Topic: General Xbox Series X|S Thread

@Senua Tech is only going to improve over the generation.

All you have to look at is games at the start of current gen and what devs were able to do towards the end. You can see how Frostbite games were able to deliver better performance metrics as well as actually improve the visual quality too. Forza Motorsport 5 vs FM7 too shows improvements.

Its not ALL down to developers becoming more accustomed to the hardware and understand how to extract more from it, a LOT of it comes down to tech, to improvements in the game engine, understanding where improvements to the pipeline can be made, understanding how to improve the efficiency and adding you new tools, new features etc too.

Interested to see Cyberpunks RT on Console, what they can bring - no doubt supplemented by traditional rasterisation techniques.

I am still surprised though that images like those Gears 5 ones exist and yet someone still says they can't see any difference. I know that you can pick scenes to suit a narrative if you want and in some scenes, the difference will be subtle. Even if you have RT reflections for example, there will be scenes where Reflections are not so prevalent and SSR may well do a decent job - just like baked in effects of Global Illumination and Ambient Occlusion may look very close to real time Global Illumination - especially in a 'static' image...

Amazing!

That was FAST!

Starting up from 'rest' mode is really quick. I haven't tried the Power save mode on Xbox One X but its probably as fast as that on PS4's rest mode too but that only suspends one game and if the power goes out, you lose that suspended state.

On Series S|X, you won’t lose the suspended state as the memory is dumped into the persistent storage.

@Senua Exactly - why its better than PS4's but as far as boot up time from rest and jumping into a suspended game, I don't think that demo is anything we haven't seen this gen. As I said, I haven't tried doing the same on Xbox One X, but you can definitely do that on PS4.

It was fast, but that twitter demo wasn't really anything we haven't seen or got now. Yes the Series S/X can suspend multiple games now and those games are not lost if the power goes out but booting from a rest mode to game is 'fast' now so I don't know what he was trying to show...

Looks like I’m now unable to get the Series X on day one due to needing the money for a new car. I currently have the Series X on pre-order from Microsoft, before I cancel is there anyway I can give someone my pre-order or is there no way to do that?

I’m gutted I’m not going to experience the Series X on day one but I’ll definitely be picking one up in January after Christmas and I’ve got a few games on the One X to tide me over till then.

@BAMozzy sorry you weren't too impressed. It took less than half the time it takes to do the same thing now which is why I thought it was neat.

@redd214 Its not that I am not impressed, its just that a PS4 can do that now - which is 'impressive' too but you would hope a next gen console can do what a 'current' gen console can. The speed isn't that 'impressive' to me, what is is that you now have multiple suspended games instead of just 1 and even if you switch off completely or the power goes off, those suspended states are not lost. If you 'boot' up from a cold start (not in a rest mode like this) its obviously quite a bit slower - but still faster than a cold boot up today. The PS4 in rest mode with a Suspended game can still probably boot up quicker and into game than a cold boot into a suspended game on series X.

Literally, you can start a PS4 from rest and you don't even get the 'home' screen, you start up straight into the game and exactly where you left off. I don't know if Instant On on Xbox does the same, I haven't tried it but PS4 added it back in 2015 (I think) so seeing the Series X do something a PS4 doesn't impress as much as if it was the 'first' console to be that quick...

@MaccaMUFC I don't know if you can pass on you pre-order as such so they get it day one. You can sell it and maybe swap the delivery address or arrange to send it to them as soon as it arrives but I expect if you were to cancel, the person at the top of the queue of people waiting for new stock would be contacted by the store.

@BAMozzy I don’t know anyone personally who wants a Series X day one so I may as well cancel and save the fuss of selling it and changing delivery address. I could see some people taking advantage of this by selling the pre-order for like £800 or something to get it day one but I’m not about that, hate scalpers as it is and I’m certainly no hypocrite.

@BAMozzy fully aware of how a ps4 works, thanks for the refresher though

@MaccaMUFC Makes sense - I dislike scalpers too.

@redd214 So you can understand why I was not as impressed as perhaps others may be. It is 'impressive' in general, but if it didn't do that, it would be 'disappointing'. I expected it to be incredibly fast...

@BAMozzy lol OK man, glad your expectations were met

@BAMozzy Kinda knew Gears 5 would push the hardware more than anything else right now and titles like Yakuza severely and disrespectfully underutilised the highly scalable hardware.

@Senua Its difficult to know exactly what's going on with a game like Yakuza because an RTX 2080 gives similar performance and we know that none of the current gen hardware will be offering more than 1080/30. A PS4 Pro isn't able to run it at a locked 1080/30 - too early to know how it runs on an Xbox One X so I don't think you can say that they are disrespectfully underutilising the hardware. The fact its consistent across many platforms is more indicative of issues within the engine. It may just be so poorly optimised that parts of the system are not being pushed at all and therefore not drawing power.

Crysis is a good example where a LOT of the CPU workload is done by 1 core and as such, that a bottleneck, a frame time limiter. If you have 8 cores, 1 working at 95% on avg and the rest are only working at 30% for example, the CPU is not going to be pulling as much power as a CPU with all Cores running at 75% and, if that 1 core exceeds 100%, there is a bottleneck and may cause the GPU to have to wait on the CPU so drop in power consumption. If the workload is more evenly spread across 8 cores, not only is it drawing more power, if there is a spike in the workload, its not going to cause a bottleneck so everything else continues to run.

I don't know what's going on with Yakuza, I don't have a PC version so can try and see if parts of the system are not being utilised fully, not a developer to understand why the engine seems to be much heavier than other engines available but I wouldn't be surprised if that's the best they can do right now.

A lot of Devs may also not of had a Series S/X devkit until 'late' in development cycle or opportunity to test on it - with the way the world is and working from home. For all we know, these games may well be running like the BC games but able to leverage some aspects because of 'developer' tweaks as opposed to BC games that are 'locked' in to Current Gen. First Party studio's would have the first dev kits, involved in discussion with the designers of the hardware long before the first Dev Kits were built so had a better understanding and insider knowledge. There was a rumour going round that MS's devkits were much later than Sonys because of certain features were still not quite ready so that's going to impact on the hands on time and understanding of the system.

Lets see how things are looking in a year. Maybe some of these games could well be patched too. I don't think DirextX12 Ultimate is quite where MS hoped it would be either right now...

@BAMozzy That’s a good example since Crysis has scaling bottlenecks and issues too. Having the first party advantage, Coalition has implemented some of RDNA2 features and optimisations resulting in higher average power draw as opposed to other titles which runs on GCN emulation layer. It will be interesting when how titles like Cyberpunk utilises the hardware beyond it’s brute force. But it’s also true that the next-gen Gamecore platform for Scarlet generation is not ready yet and maybe first party studios will get some type of early access.