminal with two displays. On the left, the PIX profiling software is running. On the right, the ForzaTech demo is running beautifully on a 55-inch LG OLED B6 display.
"This is us. This is ForzaTech running 60 frames a second, 4K," Tector says proudly. "We're still running with settings that we would have used in Forza 6. Since it's Xbox, we're using EQAA, so it's like a 4:2 EQAA. That's the actual GP utilisation so we're only using 60 per cent of the compute to get to this. Importantly, I know I've just said it's like a Forza 6 set-up, but this is also including 4K content, so all of our build system - 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."
The surfeit of memory bandwidth in Project Scorpio ensures that the additional overhead of these assets only hits performance by one per cent. The demo itself consists of a full complement of cars stacked up in two columns, moving like a train around the Nurburgring GP circuit.
"This is a stress case. Like I said, we do a ton of work to prove out the performance of any of our titles," explains Tector. "What we're doing is we're letting the cars drive. The full AI is running, the full physics is running for them and then we're snapping them back into this fixed grid... And then we let the AI player drive around and this is one of the cases we use to enforce the [rendering] budgets. We do a validation pass since all the cars or all the tracks or whichever components are running within budget. That's one of the biggest reasons we can hit those smooth frame-rates. We get super-stringent about how we follow those."
The Forza engine unfailingly hands in a new frame every 1/60th of a second - what Chris is saying is that each individual component has a set budget that it cannot exceed - but it can obviously come in under budget - for example, when fewer cars are on-screen. GPU load varies as the demo progresses; it seems to hit a maximum of around 70 per cent, but most of the time it's in the mid-sixties, sometimes lower.
"It'll vary around. Largely it scales relative," says Tector. "Here it's in the 50s because some of the car grid has gone off, and now we're back. And then it depends... are we on an outer section of the track and so there less for it to see? Whereas when we're at the start in the heavier sections, you've actually got more of the models in view."
The full complement of cars remaining on-screen for the majority of the duration ensures that this is a stringent test of the hardware, but maybe the Nurburgring GP course isn't the most demanding circuit available?
"They all adhere to a track budget," replies Tector, suggesting that the choice of course would have no impact on the result. "The way we do our budgeting is like at a sub-frame level. It's not did you hit 60? It's did the environment hit this number of milliseconds budget, so that normalises everything and lets us manage it as a whole process across the hundreds of cars and all of the tracks that we have. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to manage it."
The presentation is crisp and clear, the Scorpio test kit sits next to the TV - there's no doubt whatsoever that this is indeed Scorpio hardware running the Forza Engine at a locked 4K60 with plenty of overhead remaining, and GPU utilisation is definitely staying within a set range as the train of cars careens around the track. The result is impressive, but without seeing an Xbox One running the same demo as a reference point, the question is how much scalability we actually have with the jump from 1080p to 4K.
"With this scene, it's good that you point that out because we don't have a few of the components that we have within the budget, like particles. I'd say it would probably be 14ms but with this type of a grid it might be closer to 15ms," Tector replies - effectively suggesting that GPU utilisation in the mid-60s on Project Scorpio hardware would translate to 84 to 90 per cent running the same content at 1080p on Xbox One.
Tector moves to the left display on the bench, running PIX. He scrolls through GPU captures where the waves of work roll out. The tool can show what shaders are running, what the bottlenecks are, and he can dig deeper, all the
way down to the individual GPU draw call. There's a similar level of granularity on the CPU side too. It allows for fine-grain optimisation that simply isn't possible on PC.
"When we did Apex and we were first going on the PC coming from Xbox development, we had these well tuned performance tools, going back to PC development where we didn't have them was painful," Tector recalls. "For us to have this from day one, it's been so powerful because we just get insights instantly and we can start comparing and saying 'well I know it took this many microseconds to render this driver model on Xbox One. Why is it taking this many microseconds or nanoseconds on Scorpio?'"
This immediate level of information on a brand new console is hugely beneficial to developers. Microsoft says that Project Scorpio sits within the Xbox One family of products and it's clear that this goes all the way back to the developer level - the mature tools used to optimise for the three-year-old console work just as well with its upcoming 4K-orientated companion.
"Since those first two days we've actually shaved out a couple of milliseconds because we need more time, we want to bring more features into the game and importantly we want to bring them into the game in both versions," Tector reveals - and it'll be interesting to see what they do with that additional GPU time in the next Forza. "Having that level of detail there lets us pull off optimisations that only a first party is going to do and usually they only do them for the one console they're working on. And now the two of them are so similar and so compatible, we can apply optimisations over here that are going to benefit Xbox One. We can actually bring features to both versions we might have not have been able to."
Clearly, there's still a large amount of GPU overhead left over on Scorpio, so where can the engine be taken from there? Turn 10 is still working on this, but the quality settings from Forza Motorsport 6 Apex on PC can be fully invoked on Scorpio. Turn 10 literally ramped up everything to ultra and it just worked, with the game retaining a 4K60 performance level. As well as validating the capabilities of the new console, we also get an insight into how some ultra-level settings may actually amount to a rampant misuse of PC GPUs' capabilities.
"The crazy story here is that we've gone over our PC ultra settings and for everything that's GPU-related, we've been able to max it - and that's what we're running at, 88 per cent," says Tector, pointing to the utilisation data at the top of the screen. Right beneath it is the anti-aliasing setting - 4x, or rather 8:4x using the Radeon EQAA hardware AA.
"This is rendering the player LOD for every car, so you won't see a single LOD pop. [It's the] top-level model you'd see in race, one below what you see in Autovista, the model you usually only see for the player. And then we balance out LODs across the scene. It's a disgusting abuse of GPU power is what it is, right?"
With the equivalent of PC's ultra settings invoked, shadow quality and corresponding resolution are ramped up, more subtle areas of the lighting are enhanced, foliage density increases and the number of taps used for motion blur quality doubles. Based on the ForzaTech screenshot Microsoft provided for our Scorpio coverage, essentially the same level of geometry used for the car nearest to the camera is being used on the vehicle furthest away. Taking the shot into Photoshop, it's occupying approximately 1500 pixels out of 8.3 million - a disgusting abuse of GPU power indeed.
"It's horrible but we can do it and we still have the power left over," Tector concludes.
The extent to which the comparison is valid is highly debatable, but we tried to replicate the ForzaTech content on the PC version based on this ultra-level stress test. It's impossible to keep all cars snapped into place as per the Scorpio demo, but the evidence seems to suggest we're looking at performance in the same ballpark as an Nvidia GTX 1070-class GPU here and even that can drop frames at ultra settings when wet weather hits. Turn 10's stringent budgeting would ensure that this would never happen in a console release. But the point isn't really about platform comparisons at this very early stage, it's more about how Turn 10 plans to use that power to get more visual return for the console player as opposed to just maxing out quality settings that offer a drastically diminishing visual returns.
"The awesome part about the whole story [is] that we can spend all this time heading into the future," says 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 for titles or a final frame-rate, we can really drive it all into quality."
Unfortunately, the Microsoft team won't show me everything they've got up and running on now-final development hardware - E3 will be the venue for that - but they're keen to point out that despite Turn 10 running one of the most optimal game engines in the business, others are getting similar results. I'm also told that key developers have had access to hardware on site at the Microsoft campus.
"Chris's experience is not atypical of what we've seen from partners we've had in - varying, different degrees of results but all positive. It's been great," says Kevin Gammill.
"I think this is the earliest in terms of time to ship. As Chris was alluding to, it's usually right down to the wire," adds Albert Penello. "And now we've got fully performant boxes going out shortly... We're seeing exceptionally fast 'getting up and running' times with developers, so we're pretty bullish. I like the direction we're heading, where we're hearing a lot of time spent on quality, not a lot of time spent on performance tuning or engines or the technical development side."
I went into the Xbox visit looking for validation beyond the specs, that the Scorpio hardware could deliver on the claims made for it. It speaks to the confidence of the Xbox team that they chose to showcase the power of the new console by wheeling out a three-month-old demo (!).
As Chris Tector points out, the Forza engine has evolved since then with further optimisation allowing for the addition of new features for the next series release. And on top of that, Turn 10 still has that big slice of GPU time remaining to beef up Scorpio visuals still further. It'll be fascinating to see how those resources are deployed in the final game.
It's only one game engine of course - and one of the best in business, no less - with all the benefits of a first party focus. In terms of a better look at how Scorpio will handle a breadth of software, we'll need to see more games - third party titles in particular. But at this very early stage, I asked for an authentic real-time demonstration that shows what the Scorpio hardware can potentially deliver and Microsoft didn't falter. And going forward, it sets up an extraordinarily high level of expectation for E3 - just two months ahead of us. The hardware credentials are clearly impressive, but as always, it's the games that count.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/d...-motorsport-on-project-scorpio-the-full-story
Gamestop.com Investigating Possible Breach
Video game giant GameStop Corp. [NSYE: GME] says it is investigating reports that hackers may have siphoned credit card and customer data from its website — gamestop.com. The company acknowledged the investigation after being contacted by KrebsOnSecurity.
“GameStop recently received notification from a third party that it believed payment card data from cards used on the GameStop.com website was being offered for sale on a website,” a company spokesman wrote in response to questions from this author.
“That day a leading security firm was engaged to investigate these claims. Gamestop has and will continue to work non-stop to address this report and take appropriate measures to eradicate any issue that may be identified,” the company’s statement continued.
Two sources in the financial industry told KrebsOnSecurity that they have received alerts from a credit card processor stating that Gamestop.com was likely compromised by intruders between mid-September 2016 and the first week of February 2017.
Those same sources said the compromised data is thought to include customer card number, expiration date, name, address and card verification value (CVV2), usually a 3-digit security code printed on the backs of credit cards.
Online merchants are not supposed to store CVV2 codes, but hackers can steal the codes by placing malicious software on a company’s e-commerce site, so that the data is copied and recorded by the intruders before it is encrypted and transmitted to be processed.
GameStop would not comment on the possible timeframe of the suspected breach, or say what types of customer data might be impacted.
Based in Grapevine, Texas, GameStop generated more than $8.6 billion in revenue in 2016, although it’s unclear how much of that came through the company’s Web site. GameStop operates more than 7,000 retail stores through the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Europe. There is currently no indication that the company’s retail store locations may have been affected.
According to Web site statistics firm Alexa.com, Gamestop.com is the 269th most popular Web site in the United States.
“We regret any concern this situation may cause for our customers,” Game Stop said in its statement. “GameStop would like to remind its customers that it is always advisable to monitor payment card account statements for unauthorized charges. If you identify such a charge, report it immediately to the bank that issued the card because payment card network rules generally state that cardholders are not responsible for unauthorized charges that are timely reported.”
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/04/gamestop-com-investigating-possible-breach/
Ghost Recon Wildlands – Narco Road Expansion Coming April 18, Adds New Vehicles and Factions
New targets, new vehicles, and a new approach to taking down the cartel are all coming soon in the Narco Road expansion for Ghost Recon Wildlands. In order to dismantle a smuggling ring led by the elusive El Invisible, you and your squad will have to infiltrate the gangs under his control and earn the respect of three new bosses. Each boss commands a gang with its own identity, including the thrill-seeking Kamikazes, the muscle car-loving Jinetes Locos, and the Santa Muerte-obsessed Death Riders.
You’ll take on more than 15 new campaign missions, as well as four new types of side missions and racing challenges, all with the goal of earning fame and followers. The more followers you acquire, the more you’ll ingratiate yourself with the gang bosses, and the closer you’ll get to your goal. Along the way, you’ll want to get comfortable with the new vehicles Narco Road is bringing to Bolivia. Muscle cars with nitro boosts, planes built for acrobatic flight, big chopper bikes, and hulking monster trucks will all be available for you to use as you please.
In addition to these four new vehicles types, Narco Road will introduce four outfits and nine weapons when it launches for season pass holders across all platforms on April 18 (or individual purchase for owners of the standard and deluxe versions of Ghost Recon Wildlands on April 25 for $14.99).
Narco Road will be preceded by a free title update – April 12 for consoles and April 14 for PC – that will introduce live season challenges and new rewards to Wildlands. The first themed-season, “The Rise and Fall of Unidad,” will challenge players to target Unidad operations. The challenges for the first season will refresh every Wednesday for six weeks, and reward players with up to three unique rewards per week.
http://blog.ubi.com/ghost-recon-wil...n-coming-april-18-adds-new-vehicles-factions/
Microsoft is now offering self-service refunds through their website
Microsoft have just announced that they will be offering self-service refunds across both Xbox One and Windows 10.
Users will now be able to refund any product bought through the Microsoft Store through account.microsoft.com. Games will have to have been bought within the last 14 days and you must have two hours or less play time for the product to be eligible. Sadly, DLC content, season passes, et cetera, are not eligible through this service. For those, you’ll have to attempt at convincing Microsoft’s Live Chat team.
To refund an item you must follow the below steps:
• Navigate to account.microsoft.com and sign-in.
• From the top menu bar, select Payment & Billing
> Order history.
• Navigate to a purchased game or app, and select request a refund.
It’s nice to see Microsoft following in Steam’s footsteps and allowing users to refund titles—especially broken titles—without having to go through Microsoft’s Live Chat service. Tell us what you think about this in the comments below.
http://www.icxm.net/x/microsoft-self-service-refunds-xbox-one-windows-10.html
wow...I wish I could've fucking returned assassin's creed unity and battlefield hardline...this is a huge gesture tho...it's pretty much a given if you buy digital content it's pretty much fucking yours w/ no take backs...the only exception is w/ amazon...I remember buying a digital copy of batman vs. superman cuz the leak was taking too long to drop...then I figured it'd probably drop later that day since it was on amazon...and I was able to get an instant refund...I think they only gave you a refund window of like 30 minutes or less tho...and I hadn't started watching the movie yet...don't know if that was a factor...wonder what the full guidelines are for a return...can I basically play the game for 2 weeks perhaps even beat it then return it?
if MS had offered all this shit @ the jump...they would've CRUSHED sony in domestic sales
if MS had offered all this shit @ the jump...they would've CRUSHED sony in domestic sales
Microsoft is now offering self-service refunds through their website
Microsoft have just announced that they will be offering self-service refunds across both Xbox One and Windows 10.
Users will now be able to refund any product bought through the Microsoft Store through account.microsoft.com. Games will have to have been bought within the last 14 days and you must have two hours or less play time for the product to be eligible. Sadly, DLC content, season passes, et cetera, are not eligible through this service. For those, you’ll have to attempt at convincing Microsoft’s Live Chat team.
To refund an item you must follow the below steps:
• Navigate to account.microsoft.com and sign-in.
• From the top menu bar, select Payment & Billing
> Order history.
• Navigate to a purchased game or app, and select request a refund.
It’s nice to see Microsoft following in Steam’s footsteps and allowing users to refund titles—especially broken titles—without having to go through Microsoft’s Live Chat service. Tell us what you think about this in the comments below.
http://www.icxm.net/x/microsoft-self-service-refunds-xbox-one-windows-10.html
Inside the next Xbox: Project Scorpio and its brand-new dev kit
Microsoft’s Xbox One turns four this year. Before the year is out, the company plans to provide its aging console with a beefier, more capable sibling: Project Scorpio.
It’s been about a year since news of the company’s plans to breathe new life into the brand leaked, but Xbox chief Phil Spencer traces Scorpio’s roots back to 2014, shortly after he stepped up from head of Microsoft Studios to become head of Xbox.
“It was pretty close after that that we started on what our hardware roadmap was gonna be,” Spencer told Gamasutra during a recent visit to Microsoft. “The ideas behind [the Xbox One] S were in flight slightly, because we knew we would do something in terms of a hardware refresh. But in terms of something more powerful, that kind of came in at that time.”
How the plans for the console we know as Scorpio came together, and what it means for game developers going forward, is what we tried to figure out during that visit. While Microsoft is being very careful about how it metes out details about Scorpio (the console’s name and price were not discussed), Gamasutra was shown the Scorpio dev kit and sat down to chat with some of the folks involved with its design.
For developers, Scorpio -- and its cousin across the aisle, Sony’s PlayStation 4 Pro -- present familiar opportunities and challenges. By expanding “the Xbox One family of devices,” as Microsoft representatives are fond of saying, the company has significantly blurred the line between being a PC game developer and a console game developer.
Console game devs must now think like PC game devs
The limits and comforts of having a single device to target are gone; in their place, developers who make games for Xbox must now think like PC game devs, building their games to scale across at least two significantly different hardware configurations.
This is not a new challenge, of course; Sony beat Microsoft to the punch by releasing its own supercharged PlayStation 4, the PlayStation 4 Pro, late last year -- along with a mandate to devs that all PS4 games launching after the Pro be capable of supporting its beefier specs in some fashion. When we spoke to PS4 system architect Mark Cerny last year about the Pro, he said Sony was also having “conversations” with devs about patching their extant games to support the Pro. Some games were patched, but many had compatibility issues with the Pro; Sony eventually patched a “Boost Mode” into the console this year that sees some games gaining increased performance on the Pro, even if they don’t officially support the beefier console.
All of this is important because Microsoft is making a show of avoiding the compatibility problem entirely. The pitch to game developers, according to Xbox software engineering exec Kareem Choudhry, is that you don’t have to do anything to your existing or future Xbox One games to get them running better on Scorpio -- they just will.
“You can just write to the original set of [Xbox One] requirements that we have today, and then we'll do the work to make sure that it actually runs better. But [developers] don't have to do any custom work for Scorpio,” Choudhry told Gamasutra. “We're just inviting people to come in and take advantage of it. In terms of requirements if they do decide to take advantage of it, we want that content to run, at minimum the same as but ideally better than it does on the original Xbox One.“
Microsoft’s pitch to developers, then, is that Scorpio is to Xbox One as a recommended PC system spec is to a minimum PC system spec; the components are more powerful, but the underlying platform is the same.
The same goes for the new Project Scorpio dev kit, which Microsoft says is basically an Xbox One dev kit upgraded to benefit from a couple years’ worth of technological progress and developer feedback. It differs from the Scorpio console that will appear on store shelves in a few key ways, but in order to dig into them we should first talk about the retail Scorpio specs.
What's under the hood of both Scorpio and its turbocharged dev kit
As publicized last week, the console currently known as Scorpio will sport a new custom eight-core CPU clocked at 2.3 Ghz. Kevin Gammill, Microsoft’s group program manager for Xbox Core Platform, claims that’s a 31 percent improvement over the Xbox One S, and that the CPU itself works more efficiently with the console’s GPU.
“The other thing we did is improve our GPU to CPU coherent bandwidth. So the bandwidth between the CPU and the GPU is drastically improved as well,” Gammill said. “The net result of all that is that not only does the CPU clock faster than it does in Xbox One, it's actually more efficient than the one in both Xbox One and Xbox One S. We had more time to tune it. You learn a lot when you put something out there, you can iterate on it, and this is the result of our learnings.”
The GPU in question sports 40 customized compute units at 1172 Mhz, but the Scorpio dev kits will actually ship with a bit more power -- 44 CUs, rather than 40.
“At a high level, it's much easier for a game developer to come in higher and tune down, than come in lower and tune up. Or nail it. That just rarely happens,” said Gammill, by way of explaining why the Scorpio dev kit is a bit beefier than its retail counterpart. “Our overarching design principle was to make it easy for devs to hit our goals: 4K, 4K textures, rocksteady framerates, HDR, wide color gamut, and spatial audio.”
What’s more interesting about the Scorpio console is that, according to Microsoft, it’s designed to incorporate basic, oft-used DirectX12 draw calls into the GPU command processor itself, potentially freeing up some processing power for devs.
“It's the first time I'm aware of us ever doing something like this,” Gammill said. “We actually pulled some of the DX12 runtime components directly into the hardware. So basically, these high-frequency DX12 draw calls you'd normally call [to output a frame, for example] which would take up a lot of GPU and CPU cycles, now that that's baked into the system itself, it makes the system significantly more efficient.”
Gammill estimates this can lead to situations where hundreds of specific API calls can be cut down to 10-15, potentially giving developers a bit of extra efficiency to play with.
In terms of memory, gone is the Xbox One’s combo of ESRAM and 8 GB of DDR3 RAM. It’s been replaced with a flat slab of DDR5 RAM, 12 GB in total. According to Gammill, developers can expect to get 8 GB of that for their game itself, and that the ESRAM was axed in response to devs’ requests.
“This was feedback we got from developers, that targeting ESRAM was harder, so we wanted to not make that an additional challenge,” he said. “The other thing we heard is that they wanted more headroom for their titles, so we moved from 5 gigs of RAM to 8.”
Scorpio’s chief talking-point is 4K resolution: Spencer says Microsoft is trying a mid-generation console refresh because it wagered the Next Big Thing in television technology, 4K displays, would be adopted widely enough to justify building towards in the middle of the Xbox One’s lifespan, rather than at the end.
“We could use that kind of clean cut,” Spencer said. “But we thought 4K TVs would get to scale in the middle of this generation.”
But there’s also support for another bit of novel display tech built into Scorpio: variable refresh rate. The idea is that televisions will in the near future be widely capable of dynamically changing their refresh rate to render frames onscreen the moment they’re rendered by the GPU, cutting down on screen tearing and other graphical corruption.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because some PC monitors are already capable of doing this via GPU technologies like AMD’s FreeSync and Nvidia’s G-Sync. Gammill says that Scorpio will support variable refresh rate (which is part of the not-yet-ratified HDMI 2.1 spec) and work with FreeSync monitors; moreover, that Microsoft is working with TV manufacturers to try and ensure Scorpio will support the feature in as many TVs as possible.
“This is new technology we expect to see coming to displays over the coming years,” said Jason Ronald, head of the Xbox Advanced Technology Group. “We want to make sure Scorpio is set up to take advantage of it when it comes out.”
What this means for devs, as noted earlier, is that you basically need to be developing Xbox One games with an expectation that some people will be playing them on beefier hardware attached to 4K screens. However, as previously reported, Microsoft is not currently cool with developers targeting Scorpio exclusively; your Xbox One games need to run well across all Xbox One consoles, and that means that you still need to worry about, say, ESRAM and hitting decent framerates on the vanilla One if you want to bring your game to Xbox.
Also, we should point out that Scorpio will also be capable of being converted into a dev kit, just like the Xbox One and One S. It won’t be as powerful as a Scorpio dev kit straight from Microsoft, but it will be more powerful than an Xbox One converted into a dev kit.
"If you're a developer, you can go to Universal Dev Center, just like today, you can do that development on your Xbox One console you own today and also the same thing on Project Scorpio when it comes out,” said Choudhry. “And you'll have more power available to you.”
However, Microsoft plans to continue what Choudhry calls its “tiered approach” to sending dev kits out to developers: basically, you have to be either a first-party studio, or a partner dev (via either Microsoft’s third-party program or its ID@Xbox indie dev initiative) to get a Scorpio dev kit.
So let’s talk in-depth about the kit. According to Microsoft, Scorpio dev kits will be shipping out to some developers in the next few weeks, can be toggled to replicate Xbox One, One S, or Scorpio, and incorporates a host of devs’ requested changes.
For starters, the kit sports a real-time clock and battery backup, as well as an OLED screen w/ navigation button on the front of the box and five programmable buttons. This seems like a small but meaningful quality-of-life improvement for devs: if you’re working with Scorpio dev kits, you should be able to set them up to display useful data like, says, frames per second, at a glance.
The dev kit has exactly the same ports (down to an HDMI IN jack) as the retail Scorpio, as well as an additional three front-facing USB ports and an extra NIC (network interface card) for transmitting debug information while running a multiplayer game.
The kit now also vents from the back and sides, rather than the top, to make it easier for devs to stack Scorpio dev kits without running into problems or having to build weird spacers out of office supplies (or Lego.)
“I kid you not, I go to first-party studios, I go to third-party studios, and they have dev kits stacked. But they basically built blocks, or used Legos, as a gap so they could vent,” said Gammill. “Well now you can stack these 10 high.”
It’s also more powerful than the retail console: 44 CUs on the GPU instead of 40, 24 GB of DDR5 RAM (double retail’s 12 GB), and a 1 TB solid-state drive in addition to the retail console’s 1 TB hard drive. Microsoft’s pitch to devs is consistent here: build your games big (4K native textures, etc.) and tune them down to run on the Scorpio and other Xbox One consoles.
The company also wants to make a show of listening to developers’ feedback about a key game dev gremlin: iteration time. To that end, it’s promising that Scorpio dev kits will be basically “hands-free” in terms of setup: you unbox ‘em, hook them up to power and Internet, boot them up and basically just walk away as they automatically configure themselves and download updates.
Microsoft is also packaging a new high-speed transfer cable in with Scorpio dev kits that Gammill claims can push 100 GB of data in about 4 minutes.
"It takes a hell of a long time to transfer a full build to a kit," Mike Rayner, technical director at Microsoft's Gears of War 4 developer The Coalition, told Gamasutra. He claims the new transfer cable is a significant time-saver for the studio, as they can now push a build for testing "6 to 7 times" faster.
"Something that would have taken 30-45 minutes now takes a couple of minutes," he added. "So that's pretty huge for us."
Incidentally, the new cable isn't limited to Scorpio dev kits; Rayner says the "low-cost device" works with Xbox One and Xbox One S as well, and should help developers across the board cut down their iteration speed.
"We spent a ton of effort on reducing iteration time for developers"
“We spent a ton of effort on reducing iteration time for developers,” says Gammill. “Everything from quickly getting dev kits up and running, to the fast transfer cable, all of that is focused towards tightening that iteration loop. Where a developer can debug, fix the bug, redeploy, test. That all needs to be as tight as possible, because the faster they can do that, the better the game's gonna be. The better the game is, the happier they're going to be and the happier the player is going to be.”
What can you expect when it comes time to get your current games up and running on Scorpio? The answer seems to vary a bit, even within Microsoft. Two separate developers at The Coalition and Turn 10 Studios each said, independently, that it took one person two days to get their latest Xbox One game up and running in 4K on Scorpio. However, Xbox ATG chief Jason Ronald says it’s taken some folks less than a day of work.
“One of the things that's been really encouraging to us is, most people who are used to doing hardware bring-up, usually its a couple weeks to get games just physically running on it, let alone at performance. What we've seen with some of the middleware partners, the first-party and third-party partners, people have actually been able to come in, get their game running, and running at 4K, in less than a day,” said Ronald.
“So then once they've got the basic game up and running at 4K, then it's really about how to optimize it. Do you want to go after more effects, etc. We've never had hardware this early, running at near-final performance. And this is part of what gives us confidence as we go into holiday this year. We've got multiple games, multiple engines, multiple middleware up and running already, even before developers have hardware in studios.”
This kind of confidence was on display within Microsoft during our entire visit; whether it’s well-founded or not remains to be seen. Microsoft’s pitch for Scorpio is in many ways a vision of triumph delayed: it wants developers to view the high-end Xbox debuting later this year as the place where console games look and play their best.
“I want the best version of the games people want to play to be running on our platforms,” said Gammill, by way of explaining why Scorpio exists. “We didn't have that until we came up with Scorpio. So Project Scorpio fills that gap.”
So what does that mean for Microsoft? Given that some of the most successful console games this year (Zelda: Breath of the Wild) and this generation (Minecraft, which Microsoft now owns) aren’t technical powerhouses, it seems like the company’s future is yoked more to the games it can bring to its platform than how beefy a box it can build to run them.
But the company appears to be betting that a supercharged mid-generation Xbox upgrade that’s capable of running even older Xbox One games (including Xbox 360 back-compatible games) with improved performance will draw more players to the platform, even as the console’s beefier specs and improved dev kit make it easier for multi-platform devs to port their games to Scorpio.
One big takeaway here is that Microsoft is looking to basically standardize and simplify the hardware upgrade cycle that drives the PC game market. Late last year, Sony made it clear that its mid-cycle PS4 refresh wasn't meant to compete with Xbox; it was made to compete with the PC. Project Scorpio has a similar mission: to keep Xbox competitive with PC by affording Xbox an upgrade path that's simple and centered around the TV.
And even as the console game development business continues to inch ever closer to the PC game development business (live games, modified PC components, regular hardware refresh cycles) Microsoft says it’s not thinking about backing out of the game console business anytime soon.
“I'm a strong believer in console. And what that appliance means in my family room, under my TV,” said Spencer. “I've said, and this is actually true, the planning for what happens after Scorpio in the console space is already underway. You have to think about it that way. Like, what is the next thing? We -- I -- are committed to the console space. We think it's critically important.”
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/...rojectScorpio_soc_omc_xbo_tw_Video_lrn_4.12.1
wish this was out when fallout 4 came out because to me that game was trash.
ya I got caught up in the hype and bought the special edition for $120 but for PS4 tho...now amazon only wanna offer $25 for it smmfh
Q&A: With Scorpio rising, Phil Spencer looks to the future of Xbox
In March of 2014, Microsoft Studios chief Phil Spencer was tapped to lead Xbox.
Since then, he's been working with the folks at Xbox to shepherd the production of a new, much more powerful model of the Xbox One console: Project Scorpio.
Gamasutra recently visited Microsoft's headquarters in Washington to chat with some of the people who worked on the console, including Spencer himself.
We excerpted some of his comments in our in-depth feature on the Scorpio and its dev kit (which you should read if you want a deeper dive into Scorpio's specs) but since our conversation with Spencer wound up touching on a lot of topics that game developers care about, it made sense to also publish it as a straight Q&A.
Here then is a rundown (edited for clarity) of our conversation with Spencer about everything from Microsoft's VR plans to the future of the game console business, and how Project Scorpio represents an attempt at "learning from some of our PC heritage."
Let's start with an overview of your work on Scorpio. How involved were you in the design and development on this new console?
Fundamentally, my role as I see it is to enable the teams on Xbox to do their best work. So depending on what the teams are working on, the things I have to do are somewhat different. In the case of Scorpio and S, 'cuz we kind of built the plan for them simultaneously...well, it's almost been 3 years I've been in this job. Hardware is one of the longer lead time things. It just takes longer to build hardware than it does...well, games are similar, but in terms of platform or service things, we can do those more quickly. When I came in, I thought we could refresh the original Xbox One and I knew if we wanted to get that done in some timeframe that made sense, we were gonna have to start that quickly.
So my role in that case is setting context for what we want to do, and letting the smart teams go off and come up with the ideas about what's possible and then we come back and fundamentally, at some point, I have to make a decision about what we're going to do. In the case of Scorpio, the decision really was, we knew we were gonna go do S. There were some specific things we wanted to get done with the S console than were different than the original Xbox One. And then on Scorpio, the decision was, okay do we ship a higher-powered console?
We saw 4K TVs coming, and we made a prediction that 4K TVs were going to be a thing during this generation. As opposed to when you think about original Xbox to 360, the SD to HD transition for TVs kinda happened basically as the generation happened. So it was nice because we could just kind of ride that and say okay, 360 is an HD console. OG Xbox is an SD console. Even though there were actually some progressive mode games on the original Xbox. Still, we could use that as a kind of clean cut.
But we thought 4K TVs would get to scale in the middle of this generation. So we designed a console for 2016, and a console for 2017. We were kind of working on both plans simultaneously. And at some point, we got to -- let's just call it greenlight. For what we would do in 2016, and we sat around a table not too dissimlar from this and said, I think we need to do more than what the silicon is that's available in 2016 at a price point that a console customer would want to pay. So that's when we stopped that effort.
I actually don't remember what the codename was for that effort, but we stopped that effort and said okay, we're going to put all of our weight and execution capability of the hardware team behind delivering a higher-powered console in 2017 that's completely geared towards 4K. And then as we watched how we built it, we realized we could actually build some benefits for the -- I'll call them the 1K customers as well. The 1080p customer. Because the capabilities of the box don't dictate that somebody builds their game in 4K, or that you plug in a 4K TV. So if you're running one of our games in 1K, we wanted to do better there as well.
So my role was to set context, when the teams need decision-making to unlock progress, be the person that takes the tradeoffs and makes the decision, and fundamentally be accountable for what we go do.
Have you been working on this since you started in this role, roughly 3 years ago?
Yeah, it was pretty close after that that we started on what our hardware roadmap was gonna be.
And if you remember in the 360 generation, just to use that as an example, you know the original Xbox 360 did get a refresh to a new console. So it's not out of the ordinary that we would build it, even if it's just what we would call an industrial design -- or ID -- refresh. And sometimes it's a lowering, where we learn where we could save a little bit of money, we would do that also.
So pretty quickly we started on what our hardware roadmap would be. I remember when I came into this job, and I think about the role kind of in this way, there were service things that we wanted to go do with Xbox Live. Things around like, moving Netflix and things outside of Xbox Live Gold requirement, there were just some fundamental platform service decisions we wanted to make with Xbox Live. So we made some of those decisions quickly. On the platform side, back-compat was one of the things I was pretty passionate about. And we had a bunch of other work we wanted to go do on the platform side.
But if I think about service, platform, hardware, first-party, and then I'll call it developer, that's kind of how I look at the job. And in every one of those areas, there was a real desire to go and rethink our plan. Not rethink and redo, sometimes you rethink and you say what we're doing is absolutely what we should be doing. And then in other areas you say okay we're going to wanna rethink the plan that's in place, and do something new. The ideas behind S were in flight slightly, because we knew we would do something in terms of a hardware refresh. But in terms of something more powerful, that kind of came in at that time.
Okay, let's zero in on that developer column. What was the goal there, in terms of strategy?
Yeah, this one helped me. Because my role prior to this job was head of first-party. So I was a developer on our platform. Like, I lived through shipping games like Ryse and Forza and other things. Using the tools and capability that were there on the platform.
And I'll say, we slid into the launch of Xbox One pretty warm. And the development platform itself was not as mature as I would have wanted it. Definitely not as I wanted it, as somebody who is trying to ship games day and date on the launch of the platform. There were just some things that we needed to go back and -- I'll just call them hygiene things. Some things that we could go improve on, and get to state of the art.
The other thing that you see, and you guys write well on this topic, you're seeing now, moreso than clearly any other console generation, but probably at a surprising clip, console games feel more like PC and almost mobile games, than they ever have. Not visually, in the case of mobile games, but in terms of games as a service. Which I know is kind of an over-used term. Today, if I look at the top ten games that people are playing on Xbox One (and I do that every day) a lot of those games are games that have been around for years. I can pick something, obviously I can pick something like Minecraft, but that's a little bit cliche at this point. But pick something like GTA V. GTA V is a game that's been out there forever, a massive success, and still incredibly powerful on our platform, in terms of what people are playing as they continue to play it.
So as we were looking at the development platform, we saw games that had a longevity in the market. Not just from people playing, but also frankly developers building new content and continuing to profit off of people playing those games. And we said okay, instead of I launch a game, somebody plays it for 30 days, and then that game kind of goes away out of the consciousness, other than just a memory, we're seeing these games actually continue to live. And people, developers and publishers, want to continue to service those games on our platform.
You know, Call of Duty is a great a example. Right now we've got a lot of people playing Infinite Warfare but we also have a lot of people playing Black Ops 3. And that's good for Activision. They can keep both of those ecosystems strong. And we want to help them do that.
So when we thought about our tools, I said okay, games are going to live longer than we're used to them living on our platform. Which means from the service capability and monetization standpoint, we've got to go build tools so that they can continue to give content and services and other things to the customers. Seeing games like Destiny get born this generation makes a ton of sense.
But also these games are going to probably start to span generations. You know if you think about like, Destiny 2 is coming this year -- I pick Destiny because I think I have 600 hours into the game. But you know, Destiny 2's gonna be one of these games that I expect five, six, seven years from now, people are still going to be playing that game. It's going to be a little bit like WoW. Which you know, whatever its been, 10 years later, 15 years later, millions of people play the game.
So from a development platform, we needed to think about our hardware as multi-generational. Because we said 'Okay, there's gonna be games that are going to live multiple generations. And our software platform really has to service a developer's need to service an ongoing set of users.' As much as it has to serve, you know, how do I get a disc done. And just kind of burned, and go on to go do my next thing. So these two things kind of working on conjunction, which is why you see us doing things like Beam. Because Beam's a great way, if you're a socially led game, to go and share your game to a ton of people who are maybe thinking about buying it, but haven't made a decision yet.
You see us doing things like Game Pass, and Game Pass is this idea of, even games that are more, I buy them, I play them, I finish, you still want to have a way for your customers to engage in those games. So we said okay, we look at obviously what Netflix has done in video, and say that's an interesting way of kind of keeping some of these games in the consciousness, when people do not necessarily go out and buy that full version of the game.
And as a development platform, making sure that the tools are there for developers to keep their game up to date. Make the money that they want to go make, and keep their customers happy.
How has your work as a game developer shaped your approach to leading Xbox? How did it inform your work on Scorpio?
This is about Scorpio, but, it'll ... I'll start with back compat. Because yeah back compat's a nice feature of the box, people can have this library of 360 games to play when they buy an Xbox One. It's a nice marketing feature for the platform.
But as a developer, as somebody who plays a ton of games and has been in this industry for a long time, I kind of have this belief that there are just games people should play. And I grew up as a PC gamer, and the thing I love about the PC ecosystem is I can still go boot up Age of Empires 2 and I can go play that game. It's funny, I was looking at the World Video Game Hall of Fame, there's like Solitaire and Donkey Kong....but...console has this construct that actually makes it hard to go back and play some of those old console games. Because the format is so tied to the hardware itself.
And there's some clear benefits of doing that. I can tailor my games specifically to the hardware platform that I'm building towards. But it means you end up with this kind of land-locked content that it's hard to go play. Tempest 2000 on Atari Jaguar is a hard game to actually go off and play right now. Because the number of Atari Jaguars that still work, I don't know how many that number is, but once a transistor blows in one of those things, now what do you do?
So, starting with this idea that there are games that I just think are seminal games that people should be able to play, and not getting those locked to a specific generation of the hardware, is a goal of ours. It's a difficult goal, but it's a goal. Ad it's a goal that you see play out on PC, where I can go back and play Doom, I can go back and play Quake. I can go do those things.
So then when we started thinking about our hardware generations, and I talked about this a little bit at one of our showcase events last year, where I talked about hardware -- and I'm thinking as much as I'm saying -- I was thinking about console generations being able to take on some of the advantages that PCs have. Without becoming PCs themselves.
Because there are unique things about being a PC gamer that's different from being a console gamer. But I think there are some things that we can leverage and learn from that happen on PC, when thinking about console.
So one of the things we did in[Xbox One] S, which was actually kind of a pre-warm for Scorpio, is did something like added HDR support in the middle of the console generation. So as a developer now, I have to think about an install base of consoles that don't have HDR, and an install base of consoles that do have HDR. And how are you gonna treat that.
And then start talking to developers about like, what is scalable resolution, and why are you putting that into your game. Why might that be interesting in the future, if new CPU or GPU capability came online and you were able to use that. Those conversations have to start well in advance of us delivering something like Scorpio. Because you want games to take advantage of those things.
Like Halo 5 was a great example, right. It has dynamic scaling of resolution so in more complex scenes, those games, obviously you throttle down a bit on the resolution to keep framerate constant and you think well if you've got more CPU, what's going to happen in that situation. Well, the thing is gonna max itself out, right, and it's gonna run better.
These are the kinds of thoughts, when we think about dev platform hardware evolution, that were coming together, and this idea that I should be able to continue to play the games that were great. That gave us confidence that we could do something like Scorpio. Learning from some of our PC heritage as Microsoft, and also just watching a lot of the movement that was going on in the market. And the fact that games are living longer than they ever have before.
And as I said, you know with games as an art form, I do think people should go back and experience Age of Empires 2. People should go back and play Ico. People should go back and play Donkey Kong Country. People should go back and do those things, just like people go back and listen to old music or read old books.
I think of gaming in a similar fashion. And console generations make that difficult to do. There are advantages to the console generations, but I wanted to try to evolve our capability to kind of have the best of both. Old games that work well, new games that are innovative, and hardware platforms that could scale.
Will you require Xbox devs to support Scorpio? Will you expect them to patch in some level of support?
I want to make sure I understand the word support. The games will run on Scorpio. Any hardware peripheral you have, any game, any app; it is part of the Xbox One family.
Even -- and I tease the hardware team about this, because I'm running takehome now, so I have Scorpio at home --- even when you set it on top of your One, it directly portmaps. Like, you literally plug power in, plug HDMI in, it's all exactly the same.
We want to make it as turnkey as possible, for an Xbox One customer. That person has bet on us. They bet on us this generation, and I want to make sure that we're delivering a product for them, in Scorpio, that kind of meets the expectations and the investment that they've made in us.
So the Xbox One games are going to run on Scorpio. And when you ship an Xbox One game two years from now, even if you don't look at Scorpio as something that you want to take advantage of, fine. That's up to you. We're not mandating that people go and do Scorpio-specific work.
The big triple-A studios, that hasn't been the issue. Most of them, with their PC targets, already have...they've already built the assets. And we've thought about this. This comes from our PC heritage. That we should build the dev tools we deliver, through Direct X and now Pix, and working with our middleware providers, so if you've got a 4K version of your game on PC, we want to make moving that, those assets and that capability over to Scorpio seamless for you. That hasn't been a problem, when we're going and talking with the third-party developers that have done this work.
It's helped us that about a year ago, we started shipping games on PC. So, we did Forza at 4K on PC. We did Gears at 4K on PC. We did some other games, without announcing everything.
We've been in this motion of shipping games at a higher resolution than the current-gen consoles were capable of for a while, and we've used those learnings in our first-party, mixing with our platform and our hardware teams, to say okay, what is it going to mean if big third-party publisher X is already doing the same thing? How will they move over? And frankly, that's what we're finding. That when we go talk to them about it, it hasn't been 'how do we get you to support it?' It's been 'of course we're going to do this, because we want our game to show well.'
And there's even been this dynamic of -- you remember when Red Dead hit 360 back compat, it sold. It really started to sell well. Because a game like that -- well, Red Dead is definitely one of those games everybody should play. And when developers see that they say okay, there can be a new beat for my game, when it comes out and it's running at a native 4K on Scorpio, it's going to bring a new set of interest in my game, that people want to go see it.
And they're not often having to go rebuild the assets, because like I said in most cases they already have the assets. It's just setting the you know, the one guy for two days -- and to be clear, it's not 'one guy for two days' with every project -- that kind of scenario. And we're seeing the games get up and running well on the platform very quickly. And I think it's nice, because even if the game has been out for a while, a higher-res version of the game will cause people to take interest again. Those who maybe passed on it the first time, or were just too busy at the time.
Sounds like a PC game sales tail.
That's right.
What if a developer wants to take advantage of Scorpio hardware, at the expense of performance on original Xbox One?
We are set that Scorpio is part of the Xbox One family of devices. You're probably gonna get tired of our PR like, answers on that. But it's true. Like, we have millions of customers that have made a commitment to the Xbox One generation and I want to make sure if you bought the original Xbox One -- and frankly, developers want to support the largest install base of consoles that are out there, so from a financial standpoint they totally see it.
But I do get the question, more from game players than game developers, on why won't you just let developers target only Scorpio. And aren't you holding them back. Like, that's usually the social question I get: aren't you holding the developer back by requiring they support Xbox One when they support Scorpio?
Which is what we're going to require: you've got to support Xbox One, S, and Scorpio when you launch your game on Xbox One. But the truth is, the only developers that target one platform are first-party. Any other developer out there is building for the PS4, the PS4 Pro, the Xbox One, Scorpio, PC, probably Switch now, with the great start that they've had. And developers have learned how to craft their tools and their pipeline to support multiple capabilities as they go build those games.
Even if you just focused on PC, any PC game that you pick up has a recommended config, a minimum config...and like, the engines that are out there, the asset library handlers that are out there, understand how to have multiple LODs [levels of detail]. They understand how to deal with multiple asset bases and multiple rendering targets. So we're not holding anybody back.
But for developers, I want them to support the full Xbox One family. I think what they're going to see in Scorpio is the best version of the game that they've seen on console. And that's a little bit of ego speaking, but I'll say, as we designed the console we picked a certain GPU, we picked a certain CPU frequency we wanted to hit, an amount of RAM we wanted, an amount of memory bandwidth we wanted, and I kind of talked about it more as a balanced system.
It's easier to stand on stage with a 6 teraflop t-shirt, and people kind of focus on one thing, but the platform is obviously much more complex than a single number. I think it's fair to say we've been, um, surprised by the performance gains that Scorpio is giving us. Beyond our expectation when we designed the hardware. The engines that we've been bringing through and porting over, one, they've ported over fairly quickly, as third-parties have been coming in. And our own first-parties. The porting has been fast.
And this comes from, so many of these games have PC equivalents that if you say hey, can you set a 4K render target for your engine, you can often just say like sure, I just change this .ini setting right here. Boom! The engine knows how to go do this.
And then when we've looked at our first-party engines, as the third-party engines have been coming up, the balance of the system is playing out. The amount of RAM we're giving to developers, the bandwidth, memory bandwidth, so the GPU is always fed, you don't see stuttering that's happening on the GPU due to lack of assets hitting the GPU. Which is a big issue. You can push as many teraflops onto the GPU as you want, but if you can't feed it with assets, the thing's gonna stall. Because it's run out of stuff to actually go render. CPUs so that we can hit the framerates that people want to see.
And I think that when teams want to show the absolute best version of their game, assuming marketing deals and other things don't keep them from doing that, when they show a console version I think Scorpio is going to be the version that looks better than any other version.
When you say you expect devs to support Xbox One if they ship on Scorpio, what, specifically, do you mean by that?
The requirements themselves don't change, other than there's a new spec and we're saying hey, you've got to support the vertical nature of Xbox One, all the way through Scorpio. When we designed the Scorpio spec, we specifically said games running at 1080p 30 on an Xbox One -- what do we need to put in the box for that thing to run at 4K 30
And that was our design goal, from the beginning. To say: same framerate, increased resolution. Let's make sure that we can go hit that, as a minmum bar.
Now, software's complex and different things can happen, but one of the things that kept us from shipping in 2016 was we didn't think we could make that promise to developers in 2016. That the game that you're running at framerate and resolution on an Xbox One, that you'd be able to take to the same framerate and increased resolution on Scorpio. We didn't think we could get there last year, with the silicon that was in the market.
What changed?
It's a combination of price and capability from our hardware partner, that we worked with as we described a certain spec that we wanted to hit.
Sometimes I get in trouble when I talk about Sony too much, but, the choice they made on PS4 Pro, I totally get that choice, from their perspective and what they wanted to go do. I've said it publicly and I've said it privately, I think they've built a good 2016 PS4 Pro. With the silicon that was available, they picked the parts that made sense to go and put together a console in 2016.
But the point on not wanting framerate to drop when you go to the higher box, right, if the developers want to push resolution, to say to the player 'here you bought this higher-end console, let me show you higher-end resolution,' you don't want the framerate to drop. And that was something we didn't think we could deliver with the silicon that was available in 2016.
So some of it was time, as certain things come down in price -- some of them not as quickly as we would like. And some of it was hardware capability from our silicon partners, that allowed us to go do that in 2017.
And frankly we had to make that bet two, two and a half years ago, right. You're kind of throwing a dart a long way out, because the timelines in hardware are kind of like that. In the case of this, our hardware partner is the same [as Sony] -- we're both AMD partners. So we don't know what each other is doing, but we definitely know the roadmap, because we're working with the same partner. And we chose to pick something that said, if you're runnning -- 1080p 30 on an Xbox One, what does it mean to run that at 4K 30 on Scorpio. And make sure we could do that. And we're seeing results that make us feel really good about the choices we've made.
And some developers will come back and say, maybe I don't want a 4K native frame buffer. And we know some developers that are targeting other platforms are doing checkerboarding and other things. And we said okay, we want to make it easier for the developer to do what's natural for them. So we want to give them the tools to target their rendering techniques, that they want to use.
I believe, regardless of the technique you use, you are going to end up with a better performing game on [Scorpio], just because of the pure specs and hardware capability of the box. And we're starting to get questions like, if I plug my Scorpio into my 1K TV, because that's what I have right now, will I see something that's better than on the Xbox One? And we wanted to go tackle that scenario as well, so if developers wanted to make use of it, they could.
Giving developers tools to do the right thing at different resolutions is part of the dev plat[form] that we want to build.
Do you foresee a future where the Xbox doesn't exist, as a console? Where it instead exists as a PC-based platform?
So...I'm a strong believer in console. And what that appliance means in my family room, under my TV. Like I think...I log in with a controller, it kind of has power options and auto-update options that just feel a lot more like my cable box than it does my laptop.
I'm not saying one is better than the other, but that space of a console, you just turn it on and it's always ready and it's really purpose-built to go do one thing first, which is play games. Yes, people can do other things on it, but it's purpose-built for that. I'm a believer in that.
And I've said, and this is actually true, the planning for what happens after Scorpio in the console space is already underway. You have to think about it that way. Like, what is the next thing? We -- I -- remain committed to the console space. We think it's critically important.
But you're also hitting on something that I think is another change this generation. This will get a little philosophical, but -- gaming, over the decades I've been involved, has been about the device first. And then, almost, gamer second. Like I'm a console gamer, I'm a PC gamer. And still, like, I mainly play on console.
But what you're finding now, if you put the gamer at the center and you say okay, what do I want? I want to be connected to my gaming experience wherever I might go. And like, Twitch is a great example of that. Twitch lets me watch people play Destiny, wherever I go. And if a new raid drops and I happen to be on the road somewhere and I don't have my console with me and I want to see what a new raid looks like, I can get online and watch people go throgh it. That's cool. The experience becomes about me as a gamer, and where do I want to consume the content around the games that I love.
What we started looking at, then, is that we happen to be Microsoft, and we have this foothold on PC. Can we make Xbox an experience that expands, not only from console, but console to PC, and frankly mobile as well. We have millions of customers that come in from iOS and Android today. I think Xbox Live, as a service that connects a customer, a gamer, to their friends and their content and their Achievements and their feeds -- can exist on every platform.
Now some platforms might not allow that, like certain people might look at any encroachment of Xbox Live on their platform as a bad thing. But one of the things that happened when we acquired Minecraft, is we realized, very very quickly, the power of the community around driving the success of the game. Same thing happens with games like GTA V and Ark and Astroneer. You see these games that are almost more about the community than the original creators. When I go to MineCon, the line of kids is not for the team -- it's for the YouTubers! That's awesome.
So put the gamer in the middle, build a service capability around them, and whatever device they sit down with, we've got the capability, let's bring them the experience we can bring them there. If the games can run natively on a PC, and they're on a PC, let's go let 'em play those games.
Obviously on console, same thing. If they're on a mobile device, what can we do? In the case of like Minecraft and Solitaire and some other things, we can give 'em a game. In other cases we're going to bring 'em things like Beam, and their activity feed on Xbox Live, and the ability to chat with their friends on a service and device, wherever they are.
So I definitely think about Xbox Live as something that's more pervasive than just sitting on the console. The console itself, I think, is a foothold for us, a strength for us, and something we definitely have longterm belief in.
What's your general philosophy concerning the future of Xbox, then? Devs wonder about the future of game consoles. Is Scorpio an example of how Xbox evolves from here on out?
Well, let me say that the amount of times we've designed, roughly designed, an Xbox handheld, or a cheap Xbox kind of stick that you could plug in and stream from an Xbox in the home, or play low-powered games....we are always thinking and brainstorming on different scenarios of where the console could go. Or the gaming experience, I guess, more specifically, could go.
In terms of where console will go, I still believe in the power of a television in the home. Now some people don't, right. I happen to have two daughters, they're younger, they don't watch TV -- they watch things on their laptop, right. This big screen on the wall that's a communal viewing service is something of my age demographic, and not theirs.
That said, she'll come down and play games with me. So I believe in that television experience, which I really believe console is docked to, in my mind. Console let's four of us grab controllers and try to go play Overcooked and yell and swear at each other when Jason [glancing meaningfully across the table at Xbox ATG chief Jason Ronald] forgets to slice the tomatoes, or something. I think that experience is magical.
And I think it's something that -- I know it's something that we're committed to, in the long run.
In terms of where the console space goes, there's some things about how the console business runs, in terms of you don't make any money on the hardware, it's making money on the games, making money on the service. So if you're in a situation where you're subsidizing the hardware, a faster refresh of the hardware really hurts you. Because obviously, any subsidy of the hardware is kind of played out over, somebody is going to buy games, they're going to subscribe to Live, they might go subscribe to Game Pass and other things. And that's how you kind of run a business around the console space.
So I don't think you'll see console move. Unless the prices of the consoles themselves change to where they're not a subsidized piece of hardware but rather something that's profitable, like other consumer electronic devices, I don't think you're going to see a constant iteration in the console space.
Going back to Scorpio, we saw 4K. And we said we're going to go make a bet that 4K adoption is going to happen faster than maybe some people thought, or that it's going to happen in the middle of this generation. Let's go do something. So in the console space, in terms of where it's going, I look at those gaming consumer trends and say what are the trends we want to be a part of?
It's possible console generations slow down. Because I don't want to falsely put out a console that doesn't have a real selling proposition relative to the thing that's already in the market. I've said this before, that with the launch of this generation, I thought we struggled a little bit. Because a late-gen 360 game looked pretty good. So when an early-gen game from this generation came out, if you weren't in the industry, and you looked at late-gen 360 game to early-gen Xbox One game -- and I'd say the same thing for the other platforms -- you couldn't make the same statement you made on original Xbox to 360, where the screen went from 4:3 interlaced to all of a sudden you're sitting there at 720p HD. Like, it was just obvious. And TV was moving that direciton, you had sporting events and other things being broadcast in HD, and it was just like okay that's a no-brainer, I'm going to go do that.
This generation, I don't think, had that same call to action. Of here's what's happening around gaming, and you all have to be a part of that. We looked at 4K, we said we wanted this generation to incorporate 4K, and we thought we could do it in a way that wasn't disruptive, and was additive to this generation. And that's what we're trying to do.
When you think about what's next, and what's going on, just like you guys write about it every day, we play games every day, and we watch what's happening in development and we think okay, well what are the trends? Trends are more socially-driven games. Trends are a more constant set of games that grow with, frankly, a very strong indie scene, such that the hit games don't come from the top three publishers. So we've reached down into the ID@Xbox program and done things like give them dev kits, let them turn their Xbox One into a dev kit so effectively anybody can become a developer. Now letting them submit their stuff directly to the store. This is all part of us saying how do we unlock the greater dev community so that they can actually create the next hits?
Because it's not as likely that you're just going to go bet on a hit that's going to come from one of your traditional names; it might come from somewhere else. And then well, what does the console have to be in order for that to make sense? From a platform standpoint, the platform's still got to be safe. As a parent, I want to know that my daughters can go on the platform and I know what they're able to play and I know who they're able to play with and the ratings of the content they have. We have to continue to do work on the service; we've built Clubs and we'll continue to work on our gaming for everyone accessibility features. And then the hardware capability itself, it's how do you hit a price point that somebody will like with a hardware capability that's easily understood?
The two easy ones to bet on are resolution and framerate. And I don't know if we're ready -- I saw Dell shipping their 8K monitor now, but it's like...five thousand dollars. I don't know if we're quite at a point where everybody is gonna refresh their televisions to 8K framerate. So you see us starting to look at the framerate area and saying okay what innovations can we bring, not only in maximizing the framerate, but even things that tailor the framerate of display to the capability of the engine. So that you get a very smooth feeling. So framerate is one of the things, as we go forward, that we're going to look at.
But I also think there's going to have to be some disruption. Nintendo, I thought, did a cool thing with picking mobile. They kind of said okay, Switch is going to be a console that you can take with you. That's an interesting idea. Nintendo always does cool things, right. They did the second screen with Wii U, they obviously did the Wii and motion gaming in the room. I love that innovation.
Having innovation that really brings third-parties along is critical to us, I think; Nintendo tends to have great success in their first-party on their platforms and then third-parties usually come in a little bit later, usually because Nintendo creates things that are less like other things. Which is, you know, kudos to them. I think it's a fantastic part of the industry. Us being Microsoft, we're going to think about the health of Windows. And of our Xbox console. And try to think about those together, and really continue to grow Xbox Live.
This is the year I think people are predicting that broadcast viewership of games will exceed playing hours of games? I don't know where people come up with those stats. And playing hours are going up. We know this. This industry's massive. It's over a hundred billion dollars, the game industry, globally. It's a massive business, and it's just finding more and more ways of reaching gamers every day, which is I think good for all of us.
I mean, there are many months on YouTube where Minecraft is the number one or two search term on all of YouTube. And obviously we have almost nothing to do with it, other than to continue to try and ship a game that works. Which is awesome.
I've been here a whole day and nobody has wanted to talk about VR. So what's up with VR, at Microsoft?
I've tried to be consistent on this, so I will stay in the swim lane I've been in, not because of any official answer, but because it's what I believe. I have a PSVR, I have an Oculus, I don't have a Gear VR, but I have an HTC Vive and I play a lot of this stuff. I still think we're very very early in the evolution of VR.
Really what I see today is a lot of what I call kind of planar 2D applications being ported to volumetric 3D, or volumetric VR. And I actually don't think that's where we're going to see the breakout hit, something that moved from yes I did this on my monitor and now I'm going to go do this in VR. There's a lot of cool things, there's a lot of learning going on, and I think that's the natural trajectory; I think we need to go learn.
But we don't yet know how to paint on the VR canvas. We're still learning that. And to me, the most innovative space to go, and the most open space to go and learn about what VR is, is Windows. Because anybody can go and take their Windows PC, and we're now coming with our Windows HMDs that are lower-priced and will support a broader spec of PCs, so that any developer if they really want to go learn about VR development, can go plug one of these things and go party on it. Because that's the kind of activation we need, to figure out what's really happening in VR.
And I think we're on like a decade-long journey with VR, and we're still right at the beginning. So I have hesitated to say let's lock on one piece of hardware on our console and say this is it, we've figured out what VR is, this is it. Because from a hardware standpoint I think you can kind of do that, though I stil think we're early, but from an experience standpoint I don't think we've seen the things that we need to really have VR break out.
So we will support VR on Scorpio. We said that onstage. We will support VR on Scorpio, we're going to do that, I think it's important, I think there's some great immersive VR experiences.
But I still feel like the motion of the creative community is more vibrant on PC. And that's the place where we're going to see a lot of those ideas. So our approach is going to be to try and embrace both of those thigns, as opposed to creating a vertical in the VR space to say okay this thing is completely disconnected from the other things. Because I think the Windows space is the place where most of the developer engagement is happening.
Yeah, VR devs are having to choose which platforms they want to be on.
I know! I don't like that.
Do you have any interest in doing your own VR work?
Well, we built Minecraft in VR to learn. It's on Oculus, it's on Gear, we kind of watch and we iterate and we kind of figure out what works and what makes people sick, what doesn't make people sick. Like a lot of creators, as an organization we mess around with VR all the time. And learn.
And the VR community itself is actually really open. The Sony guys have been great, they've had our teams down, we've had them up to look at HoloLens and stuff that's been going on. Obviously Valve's about a stone's throw from here. So the VR community itself is actually very collaborative because I think everybody realizes how early we are in the evolution of what this thing is about.
In terms of hardware, we will talk more about it. There is a plan. I'll say that. This is not a we don't know what we're doing; it's more that we aren't saying yet. I think it's an immersive experience. I do not like that people are having to say, which of these VR verticals do I go pick right now, as a developer? Because I don't think any of them are really big enough yet to support a single experience. So you can see what we've done on console where we've said hey, go unlock your console and become a developer and go build a console game. You don't need to sign any kind of exclusivity deal with us in order to go unlock our console and go party on it. And build games.
So we're going to...my approach is to try and take a more open and inclusive approach to VR. The problem is the other people who are creating closed ecosystems are probably not going to like that. They're probably not going to want to play.
But I'm going to try and be as open as we can, definitely across the platforms that we support. Because I think that right now if you're a developer, you're just looking for oxygen to go sell your game. And having to pick the winner in VR, this early, feels like a path to not having this space really take off, to me.
So we're also out there talking to people that are building VR games today who don't have some kind of exclusivity deal, and saying hey, I want to be able to support you with the Windows work that we're doing. So if you want to ship your stuff here, come over, it's not like if you ship your game somewhere else you can't ship here. We just want people to get users on the VR things that they've built right now. Windows is the easiest space for us to start, which is why you've heard, so far, our VR plan has been more Windows-focused.
So what advice would you give to game developers, in 2017?
We're trying to build the best hardware platform and service that we can.
I guess from my decade-plus in building first-party games, when you ask me to speak to developers, which I do a lot of, I kind of come to the soul of what it is to be a game developer. And I think today's world allows for an unprecedented level of connection between you and your creative capability, and the fans and customers of your game. Whether it's through Early Access or Game Preview, or different ways you can go build a game kind of hand-in-hand with the people who end up being the biggest fans and most devoted players of your games.
And I'd say to developers, go embrace that. Embrace the fact that there are so many people out there that love the craft of building games, as well as playing games. And build games where that community can be part of the experience.
A great little example is, you're seeing more and more developers now building games, understanding that things like Twitch and Beam exist. And the game itself kind of natively exists in this world of players and viewers. And I love that thing. It's what's unique about our art form, is that it's interactive. And I think the process of creating our art form can be as interactive as the end experience is when you're done. And that's something that's unique to being a game developer.
And us at Xbox, we're going to go build the best hardware we can, platform and service, to allow you to go do that. But embrace that interactivity with the community. Because I think it's....we see it in Minecraft: I say you don't own Minecraft; you're the curator of Minecraft. Because it kind of has its own life out there, and that's such a strength for it. So that would be my recommendation.
Continue to give us feedback on how we can do better. That's how we get better. I think it's gonna be a fun 2017.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/...Phil_Spencer_looks_to_the_future_of_Xbox.phpQ
yo, am i looking at thi right.to me it looks like the scorpio will be a 5 disc system meaning you can have 5 games and what ever game you want you hit the number button and it will load the game instead of ejecting every time to put another game in.what do yall get from the bottons on the front of the dev kit.
Oh my god...all these bells and whistles and extraordinary power...none of this matters without AAA built exclusively for the console. I sound like the fun police, but they're running game on everyone. Exclusives are the only thing that matter in console wars...Nintendo Switch is lame compared to this, but that Zelda game is a fucking beast.
agree but xbox has some tricks up there sleeves what's.theres exclusive for the scorpio theres state of decay,crackdown 3 and that dumb pirate game and watch there's gonna be some surprises e3 that's gonna blow sony out the water with games.have faith my brother i know microsoft isn't dumb like that to not have games for their system.
Project Scorpio: The Most Powerful Place to Create and Play
At Team Xbox we put gamers at the center of everything we do and we are driven to build the best platform on which to create and play games. We know that you can’t have one without the other, which is why we’ve invested so much in new development tools, publishing opportunities, hardware and services for developers and gamers alike. With Project Scorpio, we created a console with the goal of being the ultimate place for developers to realize their visions and the best place to play any Xbox game.
The creativity and innovation in our industry is driven by developers of all sizes. A single person can launch a game that becomes a global phenomenon or teams of hundreds can create the industry’s biggest blockbuster. At GDC in March, we announced the Xbox Live Creators program, opening up access for anyone to create and publish a game to Xbox One consoles and Windows 10 PCs. When you combine that program with dev mode, which enables any retail Xbox One to be a developer kit, you have the easiest path in the industry for game creators to publish their games broadly to console and PC, reaching millions of gamers around the world.
With Project Scorpio, we set a design goal of building the first true 4K console for gamers with an emphasis on compatibility so no one gets left behind. Once we locked that plan, we set our sights on building the world’s most powerful console development platform, which includes the new Xbox One Development Kit and a full suite of software to get every ounce of performance from the platform. Like the retail console, we built this special dev kit by evaluating every piece, from hardware to software and tools, with developers and compatibility in mind. We paid attention to logistical details, like dramatically speeding up how quickly a developer can move their work between PC and dev kit, and made it easy to program and test changes at the literal press of a button on the front of the box. The goal is to let creators focus their time and energy on bringing their game to life, and less of it on getting up and running on new hardware.
We’ve created the most powerful console with you in mind. We’ve created the most powerful development platform with our industry’s creators in mind. And, we’re unifying players across PC and console with Xbox Live, the fastest, most reliable multiplayer network and Beam, the next generation streaming service. Ultimately, we know you care most about great games, whether they be exclusive, multiplatform, independent or AAA. We are proud of the diverse lineup of games coming this year that will only be playable on Xbox One and will play better on Project Scorpio. We designed Project Scorpio to be the best console to play the blockbuster multiplatform games from our publishing partners, made it easy for recently released titles to upgrade to true 4K and for beloved, backward compatible titles to play better than ever before.
I’m proud of the progress made with Project Scorpio and what it will mean for the creators who fuel the passion of gamers around the world. On behalf of everyone at Team Xbox, thank you for your continued passion and support. We’re excited to unveil Project Scorpio and the amazing game experiences it powers at E3 this June.
Phil Spencer
Twitter: @XboxP3
GT: P3
Read more at https://news.xbox.com/2017/04/13/pr...place-to-create-and-play/#7DCpwDTEgmhBYWR1.99
Inside the Scorpio Engine: the processor architecture deep dive
Editor's note: This one is for the hardcore. We've already covered Project Scorpio's hardware specs in broader detail, and posted critical analysis of everything we've seen so far, but for those of you hungry for more detail, who want to know absolutely everything shared with us, this is the place to be. We'll be running a similar deep dive on the construction of the retail console tomorrow.
If there's a recurring theme in our discussions with the hardware architects of Project Scorpio's new processor, it's customisation. And to be fair, PlayStation 4 system architect Mark Cerny made very similar points when I met up with him last year to discuss PS4 Pro. "It's not a process of calling up AMD and saying I'll take this part, this part and this part," says Kevin Gammill, Group Program Manager of the Xbox Core Platform. "A lot of really specific custom work went into this."
Of course, the base hardware designs across the various components and blocks within the Scorpio Engine SoC (system on chip) are indeed based on technology derived from AMD - the CPU technology has been customised to the point where Microsoft doesn't refer to them as Jaguar architecture any more, but that is clearly the starting point from which the Project Scorpio design began. Similarly, Scorpio's Radeon graphics core has features from AMD's latest Polaris architecture - but there is no equivalent part to it in the PC space. We've moved on from PS4 and Xbox One, where the basic GPU configurations (compute units, texture units, ROPs) at least mapped relatively closely to off-the-shelf PC parts.
"It's a completely unique design... you wouldn't be able to buy this anywhere else and really, we created this is in conjunction with AMD and it is a nice unique part for Scorpio," says Nick Baker, Distinguished Engineer, Silicon.
"The few high-level constraints and goals in the programme were to really say, we wanted to be the most powerful 4K gaming console. The other key area was to maintain full back-compat with Xbox One and One S titles and also to retain features we added in on those consoles to allow Xbox 360 compatibility as well. If you look at how we came up with the architecture those were the most important goals we wanted to keep in mind," Baker continues. "Key differentiators for Xbox that we wanted to retain and extend for Scorpio: we have CPU/GPU coherency, the GPU virtualisation support, the audio processing that's being used for spatial audio. We have the powerful and flexible display output processor we're using for super-sampling for 1080p TVs, for example, and we kept and extended and improved the GameDVR support too."
Years before any silicon arrived back from chip manufacturing giant TSMC, the Xbox team began by carrying a vast range of simulation and analysis. As Project Scorpio is effectively a mid-generation refresh - an extension of the existing console designed primarily for 4K screens - existing game code captured at a granular level via the PIX (Performance Investigator for Xbox) tool could be run on potential hardware designs, well before Microsoft went to AMD.
"We wanted to run simulations to make sure we were meeting performance goals and also back-compat, and to verify that the design was going to work correctly," says Nick Baker. "We took the full design database in-house. We had several hardware emulators that let us speed up the simulations. Typically, you get something like 1Hz or one cycle per second if you run on standard simulators. These things let us now run at half a MHz or more, which is 500 thousand cycles per second. We had these running 24/7 for several months, calculating effectively one hundred trillion cycles - it's absolutely amazing what we managed to achieve here. There are parts of the design that were designed at Microsoft. Microsoft engineers handed logic to AMD for integration."
"We did multiple PIX captures from every single game and ran them on the emulator," Andrew Goossen, Technical Fellow, Graphics, tells us - a process that proved invaluable for validating Scorpio's back-compat capabilities. "We did over 30,000 emulator runs, which is a big contributor to Nick's total cycle count because we had to make sure that we were going to land with that 100 per cent compatibility [with Xbox One]."
As we move deeper into the Scorpio Engine's hardware design during our presentation, the basic layout of the chip is displayed on-screen in the meeting room. It only represents two mask layers out of about 60 in the complete design, but it reveals the general plan of the full processor. It's a 360mm2 die and size-wise, it's very similar to the Xbox One processor's 363mm2, but the geography is very, very different. The move from 28nm planar fabrication to TSMC's 16nm FinFET coupled with the omission of ESRAM represents a radical change overall. More components now fit in the same area of the silicon and four clusters of Radeon compute units dominate. The GPU block sits to the left, with two, much smaller quad-core CPU clusters to the right, occupying a fraction of the overall area. There's a total of 4MB of L2 cache.
"We needed to run a fair amount of simulation to figure out what really we wanted to achieve with the CPUs as far as the design was concerned," says Baker. "In dealing with a full custom CPU design, you can't just go and say 'super-size this'. It's not that easy. Try doing that and quite often you'll find that somewhere else, you'll get counter intuitive results from that. We really wanted to be targeted with what we wanted to do."
It's at this point in the presentation where it's clear that the hopes of the most hardcore users weren't going to be realised - there is no Ryzen technology in Project Scorpio. Timelines, cost, area on the die, not to mention Microsoft confirming eight CPU cores last year had realistically ruled that out anyway - but hopes had lingered on, with shots like this stoking expectation.
"On the CPU side of things, we could still meet our design goals with the custom changes we made. At the end of the day we are still a consumer product. We want to hit the price-points where consumers want to purchase this. It's about balancing the two," explains Kevin Gammill.
It's a reminder that however advanced the hardware may be overall, 'bang for the buck' remains a crucial factor in the physical make-up of a new console processor. The Microsoft architects drew on Xbox One's existing customised design and aimed to double down on areas where clear performance wins were possible.
"Typically for CPU, the top two items are frequency and memory latency. If the CPU has data, the faster it can process it, the quicker the result, but it also means that if it doesn't have the data, it sits there idle, so latency is a big component. On frequency, we pushed it up to 2.3GHz" explains Nick Baker "On the latency, a couple of the areas we tackled, one was all the queues coming back from the memory interface, we sped those up as well. Specifically, within the core, because we're running a virtualised OS environment, we wanted to optimise how memory translation operations happen so there are some key changes inside the core to speed those things up. The end result is that not only does the CPU run faster, it also runs more efficiently meaning more power for you at the end."
Adding to the list of enhancements, Microsoft increased performance in CPU/GPU coherency and enhanced and improved the speed of the GPU command processor to offload a lot of work from the CPU too, specifically with DirectX 12 engines. However, looking at the layout of the Scorpio Engine, the proportion of the space occupied by the GPU dwarfs the CPU area. The ratio is much, much larger than both Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
"There are four shader engines on Scorpio, each shader engine has ten CUs," Baker explains. "The design from AMD lets us choose a lot of options in terms of number of SEs, CUs [compute units], the render back-end, the RBs that do the pixel blending, the cache sizes... and rather than make those as high as possible we needed to understand what was the best bang for the buck... Aside from that there were also 60 or so specific targeted changes throughout the pipeline. Everything from various memory sizes, queue sizes, features to make sure that back-compat went as smoothly as possible as well."
In actual fact, there are 11 compute units in each shader engine. However, one CU in each SE is disabled: it allows processors with small defects to still make their way into final consoles (fully enabled chips are available only for developers in the new Scorpio dev kit). The Scorpio Engine's GPU is targeted specifically for 4K rendering with ultra HD textures, with support for HDR and wide colour gamut. Microsoft's guiding principles involved making it as easy as possible for developers to access the full power of the hardware.
"This is reflected in everything. You'll see it in the developer kit we give to developers. You'll see it in terms of the performance goals - we want to make it easy as possible for developers to show that ultimate true 4K quality," says Andrew Goossen. "The other guiding principle was to minimise the work in terms of features. We didn't want developers to go and take advantage of some quirky new console-specific hardware feature to get that performance. Our guiding principles were around making it easy as possible for developers to showcase and exhibit the performance and power of Scorpio."
The Xbox One architecture was chosen as the base to better facilitate backwards compatibility, but similar to Sony's PlayStation 4 Pro, Microsoft had the option to factor in features from later Radeon architectures. There's some crossover in the elements both platform holders factored into their custom designs, but a good degree of variance too.
"We have Polaris features in Scorpio that we've picked up. Some of the big ones are delta colour compression, so that helps us out on our bandwidth, both for 4K textures and 4K rendering solutions to achieve that," says Goossen. "It's typically quite easy for the developers to integrate and then also more transparently we picked up some geometry and quad-scheduling improvements AMD has done in the Polaris architecture."
According to Goossen, some performance optimisations from the upcoming AMD Vega architecture factor into the Scorpio Engine's design, but other features that made it into PS4 Pro - for example, double-rate FP16 processing - do not. However, customisation was extensive elsewhere. Microsoft's GPU command processor implementation of DX12 has provided big wins for Xbox One developers, and it's set for expansion in Scorpio.
"Despite that, we're actually faster on the GPU too. You might think, oh you're sending more commands to the GPU now, maybe you're slowing down the GPU," suggests Goossen. "Well, very rarely are we draw-bound on the command processor. And the nice thing is that even when we are draw-bound now in D3D12, again we are more efficient even from the GPU perspective, because we're built-in. We don't have a very big and noisy and abstract interface we have to deal with. We just have the logic built right into the command processor, and in the command processor we can do more optimisations than we can in the driver."
But it's Project Scorpio's status as a console designed to enhance the current-gen titles with 4K functionality that helped most in defining the characteristics of the silicon. Typically, platform holders create console hardware and the developers do their best to fully exploit it. This time around, Microsoft could profile the game engines that would run on Scorpio and optimise the design to get the most out of the content.
"What we did was to take representative PIX captures from all of our top developers," says Goossen. "By hand we went through them and then extrapolated what the work involved would be for that game to support a 4K render resolution. We didn't want to apply a blanket upscale on all render targets, because as you know there are various intermediate renderings that will not scale as much. We went through those by hand and marked places where we didn't need to do resolves anymore because we have DCC, and there's other things we can save."
The Radeon GPU architecture can be built into a final console design with a range of different hardware configurations, and armed with this profiling data, Goossen and his team could effectively test-run the code on prospective designs before going to AMD with a target spec.
"Now we had a model for all of our top-selling Xbox One games where we could tweak the configuration for the number of CUs, the clock, the memory bandwidth, the number of RBs [render back-ends], the number of SEs [shader engines], the cache size," he says. "We could tweak our design and figure out what was the most optimal configuration. It was incredibly valuable for us to be able to make those trade-offs because ultimately these Xbox One titles are the ones that we wanted to get up to 4K."
The final Scorpio configuration achieves its performance objectives by hitting six teraflops of rendering power, and there's a clear emphasis on pushing GPU frequencies significantly higher than anything we've seen in any console powered by core AMD technology.
"This has two wonderful virtues from my perspective - as you know, the clock drives all the various different parts of the pipeline so it raises all boats," explains Andrew Goossen. "I don't get imbalances in my pipeline or introduce new bottlenecks or anything like that. The second one is that for the pixel pushing power we didn't need as much area, we didn't need as many CUs to hit that. It saves area - a pretty important consideration. We were 853MHz in Xbox One, we dialed it up to 1.172 GHz (1172MHz). That's a 37 per cent increase in clock, more than our CPU clock relatively. The next big one: we have 40 CUs. When you take 1172 multiplied by 40 multiplied by 64 for ops multiplied by 2 FLOPS per op, you get exactly 6.0TF."
Compared to Xbox One, the amount of shader engines doubles, which combined with the frequency boost sees triangle and vertex rate rise by 2.7x. The GPU's L2 cache gets a 4x increase, which Goossen says is there for targeting 4K performance.
"Those are kind of the big items but we also leveraged the fact that we understand the AMD architecture really, really well now and how well it does on our games," adds Goossen "So we were able to go through and examine a lot of the internal queues and buffers and caches and FIFOs that make up this very deep pipeline that if you can find the right areas that are causing bottlenecks, for very small area we could increase those sizes and get effective wins. This was a very big focus of ours to go through and you basically really leverage that understanding of having those years of looking at performance on the Xbox One."
Certainly in the PC space, GPU performance tends to scale with bandwidth - the more you increase compute power, the faster the memory you need to get best performance. It's an area where Sony were constrained in the PS4 Pro design. Having settled on 8GB of RAM, the only way to increase bandwidth and maintain compatibility was to swap in faster modules. There's a 2.3x increase in compute power, but only a 24 per cent increase in bandwidth. Microsoft ditched Xbox One's DDR3 and ESRAM combo, and moved to GDDR5.
"For 4K assets, textures get larger and render targets get larger as well. This means a couple of things - you need more space, you need more bandwidth," explains Nick Baker. "The question though was how much? We'd hate to build this GPU and then end up having to be memory-starved. All the analysis that Andrew was talking about, we were able to look at the effect of different memory bandwidths, and it quickly led us to needing more than 300GB/s memory bandwidth. In the end we ended up choosing 326GB/s. On Scorpio we are using a 384-bit GDDR5 interface - that is 12 channels. Each channel is 32 bits, and then 6.8GHz on the signalling so you multiply those up and you get the 326GB/s."
Baker explains that with those variables in place, the decision in targeting the amount of memory Project Scorpio would address is essentially made for you, and in our E3 2016 Scorpio speculation, that same logic led us to conclude that the machine would indeed deliver 12GB of capacity. Four gigs is reserved for the system (an extra 1GB there is utilised for a full 4K dashboard), leaving 8GB for game developers - a substantial increase over the 5GB used on Xbox One, and indeed PlayStation 4 Pro.
"Aside from the interface you also want to make sure that the data can get from the memory interface to the internals efficiently as well," adds Baker. "We already talked about the latency for the CPU, for example, but other areas particularly when you're dealing with real-time data for video output and such, you want to make sure that those aren't starved as well - and so we went through and looked and rejigged a lot of the quality of service that happens on the chip, to get the bandwidth around effectively. Also with render targets and textures being larger we went and tweaked the page tables for the GPU as well."
"We really like this memory solution because it did solve our two primary challenges in terms of providing 4K render targets and 4K textures. We considered various different options but the 384-bit 12GB config really made a lot of sense," Goossen says.
"And we have DCC on top of that as well," adds Baker.
ESRAM was a component of the Xbox One SoC that is surplus to requirements with the move to a fully unified pool of GDDR5, but there is no doubt that having that 32MB of memory within the SoC does have a latency advantage. However, the balance of the new design effectively factors that out.
"The memory system we've got, we've got enough bandwidth to more than cover what we go from ESRAM," says Baker. "We simply go and use our virtual memory system to map the 32MB of physical address that the old games thought they got into 32MB in the GDDR5. So latency is higher but in terms of aggregate performance, the improved bandwidth and improved GPU performance means we don't hit any issues."
Also within the SoC, the audio processing block returns from Xbox One - required for compatibility, but beefed up at the system level to allow for spatial surround system support for formats like Dolby Atmos for Home Theater, Atmos for Headphones, plus Microsoft's own Windows Sonic for Headphones, an HRTF based solution, developed by the HoloLens team. New for Scorpio is technology derived from AMD's latest GPU-accelerated media hardware. GameDVR supports 4K at 60fps, and it also uses HEVC encoding, meaning much higher quality video at the same bit-rate. HDR support in GameDVR actually gives Scorpio an advantage over conventional external capture equipment, which - right now at least - does not support high dynamic range.
"We can do full fidelity, incredibly high bit-rate GameDVR recording of your 4K60 experience," says Andrew Goossen. "You'll be able to play back locally at full fidelity and when you upload to YouTube you can automatically transcode - you can send up the raw thing as well, but typically we'll be doing a transcode to h.264 as part of that. We're also supporting HDR and SDR GameDVR so you'll be able to enjoy the full fidelity of the HDR experience, the challenge being - as you know - getting more platforms so you can actually view these. You'll certainly be able to view them locally. People with Xbox One S will be able to view them and hopefully we'll getting the industry moving to view these HDR videos as well."
The design aims for the Project Scorpio can be distilled down into two very specific goals - both 900p and 1080p Xbox One titles need to scale up to native 4K. It's actually a significant extension of what Microsoft promised last year at E3, which specifically addressed running 1080p Xbox One titles at ultra HD. The scope is wider now - by targeting 900p Xbox One titles too, the implication is that the same kind of scalability is on the cards for PS4 1080p games as well.
"We wanted [native 1080p Xbox One games] to run at full native 4K with a rock-solid frame-rate with a whole bunch of performance left over to showcase and actually improve the visual experience in many other ways beyond render resolution," Andrew Goossen tells us. "And then our other goal was that we wanted to get 900p games up to full native 4K. That's a little bit harder. Some of 900p games - day one port - they should be running fine, solid at 2160p. For other games it's going to be more work than you'll traditionally do in terms of console optimisation but we wanted to get those 900p games at 2160p."
Those are the calculations the Xbox team made in formulating the design, but developers are free to use the power of the processor as they see fit.
"Every game is different, every developer is different. The developers know best what techniques make the most impact for their games," explains Goossen. "We are perfectly happy with developers choosing a bunch of other techniques that are possible. We have hardware techniques for making checkerboarding very efficient. If developers want to go for checkerboarding, that's great. We've also heard from a bunch of our partners that they're actually finding that they prefer TAA [temporal anti-aliasing] with upscaling rather than checkerboarding. They do that, that's great. We don't impose any sort of requirements on them."
There are restrictions, however. Similar to PlayStation 4 Pro, Microsoft requires developers to run their games at the same frame-rate or better than the equivalent Xbox One version of the title. And all performance or high resolution rendering modes need to be available to all users, regardless of the screen they have attached to the console.
"They're perfectly allowed to have multiple solutions they support, but they have to ask the user which one. They have to have a good default and they have to ask the user if they want to switch to another one," says Goossen - good news of course, but our hope is that developers will instead opt for the ability to swap between modes in-game.
"In terms of the panoply of implementations we're going to see for Scorpio native games, I expect quite a range. I wouldn't be surprised to see games running at 1080p on Xbox One... they might use checkerboard and then they use the remaining GPU to really impact visual quality," Goossen continues.
"For the very small handful of titles that run at 720p today, our expectation is that they can checkerboard up to native 4K if they want to do that. I also expect variations of titles that are perhaps running at 900p at 30fps on Xbox One today that they can leverage the 31 per cent boost to CPU clock along with a bunch of other optimisations in conjunction with our D3D12 offload to potentially offer 1080p60 rather than 900p30. It's totally up to developers."
Microsoft didn't delve too deeply into specifics on the checkerboarding support that Scorpio possesses at the hardware level. However, Andrew Goossen tells us that the GPU supports extensions that allow depth and ID buffers to be efficiently rendered at full native resolution, while colour buffers can be rendered at half resolution with full pixel shader efficiency. Based on conversations last year with Mark Cerny, there is some commonality in approach here with some of the aspects of PlayStation 4 Pro's design, but we can expect some variation in customisations - despite both working with AMD, we're reliably informed that neither Sony or Microsoft are at all aware of each other's designs before they are publicly unveiled.
What is clear is that both companies had very different design priorities. Sony doubled down on checkerboarding support at a hardware level for addressing a 4K display because effectively there was no other choice: a 2.3x compute boost and only a modest bump to memory bandwidth over PS4 ruled out native 4K on top-tier titles. Microsoft's focus is clearly on pursuing higher native resolutions - the stops were pulled out on memory bandwidth and processing power, plus there's the focus on customising the silicon according to content.
But to what extent do those customisations elevate Scorpio beyond a PC equipped with a notional, baseline Radeon equivalent to Scorpio's GPU - no customisation but 'the same teraflops'. After the presentation, that's exactly what I asked Microsoft in the first of a couple of follow-up rounds of questions conducted over email.
"Our performance analysis and modelling was so core to the entire design process of optimisation and adjustments that I don't have a specific example to call out," says Andrew Goossen. "We put every change we considered through the model. But in terms of 'more from your teraflops', I will point out that Scorpio has significant performance benefits relative to PC:
"Microsoft has made continual improvements to the shader compiler. We see significant performance wins for Xbox game content relative to compiling the same shaders on PC. [Secondly], 'to the metal' API and shader extension support allows developer to optimise in ways that simply can't be done on PC cards. [Finally], PIX provides low level analysis and insight that, in conjunction with 'to the metal' support, allows developers to make the most of the console GPU. These technologies are all already mature and familiar to developers, so Scorpio games will benefit from the get go."
We've already seen some evidence of the results of this approach with Forza Motorsport - the demo we saw provided stability at 4K on par with a higher-end Nvidia GPU, but this is just one shaky comparison point this early on. Once third party titles are shown on Scorpio, we should have a better grip how easy it is for developers to tap into the power of the processor. And rest assured, we'll be there with complete analysis, when the time is right.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2017-the-scorpio-engine-in-depth
Microsoft has made Xbox Scorpio exactly what it needs to be: simple
Microsoft’s messaging on Xbox Scorpio is blessedly simple: This is the most powerful console hardware on the planet, all your existing games will work and look better, and cross-platform games will look and run the best on our hardware. This is a premium system, and it’s going to be fast as hell.
The Xbox One suffered from sloppy, meandering sales pitches that emphasized a doomed digital strategy and Kinect hardware that’s now been dead for years. Microsoft was left with a system that was slower and more expensive than the PlayStation 4, which focused on games and power.
The good news is that Microsoft has learned, and the new statement — Scorpio is massively powerful and nothing will match its performance for a long time — feels much better. It feels simple, in a good way.
The PlayStation 4 Pro has the Boost Mode, sure, but it affects different games in different ways and may even break certain games. Microsoft is promising games will just work on the Scorpio, and Kevin Gammill, group product director of the Xbox, said that “any 900p or better title [on Xbox One] would be able to easily run at frame-rate at 4K on Scorpio.”
If you have a 4K display, just put in your games and enjoy. They will work, and will look measurably better. Microsoft is also promising a variety of ways in which games will perform better on 1080p TVs.
“We’re going to be the ones that ensure that your games run as fast as they can [and] the best that they possibly can,” Microsoft’s Andrew Goossen said. "There will be some cases where we have to dial down some of those attributes... in some games we potentially have to dial down the number of [compute units], for example, to maintain compatibility with that title. But again these are all things that Microsoft does, we’ve always done, that’s true of all 360 titles on Xbox One. We just make sure it runs the best it possibly can on Scorpio and we’re very excited that Scorpio really will be the best place to run all your Xbox content.”
The Xbox One already allows Xbox 360 games to run better, and seeing such a big jump on all your existing content is going to be a huge advantage in the market ... at least for players who are willing to spend the money to get the best performance possible in a console. PlayStation VR is already exceeding expectations as well, and Scorpio is poised to provide even better performance with VR if Microsoft goes through with its plans to bring VR to the Xbox family of consoles.
The lack of 4K Blu-ray support on the PlayStation 4 Pro is baffling, and feels a bit like a gotcha move. Scorpio comes with a 4K Blu-ray drive and, in fact, may be one of the best physical media players available when it launches. Again, this is simple: The system seems ready to do all the things you expect it to do. You buy it, connect it to your display, and games and media will look better.
Microsoft has responded to the current console war by throwing power at Sony, and that’s a bit of a crude strategy, but who cares? On paper, Scorpio isn’t just a little more powerful than the PlayStation 4 Pro; Microsoft has a massive power and memory advantage that — on paper at least — should let the company say that every multiplatform game will look the best on Scorpio. That’s what Microsoft needs to hammer for the mainstream once the press is done with the technical details being released now: You don’t have to understand why, but your games will look best on our platform.
And that’s why Microsoft’s message is so good for this console. You can get into the weeds about memory bandwidth or 4K standards or explaining what exactly FreeSync is, but that level of granularity isn’t necessary to sell the system. Microsoft only has to repeat, over and over, that your existing games and future purchases are going to look significantly better on this system — and there’s nothing the PlayStation 4 Pro can do to compete.
It’s a simple message, one that will hopefully be easy to convey visually once we begin seeing more games. And being the best at something is a very good weapon to have in your arsenal.
http://www.polygon.com/2017/4/13/15289986/xbox-scorpio-specs-features
Anyone else having a problem with their Xbox one since this new update.
yep my xbox one been acting funny.
Yeah man all of a sudden updates on apps are getting hung on downloads. In fact I can't download Shit right now or play videos on some apps.
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