4 ms·

Inside the next Xbox: Project Scorpio and its brand-new dev kit

68 points by richardboegli 10y ago

microcolonel 10y ago
Annoying misuse of the term "draw calls". :- ( Also, the fancy transfer cable seems to be basically just a USB 3.0 connector, and by their description it gets about 3.4GiBit/s. Pretty okay.
- Negitivefrags 10y ago
  How were they misusing the term?
  - microcolonel 10y ago
    There is only one "draw call" in D3D12, ID3D12GraphicsCommandList::DrawInstanced. Strictly speaking, DrawInstanced isn't even a call anymore, it is just part of a recorded command buffer. When they say draw calls, I imagine they mean that they added D3D12 command stream handling to the firmware on the GPU. It's arguably nonsensical to say "it’s designed to incorporate basic, oft-used DirectX12 draw calls into the GPU command processor itself".
- gambiting 10y ago
  Well, one of the downsides of X1 devkits being just normal retail units was that you only had 1 gigabit ethernet and no extra connectors. With PS4 devkit you can connect using a USB 3.0 and transfer builds much quicker than over ethernet - so it looks like Microsoft is finally catching up there.
- atonse 10y ago
  Why didn't they just package TB3 in with a fiberoptic cable? That can go 10s of feet at 40 Gbps.
Asooka 10y ago
Maybe unrelated but it's quite confusing to call the second revision of the original hardware the "One S", and name the hardware upgrade the "One Scorpio". Hopefully they'll pick some other name not starting with S for the final name.
- ascagnel_ 10y ago
  They've announced already that Scorpio is just the codename; they have yet to announce the shipping product name. I'd guess they'd do that at E3, alongside pricing.
gambiting 10y ago
Hehe, I love that they shown those stacked - my biggest issue with X1 devkits is that they have the vents on top, so I have two on my desk but can't put anything on top of them because the console will overheat.
- MaulingMonkey 10y ago
  Our I.T. guy grabbed some desktop shelving from a local office store to help stack mine when I had devkits. Sadly I can't find the exact model online to share. Between the XB1s, XB360, PS4s, iPads, Windows Tablets, Mac, and Windows dev boxes, monitors and HDMI switches, I also needed an extra desk. I also added some nails to a plank to help make a (tiny) wall of tablets... Porting things has it's perks :D EDIT: "Shelves" were probably actually monitor stands, roughly like these - stacked a little percariously but it did the trick (tm): https://www.amazon.com/Allsop-Monitor-18-Inch-platform-keyboard/dp/B003M2YDE2/ref=pd_sim_229_7?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B003M2YDE2&pd_rd_r=MFWGGTCWP2BF9D645PAD&pd_rd_w=8CMIp&pd_rd_wg=7UZNG&psc=1&refRID=MFWGGTCWP2BF9D645PAD https://www.amazon.com/Allsop-Monitor-18-Inch-platform-keybo...
  - theandrewbailey 10y ago
    My work laptop is on one of those stands. I got it for free, then bought a Dremel to cut out some metal between two of those holes so that a USB hub could be plugged in from underneath. Not bad.
- maccard 10y ago
  Huh. I've got one on my desk right now with a monitor sitting on top of it. I guess the ridged top is a vent? Oops...
nlawalker 10y ago
After so many attempts to innovate and bring new ideas to the console space, Microsoft must be relieved (and kicking themselves a bit) to finally realize that all that their most vocal consumers ever wanted was bigger iron. I sense that the console market has picked up a lot of "performance enthusiasm" from the PC community. The tried-and-true tech/car analogy works here - a lot of people love building, or even just buying and owning, really powerful cars. Do a search on Youtube for "[game] framerate [test|comparison]" and you'll find a zillion hits, many of them with details down to patch versions, driver versions, and detailed settings. The number one complaint I saw of the new greatest-game-of-all-time Zelda game was "framerate," and the web was flooded with framerate tests as soon as a patch was released. A common meme in Reddit's PC-building community is dropping $X000 building a monster rig in order to install a big new game just so they can jack it up to max settings and watch it run at 100FPS, then shutting it off and returning to browsing and Minecraft. That said, it's a little surprising to me to read all the positive feedback on this, especially around the price. Game-related Reddit threads are usually full of hate on any topic that involves paying for something, but all I see for this is "I will drop $500 for this, day 1, I'd even consider it at $600; guess I better get that $1500-$2000 4K TV I've been looking at too; let me know when the VR's ready and I'll put $600 on that as well." Just a couple years ago, speculation about a move like this was widely poo-pooed by industry analysts, who said that bringing the PC's complexities of hardware upgrades to developers and consumers would kill the only thing consoles had going for them - simplicity - and leave consumers wondering why they're expected to shell out $X00 just a few years after buying the last new box. Now the overwhelming consensus appears to be "4K at 60FPS or don't bother". With hardware standardization increasing, compatibility becoming the norm, and the focus on power, I think there's going to be a really interesting convergence between the PC and console market in the next few years.
- merb 10y ago
  well the question for the game industry should be: do we really want to target a audience who doesn't care about the "fun" part and more about the "good locking" part? - actually I'm more a nintendo person, because their games are fun and they don't care about all this fps/monster machine, thingy. I mean I don't care about Call of Duty 1000 or any other re-release with cool looking graphics but minor game play enhancements. well the pc, xbox and ps4 also has a lot of games that are fresh and new and make fun or even a re-release of a game can be great, but most of them are just sickening and after a while I stop playing them. It's really really sad where this industry goes. Well pushing graphics is good, but overdoing it while limiting the fun part, is bad. tl;dr fun > graphics
6stringmerc 10y ago
Until I can use a keyboard and mouse in FPS settings against people with controllers, I don't give a fuck. I came up the hard way and hate the exploits possible in pretty much every competitive game. In that regard, I want to have the real advantage I care about. Precision. Finger agility. Until a console gives me that option, to lay waste to Player and (1)Player and (2)Player like Half-Life gave me joy back in the day and leveled me up beyond what I could've imagined by bunny hopping and tau jumping and using audio A3D to at least hang with the best...Chosen1, Neo, aCiDtRiP, 007 and more... I'm an old now. I'm not going to let a bunch of teenagers talk shit to me with a mic unless I can lay waste to their feeble understanding of victory by attrition. I've found it's uncomfortably hard to use a controller to walk up to a victim and use the squat/crouch function to tea bag their carcass. When console gaming gets with the mainline of competitive PC gaming, it might be worth it. I've got no use for MMOs and shit like that. I'm an FPS/driving guy. I've played Australians and Croations alike no matter the lag, we competed fair. Console interfaces are fucking garbage. Give me my mouse, my keyboard, my console to tweak my views (FOV 110, weapon_on 0) and let me do my thing. Apparently this is not the best business model. Huh. For a minute there I was (1)Player getting a face full of Glock or crowbar, but life is like that. Spawn. Run. Die. Repeat. Oh, just for the record, if Gabe debuts HL3 as an Xbox Scorpio exclusive I will take money out of my retirement fund just to get in on it. Only if I can use my keyboard and mouse though. Always good to temper expectations...
- jamesgeck0 10y ago
  I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not. Mouse precision is so much more accurate than controllers that the Overwatch team literally considers using KB/M on consoles to be cheating.
  - 6stringmerc 10y ago
    It is tongue in cheek. I don't want to play unless there's a choice. KB/M vs console controllers. Pick your poison, get down on it. I happen to think using anything but KB/M is dumbing-down handicapping. Canon fodder takes many forms.

68 points by richardboegli 10y ago

Annoying misuse of the term "draw calls". :- ( Also, the fancy transfer cable seems to be basically just a USB 3.0 connector, and by their description it gets about 3.4GiBit/s. Pretty okay.

Negitivefrags 10y ago
How were they misusing the term?
- microcolonel 10y ago
  There is only one "draw call" in D3D12, ID3D12GraphicsCommandList::DrawInstanced. Strictly speaking, DrawInstanced isn't even a call anymore, it is just part of a recorded command buffer. When they say draw calls, I imagine they mean that they added D3D12 command stream handling to the firmware on the GPU. It's arguably nonsensical to say "it’s designed to incorporate basic, oft-used DirectX12 draw calls into the GPU command processor itself".
gambiting 10y ago
Well, one of the downsides of X1 devkits being just normal retail units was that you only had 1 gigabit ethernet and no extra connectors. With PS4 devkit you can connect using a USB 3.0 and transfer builds much quicker than over ethernet - so it looks like Microsoft is finally catching up there.
atonse 10y ago
Why didn't they just package TB3 in with a fiberoptic cable? That can go 10s of feet at 40 Gbps.

Asooka 10y ago

Maybe unrelated but it's quite confusing to call the second revision of the original hardware the "One S", and name the hardware upgrade the "One Scorpio". Hopefully they'll pick some other name not starting with S for the final name.

ascagnel_ 10y ago
They've announced already that Scorpio is just the codename; they have yet to announce the shipping product name. I'd guess they'd do that at E3, alongside pricing.

gambiting 10y ago

Hehe, I love that they shown those stacked - my biggest issue with X1 devkits is that they have the vents on top, so I have two on my desk but can't put anything on top of them because the console will overheat.

MaulingMonkey 10y ago
Our I.T. guy grabbed some desktop shelving from a local office store to help stack mine when I had devkits. Sadly I can't find the exact model online to share. Between the XB1s, XB360, PS4s, iPads, Windows Tablets, Mac, and Windows dev boxes, monitors and HDMI switches, I also needed an extra desk. I also added some nails to a plank to help make a (tiny) wall of tablets... Porting things has it's perks :D EDIT: "Shelves" were probably actually monitor stands, roughly like these - stacked a little percariously but it did the trick (tm): https://www.amazon.com/Allsop-Monitor-18-Inch-platform-keyboard/dp/B003M2YDE2/ref=pd_sim_229_7?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B003M2YDE2&pd_rd_r=MFWGGTCWP2BF9D645PAD&pd_rd_w=8CMIp&pd_rd_wg=7UZNG&psc=1&refRID=MFWGGTCWP2BF9D645PAD https://www.amazon.com/Allsop-Monitor-18-Inch-platform-keybo...
- theandrewbailey 10y ago
  My work laptop is on one of those stands. I got it for free, then bought a Dremel to cut out some metal between two of those holes so that a USB hub could be plugged in from underneath. Not bad.
maccard 10y ago
Huh. I've got one on my desk right now with a monitor sitting on top of it. I guess the ridged top is a vent? Oops...

nlawalker 10y ago

After so many attempts to innovate and bring new ideas to the console space, Microsoft must be relieved (and kicking themselves a bit) to finally realize that all that their most vocal consumers ever wanted was bigger iron. I sense that the console market has picked up a lot of "performance enthusiasm" from the PC community. The tried-and-true tech/car analogy works here - a lot of people love building, or even just buying and owning, really powerful cars. Do a search on Youtube for "[game] framerate [test|comparison]" and you'll find a zillion hits, many of them with details down to patch versions, driver versions, and detailed settings. The number one complaint I saw of the new greatest-game-of-all-time Zelda game was "framerate," and the web was flooded with framerate tests as soon as a patch was released. A common meme in Reddit's PC-building community is dropping $X000 building a monster rig in order to install a big new game just so they can jack it up to max settings and watch it run at 100FPS, then shutting it off and returning to browsing and Minecraft. That said, it's a little surprising to me to read all the positive feedback on this, especially around the price. Game-related Reddit threads are usually full of hate on any topic that involves paying for something, but all I see for this is "I will drop $500 for this, day 1, I'd even consider it at $600; guess I better get that $1500-$2000 4K TV I've been looking at too; let me know when the VR's ready and I'll put $600 on that as well." Just a couple years ago, speculation about a move like this was widely poo-pooed by industry analysts, who said that bringing the PC's complexities of hardware upgrades to developers and consumers would kill the only thing consoles had going for them - simplicity - and leave consumers wondering why they're expected to shell out $X00 just a few years after buying the last new box. Now the overwhelming consensus appears to be "4K at 60FPS or don't bother". With hardware standardization increasing, compatibility becoming the norm, and the focus on power, I think there's going to be a really interesting convergence between the PC and console market in the next few years.

merb 10y ago
well the question for the game industry should be: do we really want to target a audience who doesn't care about the "fun" part and more about the "good locking" part? - actually I'm more a nintendo person, because their games are fun and they don't care about all this fps/monster machine, thingy. I mean I don't care about Call of Duty 1000 or any other re-release with cool looking graphics but minor game play enhancements. well the pc, xbox and ps4 also has a lot of games that are fresh and new and make fun or even a re-release of a game can be great, but most of them are just sickening and after a while I stop playing them. It's really really sad where this industry goes. Well pushing graphics is good, but overdoing it while limiting the fun part, is bad. tl;dr fun > graphics

6stringmerc 10y ago

Until I can use a keyboard and mouse in FPS settings against people with controllers, I don't give a fuck. I came up the hard way and hate the exploits possible in pretty much every competitive game. In that regard, I want to have the real advantage I care about. Precision. Finger agility. Until a console gives me that option, to lay waste to Player and (1)Player and (2)Player like Half-Life gave me joy back in the day and leveled me up beyond what I could've imagined by bunny hopping and tau jumping and using audio A3D to at least hang with the best...Chosen1, Neo, aCiDtRiP, 007 and more... I'm an old now. I'm not going to let a bunch of teenagers talk shit to me with a mic unless I can lay waste to their feeble understanding of victory by attrition. I've found it's uncomfortably hard to use a controller to walk up to a victim and use the squat/crouch function to tea bag their carcass. When console gaming gets with the mainline of competitive PC gaming, it might be worth it. I've got no use for MMOs and shit like that. I'm an FPS/driving guy. I've played Australians and Croations alike no matter the lag, we competed fair. Console interfaces are fucking garbage. Give me my mouse, my keyboard, my console to tweak my views (FOV 110, weapon_on 0) and let me do my thing. Apparently this is not the best business model. Huh. For a minute there I was (1)Player getting a face full of Glock or crowbar, but life is like that. Spawn. Run. Die. Repeat. Oh, just for the record, if Gabe debuts HL3 as an Xbox Scorpio exclusive I will take money out of my retirement fund just to get in on it. Only if I can use my keyboard and mouse though. Always good to temper expectations...

jamesgeck0 10y ago
I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not. Mouse precision is so much more accurate than controllers that the Overwatch team literally considers using KB/M on consoles to be cheating.
- 6stringmerc 10y ago
  It is tongue in cheek. I don't want to play unless there's a choice. KB/M vs console controllers. Pick your poison, get down on it. I happen to think using anything but KB/M is dumbing-down handicapping. Canon fodder takes many forms.