Report: Leaked Xbox Scorpio documents reveal absence of ESRAM
Despite lacking ESRAM, Microsoft's Xbox Scorpio must be able to run Xbox One and Xbox One S titles.
Some hardware specifications for Xbox Scorpio, Microsoft's forthcoming upgraded Xbox One, have leaked according to a report published on hardware website Digital Foundry.
Reporters from Digital Foundry received white papers titled "Reaching 4K and Multiple GPU Scaling Across Multiple Xbox Devices," dated July 2016 shortly after Microsoft announced Scorpio at E3, from an anonymous source.
The report emphasized that ESRAM, a bank of dedicated memory with high bandwidth output, will be absent from Scorpio. However, Xbox One and Xbox One S both utilize ESRAM. Per Microsoft's mandate, all Xbox games must run on all incarnations of the hardware.
"ESRAM remains essential to achieving high performance on both Xbox One and Xbox One S," per the white papers. "However, Project Scorpio and PC are not provided with ESRAM. Because developers are not allowed to ship a Project Scorpio-only SKU, optimizing for ESRAM remains critical to performance on Microsoft platforms."
The crux of the report focuses on myriad ways that developers could opt to channel Scorpio's increased horsepower. "To make the best games possible, developers will inevitably spend GPU resource on other quality improvements such as higher fidelity shadows, reflections, texture filtering and lower draw distances. Another option developers might consider is frame-rate upscaling - running graphics at 60Hz but the CPU at 30Hz and interpolating animation."
The full report, including a video analysis, can be found on Digital Foundry.
Microsoft has made bold promises concerning Xbox Scorpio: that it will deliver true 4K, and that it will be the "most powerful console" yet seen.
[Source: Digital Foundry]
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replyDavid Craddock posted a new article, Report: Leaked Xbox Scorpio documents reveal absence of ESRAM
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It'll be interesting to see how that effects compatibility and performance on Scorpio. Obviously it was taking up a ton of die space but it feels like that might have been a really important part of getting more demanding previous titles working properly.
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the GDDR5 ram in Scorpio has more bandwidth now anyway. I don't think it will be an issue.
ESRAM = 109GB/sec
Scorpio Ram = 320GB/sec
I'd imagine it would just reserve 32MB of the main memory to act as the old ESRAM if a game isn't updated to directly work with Scorpio.-
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With almost triple the bandwidth the latency would have to be massive increase would have to be massive to be a net loss. There's a reason latency in ram hasn't been decreasing, the gains in clock and throughput eliminate the necessity for it. It only matters if everything else were equal.
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I wasn't talking about ram latency, in the ram itself. I was talking about if the ram controller has to make a translation from a memory call that's targeting the ESRAM address space and translate it to the Scorpio's configuration. It may not be an issue, but if some kind of translation has to take place, there has to be some kind of cost. It could be insignificant, but if there was one it wouldn't be "free" if you get my meaning.
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Exactly. Simple is better, because multi platform developers will focus on lowest common denominator.
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I'm guessing MS did the math and came out on top without it. It probably affords them more die space for more stream processors, which matter waaaaay more
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Neogaf is full of ESRAM truthers who think the xbox one is more powerful than the PS4 because of ESRAM. In the end, the xbox one is so GPU limited that it was irrelevant (in my opinion)
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ESRAM is a developer complication like the SPUs were on the PS3. Theoretical power will always lose out to easy to use power when spread across enough developers.
Both consoles are just rushing towards lowest common denominator at the highest GHz and GFlops, which is what PC gaming has been doing for years.
Simple is the way to go.-
ESRAM is a developer complication like the SPUs were on the PS3.
I don't think you can argue that it did not significantly help the XBox 360.-
I wouldn't argue that, the 360 memory architecture was so bad that it was a great benefit
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