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Comment by Mirioron | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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