And where did RTs spawn from? From Nividia doing Hardware accellerated ray traying with SMs. Just because nividia made specific cores for specific actions doesn't mean that is the only hardware ray tracing. That is like saying a steam train isn't a train because it uses steam.
Wouldn't they be considered a publisher, or at least, collective of developers? I would say they were the best, and I hate to see them now as a shadow of that state. Maybe they can keep adapting, but I really miss their game innovation that went hand in hand with hardware innovation, especially their state of the art arcade hardware. That's a chapter that a newer generation of gamers probably won't understand. The Model 2 and Model 3 arcade boards were years ahead of what you could get at home. It all came to a beautiful finale with the Dreamcast, washing away the Saturn (cult fav), and amazing and beautiful games aplenty. Ever since, I feel that they are more like SEGA's ghost.
Xbox Series X Velocity Architecture – Fast SSD Is Just The Beginning
April 17th, 2020 Marcin Featured, Tech, Xbox0 Comments
Last month Microsoft released a full specification and features list for the Xbox Series X. We have learned that their lastest console is not only going to be very powerful but also very fast. The speed of the console is partially due to the CPU and memory bandwidth, but a very swift SSD plays a crucial role. To ensure both the quick Zen 2 based CPU and powerful RDNA 2 based GPU are occupied, they both have to be feed data at a very quick pace. This is where Xbox Series X Velocity Architecture comes in.
Xbox Series X Velocity Architecture Breakdown
- Very Fast 1 TB Custom NVME SSD– 2.4 GB/s (Raw), 4.8 GB/s (Compressed, with custom hardware decompression block) I/O throughput
- Hardware Decompression – Hardware decompression is a dedicated hardware component introduced with Xbox Series X to allow games to consume as little space as possible on the SSD while eliminating all CPU overhead typically associated with run-time decompression. It reduces the software overhead of decompression when operating at full SSD performance from more than three CPU cores to zero – thereby freeing considerable CPU power for the game to spend on areas like better gameplay and improved framerates. Hardware decompression is one of the components of the Xbox Velocity Architecture.
- DirectStorage – DirectStorage is an all-new I/O system designed specifically for gaming to unleash the full performance of the SSD and hardware decompression. It is one of the components that comprise the Xbox Velocity Architecture. Modern games perform asset streaming in the background to continuously load the next parts of the world while you play, and DirectStorage can reduce the CPU overhead for these I/O operations from multiple cores to taking just a small fraction of a single core; thereby freeing considerable CPU power for the game to spend on areas like better physics or more NPCs in a scene. This newest member of the DirectX family is being introduced with Xbox Series X and we plan to bring it to Windows as well.
- Sampler Feedback Streaming (SFS) – A component of the Xbox Velocity Architecture, SFS is a feature of the Xbox Series X hardware that allows games to load into memory, with fine granularity, only the portions of textures that the GPU needs for a scene, as it needs it. This enables far better memory utilization for textures, which is important given that every 4K texture consumes 8MB of memory. Because it avoids the wastage of loading into memory the portions of textures that are never needed, it is an effective 2x or 3x (or higher) multiplier on both amount of physical memory and SSD performance.
