E3: Microsoft’s next Xbox: 8K graphics, SSD storage, and ray-tracing for 2020 | Hacker News Reader

E3: Microsoft’s next Xbox: 8K graphics, SSD storage, and ray-tracing for 2020

theverge.com

105 pointstosh83 comments

8k gaming? At 120 fps?

They should try to get games running at 120 fps on ultra settings at 1440p before 4k. Leave 8k to the next generation or maybe the one beyond that. Even the most powerful desktop GPUs struggle with 4k.

An RTX 2080 Ti gets 43 fps in AC Odyssey at 4k, 51 in AC Unity, 82 in Battlefield 1, 49 in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, 63 in The Witcher 3 etc.[0]

The numbers will change depending in who's benchmarking them, but they're not going to change much. This is the fastest GPU you can get right now and it costs over a thousand dollars, yet it still can't run many games at 4k 60 fps. It even struggles at 1440p in some. Yet this press announcement says that in a year to a year and a half there will be a console that will cost half as much as this GPU and it will bring many times higher graphical performance? I find it hard to believe.

[0] https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-05-07...

No, they're promising 8K xor 120 fps.

Or rather 8K NAND 120 fps

I think so-called Ultra settings are a conspiracy to burn up cycles for no appreciable gain. Keeps the whales buying new graphics cards endlessly.

Conspiracy would suggest someone is hiding something.

I think it'll support 8k, much in the same way the original wii supported HD. Just because it displays at 8k, doesn't mean it's top tier quality at 8k.

That said, on known/fixed hardware, there's some really cool things that can be done. I wouldn't expect a fast-twitch FPS at 8k, but something like Rocket League or Mario Kart, sure.

The original Wii did not have any HD support whatsoever, the original Xbox from 2001 on the other hand actually had a few dozen games that could run in 720p.

Some could even run at 1080i! IT's pretty impressive honestly. ModernVintageGamer on youtube has some great videos with high quality footage of it.

If I’m buying a console that I expect to last me at least 3-4 years in 2020, then it better come with 8k support - if not for the games, at least so that the UI doesn’t look like crap on 8k TVs that will inevitably get dirt cheap in the next few years, and so I get video in native resolution by the time streaming services start having it.

My best guess is that it will support 8k video output but render games internally at a lower resolution, like how an Xbox one s has 2160p60 video out but games are rendered at 1080p and upscaled. Their design goal for game rendering will likely be 2160p 60 fps.

Ray tracing cannot even render at that lower resolution in real time. They are going to partially ray trace a subset of the pixels and use a neural network to generate the rest.

Games can get away with claiming "4K" and "8K" through clever rendering. Only some parts of the screen need to be rendered at a higher resolution at any given time. Tomb Raider shows this off a bit. When geometry is far away and DOF blurs it, it's also being rendered at a lower resolution. It's like how the human eye doesn't gave a strict "resolution", but instead has higher acuity at different spots of your vision.

I wonder how much of a speedup you could get by doing eye tracking and only rendering high quality for the area within the fovea.

About 20x but we're not quite there yet.

https://youtu.be/WtAPUsGld4o

That is an amazing concept - hopefully this can soon become reality

I did a very primitive version of this for rendering shadows for my master thesis. It sucked because of my poor accuracy eye tracker (self built) and because my approach was very naive.

Participants perceived jumps in shadow quality much harsher than lower resolution shadows.

It saved a lot of memory though, that was nice.

Microsoft has a great paper on more general foveated rendering.

Probably just checkerboard rendering. A not entirely dishonest way to pump up the marketing copy.

I had read 4k at 120fps, and "8K capable"

Which is like "1080 capable" in 2002, which turned out to be 1080i capable, can forget about 1080p.

I’ll be happy if AAA games can run at 4K 60 fps.

I find this kind of comment strange in a community of self professed hackers :)

8k 120fps HDR is just the specification of the hardware. The hardware supports an 8k framebuffer and can output it to the display at 120fps. Whether or not you will choose to do that depends on what you are trying to achieve with the available GPU cycles. It's exactly the same on current consoles (and PC really). Maybe Forza 19 will choose to render simpler graphics at 8k 120fps, but Witcher 5 will decide to run at 4k but use raytracing and dynamic global illumination (these games may or may not exist :).

There are games that run at 4k/60 with HDR on XBox One X (I worked on one), and there are games that choose not to in order to do something a bit more advanced.

No one is saying that all games will run at 8k/120, just as no one is saying that all games will run at 8k/60 on the RTX 2080 Ti even though its possible to do.

What you say is correct, but most of the people watching the announcement aren’t technical enough to know that, so it’s really just marketing PR bullshit inflated numbers.

In theory I can run with 120 miles/hour but my muscles limit me to 10 miles/hour. So how fast can I run?

I think your tendons would explode from forces of acceleration at some fraction well below 120mph.

You can do a lot when your entire machine is built around getting data to the GPU, and when your developers are allowed to sink large amounts of effort to maximizing for a single GPU instead of all GPUs on the market. An Xbox One X has a GPU in it that's 40 compute units at 1172 MHz. That's pretty close to a Radeon RX 580, which is 36 compute units at 1257 MHz. You can't run the PC version of Forza at 4K with that kind of a card, but the One X pulls it off.

I don't think they promise both - either you get 120Hz or 8K.

Exactly. I returned my PS4 PRO because any 4K game was unplayable while I could not hear my friend talking to me because of the fan noise. Gaming consoles supposed to be a quite powerhouse, not a noise crappy PC imitation.

It's amusing that both the Xbox and PS5 stories are leading with "8K gaming", which is of course empty Big Number nonsense that's not going to materialize in real games.

I remember being a wide-eyed teenager that would get hyped up into a fever pitch by this kind of game system marketing.

Even if it did, do people want 8k? I haven’t been pining for more than 1080p with my Xbox.

Why isn’t HDR color moving very fast? I feel like I’d rather have more color resolution than spatial resolution given the choice...

> Even if it did, do people want 8k?

As a current PS4 owner, I’d definitely prefer 60+ fps baseline then 8k resolution.

I'd kill for 60fps 4k on anything. Sitting fairly close to a 65" TV it makes a big difference. But no console can even deliver that, I doubt they're going to deliver 8k gaming at any reasonable framerate in a modern AAA game, maybe 8k menus.

EDIT: Maybe they're planning to go the way Nvidia is doing now with things like Deep Learning Super Sampling and try to scale up content in intelligent ways. I'm not sure how well that would work with realistically priced console hardware or what kind of results it would produce, maybe someone more familiar can comment on it.

> I'd kill for 60fps 4k on anything.

There are a couple games on Xbox One X that support 4k60 - the one people care about is Forza Motorsport 7. From what I can tell, the Xbox One X can actually support 4k60, but I imagine it's a pain in the ass to accomplish and most studios don't bother since it's a niche market.

You wouldn't think it's really a niche market - most TVs made in the past several years are 4k, prices have become quite cheap, if you're buying a new mid or high end TV today chances are it's a 4k panel.

It's just a cost factor more than anything, if you spend $1200+ on video cards you can pull it off on PCs today with most major titles, but that price alone is several times what top of the line consoles run. That price is rapidly dropping, but just isn't there yet. As such, bragging about 8k support on a console that's probably not going to cost that much more seems... unrealistic to say the least.

I meant they have to optimize the games just for Xbox One X users, which I'd guess is less than 10% of Xbox One owners.

This is one area that I wish the community was given more control. I don't know of a solution but it would be great if companies of all kinds would just say "We don't think this feature has a worthwhile financial return but if you (the players) want to find a way to make it work, here are the tools to do that."

Then, interested parties, like GP, could take up the mantle.

> Why isn’t HDR color moving very fast?

Xbox One X supports this now. Here's a good list of titles that take advantage of it: https://www.xbox.com/en-us/games/xbox-one/xbox-one-x-enhance...

> Why isn’t HDR color moving very fast?

My theory on tech adoption is that the advantages of some new piece of tech have to be _immediately_ obvious to the average person and to such a large degree that they would actually care. E.g.:

* Records -> Tapes: smaller, portable.

* Tapes -> CDs: obvious sound quality improvements, never degrades, don't have to rewind/fast-forward.

* CDs -> iPod et al: "you can carry hundreds of CDs in your pocket."

* VHS -> DVD: just say "it does for movies what CDs did for music" and that's all it takes to convince someone of the benefits.

* DVD -> Blu-ray: now it gets a little dicier. Yeah it's an obvious jump in quality but a lot of people just don't care.

* Blu-ray -> UHD (just the resolution aspect): the average consumer isn't the most discriminating in terms of source quality, and even to someone who really cares it can be a bit tough to tell the difference (talking about movie transfers here, in particular). Generally the biggest benefit I've found here when going from Blu-ray to UHD is when the movie's existing Blu-ray transfer is 10+ years old and just terrible. The fact that the studio simply did a new scan is what brings out the improvement, and it would look pretty damn good on Blu-ray (just look at any Blu-ray sourced from a 4K scan).

* SDR -> HDR: "the colors are better, man." Forget trying to sell this to your average consumer, even if they notice they won't care.

4K -> 8K? It's really out there as far as diminishing returns goes. It's not going to be embraced in any meaningful way by the average consumer. It'll be ubiquitous simply because hardware manufactures are eventually going to make nothing but 8K TVs, but the average person probably won't be able to tell it from 4K, perhaps even 1080p.

This is true even outside video tech. To gain adoption a product doesn't just need to be better. It needs to be so much better that it's worth the effort of adoption.

That's why every "Facebook killer" dies on the vine. They just aren't better enough.

That's why every Bitcoin killer fails to displace Bitcoin as number 1.

Etc

Many PS4 games run in HDR.

It’s just slow in the Microsoft world.

It gets more interesting when you think of use cases beyond an 8K mono screen. "8K VR" typically means 3840×2160 per eye, for example. It could even theoretically unlock scenarios like simultaneous 4K to a local display and 1080p to a handheld device.

4K+1080 is a matter of downsampling, not re-rendering. You could even do the downsampling “for free” if it’s done by the part of hardware that reads from the framebuffer to generate the output signal just by skipping lines.

Stereoscopic rendering (e.g. 2x4K) can far more expensive than 8K rendering despite brung half the pixels because all of the non-pixel-related scene rendering calculations have to be re-done to account for the two different camera positions.

> 4K+1080 is a matter of downsampling, not re-rendering.

I'm talking about supporting multiple local players simultaneously. (Apologies if this wasn't obvious enough.)

The video at the event didn't even say anything about gaming specifically, just nebulous 8K "capabilities". https://twitter.com/Xbox/status/1137844761253957632

My cynical side sees this as: "Your games still render at 1080, we scale the video up to 8K to output on your 8K screen."

Outputted to your 1080p screen 8 feet away from your head

Maybe it’s just support for 8k movies...
Who has an 8k tv anyway?

Even if the cost premium wasn’t an issue, who has the geometry in their living room to be able to take advantage of an 8k resolution? Even 4K is hard to take advantage of in a living room setting, you need a huge tv with your seating set up very close to it.

I agree. I have a 65'' and 4K is not a huge improvement over 1080p at 10 feet.
For 8K to make any sense you'd need a 100'' at least which is massive and prohibitive.
IMO HDR is a much bigger improvement than 4K.

The whole commercial was a reminder how closed off console gaming is.
>SSD
Yeah that reminds me how far behind console gaming is.

You can get an X-Box One S 1TB w/Game for $225. A 1 TB SSD costs upwards of $115 (48% of the total console cost). The gap was significantly wider when the X-Box One S launched in August 2016.
Therefore it is less about how behind/ahead they are and more about creating a consistent platform and setting a price that is comfortable for the mass market appeal they're aiming for.
By contrast a GeForce RTX 2060 starts at $350. Hardly comparing like with like price wise. Even their "high end" X-Box One X is only $400. And we're missing CPU, RAM, SSD, motherboard, case, and Windows license and already $50 shy of that.

Xbox One S is still spinning rust.

My PS4 has had an SSD in it since 2014. Wow half a decade.
I recently upgraded it to 1tb, from 512gb.
I also realized that my systems have SSDs in them no matter how optimistic I feel about my future spending capabilities. Matter of priorities.
I didn't find this SSD part of the teaser compelling, but I'm looking forward to the 8K pipeline in 2023 I guess. Will my short-throw projector support 8K? Will my internet connection support 8K streaming without restrictive bandwidth limits? Will my cellular connection support 8K streaming without consequences for my otherwise casual use? Will there be a lot of content? Will I actually enjoy any of this more?

> “We’re using the SSD as virtual RAM”
Swap file as a selling point, hmm? If you’re leading with that, that makes me a little nervous for the rest of the “innovations.”
Similarly, I laughed out loud when one of the talking heads in the video said “the SSD and the solid state drive.” Okay then.

He said "the SoC and the solid state drive"

Thanks. I had totally misheard that as "SSD and solid state drive" as well. Went back to listen and you're right

I too heard it as "SSD and solid state drive", so thanks for the clarification. I was picturing some sort of hierarchy of SSDs (which sounded insane).

They also are using GDDR6 ram. I’d take the swap file comment as a bullshit marketing phrase the verge decided to highlight and leave it at that.

Swap file memory is a “big deal” for consoles. Having worked on the 360 this is kinda a big deal. Even for the Xbox One, the only swap file concept was in the OS/ “dashboard”. I’m not aware of the PS3 or 4 ever having such a concept. SSD’s have traditionally served as an alternative to disc based games, not a functional element of system architecture

This may be a reference to texture streaming. While I've never developed for consoles, I do know that texture streaming on desktop & mobile can be challenging.
Being able to mmap a texture directly from ssd (as if it were RAM), with the hardware & os taking care of all the details, could be a big deal for developers.
Edit: To get a sense of how challenging this can be, see this recent talk from GDC for texture streaming in Titanfall 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BuvKotqpWo . Literally all of this complexity would go away if you could mmap textures directly from disk and let the gpu handle it.

To my ears, this sounds very similar to what AMD's "Vega" cards provided for high-end compute. The "High Bandwidth Cache Controller" allows datasets outside of the GPU's memory to be accessed in a transparent way.
I can't find a decent technical article at the moment, but here's a link to the "Radeon SSG," a $7k graphics card that ships with 2TB of solid-state storage attached, designed to be used to process absolutely massive datasets as though they were in RAM: https://www.amd.com/en/products/professional-graphics/radeon...

Sounds similar to NVIDIA's GPU Direct RDMA in principle. https://developer.nvidia.com/gpudirect

Both the PS5 and Scarlett sound like a console implementation of AMDs Radeon Pro SSG.
The Radeon Pro SSG has a PCIe3 x8 NVME SSD on the GPU PCB directly connected to the GPU and managed by HBCC which uses the 16 GB HBM2 memory as a first level cache to the SSD.
I haven't had a console since the PS2 but the promise of a unified memory pool with GPU decompression (or dedicated hardware like in one of Sonys patents) a desktop class CPU and an SSD as the baseline (~100x better latency, ~40-50x better peak read etc. and games hopefully not developed with a HDD in mind anymore) looks really promising.
Sadly the GPU increase will probably be eaten up mostly if they go for native 4k.

Maybe they mean some kind of software ram disk? Whatever it is it sounds like gold plated 90s marketing.
... fog lifts from stage
... a huge screen with flashing, strobing lights emerge with diffused 90s font writing ...
Some kinda music roars and the writing on screen is undiffused instantly revealing
“SOLID SATE DRIVE POWERED VIRTUAL RAM”

I read that as implying that the SSD is part of the standard memory hierarchy, byte-addressable and not requiring a filesystem. No need to load assets: just create pointers into the SSD's address space. Sort of a modern version of the ROM on an NES cartridge.
I could, of course, be way off.

That's very unlikely and probably a bad idea anyway since NAND latency is too high.

Sounds like a perfect application for Micron/Intel's (yet to be widely commercialized) 3D XPoint[1] :) Although I find it highly unlikely a new Xbox would be the place to debut the technology.
Regardless, claimed latency is between DRAM and NAND, so I wonder if it would be performant enough for a gaming use case. To mikeash's point, 3D XPoint is byte-addressable, so perhaps it's possible...
[1] https://www.micron.com/products/advanced-solutions/3d-xpoint...

3D XPoint would cost more than the price of an Xbox.

3D Xpoint has been commercially available for years under the Optane brand name. It's much more expensive than NAND (16 and 32GB NVMe drives available for ~$2/GB) but a smallish amount in the Xbox acting as some sort of cache seems at least semi-plausible and would fit with the "next generation SSD" and "virtual RAM" statements.

I believe IO Fusion drives (PCI-Express) had a linux driver that allowed this.

Hard to believe a gaming company in 2019 puts out promo material, even (especially?) marketing hype material, about their vision for the future of gaming, and never once even utters the words virtual reality.

Virtual Reality or even game streaming, which I feel is going to change the gaming scene if they can pull it off.
Having played VR games, I totally believe this will transform a huge segment of games. Not all, but a huge swath of casual players.

Streaming is a tough cookie because it's so reliant on the end user's ISP behaving nicely with advertised speeds. I was a beta tester for google's streaming project with assassins creed odyssey, and even though I had a gigabit connection the game occasionally had to drop framerate. If even a wired gigabit connection wasn't reliable enough, I can't imagine how terrible the experience would be if you had a more modest internet package.
However, it would be sweet if LAN streaming took off. The Xbox becomes something you just plug into the wall in a nook somewhere in your house, and streams to every screen you own on the wifi network; phone, tv, laptop, whatever you have. That seems a little more tangible to me than expecting ISPs to walk the talk with internet speeds.

actually -- the most interesing gaming innovations that I watch for are from Nintendo. I found the Wii console and Switch to be truly innovative. Whereas I feel Sony and Microsoft just seem to be adding more muscle every iteration.

Excited about the new Xbox. I’ve had my classic Xbox One for a while now and still enjoy playing it.
This promo video though, I hate to generalise but I didn’t find anyone’s excitement believable at all.

They are prob PC gamers anyway. What hardcore gamer mains consoles?

Numerically, probably most of them.

People who want to hand someone off craiglist $150 for the entire console vs. dropping serious cash on marked up GPU to play the same triple A games.

Any idea how they're supporting ray-tracing? Haven't seen any details on AMD's answer to Nvidia's ray-tracing cores, but I presume it'll be part of RDNA, whatever that is, and use Microsoft DXR.

They haven't announced details, but the PS5 is supposed to support raytracing on AMD as well. Perhaps we'll have more info soon.

RTX is not necessary for RayTracing, AMD with Crytek made a demo ("Noir") of realtime ray-tracing.
But still, I hope AMD will standardize a core non-proprietary Vulkan API for ray-tracing unlike the RTX close proprietary Nvidia-only prefixed RTX for Vulkan extension.
A bit off topic, but it's sad to see so few people raising against Nvidia-monopoly closed & proprietary CUDA, Optix, RTX, etc. this is the equivalent of Flash, Vendor Prefixed Web (-apple-, -ms-, -webkit-,...) or AMP but for computer graphic

As much as the skepticism around their ability to truly do 8k 120hz (of which I am equally skeptic), and the technologies that have been in PC gaming for a while - but please don't forget the benefits this brings.
As we saw with the 4k console push, it helped expand the 4k TV market, and particularly 4k media content.
I'm all for pushing hardware manufacturers, developers and content creators to think more about high resolution and high refresh as something expected - not just something to strive towards.
So as much as I doubt there will be much 8k or high refresh content available - I'm glad we have two big companies in Sony and Microsoft helping drive that push. Kudos to them.

By 8K they meant the display resolution will be 8K, but the scene will be rendered at 2K and upsampled?
Even a 2080 Ti has trouble rendering 4K with raytracing...

Just a reminder, before we get too excited: this is the definition of vapourware. We haven't seen anything.

It's a pity they ditched Kinnect, that killed it for me.

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