TR Forums

might as well have an official thread for it, though it'll start off late
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digit ... s-revealed
There's a lot of quotable bits here but I'll just go with these.

Clearly a 720p title on base Xbox One isn't going to make it to native 4K on Xbox One X. The raw metrics here suggest that what was originally a 60fps experience would linger in 38fps territory - not surprising, bearing in mind we're looking at 9x increase in resolution.

In fact, DX11 moves into 'maintenance mode' on Xbox One X, suggesting that Microsoft is keen for developers to move on. There are benefits for both Xboxes in doing so - and there may be implications here for the PC versions too. We could really use improved DX12 support on PC, after all.

The XBox One X can do 4K. It has been demonstrated. It's entirely up to developers to make content that can be played at reasonable frame rates. Some titles will need some tweaking and will not just scale up to 4K, IF they choose to patch it for the One X.

Whether or not the XBOX does 4k60fps depends on a ton of factors. Forza can do 4K60 because it doesn't really animate anything and there are at most 12 relatively static cars on screen. That's 4K ezmode if there is such a thing.

4k60 Halo? I don't see that happening without compromises elsewhere, such as with shadows, lighting and particle effects.

Thing is for me, I would have liked to see them nail 1080p60fps in every game before making the jump to 4K. We never got that console. 1080p60 with HDR and basically the equivalent of very high or ultra settings on PC would be amazing for $400-500 console. Its just harder to market 1080p60 as something to get excited about when 4K is a thing.

DragonDaddyBear wrote:

The XBox One X can do 4K. It has been demonstrated. It's entirely up to developers to make content that can be played at reasonable frame rates. Some titles will need some tweaking and will not just scale up to 4K, IF they choose to patch it for the One X.

I think the point was that things that are at 720P might need more work to get there, not that it can't do it.

southrncomfortjm wrote:

Whether or not the XBOX does 4k60fps depends on a ton of factors. Forza can do 4K60 because it doesn't really animate anything and there are at most 12 relatively static cars on screen. That's 4K ezmode if there is such a thing.

4k60 Halo? I don't see that happening without compromises elsewhere, such as with shadows, lighting and particle effects.

Thing is for me, I would have liked to see them nail 1080p60fps in every game before making the jump to 4K. We never got that console. 1080p60 with HDR and basically the equivalent of very high or ultra settings on PC would be amazing for $400-500 console. Its just harder to market 1080p60 as something to get excited about when 4K is a thing.

It's not really the cars themselves but the constantly shifting environments and objects on screen that make racing games hard. On the Xbox One the Forza series does 1080p60 I believe, but it also doesn't really look that good. X1X should bring the level of detail way up...Forza Horizon 3 on PC looks amazing. Need for Speed on the X1 (when I played a bunch of it) can't do cornering in some areas with its fastest cars and it's harder to control the car because of it.

As for me I just bought a cheap 4k HDR TV to go with my ps4 pro, and it's pretty great. It kinda sucks having this mess of equipment between HDMI 1.4 and 2.0 and in two seperate rooms because summer and all that...can't really fix it with the vidcard craze right now and that seperate rooms isn't really a bad thing when it gets hot.

X1X won't do 1080p60 in every game (the Destiny 2 peeps apparently would rather keep all players in one ecosystem on the same framerate) but it's definitely more capable of it than any other platform from what I've read from devs. (The ARK devs said PS4 Pro would still be getting 1080p30fps.)

https://www.neowin.net/news/developer-s ... nd-ps4-pro

"I don’t mind saying that it’s significantly more powerful than the PlayStation 4 Pro, and we’ve worked with PlayStation 4 Pro. It’s way more powerful. It’s a night and day difference.”

I'm also seriously excited about Crackdown 3. I don't really know any game off the top of my head I love more than the original Crackdown.

2...err, existed. We just mostly pretend it didn't.

Will be disappointed if the original Crackdown games aren't released on backwards compatibility when the third game shows up, like they were doing with Gears of War and so on.

LostCat wrote:

https://www.neowin.net/news/developer-says-theres-a-night-and-day-difference-between-the-xbox-one-x-and-ps4-pro

"I don’t mind saying that it’s significantly more powerful than the PlayStation 4 Pro, and we’ve worked with PlayStation 4 Pro. It’s way more powerful. It’s a night and day difference.”

I'm also seriously excited about Crackdown 3. I don't really know any game off the top of my head I love more than the original Crackdown.

2...err, existed. We just mostly pretend it didn't.

Will be disappointed if the original Crackdown games aren't released on backwards compatibility when the third game shows up, like they were doing with Gears of War and so on.

I'm interested to see the Azure assisted destruction in multiplayer. For the rest, we'll see how well/much they actually changed from the Crackdown 1 formula. MS hasn't exactly been doing well with their first party releases lately, so I'm not getting too excited.

Sony got ahead because they had the more powerful console early in this cycle. They are staying ahead because they have a crazy robust catalogue of exclusives that can even make Nintendo blush. MS needs to step up their first party development in a big way.

southrncomfortjm wrote:

MS hasn't exactly been doing well with their first party releases lately, so I'm not getting too excited.

I don't know. I love Forza Horizon 3. I haven't even gotten Gears 4 to launch on PC so I can't say if it's any good.

I'm not even sure what else they've been doing for the most part, so I definitely agree they need to step it up. But if they can't do Crackdown right then why even bother o.o

(I don't really follow Halo. Usually a few games behind on it.)
___
(also really liked Quantum Break, except for the end boss)

LostCat wrote:

DragonDaddyBear wrote:

The XBox One X can do 4K. It has been demonstrated. It's entirely up to developers to make content that can be played at reasonable frame rates. Some titles will need some tweaking and will not just scale up to 4K, IF they choose to patch it for the One X.

I think the point was that things that are at 720P might need more work to get there, not that it can't do it.

southrncomfortjm wrote:

Whether or not the XBOX does 4k60fps depends on a ton of factors. Forza can do 4K60 because it doesn't really animate anything and there are at most 12 relatively static cars on screen. That's 4K ezmode if there is such a thing.

4k60 Halo? I don't see that happening without compromises elsewhere, such as with shadows, lighting and particle effects.

Thing is for me, I would have liked to see them nail 1080p60fps in every game before making the jump to 4K. We never got that console. 1080p60 with HDR and basically the equivalent of very high or ultra settings on PC would be amazing for $400-500 console. Its just harder to market 1080p60 as something to get excited about when 4K is a thing.

It's not really the cars themselves but the constantly shifting environments and objects on screen that make racing games hard. On the Xbox One the Forza series does 1080p60 I believe, but it also doesn't really look that good. X1X should bring the level of detail way up...Forza Horizon 3 on PC looks amazing. Need for Speed on the X1 (when I played a bunch of it) can't do cornering in some areas with its fastest cars and it's harder to control the car because of it.

As for me I just bought a cheap 4k HDR TV to go with my ps4 pro, and it's pretty great. It kinda sucks having this mess of equipment between HDMI 1.4 and 2.0 and in two seperate rooms because summer and all that...can't really fix it with the vidcard craze right now and that seperate rooms isn't really a bad thing when it gets hot.

X1X won't do 1080p60 in every game (the Destiny 2 peeps apparently would rather keep all players in one ecosystem on the same framerate) but it's definitely more capable of it than any other platform from what I've read from devs. (The ARK devs said PS4 Pro would still be getting 1080p30fps.)

X1X won't have to run 60hz at 4K or 1080p, when some newer TVs come out that support FreeSync2. It remains to be seen how much TV manufactures try to use FreeSync2 as a Markup/Sellup feature for their TVs. FreeSync2 TVs will give developers more freedom depending on adoption rates which won't be fast without M$ greasing the skids with some co-funding agreements.

freebird wrote:

X1X won't have to run 60hz at 4K or 1080p, when some newer TVs come out that support FreeSync2. It remains to be seen how much TV manufactures try to use FreeSync2 as a Markup/Sellup feature for their TVs. FreeSync2 TVs will give developers more freedom depending on adoption rates which won't be fast without M$ greasing the skids with some co-funding agreements.

While it does support it, it'll still take time for that to happen so they have to focus more on the market now.

I'll still be hugely disappointed if it doesn't support 1440P even if I don't expect it to. I know the PS4 Pro doesn't and it's not considered a TV resolution, but MS has always had more of a connection to the PC world anyway.

4K is a lot of pixels. I don't think most games will run at that natively. I bet they will do some funny 900p-type rendering to get the resolution up like they do to day, just higher (1800p?).

I have not bought a 4K TV because there just isn't value in the extra pixels for viewing content at my viewing distance. It would help with smoothing out games, though. I agree that Adaptive Sync capabilities would be huge for consoles. HDR on OLED almost got me to buy a new TV... almost. FreeSync might be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

Freesync support is great, but my guess is we won't see TVs with Freesync until late 2018 at the absolute earliest, but more likely 2019, if at all. We'll get it in 2018 if the XBOX takes off as well as the Switch, but it is highly unlikely to do that (my bet is that is a very muted launch, maybe 3-5 million sold in the first year).

Since we won't have Freesync TVs, and 95% of XBOX owners won't buy a freesync monitor just to play XBOX (it is unlikely a gamer that already has a Freesync monitor will buy an XBOX since you can play every XBOX game on PC), I don't know how much dev support there will be for Freesync unless it's really easy and inexpensive.

There's a long road to implementation and adoption. I really hope it works though since I could see myself giving up the PC to play on XBOX if Freesync really works and makes things crazy smooth. I've always been a console gamer at heart, and almost always use a controller, so the XBOX is a natural fit for me. I just prefer the better graphics and 60fps (and Steam Sales) of PC.

DragonDaddyBear wrote:

4K is a lot of pixels. I don't think most games will run at that natively. I bet they will do some funny 900p-type rendering to get the resolution up like they do to day, just higher (1800p?).

I have not bought a 4K TV because there just isn't value in the extra pixels for viewing content at my viewing distance. It would help with smoothing out games, though. I agree that Adaptive Sync capabilities would be huge for consoles. HDR on OLED almost got me to buy a new TV... almost. FreeSync might be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

The games will be "4K" native, but will use all kinds of new techniques to lessen the workload, like checkerboarding, and that technique that runs the middle of the screen, or wherever the action is at higher resolution/detail, while other parts get downscaled. So they'll get to 4K, they'll just cheat a bit.

southrncomfortjm wrote:

The games will be "4K" native, but will use all kinds of new techniques to lessen the workload, like checkerboarding, and that technique that runs the middle of the screen, or wherever the action is at higher resolution/detail, while other parts get downscaled. So they'll get to 4K, they'll just cheat a bit.

You more just described the PS4 Pro heh -> http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1324251
Though I expect it'll still need it, just not nearly as much.

LostCat wrote:

X1X won't do 1080p60 in every game (the Destiny 2 peeps apparently would rather keep all players in one ecosystem on the same framerate) but it's definitely more capable of it than any other platform from what I've read from devs. (The ARK devs said PS4 Pro would still be getting 1080p30fps.)

To be fair to the PS4 Pro, whatever engine ARK uses is pretty ****.

Turn up a few dials and suddenly my 390X (Hawaii-based) card is putting out ~20 frames, and that's at only 1080p.

Dang, Gears 4 looks good on the original X1. I'm...35 gigs away from having the PC version, if it'll launch this time.

Vhalidictes wrote:

To be fair to the PS4 Pro, whatever engine ARK uses is pretty ****.

Turn up a few dials and suddenly my 390X (Hawaii-based) card is putting out ~20 frames, and that's at only 1080p.

I wouldn't be surprised considering how poorly their engine did with the original X1. I mean, yeah, it's not a powerhouse but it's not that bad either. Was pretty sure they just used the DX11 renderer instead of the native one.

But then, I haven't even played it.

Official current list of Xbox One X enhanced games
I has preordered a console, for the first time ever.

I want one too cause I haven't bought a console in over a decade and I like the direction of the Xbox. Not gonna pre-order one but once it's globally available at the end of the year, I might grab one.

EzioAs wrote:

I want one too cause I haven't bought a console in over a decade and I like the direction of the Xbox. Not gonna pre-order one but once it's globally available at the end of the year, I might grab one.

Even if I didn't have a solid gaming PC, I just don't have enough faith in MS's first party offerings to go for an Xbox over a PS4, especially when the PS4 Pro will likely be at least $150 cheaper in comparison by Black Friday.

Like everyone else has said, if you check out Digital Foundry, the Xbox One X can totally do 4K. It requires devs making the time and effort to take advantage of it (and I think MS has supplied certain studios with a performance analyzer tool, to help hit the magic numbers).

That said, for all the neatness and raw power the Xbox One X brings to the table, I'd still get a PS4 Pro, purely because the amount of games I want for Sony's console has hit critical mass. I did the same thing with the PS3 and Xbox360. Wait until there's at least 25-30 games *I HAVE TO HAVE*, and then I'd throw down for the console. Got burned on the original Xbox. I think there were about 8 games that I actually liked.

Speaking of, it's nice that you can use the original Xbox discs now, but it sucks for me, since I got rid of them years ago. I'd love to play JSRF, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Otogi 1 & 2, GunValkyrie, Outrun 2, the Conker's Bad Fur Day redux, and even Breakdown. I wish they would've ported those to the PC instead.

MS official line for Xbox One X is:

Experience 40% more power than any other console.

Calling it a 4k console is same as calling a PS3/Xbox 360 a 1080p console. You can, but not really. Simple fact is 4k is exactly four times 1080p. Now of course its not one to one for performance requirements and it depends on genre, but it definitely is far short of what most regular gamers would call a 4k console.

They will have a stronger console than PS4 Pro, but at expense of it being weighed down by fact that Xbox One S is different architecture and each game has to support two architectures. As the PS4 Pro was always planned, it is with minimal/free developer cost to take advantage of.

Sony has always had the advantage on great game exclusives with rare exception. Besides PS Plus is just great, i can list so many awesome games that each have weeks if not more of time.

Not counting them out, the Xbox One X sounds like a great console but it is MS... Only wrench would be Windows 10 S or at least native MS Office support.

The Hot Chips Xbox X talk reminded me of the PS4 Pro Boost Mode:

“We doubled the GPU size by essentially placing it next to a mirrored version of itself, sort of like the wings of a butterfly,” said Cerny. “That gives us an extremely clean way to support the existing 700 titles.” In essence, the PS4 Pro switches into a non-Pro compatibility mode when it’s running a game that hasn’t been patched to support the console. It only uses half of its GPU at a clock speed similar to that of the launch PS4’s GPU.

That solution avoids problems that can arise by simply throwing more power at a game that wasn’t developed with that increased capability in mind, Cerny explained.

“Moving to a different CPU — even if it’s possible to avoid impact to console cost and form factor — runs the very high risk of many existing titles not working properly,” Cerny told Digital Foundry. “The origin of these problems is that code running on the new CPU runs code at very different timing from the old one, and that can expose bugs in the game that were never encountered before.”

Sony quote from same article:

Boost Mode lets PS4 Pro run at a higher GPU and CPU clock speed for smoother gameplay on some PS4 games that were released before the launch of PS4 Pro (and has not been updated to support PS4 Pro).

Games that have a variable frame rate may benefit from a higher frame rate, and load times may be shorter in some games too.

The Xbox X and Xbox S are different enough hardware. For folks wanting to be on same footing,... Devs can easily make the PS4 Pro be a PS4, in a real sense. Something else to consider... when choosing MS or Sony.

I will say from my own experience, I have never had to turn off PS4 Pro boost mode. It seems to just work. It's also kind of limited in scope - you're not going to go from 30fps to 60fps. But for example in Assassin's Creed Unity, you do go from an experience of "roughly 30fps with a bunch of dips" to what feels like a rock-solid 30fps. The PC version of that game was a horrible port, but the console ports were just as bad. It took the game from unplayable mess to running decently.

Ubisoft should be flogged publicly for releasing that game in the first place, though.

Wut
"And especially on Xbox One X, two hours after we got the dev kit it was running at 4K, 60 FPS. That thing is very powerful. It was that easy. I think we were expecting it to take a little longer than that, but no, it was a cinch."


https://www.windowscentral.com/what-dev ... xbox-one-x

derFunkenstein wrote:

I will say from my own experience, I have never had to turn off PS4 Pro boost mode. It seems to just work. It's also kind of limited in scope - you're not going to go from 30fps to 60fps. But for example in Assassin's Creed Unity, you do go from an experience of "roughly 30fps with a bunch of dips" to what feels like a rock-solid 30fps. The PC version of that game was a horrible port, but the console ports were just as bad. It took the game from unplayable mess to running decently.

Ubisoft should be flogged publicly for releasing that game in the first place, though.

It might not perform admirably but they're probably being too ambitious with the game in the first place. I don't know how the consoles fare now but if you have a decent PC, it should run pretty good on it. As for gameplay, after playing through both Unity and Syndicate, I personally find Unity to be better in almost every way, but both lacks the immersiveness of Black Flag that's for sure.

I'm digressing from the original topic. However, I'm interested to see whether games built originally on the Xbox One before the announcement of Xbox One X (nee Project Scorpio) will see benefit in resolutions. If it were to be the case, it means Microsoft tools and SDKs for the XB1 already had future enhancements in mind which would be kinda cool. Would a game like AC: Unity (without additional work) see improvements in resolution and frame rates on the Xbox One X? That's the thing I really want to see.

EzioAs wrote:

It might not perform admirably but they're probably being too ambitious with the game in the first place. I don't know how the consoles fare now but if you have a decent PC, it should run pretty good on it. As for gameplay, after playing through both Unity and Syndicate, I personally find Unity to be better in almost every way, but both lacks the immersiveness of Black Flag that's for sure.

I'm digressing from the original topic. However, I'm interested to see whether games built originally on the Xbox One before the announcement of Xbox One X (nee Project Scorpio) will see benefit in resolutions. If it were to be the case, it means Microsoft tools and SDKs for the XB1 already had future enhancements in mind which would be kinda cool. Would a game like AC: Unity (without additional work) see improvements in resolution and frame rates on the Xbox One X? That's the thing I really want to see.

IIRC AC Unity actually doesn't have framerate problems in the Xbox One in the digital foundry ps4 pro boost mode analysis, because the original PS4s CPU was what was holding it back.

At any rate, games built with the original tools will likely see improvement because of the CPU clock improvements. And things using dynamic resolutions will certainly stick to their best output more of the time. But since they were coded with a fixed resolution target I doubt an unpatched game will see too much difference.

We're looking at a lot of improved games though, and this is only whats been announced so far.
https://www.neowin.net/news/heres-the-f ... e-x-so-far

My fault, should have spelled it out more. When i said devs can make PS4 Pro into an almost real PS4 and that Xbox One(S) and Xbox One X are different, i was talking about mulit-player games. Where the whole point of consoles was everyone on same footing.

Also, ofcourse going from Xbox One(S) to X is easy, the X is just like the normal architecture that PS4 is. The normal Xbox One and S are the ones that devs need to special program for.

LostCat wrote:

might as well have an official thread for it, though it'll start off late

In fact, DX11 moves into 'maintenance mode' on Xbox One X, suggesting that Microsoft is keen for developers to move on. There are benefits for both Xboxes in doing so - and there may be implications here for the PC versions too. We could really use improved DX12 support on PC, after all.

They're only NOW trying to push people to use DX12??

MileageMayVary wrote:

They're only NOW trying to push people to use DX12??

No, they're only now making it clear it's not being worked on or recommended. I suspect the X1 dx11 code hasn't been improved for a while.

blahsaysblah wrote:

The Xbox X and Xbox S are different enough hardware. For folks wanting to be on same footing,... Devs can easily make the PS4 Pro be a PS4, in a real sense. Something else to consider... when choosing MS or Sony.

What does that even mean? The devs only targeting Xbox One don't even need to worry about it, because the software arch will take care of it. You can play Xbox One games on the Xbox One X without even worrying about a 'boost mode' or anything like that which frankly should've been on by default on the Pro, not a post release consideration.

LostCat wrote:

What does that even mean? The devs only targeting Xbox One don't even need to worry about it, because the software arch will take care of it. You can play Xbox One games on the Xbox One X without even worrying about a 'boost mode' or anything like that which frankly should've been on by default on the Pro, not a post release consideration.

The Xbox One( and S) are a physically different architecture that developers need to specifically optimize for to take advantage of. The XBox X uses similar architecture as PS4/PS4 Pro.

The issue isnt which arch is better. Its the fact that Sony made the PS4 Pro a superset of PS4. For any multi-player game, devs can without any effort have everyone on the same exact performance profile/footing.

MS had to drop the design they had for Xbox One because they could not scale it. They thought the Xbox One was it for the next 5-7 years. The original design was a compromise purely due to having similar budget as PS4 but spent a bunch of it on non-gaming features so they had to make cuts on the gaming side. The DDR3+big cache(that you need to specifically program for to fully utilize) instead of GDDR5, less GPU "CU"s,... The Xbox S was the best they could do with original design's handicaps. The X chooses the more sane design when gaming is much higher priority than whatever number 2 priority is.

Unlike the PS4 Pro where it literally can be a PS4 by not utilizing extra GPU CUs and lower clock rates on GPU/CPU, the Xbox One/S and Xbox X cant do that. Its different hardware. They just have to guesstimate that they are getting similar performance. [edit: my point is from reading TR's excellent reviews with 99th percentile, that average fps means nothing, and in multi-player its the little dips that matter]

There are a lot of implications besides what i say by going with path MS choose. Not saying the Xbox X is a bad console at all. But talking about what it means for entire platform. This whole mess is because those compromises made the Xbox One not what someone expected of a 1080p console. And the easy synergy between PS4(perfectly viable 1080p console) and PS4 Pro has to count for something.

And im not being unfair to Xbox One(S), they did not spend a significant portion of budget for gaming hardware.