27: The Week That It Happened

00:00SPEAKER- Hey, so homeschooling's great, Brad.

00:01SPEAKERLet me tell you.

00:02SPEAKER- Yeah? - Yeah.

00:03SPEAKER- You're a big fan?

00:04SPEAKER- Oh, yeah, yeah.

00:05SPEAKERLook, I saw on Twitter the other day that somebody said,

00:07SPEAKER"Hey, we don't pay teachers enough,"

00:09SPEAKERand after two weeks of homeschool now,

00:13SPEAKEReach teacher should make like a billion dollars a year.

00:16SPEAKERLook, I was on board for paying the teachers before this,

00:19SPEAKERbut holy cow.

00:21SPEAKERSo we're doing distance learning,

00:23SPEAKERwhich basically means that my daughter talks

00:26SPEAKERto her teachers a couple times a day, maybe,

00:30SPEAKERbut since she's in first grade,

00:31SPEAKERshe doesn't know how to work Zoom or any of that stuff.

00:35SPEAKERAnd then we get assignments,

00:37SPEAKERand then we have to kind of supervise the assignments,

00:39SPEAKERbut it's just, it's so much.

00:41SPEAKERIt is so much.

00:43SPEAKER- That's ambitious.

00:44SPEAKERI'm actually like, they're doing straight up video

00:45SPEAKERconference, is that how they're talking to students?

00:47SPEAKERIs it everybody at once or is it one-on-one?

00:49SPEAKERSurely not one-on-one.

00:50SPEAKER- So they're trying to do everybody at once

00:53SPEAKERevery day so far.

00:54SPEAKERI don't know how long that'll go 'cause it's kind of,

00:56SPEAKERbut they load up a big Zoom with 40 kids or 50 kids in it,

01:00SPEAKERand then they talk for a minute at the beginning,

01:03SPEAKERand then the teachers mute everybody but the teachers,

01:06SPEAKERand then they ask the kids to do thumbs up on the cameras

01:08SPEAKERor thumbs down to give feedback,

01:10SPEAKERand they let them raise hands to ask questions,

01:12SPEAKERbut they hit the Zoom button for raising hands.

01:15SPEAKERIt's very cute.

01:16SPEAKER- Developing entirely new forms of human communication

01:19SPEAKERin this situation.

01:20SPEAKER- But it's also really comforting.

01:22SPEAKERIt's been really nice for her, especially,

01:25SPEAKER'cause she gets to talk to her friends.

01:26SPEAKERShe gets to see her friends at least a couple of times

01:28SPEAKERa day, and we did a music class on Tuesday, I think,

01:32SPEAKERwhere the teacher was sitting in front of a webcam

01:35SPEAKERon Facebook video streaming or something,

01:38SPEAKERand all of the kids logged in at the same time,

01:40SPEAKERand they sang along with her,

01:41SPEAKERand it was just such a joyful moment.

01:45SPEAKERIt was so good.

01:48SPEAKER- I'm sure it's good for just the psychological benefit

01:50SPEAKERof maintaining some routine and communicating with people

01:53SPEAKERand still doing some version of the things you normally do.

01:56SPEAKER- It absolutely is, and I think that's an important lesson

02:00SPEAKERfor adults, too, is that keeping in touch with people

02:04SPEAKERand staying, going on walks if you're able to

02:08SPEAKERand stuff like that is really good.

02:11SPEAKER- How do you keep them accountable?

02:13SPEAKERDo they have straight up deliverables?

02:15SPEAKERLike they have to hand in homework and stuff?

02:17SPEAKER- Look, the deliverables were a moment of panic for us early on

02:20SPEAKERbecause it was unclear, like it seemed like

02:23SPEAKERwe were gonna be expected to turn in worksheets,

02:25SPEAKERlike scan worksheets and send them over and stuff like that,

02:28SPEAKERbut for first graders, they just want them to make sure

02:30SPEAKERthat they're reading and that they're continuing

02:32SPEAKERto gain skills rather than slip, so we do a little bit

02:36SPEAKERof reading every day, we do a little bit of writing,

02:38SPEAKERwe do some math, and then there's extra stuff

02:40SPEAKERin the afternoon, and one of the upsides of this

02:43SPEAKERis that everybody's cooped up, so all of the children

02:47SPEAKERof the book authors, or not all of them,

02:49SPEAKERbut a lot of super famous children's book authors

02:51SPEAKERare doing live streams where they do like,

02:54SPEAKERor videos every day where they're like,

02:56SPEAKERlike Mo Willems, the Gerald and Piggy and Pigeon guy,

03:00SPEAKERwho's so-- - Oh yeah, I'm a huge fan.

03:02SPEAKER- Yeah, you love the Pigeon.

03:03SPEAKER- One of my favorites.

03:04SPEAKER- He likes to ride the bus, that's all you need to know.

03:07SPEAKER(upbeat music)

03:17SPEAKER(upbeat music)

03:38SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod.

03:40SPEAKERI'm Will. - Hi Brad.

03:41SPEAKER- Hey Brad, how's it going?

03:43SPEAKER- It's fine, I'm sitting here in gym shorts

03:45SPEAKERand a ball cap and bare feet.

03:49SPEAKERHaven't left the house in six days.

03:51SPEAKER- Today's sweatpants tech pod is actually brought to you

03:54SPEAKERby my pajamas, which I'm still wearing.

03:56SPEAKERBreaking all of the rules of homeworking from last week.

03:58SPEAKER- Those count as sweatpants?

04:01SPEAKEREverything is sweatpants if you want it to be.

04:03SPEAKER- I feel like they have a drawstring,

04:04SPEAKERthey have a stretchy waistband.

04:06SPEAKERI feel like they have pockets.

04:07SPEAKERI feel like that's close enough to sweatpants.

04:09SPEAKER- Are you comfortable?

04:10SPEAKERThat's all that matters.

04:11SPEAKER- I could not, I'm glad, hey, congrats on your sixth day

04:14SPEAKERof not leaving the house.

04:15SPEAKER- Yeah, it's great.

04:17SPEAKERI've washed all my groceries.

04:18SPEAKERThe last time I went out on Sunday morning

04:19SPEAKERand bought a ton of groceries and then came home

04:22SPEAKERand washed them in the sink.

04:24SPEAKER- Yep.

04:26SPEAKER- Here we are.

04:27SPEAKER- We, so I talked to Kishore about that on This is Only Test.

04:30SPEAKERI think we're gonna try to get him on the podcast next week

04:32SPEAKERto answer some coronavirus questions.

04:34SPEAKER- Yeah, that would be great.

04:35SPEAKER- He, he said, like if you're,

04:39SPEAKERthere's two approaches you can do.

04:41SPEAKEROne is you can wash everything.

04:42SPEAKERThe other is you can just treat your refrigerator

04:44SPEAKERas a do not, like he said,

04:46SPEAKERif you put something that has coronavirus on in your mouth

04:48SPEAKERand eat it, you're not gonna get infected.

04:50SPEAKERThey don't have any cases of that happening so far.

04:53SPEAKER- Wait, really?

04:54SPEAKER- Yeah, it doesn't pass the digestive barrier apparently.

04:58SPEAKER- Oh, wow.

04:59SPEAKER- The acid breaks it down immediately in your stomach.

05:01SPEAKER- What about the mucous membranes in your mouth even?

05:04SPEAKER- So, I mean, presumably we didn't talk about edge cases,

05:09SPEAKERbut presumably if you have like a cut

05:11SPEAKERor something in your mouth, it's respiratory.

05:13SPEAKERSo you'd have to inhale a particle off of the thing,

05:17SPEAKERoff of whatever you have in your mouth

05:19SPEAKERwhile you're masticating it.

05:21SPEAKERAnd that would have to get into your lungs or nose.

05:24SPEAKERAnd that's the way you would get infected.

05:26SPEAKER- Well, hey, good thing our bodies aren't designed

05:29SPEAKERto have everything go down the exact same pipe or, you know.

05:32SPEAKER- We need more holes.

05:33SPEAKER- Mutual connections between systems.

05:36SPEAKERThat's interesting.

05:36SPEAKERI guess that's, what field is that?

05:38SPEAKERVirology, I guess?

05:40SPEAKER- Probably, yeah, virology.

05:41SPEAKERWell, I guess you're, I mean,

05:43SPEAKERyou're getting into like, or to take a step back,

05:46SPEAKERlike I just previously assumed like virus gets in,

05:49SPEAKERyou're fucked.

05:49SPEAKERLike that was my presumption,

05:50SPEAKERbut I guess there are a lot more nuances around like

05:54SPEAKERwhich membranes are permeable by which types of viruses

05:57SPEAKERand sizes of viruses and all kinds of stuff like that.

05:59SPEAKERLike I had no idea that you could eat it

06:01SPEAKERand not have to worry.

06:02SPEAKER- There's a lot of stuff we don't know about this so far.

06:05SPEAKERBut anyway, I think washing your groceries

06:07SPEAKERis not an unwise thing to do.

06:09SPEAKER- Okay, all right.

06:10SPEAKERI felt a little silly, but still did it.

06:12SPEAKERWe either wipe down all the packages that come in

06:14SPEAKERor we put them in the backyard

06:15SPEAKERand let them sit in the sun for a few hours.

06:17SPEAKERThat's not a bad one.

06:18SPEAKER- So yeah.

06:19SPEAKER- I've been quarantining them.

06:20SPEAKERI've been like kind of anything

06:22SPEAKERthat's been handled by people extensively.

06:24SPEAKERLike I, 'cause I think they've been saying on the outside,

06:27SPEAKERlike 72 hours is about how long they think it can survive

06:30SPEAKERon some surfaces.

06:31SPEAKERSo I just let things sit for over three days

06:33SPEAKERbefore I touched them.

06:35SPEAKER- My index came the other day and it needed a signature.

06:39SPEAKERAnd it was before FedEx stopped requiring signatures

06:42SPEAKERfor packages that required signatures.

06:44SPEAKERSo I stuck a post-it note on the door.

06:46SPEAKERThis is dear FedEx person.

06:47SPEAKERThis is my signature for the package.

06:49SPEAKERJust a tracking number, thank you.

06:51SPEAKERAnd he came up, like bumped the door,

06:55SPEAKERgrabbed the post, and I caught him as he was walking away

06:58SPEAKER'cause I wanted to make sure I didn't miss the package.

07:00SPEAKERAnd he was like, "Hey, thanks for the post-it.

07:02SPEAKERThat was awesome."

07:03SPEAKERIt's like, "Hey, thanks, man, wash your hands.

07:05SPEAKERI haven't seen anybody else in 10 days."

07:08SPEAKER- Everybody's finding ways to get by.

07:09SPEAKER- Yeah, man.

07:10SPEAKER- Last package I had delivered by hand to UPS guy,

07:12SPEAKERsure did put, throw it on the ground

07:14SPEAKERand kick it toward me with his foot and then walk away.

07:18SPEAKER- Well, those guys are force multipliers.

07:20SPEAKERLike they're helping so many people on the day to day,

07:24SPEAKERlike with the stuff that we forgot that we were gonna need.

07:27SPEAKERSo yeah, props to them, medicine and all that.

07:30SPEAKERAnyway.

07:30SPEAKER- For sure, absolutely.

07:32SPEAKER- But we have more pressing matters this week, Brad.

07:34SPEAKERSome important stuff has happened.

07:36SPEAKER- Yeah, they sure did pick an interesting week

07:38SPEAKERto go wide with all of their console stuff.

07:41SPEAKER- I mean, I think they were-

07:42SPEAKER- I assume this was probably timed around GDC.

07:45SPEAKER- Yeah, this-

07:45SPEAKER- Not a viral outbreak, but you know.

07:47SPEAKER- Yeah, isn't this GDC week?

07:49SPEAKER- Yes.

07:50SPEAKER- Yeah, it's been a great-

07:51SPEAKER- Yeah, you're right, today's the 20th.

07:52SPEAKERLike today is, this is the week

07:54SPEAKERthat everything was gonna happen.

07:56SPEAKER- Yeah, this is the week that it happened.

07:59SPEAKER- So yeah, Sony and Microsoft unveiled

08:02SPEAKERa lot more tech details on the upcoming,

08:06SPEAKERthe new console hardware that's coming out this year.

08:08SPEAKERAnd like finally, it's not,

08:13SPEAKERfor the first time with this generation,

08:15SPEAKERit's not couched in like terms of a wired article

08:18SPEAKERwhere it's like, this is gonna be eight times faster

08:20SPEAKERthan the thing you had before.

08:21SPEAKERAnd look, Spider-Man can swing as fast as he wants

08:24SPEAKERthrough New York City.

08:26SPEAKERThere's actually real numbers and real-

08:28SPEAKER- Yeah, they really got into it.

08:29SPEAKER- Yeah, and apparently Digital Foundry went out

08:33SPEAKERto Microsoft and Sony and has had a little bit,

08:37SPEAKERI don't know if they actually went out with Sony,

08:39SPEAKERthey might've just been reporting on that Mark Cerny video.

08:41SPEAKER- Yeah, I believe that's the case.

08:43SPEAKER- But yeah, there's a lot of good information.

08:45SPEAKERI guess, do you wanna do this in chronological order

08:48SPEAKERand start with the Xbox?

08:49SPEAKER- Yeah, let's do that.

08:50SPEAKERMicrosoft just kind of out of nowhere

08:52SPEAKERwent wide Monday morning with like a bunch of Xbox wire posts

08:55SPEAKERand all that Digital Foundry access and they made a video

08:59SPEAKERand there's a ton of stuff out there.

09:01SPEAKER- Yeah, so I mean, both of these consoles

09:06SPEAKERare kind of similar.

09:07SPEAKERThey're both based on AMD SOCs

09:09SPEAKERthat are based on the Zen 2 architecture.

09:11SPEAKER- Yeah, Zen 2 CPUs and RDNA 2 GPU cores,

09:15SPEAKERwhich are not on the market in the PC space yet, right?

09:18SPEAKER- Presumably in the next,

09:19SPEAKERwhenever AMD releases new graphics cards, I would assume.

09:22SPEAKER- Next year or something.

09:24SPEAKERSo that stuff like the broad strokes has been rumored

09:26SPEAKERfor so long that it was all basically just assumed

09:28SPEAKERat this point and that all of course turned out to be true.

09:31SPEAKER- Yeah.

09:31SPEAKER- But there's a ton of nuance.

09:33SPEAKERLike they're both very similar from the top level

09:36SPEAKERbut then once you dig into it,

09:37SPEAKERthere's a bunch of minor differences

09:39SPEAKERthat I wonder whether those are gonna make much

09:42SPEAKERof an actual difference in the end.

09:44SPEAKERLike obviously there'll be little things.

09:46SPEAKER- I mean, we can get into it,

09:47SPEAKERbut from my high level perspective

09:50SPEAKERand not having seen anything actually running

09:52SPEAKERin this hardware yet,

09:54SPEAKERboth of these seem like fine machines.

09:56SPEAKERIt's entirely possible that somebody has messed something up

09:58SPEAKERbut at this point, both Sony and Microsoft

10:00SPEAKERhave been doing this for long enough

10:02SPEAKERthat I would expect them to avoid the obvious pitfalls

10:05SPEAKERof making a machine that's hard to make games for

10:08SPEAKERor that they can't manufacture in quantity

10:11SPEAKERor that it's gonna fail within a year

10:12SPEAKERbecause they didn't anticipate cooling

10:14SPEAKERor whatever the problem is.

10:16SPEAKER- Or can't hit realistic workable performance targets.

10:20SPEAKER- Yeah, or can't hit yields.

10:22SPEAKEREither, we've had all these problems.

10:25SPEAKER- 'Cause I mean, you certainly have seen plenty

10:26SPEAKERof console warriors out there losing their minds

10:28SPEAKERabout 12.155 being a bigger number than 10.28, but...

10:35SPEAKER- Well, and it's one of those things

10:37SPEAKERthat the numbers don't always tell the whole story

10:39SPEAKERbecause Teraflops measures one specific part

10:42SPEAKERof the GPU's math pipeline,

10:44SPEAKERhow fast you can do certain types

10:46SPEAKERof floating point operations.

10:47SPEAKERAnd well, that's an important number for that one thing.

10:51SPEAKERIf there's weird bottlenecks coming in and out of that,

10:53SPEAKERwhich I don't think either of these machines have,

10:55SPEAKERbut this isn't as simple as looking at a car and saying,

11:00SPEAKER"Oh, this thing puts 450 horsepower on the rear wheels."

11:05SPEAKERThere's a lot more going on,

11:06SPEAKERand there's an infinite number of bottlenecks

11:08SPEAKERin places that things can be fast,

11:10SPEAKERgood or bad, inside the hardware.

11:12SPEAKERSo the TLDR, and I wanna say this upfront

11:16SPEAKERso people actually hear it instead of putting it

11:17SPEAKERat the end of the podcast

11:18SPEAKERwhere nobody ever remembers anything,

11:20SPEAKERbut buy the machine that has the games you want on it.

11:25SPEAKEROr if you play multiplayer stuff,

11:27SPEAKERbuy the machine where your friends play.

11:30SPEAKERYeah, we'll talk more about weird ecosystem stuff

11:33SPEAKERat the end, I guess.

11:34SPEAKERBut okay, so two quad-core packages on the CPU,

11:40SPEAKERtwo quad-core CPUs on the Xbox package

11:44SPEAKERfor eight cores total with 16 threads.

11:47SPEAKERThese both support the AMD equivalent of hyper-threading,

11:49SPEAKERwhich is called SMT, multi-threading.

11:52SPEAKER- Symmetric multi-threading, I think?

11:53SPEAKER- Yeah, symmetric multi-threading as well.

11:55SPEAKERAnd basically what that means is that each CPU core

11:59SPEAKERcan work as a virtual core.

12:03SPEAKER- Two to three workloads per core, right?

12:06SPEAKER- They have to not overlap in really specific ways.

12:08SPEAKERSo they can't use the same parts of the CPU

12:11SPEAKERat the same time for obvious reasons,

12:13SPEAKERbut often you can turn two real CPUs into one virtual CPU

12:17SPEAKERwith actually a pretty good performance improvement

12:20SPEAKERat this point for the same clock speed.

12:23SPEAKERIt seems like there's a weird choice.

12:26SPEAKERThere's a couple of interesting choices with the Xbox.

12:29SPEAKERThe first one we're gonna talk about is that

12:31SPEAKERif you run only eight threads, or sorry, seven threads,

12:36SPEAKER'cause one of the cores is dedicated to the OS.

12:38SPEAKERIf you run seven threads,

12:40SPEAKERyour clock speed is gonna be 3.8 gigahertz.

12:42SPEAKERIf you run 14 threads,

12:45SPEAKERyour clock speed is gonna be 3.6 gigahertz.

12:48SPEAKERAnd that seems like a developer choice.

12:50SPEAKERIs that from what the Xbox folks said

12:52SPEAKERin the digital foundry articles?

12:54SPEAKER- In the digital foundry article,

12:55SPEAKERthey talked to the system architect of the box

12:57SPEAKERwho basically, so my understanding of game development

13:01SPEAKERor software development in general

13:02SPEAKERis that parallelizing your software is pretty difficult.

13:06SPEAKER- As evidenced by all of the modern PC games

13:08SPEAKERthat hit two or maybe four cores

13:10SPEAKERand we all have six or eight core systems.

13:11SPEAKER- Yeah, actually not to get off topic,

13:13SPEAKERbut Doom Eternal came out on PC last night

13:16SPEAKERand for one thing, their performance profiling

13:18SPEAKERthat's built into that game is incredible.

13:20SPEAKERYou can turn on like, you can basically turn on a readout

13:23SPEAKERthat takes up half of the vertical space of the screen

13:25SPEAKERwith frame rates and percentages and graphs

13:28SPEAKERand all kinds of shit.

13:29SPEAKERBut that game completely utilizes eight threads

13:33SPEAKERand even that was kind of shocking to me

13:35SPEAKERwhen I turned that stuff on and saw all eight threads

13:38SPEAKERwere being used pretty much equally as I ran around.

13:40SPEAKER- Oh, wow.

13:42SPEAKER- But point being even on the PC,

13:43SPEAKEReven using just the full eight threads of a quad core CPU

13:47SPEAKERis kind of unexpected still at this point.

13:49SPEAKER- Yeah.

13:51SPEAKER- So yeah, basically the point they were making

13:53SPEAKERwas like, hey, talking to developers

13:55SPEAKERand looking at development trends right now,

13:56SPEAKERespecially at launch when people are really rapidly

13:59SPEAKERjust trying to get software to work in time to get games out

14:02SPEAKERthat they would rather have higher performance

14:05SPEAKERon fewer threads rather than a much wider distribution

14:10SPEAKERof their workloads at a slightly reduced performance.

14:13SPEAKERDoes that make sense?

14:14SPEAKER- Well, I mean, it's hard to get something as complicated

14:17SPEAKERas a game that essentially has one loop, right?

14:19SPEAKERLike a game is one loop and each time

14:21SPEAKERthat loop iterates is a frame.

14:23SPEAKERSo it's hard.

14:24SPEAKER- And that's kind of a linear process, right?

14:26SPEAKERLike you're layering.

14:27SPEAKER- I mean, kind of.

14:28SPEAKER- I'm not, that's probably a huge oversimplification, but.

14:31SPEAKER- Yeah, the answer is it's complicated, right?

14:34SPEAKERLike often--

14:35SPEAKER- I would assume there are some steps in that process

14:37SPEAKERthat have to be completed before other steps

14:39SPEAKERcan be done, I would guess.

14:40SPEAKER- Absolutely, yeah.

14:41SPEAKERAnd there are things that,

14:43SPEAKERso there are things that can run independently.

14:44SPEAKERLike often people will run sound or physics calculations

14:47SPEAKERor something like that on other threads.

14:49SPEAKERBut then you'll, you still have to sync that stuff back up

14:52SPEAKERwith the main loop at one point or another and like--

14:55SPEAKER- And I think I'm guessing that's a huge part

14:57SPEAKERof why it's so tough to multi-thread game stuff

15:01SPEAKERis that everything has to kind of converge at a point,

15:04SPEAKERwhich is the frame being drawn

15:05SPEAKERand you have to make sure everything lines up timing wise.

15:07SPEAKER- Well, yeah, and if it doesn't line up,

15:08SPEAKERit can cause like glitches or artifacts

15:10SPEAKERor crashes in some cases.

15:12SPEAKERAnd also like you think about the timing for this.

15:15SPEAKERSo you have, if you're running at 120 Hertz,

15:19SPEAKERyou have something like 8.4 milliseconds to do each frame.

15:22SPEAKERSo it's not a ton of time,

15:27SPEAKEReven given a 3.6 gigahertz processor

15:30SPEAKERor whatever we're talking about in this case.

15:32SPEAKERSo it makes sense that while the tools continue to improve,

15:37SPEAKERwe'll see people continuing to do eight threads versus 16.

15:41SPEAKERI mean, that makes sense to me.

15:43SPEAKER- Yeah, but I wonder if over the course of the generation,

15:45SPEAKERyou'll start seeing people shift more

15:47SPEAKERto the multi-threaded setup.

15:49SPEAKERLike they're more willing to take the hit on raw performance

15:51SPEAKERto get more workloads at the same time.

15:53SPEAKER- So one of the themes I think for this generation

15:56SPEAKERis that there's a lot of stuff in here

15:58SPEAKERthat we're not gonna really know what to do with.

16:00SPEAKERLike we know a little bit about what we can do with it now,

16:03SPEAKERbut it's gonna be complicated for developers

16:05SPEAKERto take advantage of, and that will give us the opportunity

16:10SPEAKERto see games continue to improve in graphical fidelity

16:14SPEAKERover the course of this generation,

16:16SPEAKERwhich kind of didn't happen so much with the PS4

16:18SPEAKERand Xbox One generation.

16:20SPEAKERLike things look better, but it's not like the difference

16:25SPEAKERbetween early SNES games and late SNES games.

16:28SPEAKERIt's like the difference between a GeForce 980

16:31SPEAKERand a GeForce 1080.

16:33SPEAKER- Yeah, like Uncharted 4 came out four years ago,

16:38SPEAKERfive years ago?

16:38SPEAKERIt's been a while, and I would still say

16:40SPEAKERthat's one of the best looking games of this generation,

16:42SPEAKERand that was relatively early on, so yeah.

16:44SPEAKER- Like Spider-Man, and I think the in-between consoles,

16:48SPEAKERthe PS4 Pro and the Xbox One X

16:51SPEAKERkind of complicated matters a little bit too,

16:54SPEAKERin terms of, 'cause a lot of like,

16:56SPEAKERthe PS4 Pro version of Spider-Man looks great.

16:58SPEAKERIt has cube mapping on all the windows,

17:00SPEAKERbut you know, the stock one still looks pretty good, so.

17:05SPEAKER- Yeah, not bad.

17:06SPEAKER- Anyway, so memory, 16 gigs of memory, is that right?

17:11SPEAKER- Yeah, that was a huge one going into this for me,

17:14SPEAKERwas just like, what's the RAM number, you know?

17:16SPEAKERI really wanted to know,

17:16SPEAKERbecause if you go all the way back to the 360 PS3,

17:20SPEAKERthey both had 512 megabytes of RAM,

17:22SPEAKERand all you heard developers say that generation

17:24SPEAKERwas RAM, RAM, RAM, like we need more fucking memory.

17:26SPEAKERLike these things, the major problem with those consoles

17:29SPEAKERis not enough memory, and point being,

17:32SPEAKERmoving from those to the PS4 and Xbox One,

17:35SPEAKERthere was a 16X increase in memory size, right?

17:38SPEAKERThey went from half a gig to eight gig,

17:40SPEAKERand here they've only doubled,

17:41SPEAKERwhich comparatively sounds pretty small,

17:45SPEAKERbut I guess we'll get into that with the way

17:47SPEAKERthat the storage sounds like,

17:49SPEAKERit's gonna help compensate for that.

17:50SPEAKER- Well, and also, like if you think about what a,

17:53SPEAKERlike you can have a really nice gaming PC

17:55SPEAKERthat can play everything at 4K

17:57SPEAKERthat has 16 gigs of RAM right now.

17:59SPEAKER- Well, yeah, but that's playing largely ports

18:01SPEAKERthat are developed for consoles

18:02SPEAKERwhere you only get about four to five for games.

18:05SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, that is absolutely true.

18:07SPEAKERI hadn't thought about that, but yeah,

18:10SPEAKERI think 16 gigs of tightly coupled memory

18:14SPEAKERwith a really fast storage system that's guaranteed

18:16SPEAKERchanges the dynamic a little bit.

18:18SPEAKER- Totally, totally, I'm not saying it's not enough.

18:19SPEAKERI just, I think it's an interesting situation specifically

18:23SPEAKERbecause the storage sounds like it can help compensate for,

18:25SPEAKERand they said that in some of these presentations,

18:28SPEAKERbut we'll get to that.

18:29SPEAKER- Well, so I've never designed a console, obviously,

18:31SPEAKERbut again, it seems like--

18:33SPEAKER- Give it the times, man, it's fun.

18:35SPEAKERYou should do it, try it sometime.

18:36SPEAKER- Maybe we'll build misters here in a little bit,

18:37SPEAKERthat's kinda like that, right?

18:39SPEAKER- Sure.

18:40SPEAKER- The thing about console design always seems to me

18:43SPEAKERlike an exercise in compromises and like,

18:47SPEAKER'cause they know that they can't go much above

18:49SPEAKERfour or $500, right, or else people won't buy them.

18:52SPEAKERAnd you're looking at, you wanna have fast load times

18:56SPEAKERand you wanna have a good GPU with a lot of overhead

18:59SPEAKERso you can do stuff for the length of the console

19:01SPEAKERthat continues to impress gamers.

19:03SPEAKERAnd 16 gigs of memory seems like the right compromise

19:06SPEAKERto me for that.

19:07SPEAKERMicrosoft's approach, they're doing something weird

19:10SPEAKERwith the memory, you explained this to me

19:11SPEAKERand I think it's a fascinating way to do it.

19:18SPEAKERBut I mean, but they're doing,

19:19SPEAKERso they're doing 10 gigabytes of the memory,

19:22SPEAKER10 gigabytes of the memory run fast at 560 gigabytes

19:27SPEAKERper second, I think is the throughput on that.

19:29SPEAKERIt's GDDR6 ECC memory, so it has error correction,

19:32SPEAKERGDDR means it's graphics double density.

19:35SPEAKERBasically, it's the kind of memory that shows up

19:37SPEAKERon a video card.

19:40SPEAKERAnd the remaining six gigs run slower at 336 gigabytes

19:45SPEAKERper second, which is like a third, 33% slower, I think,

19:48SPEAKERif I go back in the envelope math on my head.

19:52SPEAKERAnd some of that is reserved,

19:53SPEAKERa couple of gigs of that are reserved for the OS

19:55SPEAKERand then the rest is for like,

19:56SPEAKERso presumably the fast memory is for GPU

19:59SPEAKERand the slower memory is for CPU.

20:01SPEAKER- Yeah, they basically said that.

20:02SPEAKERAnd they said that the three and a half gig

20:04SPEAKERof the slower memory for games would be for physics,

20:06SPEAKERaudio, game logic, stuff that can afford

20:08SPEAKERto not have to be drawing frames at 120 Hertz,

20:13SPEAKERstuff like that.

20:14SPEAKER- One of the things that made the Xbox 360 weird

20:17SPEAKERis that that main system memory was running

20:19SPEAKERat basically GPU speeds, which is why they had,

20:22SPEAKERI mean, it wasn't running it,

20:23SPEAKERit was running faster than a CPU.

20:25SPEAKERAnd that meant that the CPU wasn't able

20:26SPEAKERto take full advantage of the memory

20:28SPEAKERbecause it can only transfer stuff on clocks

20:30SPEAKERand we don't have to get into it.

20:32SPEAKERBut the point is, this seems fine, I think.

20:34SPEAKER- Yeah, sure.

20:38SPEAKER- The GPU or graphics processing unit

20:42SPEAKERis where all the magic happens, I believe.

20:44SPEAKER- That's what that means, okay.

20:45SPEAKER- There are tiny elves inside it.

20:47SPEAKERAnd each elf is responsible for one pixel on the screen

20:53SPEAKERand he has to flip it over like Vanna White

20:55SPEAKERbetween the four different colors.

20:56SPEAKERIt is billions of them, billions of elves.

20:58SPEAKER- I don't know if you've done the math on 4K,

21:00SPEAKERbut that's quite a few elves.

21:01SPEAKER- Well, it's 'cause, yeah,

21:02SPEAKERthese are the 4,000th generation elf,

21:06SPEAKERall those fortress machines have been really turning over

21:09SPEAKERthe last few years.

21:11SPEAKERWhat are they looking for in performance here, Brad?

21:13SPEAKERWhat's the goal here?

21:14SPEAKER- They use the phrase they were looking

21:16SPEAKERfor a minimum doubling of the Xbox One X's

21:18SPEAKERgraphics performance because they're targeting

21:20SPEAKERboth 4K60 and 4K120.

21:23SPEAKER- Okay.

21:24SPEAKER- So their abstract compute number is,

21:28SPEAKERI think as we mentioned, 12.155 teraflops.

21:31SPEAKER- Ooh, that's a lot of teraflops.

21:34SPEAKER- I don't know, how much do you want to get into the specs?

21:35SPEAKER52 CUs?

21:37SPEAKER- So I think compute units are important.

21:39SPEAKERI think clock speed for the GPU is important

21:41SPEAKER'cause that tells you basically how much math

21:43SPEAKERyou can do per second or per frame.

21:47SPEAKERBut I don't think it's super,

21:50SPEAKERlike there's some interesting things

21:51SPEAKERthat they've done with these shaders.

21:53SPEAKERSo normally on a shader units on the GPU

21:55SPEAKERare what do the math that makes your materials

21:58SPEAKERlook real in the world.

21:59SPEAKERSo that can involve everything from

22:05SPEAKERlike adding highlights and shading to the world

22:09SPEAKERso that like the dark areas look dark

22:12SPEAKERand the light areas look light

22:13SPEAKERand the light behaves the way you would expect it to,

22:15SPEAKERto putting reflections in mirrors,

22:19SPEAKERor partial reflections in glass, to--

22:22SPEAKER- Yeah, you see people using shader programs

22:24SPEAKERfor some less conventional stuff like water simulation

22:27SPEAKERor like fur, you know, like anything,

22:29SPEAKERpretty much like anything that involves like a surface.

22:31SPEAKER- Yeah, so years ago we talked about bump maps

22:34SPEAKERand normal maps and stuff like that.

22:35SPEAKERAnd those were kind of fixed function,

22:38SPEAKERmeaning those were shader programs

22:40SPEAKERthat had hardware dedicated to one particular shader program.

22:44SPEAKERThese are more, shader programs now are more general purpose

22:47SPEAKERand you can do them for all sorts of things,

22:49SPEAKERbut they're still, they still slot into specific parts

22:51SPEAKERof the pipeline.

22:52SPEAKERAnd like, this is a dramatic increase

22:58SPEAKERin the number of shader units from the previous,

22:59SPEAKEReven the Xbox One X, which is good.

23:04SPEAKERThat means you can do more math,

23:05SPEAKERwhich you have to do if you wanna do four times the pixels

23:08SPEAKERon a 4K screen, and especially we wanna do 4K 60

23:12SPEAKERversus 1080p 30, which is what a lot of current generation

23:16SPEAKERXbox, launch Xbox games run at.

23:20SPEAKERIt's a good call.

23:21SPEAKEROne of the interesting things they did here

23:22SPEAKERis they're also tuning these shader cores

23:25SPEAKERto be used for machine learning tasks,

23:27SPEAKERwhich don't require the precision that graphics shaders use.

23:31SPEAKERSo you get like a force multiplier

23:34SPEAKERif you reduce the precision.

23:35SPEAKERSo if instead of running at 32 precision,

23:37SPEAKERyou run at 16 bit precision,

23:39SPEAKERyou get double the shader performance

23:41SPEAKER'cause you can run two shader programs

23:43SPEAKERin each of the 16 bit registers in the thing.

23:46SPEAKERAnd that can scale all the way down

23:47SPEAKERto running four bit accuracy

23:49SPEAKERif you're doing just simple machine learning tasks.

23:51SPEAKERSo that means, for example, this is an Nvidia example,

23:56SPEAKERbut on the RTX hardware that Nvidia released last year,

24:02SPEAKERyou can do machine learning enhanced anti-aliasing

24:07SPEAKERon games that have trained it.

24:08SPEAKER- Right, yes.

24:09SPEAKER- So, and that stuff runs at a really high,

24:14SPEAKERthat'll run on the shader.

24:15SPEAKERSome of the things that,

24:16SPEAKERMicrosoft hasn't announced anything like that,

24:18SPEAKERbut things analogous to that will run on these cores,

24:21SPEAKERwhich is cool.

24:22SPEAKER- Yes.

24:23SPEAKER- And then, let's see, the other thing is DX 12 U,

24:27SPEAKERDirectX 12 Ultimate.

24:29SPEAKER- Ultimate?

24:30SPEAKER- Ultimate.

24:31SPEAKERDo you think this was better than iterating to DX 13?

24:34SPEAKERI mean, this is probably not a big enough change

24:35SPEAKERto actually warrant that.

24:36SPEAKER- DX 13 is an unlucky DX.

24:39SPEAKER- That's the other thing I was getting at.

24:41SPEAKER- Yeah.

24:43SPEAKERLook, I feel like it's been weird

24:45SPEAKERto iterate graphics APIs

24:48SPEAKERsince we went to a general purpose shader pipeline.

24:51SPEAKER- Sure.

24:52SPEAKER- Because they're like, at some point you're just like,

24:54SPEAKERhey, you have more capable shaders

24:55SPEAKERthat can do more interesting programs

24:57SPEAKERin the timeframe that you have to render these programs.

25:00SPEAKER- Like it's more of a marketing purpose at that point

25:02SPEAKERthan it is a technical one.

25:03SPEAKER- Probably.

25:04SPEAKERI mean, anytime somebody names something inside a thing

25:08SPEAKERthat they're never gonna see,

25:10SPEAKERlike the velocity engine or a retina display,

25:13SPEAKERthat's all marketing crap.

25:15SPEAKERThe DX 12 U features are neat.

25:17SPEAKERThey're adding mesh shaders.

25:19SPEAKERThey're adding ray tracing APIs.

25:22SPEAKERThey're adding some machine learning stuff.

25:24SPEAKER- Direct ML.

25:26SPEAKER- Direct ML.

25:28SPEAKERThey're adding variable rate shading, which is cool.

25:30SPEAKERThat'll disable.

25:31SPEAKERSo like right now, when you do occlusion and stuff,

25:36SPEAKERit doesn't necessarily apply to shader programs,

25:38SPEAKERbut the variable rate shading will let you turn off shaders

25:41SPEAKERin parts of the scene that you can't see

25:43SPEAKERbecause it can determine that

25:44SPEAKERbefore it runs the shader programs, which is neat.

25:48SPEAKERAnd that should let you do much more complicated shaders

25:51SPEAKERif you build your environments in such a way

25:53SPEAKERthat there are limited uses for those things.

25:57SPEAKERSo things like the partial reflections and control

25:59SPEAKERin the glass and control and stuff like that

26:02SPEAKERmay be much more accessible.

26:05SPEAKERMesh shaders are neat.

26:07SPEAKERInstead of breaking down objects

26:10SPEAKERinto just triangles and vertices,

26:14SPEAKERit can do what's called a meshlet

26:16SPEAKERand it lets you optimize like really complicated material,

26:21SPEAKERobjects much more quickly.

26:23SPEAKERI mean, these are like optimization things

26:25SPEAKERthat make the pipeline run faster, basically.

26:27SPEAKER- Okay, I think the example I saw that

26:30SPEAKERwas like a big asteroid field.

26:31SPEAKERYou could have like an enormous number of discrete objects

26:35SPEAKERflying around with kind of

26:36SPEAKERrelative computational requirements.

26:38SPEAKER- Yeah, it's kind of like tessellation is for vertices

26:41SPEAKERis my understanding.

26:42SPEAKERI think that's probably an oversimplification,

26:43SPEAKERbut like tessellation lets you dynamically vary

26:48SPEAKERthe number of triangles that are used to render an object.

26:51SPEAKERThis lets you dynamically vary the complexity of the mesh

26:55SPEAKERusing shader units rather than using a hardware set

26:58SPEAKERor something like that.

26:59SPEAKER- That makes some sense.

27:00SPEAKER- I'm sure that's an oversimplification.

27:02SPEAKERSo if I'm wrong, please send in notes.

27:03SPEAKERI'd love to hear from you.

27:06SPEAKERThe last one is sampler feedback,

27:09SPEAKERwhich means that you can have two-way communication

27:13SPEAKERwith the texture filtering stuff.

27:16SPEAKERSo right now you just apply anisotropic filtering

27:19SPEAKERand it kind of runs.

27:20SPEAKERThis lets you know which part of the,

27:23SPEAKERlike specifically which of the mipmap levels

27:28SPEAKERare being sampled, where the origin is on the mipmap,

27:32SPEAKERstuff like that.

27:32SPEAKERSo that you like, you know how sometimes

27:34SPEAKERyou get like a weird texture alignment problem

27:36SPEAKERwhen you're like moving backwards and forth

27:39SPEAKERbetween two different mipmap levels

27:41SPEAKERwhen you're like walking down a hall or something like that.

27:43SPEAKERSo this will let the game be aware of that stuff

27:45SPEAKERso that it can align those textures,

27:48SPEAKERalign those mipmap levels

27:49SPEAKERso that you don't have those weird seams

27:50SPEAKERand stuff like that.

27:51SPEAKERIt doesn't, I feel like that's something

27:52SPEAKERmost people don't notice, but you know.

27:55SPEAKER- Or have gotten used to.

27:56SPEAKER- Yeah, probably.

27:57SPEAKER- But it'll still be nicer to solve those problems.

28:00SPEAKER- And the DX12U stuff is backwards compatible.

28:03SPEAKEROh, so here's the other big thing.

28:05SPEAKERXbox and PC DirectX are now unified with DX12U.

28:09SPEAKER- Okay, I don't think I realized

28:11SPEAKERthat wasn't already the case.

28:11SPEAKER- I did not realize.

28:13SPEAKER- I assumed they had already gotten there

28:14SPEAKERon the current Xbox One stuff.

28:17SPEAKER- They have been very careful

28:18SPEAKERto never call attention to that, it seems,

28:19SPEAKERin a public facing way.

28:21SPEAKERSo I just thought that was already done.

28:23SPEAKER- Yeah, so on the PC side, for DX12U,

28:27SPEAKERif you have a DX12U GPU, you get everything.

28:31SPEAKERIf you only have a DX12 GPU,

28:33SPEAKERwhich is pretty much everything that's out now,

28:36SPEAKERyou'll still get the DX12 features,

28:37SPEAKERbut the U features just won't work on your hardware.

28:44SPEAKER- Okay.

28:45SPEAKER- This is literally the worst logo

28:46SPEAKERI've ever seen out of Microsoft.

28:47SPEAKERIt is horrible. - It's not great.

28:49SPEAKER- It is really bad.

28:51SPEAKER- Should we talk about the ray tracing stuff a little bit?

28:53SPEAKERI mean, it's been confirmed for a while

28:54SPEAKERthat the consoles were gonna have it,

28:56SPEAKERbut they haven't really gotten into a lot of detail about it,

28:57SPEAKERpartially because AMD doesn't have any parts

28:59SPEAKERon the market that do it yet.

29:01SPEAKER- Yeah.

29:02SPEAKER- I mean, this is DXR compliance.

29:05SPEAKERI don't know that there's a ton to say

29:06SPEAKERabout this specific implementation.

29:08SPEAKER- I was gonna say the thing that they said

29:10SPEAKERin the Digital Foundry article

29:11SPEAKERis that they do bounding volume hierarchy structures

29:14SPEAKERin hardware, which basically--

29:17SPEAKER- Sounds like that's kind of the base level math

29:18SPEAKERthat's taking place to make all this go.

29:20SPEAKER- Yeah, so basically what that does is it maps the world

29:23SPEAKERand figures out where the intersections are.

29:27SPEAKERSo they said the Series X

29:30SPEAKERcan do 380 billion intersections per second,

29:33SPEAKERwhich sounds good.

29:34SPEAKERThat what that doesn't include is the actual,

29:37SPEAKERlike that just tells the game how things need to be lit

29:42SPEAKERand which surfaces are in play from each light source.

29:45SPEAKERIt doesn't tell them,

29:47SPEAKERlike it doesn't actually do the rendering

29:49SPEAKERof the reflections in the screen

29:53SPEAKERor the global illumination that has to happen and stuff.

29:56SPEAKERThat still has to happen in the rest of the GPU.

29:58SPEAKERWhat this is, this is basically just another setup step

30:01SPEAKERbefore all the scene lighting shaders

30:05SPEAKERand the texture shaders and all that stuff run.

30:08SPEAKER- Right, so my real question about this stuff,

30:10SPEAKERI don't know how much you or anybody knows about this yet,

30:13SPEAKERbut is how close this gets us to standardization

30:16SPEAKERfor ray tracing across everything?

30:18SPEAKERBecause when video was out there, gosh,

30:20SPEAKERwhat a year and a half ago

30:21SPEAKERwith the Turing cores and their RTX stuff,

30:24SPEAKERlike DXR is just coming together as a standard

30:26SPEAKERand AMD is just now starting to support that.

30:28SPEAKERSony's gonna have ray tracing,

30:30SPEAKERbut they're presumably gonna be like on a Vulcan based API

30:33SPEAKERor something similar and obviously not using DirectX.

30:35SPEAKERLike, I guess what I'm getting at is like,

30:38SPEAKERare we getting close to the point

30:39SPEAKERwhere this stuff will be standardized enough

30:42SPEAKERthat it's gonna make sense to just deploy it

30:43SPEAKERacross everything?

30:44SPEAKER- So my understanding is that the Vulcan stuff,

30:47SPEAKERthe Nvidia specific stuff and DirectX ML

30:51SPEAKERare all pretty similar.

30:53SPEAKER- Okay.

30:54SPEAKER- So, you know, they're all obviously running

30:57SPEAKERon a lot of the same hardware.

30:58SPEAKERLike Nvidia supports, I think everything.

31:00SPEAKERI think you can run the Vulcan stuff on Nvidia,

31:01SPEAKERbut I'm not sure about that.

31:05SPEAKERSo, yeah, I mean, this is an extension

31:09SPEAKERto the shader language stuff that happened years ago

31:12SPEAKERwhere the OpenGL shader language and the DirectX

31:14SPEAKERshader language and CUDA are all subsets

31:18SPEAKERand supersets of each other,

31:19SPEAKERdepending on which way you go.

31:21SPEAKER- Yeah, and like that's been going on

31:22SPEAKERall the way back to the quake days, right?

31:24SPEAKERWith Direct3D and OpenGL,

31:25SPEAKERlike the specific extensions might be different,

31:28SPEAKERbut the underlying math and techniques

31:30SPEAKERare more or less equivalent.

31:31SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, math's math, right?

31:33SPEAKERAnd this is, we're talking about math in this case, so.

31:36SPEAKER- Yeah, so I guess what I'm getting at is hopefully

31:39SPEAKERwe're not gonna have any kind of like halves

31:40SPEAKERand have nots situation of like some platforms,

31:43SPEAKERsome APIs, some hardware has better

31:45SPEAKERor more ray tracing than others.

31:46SPEAKERLike hopefully we're getting to the point

31:47SPEAKERwhere it's just gonna be there on everything.

31:49SPEAKER- I mean, my assumption is that,

31:54SPEAKERI mean, here's the thing.

31:55SPEAKERThe thing that always happens is for multi-platform stuff,

31:58SPEAKERthe least common denominator,

31:59SPEAKERassuming they sell enough units to make it worthwhile

32:03SPEAKERbecomes the defacto standard, right?

32:05SPEAKERSo, I feel like Sony has definitely learned their lesson

32:11SPEAKERabout making games hard to make on their platforms.

32:14SPEAKERLike they're not gonna make that mistake again,

32:15SPEAKERI don't think.

32:17SPEAKERSo yeah, I feel like we're probably,

32:21SPEAKERI mean, the big question is Sony,

32:22SPEAKER'cause I don't think they've talked about what APIs

32:24SPEAKERthey're supporting for ray tracing stuff yet.

32:27SPEAKERI assume it's the Vulcan stuff,

32:28SPEAKERbut we'll find out presumably at some point later

32:31SPEAKERor when some developer leaks it.

32:33SPEAKERI don't think that it is as big a problem

32:36SPEAKERas it used to be porting that stuff

32:38SPEAKERbetween the different APIs.

32:39SPEAKER- Yeah, that's good to hear.

32:40SPEAKERI mostly just ask because you need it to be that standardized

32:43SPEAKERfor developers to want to devote both the tech

32:46SPEAKERand the artistic labor to actually exploiting it

32:48SPEAKERand really making the most of it, so.

32:50SPEAKER- I mean, so the big benefit,

32:52SPEAKERthe big difference between this

32:54SPEAKERand a lot of the other stuff that we've seen over the years

32:56SPEAKERis that this stuff has a huge impact

32:58SPEAKERon the visual fidelity of the game.

33:01SPEAKERLike, if you look at Control with RTX on

33:03SPEAKERand Control with RTX off,

33:05SPEAKERit is a fine looking game both ways, right?

33:09SPEAKERBut when you turn on the reflections and the lights

33:11SPEAKERand all that stuff, it looks...

33:13SPEAKERI mean, it looks good enough

33:15SPEAKERthat people who don't play games are like,

33:17SPEAKER"Wow, that looks really good.

33:17SPEAKER"What's going on with this thing?

33:19SPEAKER"This is a neat thing."

33:20SPEAKERYeah.

33:21SPEAKER- Yeah, and again, we talked about it a few months ago

33:23SPEAKERin the ray tracing episode,

33:24SPEAKERbut some of the side-by-side Metro Exodus comparisons

33:27SPEAKERthat are out there, you really get a good sense

33:28SPEAKERof how much this can enhance naturalistic lighting

33:31SPEAKERin a lot of scenes.

33:33SPEAKERBut I just, again, I just want it to be at the point

33:35SPEAKERwhere developers feel they're justified

33:37SPEAKERin actually devoting the time to exploiting it.

33:39SPEAKER- I think given...

33:42SPEAKERThe thing that's gonna happen when these consoles release

33:43SPEAKERis that immediately the number of machines

33:45SPEAKERthat can run ray tracing stuff is going to explode.

33:48SPEAKER- Yeah, like increase by tens of millions, obviously.

33:51SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, yeah.

33:53SPEAKERAnd I think that will...

33:55SPEAKERI mean, developers are pretty...

33:57SPEAKERmercenary is not the right word, but pragmatic

33:59SPEAKERabout the value of their time versus the installed base.

34:03SPEAKERAnd I mean, frankly, that's why Nvidia and AMD,

34:06SPEAKERwhen they roll out new features,

34:08SPEAKERthrow marketing money to game developers

34:12SPEAKERto support those new features,

34:13SPEAKERis because it doesn't make sense for Remedy

34:15SPEAKERto spend the time that they did implementing ray tracing

34:19SPEAKERand control if somebody doesn't help them,

34:23SPEAKERbecause they're not gonna see a return on that money

34:25SPEAKERunless, especially early on.

34:28SPEAKERBut once the console's hit,

34:29SPEAKERI think those returns will start being worth the investment.

34:35SPEAKER- You wanna talk about the velocity engine?

34:38SPEAKER- You mean the input-output architecture?

34:41SPEAKER- Yes, I mean the SSD.

34:43SPEAKER- What do they got going here?

34:43SPEAKERThis is neat, I haven't looked at this stuff at all.

34:46SPEAKER- I guess we knew this going in,

34:47SPEAKERbut it still seems kind of up is down to me

34:51SPEAKERto say that the storage on these machines and the IO stack

34:54SPEAKERis probably the most exciting, interesting thing about them.

34:58SPEAKER- I mean, look, for years we've been saying,

35:00SPEAKERhey, the most meaningful upgrade you can make to your PC

35:04SPEAKERis to put an SSD in it and then install Windows on it.

35:06SPEAKERSo I guess it makes sense, right?

35:09SPEAKER- Totally, but even that was pertaining to like SATA 2

35:12SPEAKERand SATA 3 SSDs, and what we're talking about here

35:14SPEAKERis like an order of magnitude or more faster than that even.

35:17SPEAKERSo like the stuff that it's gonna enable developers to do

35:20SPEAKERis gonna be kind of wild, it seems.

35:24SPEAKER- I think this is the big unknown for me

35:25SPEAKERis how people actually take advantage of this.

35:30SPEAKERThere was a PC game that released this year

35:31SPEAKERthat performed exceptionally badly on traditional hard drives

35:34SPEAKERwas it Destiny 2?

35:36SPEAKER- Uh, not sure, I don't think that was Destiny.

35:40SPEAKER- I can't, but it became clear that somebody had done

35:43SPEAKERall the development on SSDs and like,

35:47SPEAKERoh, people still have hard drives that they play games on?

35:49SPEAKERWell, okay, we can patch this.

35:52SPEAKER- Right, that's right up there with font sizes

35:55SPEAKERbeing too small in games because developers have TVs

35:57SPEAKERon their desks and sit very close to them.

36:00SPEAKER- Yeah, oh yeah, I'm gonna look at that.

36:01SPEAKERLet me get my magnifier out for the dead rising feed.

36:04SPEAKER- Yeah.

36:06SPEAKER- I think adding an SSD,

36:09SPEAKERlook, I'm fine getting rid of load times forever.

36:11SPEAKERI just played Black Mesa and like even on a modern machine,

36:16SPEAKERthere's so many loads in that game because it was made

36:18SPEAKERin the era of like eight megabytes of memory or something.

36:24SPEAKERYeah, it's interesting, this is a good change.

36:28SPEAKERI think the more interesting thing is that they're doing

36:30SPEAKERthings like quick resume for multiple games,

36:32SPEAKERlike that is like not having to keep that stuff in memory

36:35SPEAKERand being able to dump it out to the SSD is really exciting.

36:38SPEAKERHow big is that?

36:39SPEAKER- A, that's a quality of life.

36:41SPEAKERWell, we're getting out of ourselves.

36:43SPEAKERThat's more of a quality of life feature,

36:44SPEAKERbut also like B, that is something they could do now,

36:47SPEAKERit's just that it would take forever to load that state

36:49SPEAKERoff of the hard drive back into memory.

36:51SPEAKER- Right, right.

36:52SPEAKER- To the point that it's not worth doing

36:53SPEAKERand this is something that enables them to do that

36:55SPEAKERin a way that's actually convenient and pleasant.

36:57SPEAKERBut so yeah, the storage size is a terabyte on this thing.

37:01SPEAKER- Okay.

37:02SPEAKER- Which that was right up there with the RAM,

37:04SPEAKERthat was another one of those big question marks

37:06SPEAKERof just like, all right, what's the number?

37:07SPEAKERIs it gonna be--

37:08SPEAKER- 128 gigabytes.

37:09SPEAKER- Surely you're not gonna go with half a terabyte,

37:11SPEAKERthat would be complete insanity.

37:13SPEAKERI think a terabyte was the absolute minimum

37:15SPEAKERthat they could put in this thing.

37:16SPEAKERLike I was kind of hoping there would be

37:18SPEAKERa two terabyte model, but that's not gonna happen.

37:20SPEAKER- You have a unique set of requirements, Brad.

37:24SPEAKER- Yes, I guess both of my consoles have five terabytes

37:27SPEAKERof storage at the moment.

37:29SPEAKER- Good God.

37:30SPEAKER- Yeah, it's pretty great, it's pretty great.

37:33SPEAKER- So, okay, so it's real fast.

37:37SPEAKERThey gave some numbers here for throughput,

37:40SPEAKERlike 2.4 gigabytes per second raw.

37:42SPEAKERAnd they're saying 4.8 gigabytes with compressed data,

37:44SPEAKERwhich seems a little bit optimistic to me.

37:47SPEAKER- Yeah.

37:51SPEAKER- I think like this is one of the places

37:54SPEAKERthat the Xbox is a lot slower than Sony's numbers.

37:57SPEAKER- Yes, but not slow in an absolute sense.

38:00SPEAKERIt is very, it's like half of the numbers that Sony quoted,

38:04SPEAKERbut also like how much memory for games are we talking?

38:06SPEAKERLike 12 or 13 and a half, something like that?

38:09SPEAKER- 13 and a half gigs, yeah.

38:10SPEAKER- 13, 14 gigs, like you're still gonna be able

38:12SPEAKERto fill most of that memory very, very quickly.

38:15SPEAKER- But I mean, four seconds is an enormous amount of time

38:19SPEAKERin, I mean, that's 480 frames worth of rendering

38:24SPEAKERif you're running at 120 Hertz.

38:26SPEAKERSo. - Yeah, okay, sure.

38:29SPEAKER- So it's a magnitude slower than the memory,

38:31SPEAKERorder of magnitude slower than memory,

38:32SPEAKEReven though it's this much faster.

38:34SPEAKERLook. - Right.

38:36SPEAKER- My hunch is that the thing that's gonna happen

38:38SPEAKERis that everybody's gonna build their stuff

38:39SPEAKERfor this hardware.

38:41SPEAKER- Yes, so I had that question and I was trying to save it

38:44SPEAKERtill we get to the PS5 'cause that's where

38:46SPEAKERthe insane numbers are for storage.

38:47SPEAKER- Okay, yeah, we'll just hold it then.

38:49SPEAKER- But I mean, well, yeah, you're kind of addressing it now.

38:52SPEAKER- I mean, I don't know, we'll see.

38:54SPEAKERAnd it may be something that's more transparent

38:56SPEAKERthan I would expect.

38:57SPEAKERThe nice thing is I think we're gonna see the end

38:59SPEAKERof like the goofy Xbox 360 generation stuff,

39:02SPEAKERlike the Mass Effect five-minute elevators

39:05SPEAKERand the long hallways and--

39:08SPEAKER- So Sony talked about that and well,

39:09SPEAKERI guess we'll get to that, but do you think that's also true

39:11SPEAKERon the Xbox where it's fast but not as fast?

39:13SPEAKER- It should be fine, I would think.

39:15SPEAKER- Yeah. - I mean, especially given

39:18SPEAKERall the work that people did in the current generation

39:21SPEAKERto do streaming off of hard drives, streaming level,

39:25SPEAKERlike the work that Epic has done with Unreal

39:28SPEAKERto do streaming levels off of hard drives

39:30SPEAKERin like giant as open world games is frankly astounding.

39:34SPEAKERLike it's really neat.

39:36SPEAKERLike look at, I mean, the fact that you could load up

39:38SPEAKERRed Dead on an Xbox launch, Xbox One or launch PS4

39:44SPEAKERand not see a game load if you don't fast travel

39:47SPEAKERis amazing to me still.

39:50SPEAKER- Sure, yeah, it's getting to be pretty old hardware.

39:54SPEAKER- Yeah, and if you put that technology

39:57SPEAKERon a couple of orders of magnitude faster throughput,

40:01SPEAKERyou'll be fine, this is a good change.

40:05SPEAKER- Yeah.

40:06SPEAKER- The storage on this is expandable.

40:09SPEAKERDid they say, I mean, obviously they're not talking

40:12SPEAKERabout pricing on anything, but presumably you can buy

40:14SPEAKERanother terabyte and jam it into the card slot in the back?

40:18SPEAKER- Yeah, did they say the cards are only a terabyte?

40:20SPEAKERProbably the case.

40:21SPEAKER- I would assume that they'll start in one size

40:23SPEAKERand get bigger over the life of the hardware,

40:25SPEAKERbut I don't know for sure.

40:28SPEAKER- There was kind of a pretty strong backlash to this

40:32SPEAKERthat I saw, people seem--

40:34SPEAKER- Oh, proprietary.

40:35SPEAKER- I was really skeptical about the idea of having

40:37SPEAKERto buy proprietary storage expansions again.

40:39SPEAKER- I mean, we can talk about that on the other side.

40:41SPEAKERIt seems like Sony is gonna have to qual the hardware

40:44SPEAKERthat they sell as well.

40:46SPEAKER- Yes, they have a much different and more kind

40:48SPEAKERof laissez-faire approach, but that is complicated

40:50SPEAKERin its own way, we'll get there.

40:51SPEAKERBut I mean, the big thing is like the subversion

40:54SPEAKERof this problem was unavoidable, right?

40:56SPEAKER- Yeah.

40:57SPEAKER- Like this is, I made this analogy on one of the,

41:01SPEAKERI forget, we've done so many live streams and podcasts

41:04SPEAKERon Giant Bomb this week, I don't know where I said it,

41:06SPEAKERbut kind of made the analogy of like, you know,

41:10SPEAKERApple ditching the old iPod connector

41:11SPEAKERfor the lightning port.

41:12SPEAKERLike at some point, there's got to be some amount of pain

41:15SPEAKERwhen you transition to something

41:16SPEAKERthat's profoundly more advanced.

41:18SPEAKER- I mean, look, I would have much rather Microsoft

41:22SPEAKERhave a little thing you can unscrew

41:24SPEAKERand jam an M2 card in there.

41:26SPEAKER- Yeah, ironically, it sounds like they maybe could get away

41:30SPEAKERwith that because their numbers are a lot closer

41:32SPEAKERto off-the-shelf hardware than Sony's are.

41:34SPEAKER- Well, I think there's still PCI Express 4.

41:37SPEAKER- Yes, that is true.

41:38SPEAKER- Which doesn't really exist that,

41:41SPEAKERthose cards are hard to find or don't exist yet,

41:43SPEAKERit's unclear to me.

41:48SPEAKERLook, Microsoft has done this, each generation,

41:53SPEAKERdid the Xbox One X, you didn't have an external,

41:57SPEAKERyou could plug an external USB drive in,

41:59SPEAKERbut it had to be a specific one, right?

42:01SPEAKEROr did you just say anything works by the end, okay.

42:03SPEAKER- Pretty much any USB three drive,

42:04SPEAKERlike they sell an Xbox branded Seagate drive,

42:07SPEAKERbut you absolutely could just get any reasonably fast

42:10SPEAKERUSB three drive and use it.

42:14SPEAKERSo this was the generation where external storage

42:16SPEAKERwas democratized and now a lot of people just see this

42:19SPEAKERas a regression of that and I can kind of get

42:22SPEAKERthe discomfort that people feel seeing that,

42:26SPEAKERbut I think it's all just gonna come down

42:28SPEAKERto the pricing on these cards, right?

42:29SPEAKERIf they're modest, if they're modestly priced,

42:31SPEAKERwhich they should be,

42:33SPEAKERthen I don't think it'll be a huge problem.

42:34SPEAKER- I mean, I don't think that this is gonna be

42:37SPEAKERa VITA situation where you have some weird memory card

42:39SPEAKERthat only Sony makes, it's 10 times the cost

42:42SPEAKERof a comparable SD card.

42:45SPEAKERI mean, that's--

42:46SPEAKER- If anything, it seems like a nod toward usability, right?

42:50SPEAKERBecause if you look at it, if people aren't familiar

42:53SPEAKERwith what an off the shelf M2 drive looks like,

42:55SPEAKERyou should take a look at it

42:56SPEAKERbecause it's a bare circuit board,

42:58SPEAKERhas to be installed directly on a motherboard

43:00SPEAKERin a very specific way, you need to screw it in.

43:03SPEAKEROften those slots are underneath the CPU cooler

43:05SPEAKERand hard to get to, it's not a user friendly experience

43:08SPEAKERat all.

43:09SPEAKER- Well, and there's something Mark Cerny talked about

43:12SPEAKERas well that I wasn't aware of,

43:13SPEAKERwhich is that there's M2 cards have length and width specs,

43:18SPEAKERbut there's no thickness spec.

43:20SPEAKERSo--

43:21SPEAKER- Oh, okay, I didn't know that.

43:23SPEAKER- Yeah, so look, here's the thing,

43:25SPEAKERis if this is priced reasonably,

43:27SPEAKERif it's not like the Xbox 360 hard drive,

43:29SPEAKERwhich was always a pretty substantial price premium

43:32SPEAKERover the comparable laptop hard drive,

43:36SPEAKERjust because it was in that weird sled,

43:38SPEAKERlike this'll be fine.

43:40SPEAKERIf this is a, it's in Microsoft's interest

43:43SPEAKERto make this thing a cost center, a profit center.

43:47SPEAKER- Yeah, like they should not sell this

43:48SPEAKERas a high margin profit driver.

43:51SPEAKER- Yeah, the cheaper it is,

43:52SPEAKERthe more games people can buy, so--

43:54SPEAKER- Totally, totally.

43:55SPEAKERTo me, it behooves them to get more storage out there

43:57SPEAKERfor people to download more software.

43:58SPEAKER- Yeah.

44:00SPEAKER- So--

44:00SPEAKER- Okay, so a couple other things.

44:02SPEAKERAudio runs on the CPU.

44:03SPEAKEROh, you can plug in a USB 3.2 hard drive for old games

44:08SPEAKERand for cold storage for games

44:10SPEAKERthat you're not playing as much.

44:12SPEAKERAnd hopefully the Xbox will do just as good a job

44:14SPEAKERwith that process as it did this generation.

44:17SPEAKER- Yeah.

44:18SPEAKER- Oh, did they show the, has anybody showed the UI running?

44:21SPEAKERIs it fast now?

44:22SPEAKERThat's the big question I have.

44:23SPEAKER- So they put out a couple of really short tech,

44:25SPEAKERlike literally like 90 seconds or two minute long

44:28SPEAKERkind of little tech demos on YouTube.

44:30SPEAKEROne was for loading, but it was for State of Decay 2,

44:33SPEAKERwhich is an Xbox One game, not a,

44:36SPEAKERso you're still looking at a loading screen.

44:37SPEAKERIt was not here's how fast we can stream assets,

44:39SPEAKERbut it was like, hey, this game loaded

44:42SPEAKERprobably 10 times faster on the new console

44:45SPEAKERthan it did on the old one.

44:46SPEAKERSo you see that in action.

44:47SPEAKERAnd then they put out a separate demo

44:49SPEAKERof the multiple game quick resume feature.

44:53SPEAKERAnd in both cases, they were using

44:54SPEAKERwhat basically looked like an Xbox One dashboard

44:56SPEAKERto run that stuff.

44:57SPEAKERBut I don't think that means

44:58SPEAKERthat's what's gonna be in the final box.

45:00SPEAKER- Yeah.

45:01SPEAKER- Like I wouldn't be surprised

45:02SPEAKERif they're just using that as a temp UI

45:04SPEAKERwhile they do development.

45:05SPEAKER'Cause I would expect a refresh, if nothing else,

45:08SPEAKERat least like a visual refresh on the UI.

45:10SPEAKER- I hope they bring the blades back.

45:12SPEAKERJust straight throwback to the blades, man.

45:15SPEAKERPut them up there.

45:16SPEAKER- Blades worked very well.

45:17SPEAKER- Ah, the blades are okay.

45:18SPEAKER- Shorten the point.

45:19SPEAKER- So cool.

45:22SPEAKERThe audio runs on the CPU, just like on the PC.

45:25SPEAKERThat's one of the things they're gonna run

45:28SPEAKERon the extra cores.

45:30SPEAKERThey're redesigning the game pad ever so slightly.

45:32SPEAKERYour old Xbox One game pads will continue to work.

45:36SPEAKERThey're adding a share button

45:37SPEAKERand they brought back the stupid disk D-pad,

45:40SPEAKERwhich I really don't like. - Why?

45:42SPEAKERI don't know why.

45:43SPEAKER- I mean, just buy your Xbox controllers now

45:45SPEAKERbefore the old ones go out of stock.

45:47SPEAKER- Yeah, that makes me extra glad

45:48SPEAKERthat you can use your old ones.

45:49SPEAKER- So they're doing some new optimizing around.

45:53SPEAKER- Is it only the Bluetooth ones, do you know?

45:54SPEAKEROr is it all the old Xbox ones?

45:56SPEAKER- I would assume,

45:57SPEAKERI think they've basically flatly said

46:00SPEAKERany old accessories will work.

46:01SPEAKER- Oh, nice, okay.

46:03SPEAKERI got my Kinect ready to go.

46:06SPEAKER- Maybe there's some exceptions.

46:09SPEAKERSo they're doing some work

46:10SPEAKERaround streamlining input latency

46:12SPEAKERover wireless for the controllers and stuff like that.

46:14SPEAKERAnd my understanding is even that will trickle down

46:18SPEAKERto the old controllers with the firmware updating.

46:20SPEAKER- If they have the right Bluetooth radio, I assume, right?

46:23SPEAKER- Yeah, well, again,

46:24SPEAKERthat may go over their proprietary wireless,

46:26SPEAKERnot just the Bluetooth, I would hope.

46:28SPEAKER- Interesting.

46:30SPEAKERThey're doing a lot of work.

46:31SPEAKEROh, they added a share button, a dedicated share button.

46:34SPEAKERI thought they had that,

46:35SPEAKERbut I guess their select button equivalent

46:38SPEAKERis like a task switching thing, right?

46:40SPEAKER- Well, in the past you would use,

46:42SPEAKERlike you would pop the guide,

46:43SPEAKERyou would hit the big X home button

46:45SPEAKERand have to go through a couple extra button presses

46:48SPEAKERto activate that stuff.

46:48SPEAKER- Oh God, the horror.

46:49SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

46:51SPEAKER- They're working on input lag and screen tearing.

46:54SPEAKERThis seems, so one of the things that was interesting

46:56SPEAKERis they talked about decoupling frame buffer and latency.

46:59SPEAKERSo instead of tying start times to v-sync,

47:05SPEAKERthey now separate them by milliseconds.

47:08SPEAKERSo the game is more aware

47:11SPEAKERand doesn't necessarily start throwing out frames

47:13SPEAKERuntil one lands.

47:15SPEAKERSo things like triple buffering don't increase latency

47:18SPEAKERat the cost of less tearing and stuff like that.

47:22SPEAKERAnd then they're doing HDR for old games,

47:25SPEAKERwhich I thought was,

47:26SPEAKERthis is a great machine learning application.

47:29SPEAKER- Dynamically, yeah.

47:30SPEAKER- I mean, it's not dynamically like on runtime,

47:34SPEAKERit's for like they're doing the work

47:37SPEAKERas part of the back compat process, right?

47:39SPEAKER- Yes, yeah, sorry.

47:40SPEAKERI don't mean dynamically in real time.

47:42SPEAKERI just meant dynamically as in somebody

47:44SPEAKERdoesn't have to get in there and hand tune

47:46SPEAKERa bunch of brightness settings

47:47SPEAKERlike they are running it through algorithms.

47:49SPEAKER- I'm gonna be really interested to see what,

47:51SPEAKERlike I have to imagine that's gonna produce

47:52SPEAKERsome really beautiful nightmares.

47:54SPEAKER(laughing)

47:56SPEAKER- I'm sure there's a QA process that it goes through.

47:59SPEAKER- I wanna see the bad ones.

48:00SPEAKERI wanna see like everything blown out real weird

48:04SPEAKERand I wanna see weird games, man.

48:07SPEAKER- So their backwards compatibility story,

48:09SPEAKERI mean, we'll touch on this with the PS5 stuff,

48:11SPEAKERbut the Microsoft solution to backwards compatibility

48:13SPEAKERis incredibly comprehensive.

48:15SPEAKER- Okay.

48:16SPEAKER- It basically sounds like I should,

48:19SPEAKERI feel it feels a little risky saying this

48:22SPEAKER'cause I wanna make sure it's 100% accurate,

48:23SPEAKERbut I'm pretty sure they said anything

48:25SPEAKERthat runs on an Xbox One will now run on the Series X.

48:27SPEAKER- Wow.

48:28SPEAKER- That is definitely true of the 360

48:30SPEAKERand original Xbox games 'cause I wanna say that stuff

48:34SPEAKERis all couched in a VM anyway.

48:37SPEAKER- Oh, yeah, that makes sense.

48:38SPEAKERYeah, that makes sense.

48:41SPEAKER- Whereas it sounds like the Xbox One compatibility

48:43SPEAKERis baked into the actual silicon.

48:47SPEAKER- Well, it's a super set.

48:48SPEAKERThe Xbox One, the Xbox Series X is a super set

48:52SPEAKERof the Xbox One X presumably.

48:55SPEAKER- And so it sounds like Xbox One games

48:57SPEAKERthat you run on this are gonna benefit from,

48:59SPEAKERhave you messed with 360 games on a One X very much?

49:02SPEAKER- I don't have a One X.

49:03SPEAKERI never got one.

49:04SPEAKER- Okay, they've done some pretty incredible stuff

49:06SPEAKERwhere they'll like a lot of 360 games run natively

49:10SPEAKERat 4K on the One X now and get better V sync

49:13SPEAKERand better frame rates and all kinds of stuff.

49:16SPEAKERLike it's really impressive.

49:18SPEAKERAnd so apparently that same benefit is gonna extend

49:20SPEAKERto Xbox One games running on a Series X.

49:23SPEAKER- That's really exciting 'cause there's a lot

49:24SPEAKERof Xbox One games that were kind of chunky

49:27SPEAKERon the watch hardware.

49:28SPEAKER- Totally, totally.

49:29SPEAKERSo Digital Foundry talked about cases where like

49:31SPEAKERyou've got One X games that have a quote unquote

49:33SPEAKERperformance mode that's supposed to run

49:34SPEAKERat a higher frame rate, but it doesn't hit

49:36SPEAKERlike a steady target.

49:38SPEAKERAnd they're saying like games like that will benefit

49:41SPEAKERfrom running at a higher resolution

49:42SPEAKERand hitting those frame rate targets more consistently

49:45SPEAKERon this hardware.

49:46SPEAKERAnd then the third party developers will not have

49:49SPEAKERto do any work to achieve that.

49:51SPEAKERMicrosoft is streamlining that process

49:55SPEAKERand doing that work themselves.

49:56SPEAKERSo it sounds incredibly capable

49:58SPEAKERfrom a backwards compatible standpoint.

49:59SPEAKER- I mean, it's interesting because stuff's forward

50:01SPEAKERand backwards compatible, right?

50:03SPEAKERSo like these launch games will work on a One or a One X.

50:08SPEAKERI believe that's only confirmed

50:10SPEAKERfor Microsoft first-party games.

50:12SPEAKER- Okay, okay.

50:12SPEAKER- I wanna say that's up to each individual publisher.

50:15SPEAKER- Okay, how they support that.

50:16SPEAKEROkay, that makes more sense.

50:19SPEAKERIt's interesting, like this seems like a really capable

50:21SPEAKERpiece of hardware that seems comparable

50:23SPEAKERwith like a pretty nice PC these days

50:26SPEAKERto a really nice PC on the machine learning

50:29SPEAKERand great training stuff.

50:31SPEAKER- Digital Foundry was like looking for,

50:34SPEAKERand this is not quite apples to apples,

50:36SPEAKERbut it was probably as close as they can get.

50:37SPEAKERLike they were looking for equivalent performance numbers

50:40SPEAKERon PC and arrived at,

50:42SPEAKERI wanna say it was like a Ryzen 3700 and a 2080.

50:46SPEAKER- Yeah, that's pretty good.

50:47SPEAKERThat's a pretty nice PC.

50:48SPEAKER- Pretty, it's like a better PC than I have right now

50:51SPEAKERby far. - Yeah, yeah.

50:53SPEAKER- So for that to be in a five, $600 box under your TV

50:56SPEAKERis gonna be pretty exciting.

50:57SPEAKER- Did they talk about cooling and noise at all yet

51:00SPEAKERfor the Xbox?

51:02SPEAKER- I didn't have a chance to watch it,

51:04SPEAKERbut the DF guys did a standalone video

51:07SPEAKERwhere they actually took apart an Xbox One Series X,

51:10SPEAKERor I'm sorry, an Xbox Series X.

51:12SPEAKERThere's that. - Yeah, it's a bad name.

51:14SPEAKER- Branding confusion, but they took the box apart

51:16SPEAKERand put it back together piece by piece

51:18SPEAKERso you can kind of see how the cooling is assembled.

51:20SPEAKERAnd I know that thing is a weird shape

51:22SPEAKERand I know it has actually two different system boards.

51:25SPEAKERThere are two boards connected together

51:28SPEAKERrather than one giant main board.

51:30SPEAKERSo I wanna say there's like custom cooling

51:33SPEAKERin between those boards and like multiple layers of it.

51:36SPEAKERSo.

51:36SPEAKER- I'm just, conceptually, I'm a little worried

51:39SPEAKERabout the manufacturer of that thing.

51:40SPEAKERUsually single plane boards are easier to manufacture.

51:44SPEAKERI know Microsoft is good at this at this point

51:46SPEAKERafter losing a billion dollars on the 360.

51:50SPEAKERBut I look at that thing and I'm like,

51:54SPEAKERthat looks really cool, it's a weird shape.

51:55SPEAKERI don't know where I'm gonna put it,

51:56SPEAKERbut also I am worried about manufacturing on that.

52:00SPEAKERIt seems like a challenging manufacturer.

52:02SPEAKER- Do you think having these chips run at locked frequencies

52:06SPEAKERsimplifies the thermal design a good bit?

52:08SPEAKERI mean, you're still gonna have a lot of variation

52:12SPEAKERas load increases, right?

52:13SPEAKER- Yeah, but in theory it should work.

52:18SPEAKERWe'll talk about this more on the PlayStation side,

52:20SPEAKERbut there's interesting choices.

52:22SPEAKERSony's made some interesting choices there

52:23SPEAKERthat I think are novel and maybe really good, we'll see.

52:29SPEAKERDo you wanna take a quick break and roll into PlayStation?

52:32SPEAKER- Yeah, sure, sure, that sounds good.

52:34SPEAKER(upbeat music)

52:40SPEAKER- PlayStation 5.

52:42SPEAKER- PlayStation 5, they're still doing the numbering thing.

52:46SPEAKER- The PlayStation 5.

52:48SPEAKER- The PlayStation?

52:49SPEAKER- No, the PlayStation 5.

52:52SPEAKER- Do you remember the rumors about PlayStation Orbis?

52:54SPEAKER- Man, that's such a cool name.

52:56SPEAKER- And then that turned out to actually just be

52:58SPEAKERlike the development environment, the operating system.

53:00SPEAKER- Orbis.

53:01SPEAKER- Have you ever seen, I saw like a developer

53:04SPEAKERor somebody posted a screenshot

53:07SPEAKERof a PS4 development kit one time years ago

53:09SPEAKERand the bootloader screen for the PS4 just looks like a,

53:16SPEAKERif I remember, it looks very similar to like a stock,

53:18SPEAKERlike free BSD boot screen except it just lists Orbis

53:23SPEAKERas like a build of free BSD 'cause that's what it is.

53:25SPEAKER- I am not currently an active PlayStation developer,

53:28SPEAKERbut I can't talk about these things.

53:30SPEAKER- Oh, interesting, okay.

53:31SPEAKERWell, I didn't sign any.

53:33SPEAKER- You didn't sign anything.

53:33SPEAKERYou can talk about whatever you want.

53:34SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

53:36SPEAKERI just, I love thinking about like the machines

53:39SPEAKERon the consoles and our TV are actually just running

53:41SPEAKERthis incredibly common operating system

53:43SPEAKERunderneath everything else.

53:44SPEAKER- Look, those elves, man, they're in there.

53:46SPEAKERThey're just pounding away the BSDs.

53:50SPEAKER- The Dreamcast ran the Windows CE kernel.

53:54SPEAKERAll right, okay, that's too much of a tangent.

53:56SPEAKERLet's move on.

53:57SPEAKER- Best console ever.

53:58SPEAKER- Okay, so PlayStation 5, basically same,

54:02SPEAKERnot basically the same CPU, but the same CPU core,

54:06SPEAKERAMD Zen 2.

54:07SPEAKER- Same architecture, same micro architecture Zen 2.

54:09SPEAKER- Eight cores, 16 threads.

54:10SPEAKERThey're clocked at 3.5 gigahertz.

54:13SPEAKER- Yeah, up to 3.5 gigahertz, so their clocks,

54:16SPEAKERtheir clocks are variable in like the Xbox.

54:18SPEAKER- Yeah, this is, we'll get into that in a minute,

54:20SPEAKERbut they run at demand basically

54:24SPEAKERrather than always full speed.

54:27SPEAKER16 gigs of GDDR6 on a 256-bit bus.

54:31SPEAKERI don't know, did Microsoft say what with their bus was?

54:34SPEAKERI don't think they did.

54:35SPEAKERWe can do that now.

54:36SPEAKER- The Google Foundry video has some of that in there.

54:39SPEAKERI wanna say the faster memory in the Xbox is a 320-bit bus.

54:44SPEAKER- Okay.

54:45SPEAKER- So I saw the throughput for the PS5's memory

54:49SPEAKERand I don't have it in front of me right now,

54:50SPEAKERbut it's in the 400s.

54:52SPEAKERSo their memory is all one speed,

54:54SPEAKERwhich is faster than the Xbox's slow memory

54:56SPEAKERand slower than the Xbox's fast memory.

54:59SPEAKER- So split the difference and it's probably fine.

55:01SPEAKER- Yeah.

55:02SPEAKER- Okay. - Yes.

55:04SPEAKER- The GPU is 36 compute units, 10.28 teraflops theoretical,

55:09SPEAKERrunning at 2.23 gigahertz and it's variable frequency too.

55:14SPEAKERSo it runs at demand rather than always at full speed.

55:17SPEAKERThe thing that I would say,

55:19SPEAKERand they talked about this in the Digital Foundry article

55:22SPEAKERand like you can't compare things like compute units

55:26SPEAKERfrom this generation to last generation,

55:29SPEAKERbecause the compute units we have now are,

55:31SPEAKERthere's a lot more transistors involved.

55:33SPEAKERThere are a lot more capable

55:34SPEAKERthan the last generation compute units.

55:38SPEAKER- Yeah, so this is a thorny issue

55:40SPEAKERbecause this is where the raw technical capabilities

55:42SPEAKERof the console run headfirst into like the marketing demands

55:46SPEAKERof selling this to a somewhat tech savvy audience

55:49SPEAKERthat wants to think it's the most powerful box.

55:51SPEAKER- Yeah.

55:53SPEAKER- So as far as like horsepower of the PS4 versus the PS5,

55:57SPEAKERyou're totally right because like the analogy there

56:00SPEAKERis that like, hey, Intel CPUs have been running

56:02SPEAKERat like pretty close to the same clock speeds

56:04SPEAKERfor a long time, but successive generations

56:07SPEAKERkeep being faster and it's because of this exact same

56:10SPEAKERconcept.

56:11SPEAKER- Yeah, more transistors equals more math

56:13SPEAKERequals faster at the same clock.

56:15SPEAKER- So in other words, like a GPU compute unit of PS4

56:19SPEAKERobviously is not as fast as one in the PS5.

56:22SPEAKER- The question I have is how directly analogous

56:24SPEAKERare the compute units in the PS5

56:26SPEAKERversus those of the Series X?

56:27SPEAKER- They're probably almost exactly the same.

56:30SPEAKER- Okay, that is a more telling comparison I think

56:33SPEAKERbecause the, yeah, because the Xbox's number

56:36SPEAKERis in the 50s versus the 36 here.

56:38SPEAKER- Yeah, it depends.

56:39SPEAKERLike it's impossible to say without running tests

56:42SPEAKERon the hardware, like writing code for the hardware

56:44SPEAKERwhich will probably never happen

56:45SPEAKERsince these are closed platforms.

56:46SPEAKER- Yeah, and we're not capable of doing that.

56:50SPEAKER- So here's the larger thing about this

56:53SPEAKERis that I think that the time of the hey,

56:58SPEAKERthis is the fastest hardware stopped

57:00SPEAKERmaybe two generations ago.

57:03SPEAKER- Yeah.

57:04SPEAKER- Like it's not like, this isn't like the 16-bit generation

57:08SPEAKERwhen somebody was baking copy versions of Strider

57:11SPEAKERthat were different on Xbox and, sorry,

57:13SPEAKERon SNES and Genesis because those machines

57:16SPEAKERwere different capabilities or Mortal Kombat

57:18SPEAKERor whatever your favorite example was from that generation.

57:21SPEAKERLike everybody, these people are taking,

57:23SPEAKERnow developers are taking the same exact game

57:25SPEAKERand just porting it to run on different platforms.

57:27SPEAKERWe're not gonna get a good version and a bad version.

57:30SPEAKERWe're just gonna get the version that runs

57:31SPEAKERat 120 frames a second and the version

57:33SPEAKERthat runs at 60 to 90 frames a second.

57:35SPEAKER- Yeah, to me as much as some of the numbers

57:38SPEAKERbetween these two consoles vary, I think the real world,

57:41SPEAKERthe actual implementation of that stuff

57:42SPEAKERis gonna be barely perceptible in a lot of cases.

57:44SPEAKER- That's my guess, especially, yeah, early.

57:47SPEAKER- We've hit such a point of diminishing returns

57:49SPEAKERon a lot of this stuff, like even going back

57:50SPEAKERto the beginning of the last generation,

57:52SPEAKERlike the difference between 720p and 1080p

57:55SPEAKERor even like 900p and 1080p is,

57:59SPEAKERA, is not super perceptible to the average person,

58:02SPEAKERbut even that is way more perceptible

58:03SPEAKERthan the difference between like native 4K

58:06SPEAKERand somewhat close to 4K,

58:08SPEAKERespecially sitting eight or 10 feet away from your TV.

58:10SPEAKERLike those things are just not that easy to tell apart.

58:12SPEAKER- Yeah, for anybody who bought a 4K TV that supports HDR,

58:17SPEAKERlike the jump from 1080p to 4K,

58:19SPEAKERif you had a decent 1080p TV is pretty minimal, right?

58:23SPEAKERThere's more pixels.

58:24SPEAKERThe HDR is a huge deal.

58:27SPEAKERAnd like, I think in this case,

58:30SPEAKERlike as long as your machines are fast enough

58:31SPEAKERto run ray tracing, you're probably fine.

58:34SPEAKER- Yeah, that's kind of the stuff I'm getting at.

58:35SPEAKER- These are all gonna be fast enough to run ray tracing.

58:39SPEAKER- Like the Xbox games may have a few more graphical effects

58:42SPEAKERor maybe at a higher fidelity

58:43SPEAKERor at a slightly higher resolution than the PS5.

58:45SPEAKER- Or they might run at 120 Hertz, right, versus 60.

58:51SPEAKERYeah, but most TVs that are out now won't run 120 Hertz.

58:54SPEAKERSo that's a different problem for a different day.

58:56SPEAKER- Yeah, but I just, I don't think like in real world

58:59SPEAKERexamples, I don't feel like the difference

59:01SPEAKERis gonna be that noticeable.

59:02SPEAKER- I would not, like, look, if you can load up a game

59:07SPEAKERon the PS4 and the Xbox One X and tell the difference,

59:10SPEAKERjust looking at, you load the same game on both platforms

59:12SPEAKERand you can see the difference between them, great.

59:15SPEAKERMost people aren't like that.

59:16SPEAKERAnd really the thing that matters is where your friends are

59:19SPEAKERand which platform has the games that you want, not,

59:22SPEAKERoh, my line has 10.28 teraflops and this one has 10.155.

59:26SPEAKERI got the bad bitch, don't worry about that stuff.

59:28SPEAKERJust play your games and have fun, man.

59:33SPEAKERSo GPU in this, like I said, 10.28 teraflops.

59:39SPEAKERThey do--

59:40SPEAKER- Very, very similar feature set, right?

59:41SPEAKER- Yeah, hardware accelerated ray tracing,

59:43SPEAKERprobably mesh shaders.

59:45SPEAKERThen they described something that sounded like mesh shaders.

59:47SPEAKERI don't think they actually called it mesh shaders.

59:51SPEAKERIt is a very capable GPU.

59:56SPEAKERThe one thing I will say is it seems like this is a machine

59:58SPEAKERthat's designed more for 4K and maybe Microsoft is thinking

1:00:02SPEAKERthere's an 8K play in this, the slightly faster machine,

1:00:07SPEAKERbut it's still four times more pixels than the 4K has.

1:00:10SPEAKERSo I'm not optimistic for good performance at 8K

1:00:15SPEAKERon either of these pieces of hardware.

1:00:17SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:00:19SPEAKER- The thing that Sony's doing that's weird

1:00:22SPEAKERand I haven't seen, I think anywhere outside of maybe mobile

1:00:25SPEAKERis this boost clock stuff.

1:00:28SPEAKERSo your PC performance is tied to thermal capability.

1:00:35SPEAKERSo your GPU can run as fast as you want,

1:00:37SPEAKERbut it can only cool so much at a time

1:00:39SPEAKERbased on the cooler that you have.

1:00:41SPEAKERAnd so they throttle down when you reach

1:00:42SPEAKERcertain temperatures and stuff like that

1:00:44SPEAKERwhen you're at max workload.

1:00:45SPEAKERMobile devices are tied to how much power

1:00:47SPEAKERthe battery can pump out as well as the thermal overhead.

1:00:51SPEAKERThe PS5 processes the same workload in any environment

1:00:56SPEAKERas what Cerny said in his video.

1:00:59SPEAKERInstead of running at the same frequency

1:01:01SPEAKERand letting the power vary by workload,

1:01:03SPEAKERthey let the system run at constant power

1:01:07SPEAKERand vary the frequency based on the workload.

1:01:09SPEAKERIs that right?

1:01:10SPEAKERYeah. - Okay.

1:01:11SPEAKER- So I don't exactly understand what the benefit of this is.

1:01:16SPEAKERIt's a weird choice.

1:01:19SPEAKERThe way they described this on Digital Foundry

1:01:21SPEAKERand the stuff that I saw is that

1:01:23SPEAKERit's gonna draw the same wattage no matter the load,

1:01:26SPEAKERwhich I don't, that seems pretty inefficient.

1:01:33SPEAKERYeah, so I don't know.

1:01:34SPEAKERI wanna know more about this feature

1:01:36SPEAKERbefore we really get into it.

1:01:39SPEAKERLike I don't--

1:01:39SPEAKER- This stuff is, this is pretty new to me.

1:01:41SPEAKERSome of it is a little over my head,

1:01:43SPEAKERbut do you think any of this ties into the thermal design?

1:01:46SPEAKERIs that the priority here?

1:01:47SPEAKERIs it like cooling or thermal dissipation considerations or?

1:01:51SPEAKER- I mean, I think their point is

1:01:54SPEAKERyou're not gonna see frame sags

1:01:55SPEAKERbecause the machine is too hot.

1:01:57SPEAKERLike you're inside the operating parameters of the machine,

1:02:01SPEAKERyou're not gonna have anything throttled.

1:02:03SPEAKERYou know how sometimes when you're,

1:02:05SPEAKERif your PC's overheating when you're playing a game,

1:02:08SPEAKERthe frame rate starts to dip

1:02:10SPEAKERbecause the GPU has to slow under clock some.

1:02:13SPEAKERI think their whole point is we're adjusting frequency,

1:02:19SPEAKERlike by adjusting the frequency based on the workload,

1:02:21SPEAKERthe system frequency based on the workload,

1:02:23SPEAKERrather than the system power,

1:02:28SPEAKERthe amount of energy going into the CPU and GPU,

1:02:31SPEAKERyou can, I mean, you get probably better performance

1:02:35SPEAKERat slightly more efficient, with more efficiency.

1:02:38SPEAKER- I don't know.

1:02:39SPEAKER- Yeah, I would love to hear from any developers

1:02:41SPEAKERwho have a better grasp on this stuff

1:02:43SPEAKERand can provide like some kind of real world example

1:02:46SPEAKERof how this would come into play.

1:02:47SPEAKERI would love to hear about that stuff

1:02:48SPEAKER'cause this is very abstract

1:02:50SPEAKERand a little hard to wrap your head around.

1:02:51SPEAKER- It's not a knock on Digital Foundry or Mark Cerny,

1:02:54SPEAKERbut like the way it was described in the articles I read

1:02:57SPEAKERand the stuff that I saw,

1:02:58SPEAKERit seemed like they oversimplified something

1:03:00SPEAKERthat left out something important about how this works

1:03:02SPEAKERand I don't understand it.

1:03:04SPEAKERSo the one thing he did say was interesting

1:03:07SPEAKERis that because AMD does this SmartShift stuff,

1:03:11SPEAKERwhen there's excess overhead,

1:03:13SPEAKERthey can shift between GPU and CPU more dynamically

1:03:17SPEAKERthan you could in a traditional console.

1:03:18SPEAKERSo like, if the CPU is not being used fully,

1:03:21SPEAKERthen that'll give the GPU a little more thermal overhead

1:03:24SPEAKERand vice versa.

1:03:28SPEAKERSo, and the bet is that the clocks that they're running

1:03:33SPEAKERare gonna overcome internal bottlenecks,

1:03:37SPEAKERlike CPU outrunning memory and stuff like that,

1:03:40SPEAKERwhich makes sense given the way the chiplets

1:03:42SPEAKERon AMD's SOCs work.

1:03:44SPEAKER- Sure.

1:03:45SPEAKER- Especially if there's a boatload of cache.

1:03:47SPEAKER- So there was a fair amount of talk from Cerny

1:03:50SPEAKERabout the cooling and the fan noise,

1:03:52SPEAKERwhich like without coming out and saying it

1:03:54SPEAKERfelt like an acknowledgement

1:03:55SPEAKERthat they have not done especially well

1:03:56SPEAKERin that domain in the past.

1:04:00SPEAKER- I don't think anybody but Nintendo

1:04:01SPEAKERhas done a good job with that in the past.

1:04:02SPEAKERI think like-

1:04:04SPEAKER- The Xbox One X is pretty quiet for the most part.

1:04:07SPEAKERLike if it is all the way spun up, you can hear it,

1:04:10SPEAKERbut not offensively so.

1:04:13SPEAKER- So the Xbox One X, the Xbox One,

1:04:17SPEAKERthe box itself was okay to loud.

1:04:20SPEAKERThe power brick was ridiculous.

1:04:22SPEAKER- Sure, okay, yeah.

1:04:25SPEAKER- Then the PS4, both the Pro and the stock

1:04:27SPEAKERare too damn loud.

1:04:29SPEAKER- I've said it many times.

1:04:30SPEAKERI traded in my launch PS4 Pro to get the third revision PS.

1:04:34SPEAKERLike I literally traded in a PS4 Pro to get a PS4 Pro

1:04:36SPEAKERbecause it was so goddamn loud, I could not stand it.

1:04:39SPEAKER- Yeah. - It was terrible.

1:04:40SPEAKER- I play console games with headphones on

1:04:41SPEAKERbecause it's louder than my PC with a 2080 Ti in it.

1:04:44SPEAKER- That was playing God of War on that launch PS4 Pro.

1:04:47SPEAKERThat was inadequate.

1:04:47SPEAKERI could hear it very distinctly through headphones.

1:04:50SPEAKERIt was awful.

1:04:51SPEAKER- Wow.

1:04:53SPEAKER- So I mean, it's great to hear

1:04:53SPEAKERthat they're thinking about that.

1:04:56SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, this may be why they went

1:04:58SPEAKERwith this constant power thing

1:04:59SPEAKERis so that then they have a known thermal load

1:05:04SPEAKERthat is fixed and they can design a really specific cooler

1:05:07SPEAKERto dump that heat without having to spin it up

1:05:09SPEAKERand make it sound like a leaf blower.

1:05:11SPEAKER- Yeah, but Cerny also did give the example

1:05:13SPEAKERof like this CPU supports 256 bit instructions

1:05:18SPEAKERwhich are gonna require more heat dissipation

1:05:20SPEAKERthan they have to anticipate like how often developers

1:05:23SPEAKERare gonna want to use things like that

1:05:24SPEAKERversus things that don't put out as much heat.

1:05:26SPEAKERSo there is still a lot of variability there.

1:05:29SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, one of the things I've learned

1:05:32SPEAKERover the years is that the thing that makes me crazy

1:05:35SPEAKERabout fan noise on a PC

1:05:37SPEAKERisn't necessarily a constant low fan noise.

1:05:42SPEAKERIt's the spinning up the fan, spinning down the fan,

1:05:44SPEAKERspinning up the fan, spinning down the fan.

1:05:47SPEAKERLike my 2080 Ti has a thermal profile on it

1:05:51SPEAKERthat basically means most of the games I play by default

1:05:55SPEAKERare right on the threshold of spin up, spin down,

1:05:57SPEAKERspin up, spin down.

1:05:58SPEAKERSo I just switched over and loaded up a thing

1:06:01SPEAKERthat lets me set the profile to be the same speed

1:06:02SPEAKERall the time.

1:06:03SPEAKERIt's much less annoying.

1:06:04SPEAKERAnd that could be where they are with this

1:06:07SPEAKERis that it just runs constantly at the same speed

1:06:09SPEAKERand it runs cooler or hotter

1:06:11SPEAKERbased on how much is being used.

1:06:13SPEAKER- Yeah, that's fair.

1:06:15SPEAKER- I thought the storage stuff was really interesting here.

1:06:17SPEAKERLike they're-

1:06:18SPEAKER- Yeah, that is absolutely the story with the PS5, right?

1:06:21SPEAKER- I think they did it.

1:06:23SPEAKERThe audio stuff is real weird too.

1:06:24SPEAKERWe'll talk about that in a minute.

1:06:26SPEAKER- Well, that's a weird outlier.

1:06:27SPEAKERThat's just like out of left field.

1:06:29SPEAKERIt's like, wow, you're really

1:06:30SPEAKERputting a lot of work into this, huh?

1:06:32SPEAKER- Well, so the internal SSD is 825 gigs.

1:06:38SPEAKER- Yeah, I wanted to ask real fast,

1:06:40SPEAKERdo you think that is actually one terabyte

1:06:41SPEAKERand that they're talking about usable space there

1:06:44SPEAKER'cause I would assume they're gonna need

1:06:45SPEAKERa fair amount of cache space,

1:06:47SPEAKERespecially based on the way that Sony does things?

1:06:49SPEAKER- It's possible.

1:06:50SPEAKERI feel like the Digital Foundry article

1:06:53SPEAKERgot into the actual layout of the SSD

1:06:56SPEAKERand it could just be that there's some sort

1:07:00SPEAKERof weird parallelization to get the speed

1:07:02SPEAKERthat they're getting out of PCI Express 4.

1:07:04SPEAKER- Okay.

1:07:05SPEAKER- Which is why it's like that.

1:07:06SPEAKERI don't know, I don't know.

1:07:08SPEAKER- Okay, interesting.

1:07:10SPEAKER- It's a four lane PCI Express interconnect.

1:07:12SPEAKERSo it's a PCI 4X slot basically,

1:07:16SPEAKERwhich it seems big for a SSD.

1:07:19SPEAKER- PCI 4.0.

1:07:20SPEAKER- Yeah, PCI 4.0.

1:07:21SPEAKER- PCI 4.0, sorry.

1:07:24SPEAKERIt's 5.5 gigabytes per second raw

1:07:28SPEAKERand faster for compression,

1:07:30SPEAKERbut like not a 2X speed increase,

1:07:32SPEAKERlike a 0.25 or 0.5% speed increase.

1:07:37SPEAKERThey're saying they can dump two gigs of data

1:07:39SPEAKERin about a quarter of a second.

1:07:41SPEAKER- Quarter of a second, that's wild

1:07:43SPEAKERbecause Microsoft is saying

1:07:46SPEAKERpretty much a full second to do that.

1:07:48SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, this number is about four times bigger.

1:07:52SPEAKERI'm, the other big thing is they're doing hardware support

1:07:57SPEAKERfor decompression.

1:07:58SPEAKERSo that means you're not hitting CPUs

1:08:00SPEAKERto stream assets off of the SSD.

1:08:03SPEAKER- Yeah, they said that there's like next to no compute

1:08:05SPEAKERoverhead for handling that kind of compression.

1:08:09SPEAKER- And they're supporting multiple types of compression

1:08:12SPEAKERout of the box.

1:08:14SPEAKER- It sounds like they've just,

1:08:14SPEAKERlike he mentioned they straight up have

1:08:16SPEAKERa custom IO controller in there

1:08:17SPEAKERthat they've done a lot of work on,

1:08:18SPEAKERthat it's got like far more priority levels

1:08:20SPEAKERthan your average off the shelf SSD in this category

1:08:23SPEAKERand stuff like that.

1:08:24SPEAKER- Yeah, it's super, like, this is super interesting.

1:08:27SPEAKERI'm very interested to see how this works in the real world.

1:08:33SPEAKERThey have APIs for game data prioritization.

1:08:37SPEAKERSo presumably like a developer can prioritize world first

1:08:41SPEAKERand then like flare assets and props and characters

1:08:46SPEAKERand stuff like that after the world or whatever.

1:08:48SPEAKER- Or things that depend on tight timing

1:08:51SPEAKERversus things that don't.

1:08:52SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, it means that,

1:08:57SPEAKERit also means that for something like a Mortal Kombat

1:08:59SPEAKERwhere each fight starts with a cut scene,

1:09:03SPEAKERthey can load in the assets that are used

1:09:05SPEAKERfor the cut scene first and then stream

1:09:08SPEAKERin the other characters that pop up later in the scene

1:09:10SPEAKERto start the fights.

1:09:12SPEAKERLike there's a lot of interesting applications

1:09:13SPEAKERoutside of like typical level load stuff that mean--

1:09:17SPEAKER- I guess, so not to get too far ahead of ourselves here,

1:09:21SPEAKERbut my ultimate question here is with these throughput

1:09:24SPEAKERnumbers being so different on the storage,

1:09:25SPEAKERI wanted to dig into how that's gonna affect

1:09:28SPEAKERreal world game design.

1:09:29SPEAKERBut I guess that is actually a good example of,

1:09:31SPEAKERso basically my premise was like,

1:09:34SPEAKERyou're only ever really gonna see this huge extra throughput

1:09:36SPEAKERon the PS5 matter for first party Sony games.

1:09:40SPEAKERBut maybe that's actually not the case

1:09:41SPEAKERwith that Mortal Kombat example you just gave

1:09:43SPEAKERthat maybe you are gonna have a lot of third party games

1:09:47SPEAKERrunning on PS5 where you do see a lot of little benefits

1:09:51SPEAKERaround loading times and stuff happening a little bit faster.

1:09:55SPEAKERWhat do you think?

1:09:56SPEAKER- I mean, it could go either way, right?

1:09:57SPEAKERIt depends on how hard, how like much overhead

1:10:00SPEAKERit is to implement this stuff on a first party basis.

1:10:03SPEAKERAnd it also depends on how the different units sell.

1:10:05SPEAKERLike if Sony sells a boatload of PS5s

1:10:08SPEAKERand they're the default,

1:10:09SPEAKERthey're the thing everybody builds for,

1:10:12SPEAKERthen people will build for their stuff.

1:10:13SPEAKERAnd then there might be load times on the Xbox One X.

1:10:17SPEAKER- Right. - Xbox Series X, sorry.

1:10:20SPEAKERIf they don't, if they build on,

1:10:24SPEAKERif the target is the Xbox, then are these,

1:10:28SPEAKERit's on Sony to make these APIs easy enough to use

1:10:31SPEAKERand fast enough that like the developers

1:10:34SPEAKERdon't have to devote a man month

1:10:35SPEAKERto implementing this stuff late in the process.

1:10:39SPEAKERSo we're gonna have to wait.

1:10:41SPEAKERThis is another place for developers to write in.

1:10:43SPEAKER- Right, and yeah, and like you're right,

1:10:45SPEAKERthat is the classic answer to that question is

1:10:47SPEAKERwhatever the bigger install base is

1:10:48SPEAKERwill dictate the development trends.

1:10:50SPEAKERBut in this context, you could walk that back further

1:10:53SPEAKERbecause all of these games are also gonna have to run

1:10:56SPEAKERon your average PC, right?

1:10:59SPEAKERSo unless we get back into a world

1:11:02SPEAKERwhere like every console game is not getting ported to PC,

1:11:05SPEAKERbut that doesn't sound realistic

1:11:06SPEAKER'cause the PC market is so big now.

1:11:08SPEAKERSo people are gonna be loading PC games

1:11:12SPEAKERoff of SATA3 SSDs or even spinning hard drives

1:11:15SPEAKERfor a good long while, right?

1:11:16SPEAKERSo like, I don't know what multi-platform development

1:11:20SPEAKERlooks like with this much of a spread

1:11:23SPEAKERin the speed of loading.

1:11:24SPEAKERAnd because Cerny got into that example of,

1:11:27SPEAKERand as much as he took a bunch of heat

1:11:28SPEAKERfor this being an incredibly like dry technical talk,

1:11:31SPEAKERI thought there were some pretty good real world examples

1:11:34SPEAKERof where this tech matters.

1:11:35SPEAKERAnd I don't know if you saw that graphic of,

1:11:38SPEAKERit was basically like, you know, here's a little castle,

1:11:40SPEAKERhere is like a city environment

1:11:41SPEAKERand they're separated by this like itsy bitsy narrow canyon

1:11:45SPEAKERthat you have to walk through for 45 seconds.

1:11:46SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:11:47SPEAKER- I thought that was a great example of like,

1:11:48SPEAKERhere's how developers have to compromise like world design,

1:11:51SPEAKERfor example, to get around how slowly

1:11:53SPEAKERthey stream assets right now.

1:11:56SPEAKERSo like that's a great example of like,

1:11:57SPEAKERhey, worlds can open up a lot more

1:11:59SPEAKERwhen the system can load assets

1:12:01SPEAKERas fast as you spin the camera now.

1:12:03SPEAKERBut if these games still have to run on PCs

1:12:06SPEAKERthat are massively less equipped to load stuff that quickly,

1:12:09SPEAKERhow does that affect, you know,

1:12:11SPEAKERthe design of multi-platform games?

1:12:13SPEAKER- I think we're gonna see people min-spec-ing SSDs

1:12:18SPEAKERfor these titles as soon as they come out.

1:12:19SPEAKERYeah, I mean, look, you can get a really good SSD

1:12:22SPEAKERfor under a hundred bucks now.

1:12:24SPEAKER- Oh, totally.

1:12:25SPEAKER- An NVMe SSD.

1:12:26SPEAKERNow you may have to upgrade your motherboard

1:12:28SPEAKERor get a card that slots into a PCI express slot.

1:12:33SPEAKERI think it'll be fine.

1:12:34SPEAKERI'm not super worried about it.

1:12:37SPEAKER- Okay, maybe you just have more confidence

1:12:39SPEAKERin like, I don't know.

1:12:42SPEAKERI don't want to like denigrate anybody's technical ability,

1:12:44SPEAKERbut again, like, you know,

1:12:45SPEAKERin two drives are not the easiest thing to install.

1:12:47SPEAKERLike not everybody who plays PC games

1:12:49SPEAKERis necessarily super aware of the difference

1:12:52SPEAKERbetween like a SATA3 SSD versus an NVMe SSD.

1:12:56SPEAKERAnd like, if they get into that level of specificity

1:12:58SPEAKERwith hardware requirements

1:13:00SPEAKERand expecting people to know what SSDs they have.

1:13:03SPEAKER- Look, I've watched you guys build PCs before.

1:13:05SPEAKERI know what the rest of the world is like.

1:13:07SPEAKER- Yeah, that feels like a technical minefield

1:13:10SPEAKERexpecting your wider audience to understand all that stuff

1:13:13SPEAKERand be equipped for it before they buy your game.

1:13:14SPEAKER- I mean, the thing you have to remember is,

1:13:16SPEAKERokay, so here's my official hot take.

1:13:20SPEAKERI don't think, I think they're safe saying,

1:13:23SPEAKERhey, you have to have an SSD to play this game.

1:13:25SPEAKEROr for best experience, you have to have an SSD.

1:13:27SPEAKERI think saying you have to have an NVMe PCI express for SSD

1:13:32SPEAKERis probably not going to happen

1:13:34SPEAKERas like a min spec requirement for games.

1:13:36SPEAKER- Okay, that's what I was getting at.

1:13:38SPEAKERThat sounds like a big ask.

1:13:39SPEAKER- Yeah, no, but I think, look, a SATA6 SSD

1:13:42SPEAKERis still an order of magnitude faster than a spinning disc.

1:13:45SPEAKER- Well, it is, yeah.

1:13:46SPEAKERBut it's not going to come close to touching these numbers

1:13:48SPEAKERthat you might need to load things in

1:13:49SPEAKERas you're moving around.

1:13:51SPEAKER- But I mean, my hunch is that for the stuff that,

1:13:55SPEAKERlike, especially if you're dealing with a system

1:13:56SPEAKERwhere somebody has a 2080

1:13:59SPEAKERand they have 12 gigs or 16 gigs of video memory

1:14:02SPEAKERand 32 gigs or 16 gigs of PC memory,

1:14:07SPEAKERthere are ways around these problems by dealing with memory

1:14:11SPEAKERand by using the more memory that a PC system will have.

1:14:14SPEAKER- Just kind of brute forcing it with what you do have there?

1:14:17SPEAKER- Yeah, so you may have a little bit more of a load time

1:14:19SPEAKERor it may be that there's still a 10 second traversal canyon

1:14:25SPEAKERrather than a 45 second traversal canyon

1:14:26SPEAKERon multi-platform cables.

1:14:28SPEAKER- Yeah, okay, sure.

1:14:29SPEAKER- But also, I think with the SSD, remember,

1:14:32SPEAKERon the consoles, we're moving from hard drives

1:14:35SPEAKERand I think we're going to see,

1:14:40SPEAKEReven if we're not, like on a game like Spider-Man

1:14:43SPEAKERwhere they were talking about specifically

1:14:45SPEAKERhis movement speed through the world was gated

1:14:47SPEAKERby the speed of the hard drive on the launch PS4s,

1:14:53SPEAKERit's a little bit of a different situation

1:14:55SPEAKERthan any SSD versus a spinning disk.

1:15:01SPEAKER- Sure.

1:15:02SPEAKER- I think it's gonna work out.

1:15:04SPEAKERI don't know how it'll break down,

1:15:05SPEAKERbut my guess is we'll still design

1:15:09SPEAKERfor SATA 6 SSD plugged into a PC.

1:15:13SPEAKERIt will be probably a mid-spec.

1:15:16SPEAKER- Okay, that probably makes sense.

1:15:17SPEAKERAll that said, I feel like this does have

1:15:19SPEAKERsome pretty wild applications

1:15:20SPEAKERfor Sony first party exclusive games

1:15:23SPEAKERwhere they know they're gonna have this kind of throughput.

1:15:25SPEAKER- We'll see some real weird stuff.

1:15:27SPEAKERThe Parappa 2 or Parappa 3 or whatever one we're on now

1:15:30SPEAKERshould be off the chain.

1:15:33SPEAKERPS4 has an NVMe slot.

1:15:35SPEAKERIt's gonna have to be a Sony quality.

1:15:37SPEAKEROh, sorry, PS5, did I say three?

1:15:41SPEAKER- Four.

1:15:43SPEAKERBranding.

1:15:44SPEAKER- Yeah, aftermarket SSDs have to be qualed by Sony.

1:15:49SPEAKERAnd nothing exists right now, which is fine

1:15:51SPEAKER'cause the hardware is not out yet.

1:15:54SPEAKER- Yeah, he said that the off-the-shelf drives

1:15:56SPEAKERthat will be compatible are actually gonna need

1:15:58SPEAKERto be faster than what's in the machine

1:16:00SPEAKERto account for some of the custom stuff they did

1:16:03SPEAKERon their controller that won't exist

1:16:05SPEAKERon the off-the-shelf drives.

1:16:06SPEAKER- Wow.

1:16:07SPEAKER- So they need extra overhead.

1:16:09SPEAKERLike he was basically saying an off-the-shelf drive,

1:16:13SPEAKERI wanna say he quoted the number

1:16:15SPEAKERof it might need like seven gigabytes a second throughput

1:16:18SPEAKERbecause they need extra overhead

1:16:19SPEAKERto account for some of the inefficiencies

1:16:22SPEAKERthat will be there.

1:16:23SPEAKER- Oh, and does that mean that they're presumably

1:16:25SPEAKERusing some extra space on the SSD

1:16:27SPEAKERfor some other magic that they're not talking about?

1:16:28SPEAKER- I don't know if it's extra space.

1:16:30SPEAKERI think he was referring more to that custom controller

1:16:31SPEAKERthey have for multiple priority levels and stuff like that.

1:16:35SPEAKERPoint being like you're gonna need extremely fast drives

1:16:37SPEAKERoff the shelf to keep up with this stuff.

1:16:40SPEAKERAnd that's why they need a test.

1:16:42SPEAKERAnd like you're basically, you're gonna need to go

1:16:44SPEAKERto like a Sony website with a compatibility list on it

1:16:47SPEAKERand buy one of the drives off that list.

1:16:49SPEAKER- I mean, that's fine, I guess.

1:16:51SPEAKERI don't know.

1:16:51SPEAKERI don't know that that's any different

1:16:52SPEAKERthan the Microsoft approach then.

1:16:54SPEAKERIt's just, it's a standard form factor.

1:16:56SPEAKER- Yeah, at that point, if it's a pretty narrow range

1:17:00SPEAKERof drives that will actually work with this thing,

1:17:02SPEAKERI guess that's not that different.

1:17:03SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:17:04SPEAKER- Well, but that'll get better over time.

1:17:05SPEAKER- PS4 also supports USB hard drives,

1:17:07SPEAKERPS5 also supports USB hard drives for cold storage

1:17:11SPEAKERand presumably backwards compatibility.

1:17:13SPEAKERDid they talk about back-compat at all with this stuff?

1:17:15SPEAKER- Yes, that has been a huge hot button issue

1:17:18SPEAKERon the internet this week

1:17:19SPEAKERbecause his wording was a slightly ambiguous.

1:17:22SPEAKER- Okay.

1:17:23SPEAKER- He got a lot more into the technical problems

1:17:26SPEAKERwith running older game code on newer, much faster hardware,

1:17:29SPEAKEReven if it's capable of running it.

1:17:32SPEAKERAnd it's, I actually, I went back and re-watched this clip

1:17:35SPEAKERagain right before this, and I'm still not 100% sure.

1:17:38SPEAKERHe basically said, we took a look at the top 100 PS4 games

1:17:42SPEAKERby playtime, and almost all of them will run.

1:17:45SPEAKER- Okay.

1:17:46SPEAKER- And a lot of people have taken that to mean

1:17:49SPEAKERfewer than 100 games backwards compatible at launch,

1:17:53SPEAKERwhich I don't know if that's actually

1:17:55SPEAKERan accurate interpretation of what he said.

1:17:57SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:17:57SPEAKER- But he did sound much more conditional

1:18:01SPEAKERfor PS4 games running on PS5 than the Xbox situation.

1:18:05SPEAKERSo, I don't know.

1:18:07SPEAKER- Have they talked about how that's gonna be,

1:18:10SPEAKERlike, is that on the developers, is Sony doing that?

1:18:12SPEAKERLike, how do we know?

1:18:13SPEAKER- I don't think he got into who's gonna do that work

1:18:16SPEAKERand how it's gonna, yeah, yeah.

1:18:18SPEAKERThat's not a lot more up in the air right now.

1:18:20SPEAKER- Interesting, I'm, I mean,

1:18:23SPEAKERbackwards compatibility is a weird thing.

1:18:25SPEAKERLike, I've used it maybe a handful of times

1:18:27SPEAKERon my Xbox and PS4, PS3.

1:18:32SPEAKERLike, I feel like I played a bunch of PS2 games

1:18:35SPEAKERon my PS3, and then didn't really touch it

1:18:37SPEAKERfor the PS4 generation and maybe played on the Xbox.

1:18:42SPEAKER- That's the ongoing joke

1:18:43SPEAKERabout backwards compatibility, right?

1:18:45SPEAKEREverybody wants it, nobody uses it.

1:18:46SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, but it feels like Microsoft and Sony

1:18:50SPEAKERwould rather sell me 4K remakes of my old games

1:18:54SPEAKERthan let me just play my old games.

1:18:56SPEAKER- Microsoft has taken a stand against that.

1:18:58SPEAKERLike, that is accounted for.

1:19:00SPEAKER- I appreciate that.

1:19:01SPEAKERHaving bought "Shadow of the Colossus" like four times now.

1:19:04SPEAKER- Yeah, both consoles support 4K UHD Blu-ray.

1:19:11SPEAKERThe audio stuff in the PS5 is interesting.

1:19:16SPEAKER- They sure spent a lot of time on that.

1:19:18SPEAKER- I, like somebody doing hardware audio,

1:19:21SPEAKERthis seems like a first party feature to me, right?

1:19:24SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:19:24SPEAKER- Like, they talked about doing custom personalized HRTFs

1:19:27SPEAKERfor your specific ear shape,

1:19:29SPEAKERwhich is ridiculous for a system

1:19:32SPEAKERthat interfaces with speakers for most people.

1:19:35SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:19:36SPEAKER- Like HRTFs work when you put headphones on your ears.

1:19:38SPEAKER- Right.

1:19:40SPEAKER- HRTFs stand for head-related transform functions.

1:19:43SPEAKERIt's how like audio in a game like PUBG

1:19:46SPEAKERcan make you feel like you hear things above and below you,

1:19:48SPEAKEReven though you're only using stereo headphones.

1:19:50SPEAKERAnd basically they use math to remodel,

1:19:54SPEAKERto delay the sound in specific ways,