Monday, March 16th 2020
Complete Hardware Specs Sheet of Xbox Series X Revealed
Microsoft just put out of the complete hardware specs-sheet of its next-generation Xbox Series X entertainment system. The list of hardware can go toe to toe with any modern gaming desktop, and even at its production scale, we're not sure if Microsoft can break-even at around $500, possibly counting on game and DLC sales to recover some of the costs and turn a profit. To begin with the semi-custom SoC at the heart of the beast, Microsoft partnered with AMD to deploy its current-generation "Zen 2" x86-64 CPU cores. Microsoft confirmed that the SoC will be built on the 7 nm "enhanced" process (very likely TSMC N7P). Its die-size is 360.45 mm².
The chip packs 8 "Zen 2" cores, with SMT enabling 16 logical processors, a humongous step up from the 8-core "Jaguar enhanced" CPU driving the Xbox One X. CPU clock speeds are somewhat vague. It points to 3.80 GHz nominal and 3.66 GHz with SMT enabled. Perhaps the console can toggle SMT somehow (possibly depending on whether a game requests it). There's no word on the CPU's cache sizes.
The graphics processor is another key component of the SoC given its lofty design goal of being able to game at 4K UHD with real-time ray-tracing. This GPU is based on AMD's upcoming RDNA2 graphics architecture, which is a step up from "Navi" (RDNA), in featuring real-time ray-tracing hardware optimized for DXR 1.1 and support for variable-rate shading (VRS). The GPU features 52 compute units (3,328 stream processors provided each CU has 64 stream processors in RDNA2). The GPU ticks at an engine clock speed of up to 1825 MHz, and has a peak compute throughput of 12 TFLOPs (not counting CPU). The display engine supports resolutions of up to 8K, even though the console's own performance targets at 4K at 60 frames per second, and up to 120 FPS. Variable refresh-rate is supported.
The memory subsystem is similar to what we reported earlier today - a 320-bit GDDR6 memory interface holding 16 GB of memory (mixed chip densities). It's becoming clear that Microsoft isn't implementing a hUMA common memory pool approach. 10 GB of the 16 GB runs at 560 GB/s bandwidth, while 6 GB of it runs at 336 GB/s. Storage is another area that's receiving big hardware uplifts: the Xbox Series X features a 1 TB NVMe SSD with 2400 MB/s peak sequential transfer rate, and an option for an additional 1 TB NVMe storage through an expansion module. External storage devices are supported, too, over 10 Gbps USB 3.2 gen 2. The console is confirmed to feature a Blu-ray drive that supports 4K UHD Blu-ray playback. All these hardware specs combine toward what Microsoft calls the "Xbox Velocity Architecture." Microsoft is also working toward improving the input latency of its game controllers.
The chip packs 8 "Zen 2" cores, with SMT enabling 16 logical processors, a humongous step up from the 8-core "Jaguar enhanced" CPU driving the Xbox One X. CPU clock speeds are somewhat vague. It points to 3.80 GHz nominal and 3.66 GHz with SMT enabled. Perhaps the console can toggle SMT somehow (possibly depending on whether a game requests it). There's no word on the CPU's cache sizes.
The memory subsystem is similar to what we reported earlier today - a 320-bit GDDR6 memory interface holding 16 GB of memory (mixed chip densities). It's becoming clear that Microsoft isn't implementing a hUMA common memory pool approach. 10 GB of the 16 GB runs at 560 GB/s bandwidth, while 6 GB of it runs at 336 GB/s. Storage is another area that's receiving big hardware uplifts: the Xbox Series X features a 1 TB NVMe SSD with 2400 MB/s peak sequential transfer rate, and an option for an additional 1 TB NVMe storage through an expansion module. External storage devices are supported, too, over 10 Gbps USB 3.2 gen 2. The console is confirmed to feature a Blu-ray drive that supports 4K UHD Blu-ray playback. All these hardware specs combine toward what Microsoft calls the "Xbox Velocity Architecture." Microsoft is also working toward improving the input latency of its game controllers.
128 Comments on Complete Hardware Specs Sheet of Xbox Series X Revealed
Yeah well 3d is not full 3D just as RT is not full RT.
More importantly, you'd never benefit. Gaming is elusive. You'd never notice if the remote tree is rendered with RT or not.
Also, I'm not sure why I'd want full realism. We're talking about games. You're like those people who say "but if someone falling from a building was caught by Superman right above the ground, he would die anyway". :)
Clearly it hasn't happend yet, but at some point you'll notice that some things in games are unrealistic and they should stay like that. For example: laser weapons, all kinds of energy fields etc. You can't ray trace them. :)
The significant gain is that already today you can have properly rendered shadows of the objects you focus on: your character / vehicle, faces of NPCs, objects that you interact with etc.
I get this may not be important for you, but guess what: it's gaming. It's not that important in general.
Anyway, this topic is not about RTRT so lets leave it here. Plus, I'm really bored by these discussions by now. I'm glad some graduated from "RT will never work" to "but this is not full RT".
At the same time I'm rather shocked that some still have no clue how ray tracing works - it's such a simple, intuitive idea (compared to pixel shaders etc).
I am bored too so lets leave it as is.
@ppn You can't think of the memory in the XSX like you do for your PC or even the current consoles. The 10gb of fast memory is for the GPU, 2.5GB of the slower is reserved for OS and the remaining is for audio and other stuff (you can watch DFs video on that). And there will be a lot more loading from disk than before because they're so much faster now. So yeah, it's going to be a whole new way of doing things. I wonder if PC is going to be somewhat holding games back now rather than consoles, since not everyone has nvme ssds.
Oh and Sony just announced they're releasing PS5 system details tomorrow. Can't wait to see how they compare.
As for all of you people arguing about RT: please stop. Yes, there are very few games making any use of RT whatsoever currently. No, it's not currently possible (nor will it be in the foreseeable future) to do full RTRT of even somewhat photorealistic games. That doesn't change the fact that RT makes realistic lighting, shadows, reflections etc. much easier to implement (rather than the two+ decades of jerry-rigged hacks currently used and bogging down game development pipelines massively (while looking okay at best, terrible at worst)) and that next-gen consoles will be entirely capable of this. As for adoption, this new generation of consoles will ensure that RT lighting and reflections will be pretty much everywhere in the next couple of years - and due to RT being easier to implement than a stack of hacks and tricks in a rasterized lighting scheme it will likely spread into smaller games rather quickly once there's a significant install base. Is there a performance penalty? Absolutely. Is it necessary? Of course not. Neither is ambient occlusion, bloom, god rays, water transparency, volumetric lighting, anti-aliasing, etc., etc., etc. It's just that all these things make games look better - and better looking games are often (though obviously reliant on the quality of other aspects of the game) a boon in the immersion and other experiential parts of a game. Playing Rocket League, Overwatch or LoL in greyscale with simplified world and character designs would obviously make those games worse games, regardless if gameplay was otherwise unchanged.
Now, was RT a must-have for the first year of RTX market availability? No. The second year? No. The third? Not likely, but that depends on how long you keep your hardware for. I've kept my current GPU for going on five years now, and haven't truly decided to replace it until this year, which obviously means that my next GPU (which I want to last as long) really, really ought not to lack a rather crucial feature like this. Similarly, consoles last for 5-7 years minimum, so as such not having RT at this point is going to be an issue if the gaming world otherwise adopts it.
So let's stop bickering over this silly nonsense, please. For non-RT games we don't lose anything in terms of performance, and what has been demonstrated is that this console does a bang-up job in automatically improving legacy titles whether they are XBone, 360 or OG Xbox titles. Higher frame rates, higher resolution, increased fidelity, etc. - it's all there, and it doesn't suffer from there also being an option to have RT lighting and reflections in upcoming games.
My gripe was with @dicktracy calling the 5700XT obsolete tech. Just because the RTX cards were released doesn't mean people aren't still buying used 1080s/1080Tis. What's to say AMD won't bring RT support to the 5700 series like Nvidia did with Pascal? The 5700 XT is far from a paperweight - even if it doesn't get RT support, the performance is solid and it will continue to deliver such at least for a few years. I can live without RT until another upgrade
Still, a sled is ... not really suitable for m.2. 2.5" drives are (largely for HDDs, entirely for SSDs) encased in a protective shell, and have screw points for easy mounting of a sled, while an m.2 drive is an entirely exposed piece of hardware with the only form of retention being the socket + a single screw. They could always make a more advanced sled with a socket adapter to something more slot-in friendly, but you'd still need people to mount the drive into the carrier then, with the same risk of breakage of both the socket and the drive. Or sell drives pre-mounted into sleds, which is essentially what MS is doing. I just really hope the MS standard is open and not only Seagate gets to make drives. That would suck.
If PS4 and Xbone are different...
Why does anyone think PS5 and the Series X will be the same?
Appearantly they can use GDDR6 as a mixed CPU/GPU memory architecture. How does it cope against traditional DDR4?
As for the chip; it does seem to look like a 2700X or so; 16 threads are'nt even needed in various games as 6 up most would be the most ideal situation.
I guess I’ll be really surprised if PS5 blows XSX away. Do we really think AMD has that much more to give? These already have bigger GPUs than what you can get from AMD for your PC. I wonder if the weird memory layout was AMDs idea in the first place.
The PS5 is likely going to be slower, but it's going to have the faster NVME drive, but it'll be more energy efficient.
That's ironically not exactly true but not wrong about AMD and it's history. The One X GPU was definitely bigger and badder than anything Polaris but smaller than Vega. Even the new GPU is definitely bigger and badder than Navi but what's interesting is that it's not just a tuned up Vega 44 like last time, it's very likely RDNA 2, which is smaller than Arcturus, which will likely get pulled into the consumer market like Vega 10 and 20. Soo...
Back on topic...
PS5 GPU: 36CUs, up to 2.26Ghz, up to 10.28TFLOPS, 256bit gddr6 memory
XsX GPU: 52CUs, 1.82Ghz, 12TFLOPS, 320bit gddr6 memory
That's quite a bit of variablity for a single manufacturer.
On this note, am I the only one with the impression that the PS5 engineering team spent the past 48 hours furiously overclocking the APU to see how little of a disadvantage they might come off looking like they have, with marketing breathing down their necks the whole time? A faster SSD does little to compensate for the competition being 15% faster in your best case scenario. The wording also makes me quite sure the PS5 will run slower than this for the vast majority of games. I have no doubt this will still be a good console, but that is a significant disadvantage for sure.
As for "quite a bit of variability for a single manufacturer" - how? They're semi-custom chips, so there would be two pieces of silicon no matter what. And AMD's architectures are built to be modular and can be scaled up and down as wanted/needed. No surprise whatsoever that this is possible.
It's decently slower and can't play 4K blurays.
If anything the Sony engineers are probably trying to overclock the memory. I'm also a little surprised that they aren't going for 3.6ghz on the 8cores instead they are giving it a 3.5ghz max boost... Not set, but 'variable'...
Water cooling your console for stable performance... :laugh:
The lack of memory bandwidth is going to hammer the PS5 at 4K. I suspect it'll be 1440p with 'image enhancements' console.
Then there's the storage system... It's going to drink power and it's going to be hot.
I'm really not thrilled that both consoles have killed user replacement/upgrades on the flash, and that stuff wears out.
The PS5 is definitely shaping up to be a cheaper console to build so it's likely going to undercut the Series X by $100 USD at least. IMHO