Yeah, no doubt. That split memory and 2 more teraflops will prove to be essential in providing a massive difference. If you add SFS, VRR, RNDA 2 full stack and a bag of chips, the Xbox will virtually be a quantum computer.
Edit: oh how I missed
Riky
leaving a triggered emoji on my comments. Such a mature response from a wanker that called me a paedophile and got away with a week suspension.
Call them massive or whatever you will, I'm not calling them any of that. But this is about far more than just merely 2 more teraflops in reality. It's about a significant boost to memory efficiency (aka more RAM to use) that's what SFS means for this system. That equates to much better utilization by the GPU of its top most memory bandwidth of 560GB/s. It means extra vitally important RAM to fit other things. These things I'm talking about are all things developers can use to be more efficient with the use of the available power the console offers. Same thing on PS5 side. You think in any generation these consoles are somehow getting stronger? No. They're being used more intelligently. The power never truly changes. The developers simply get smarter, more resourceful.
VRS Tier 2 is again not about giving you some massive boost. That's about giving you just enough extra percentages worth of frametime back that you can hopefully use that to ensure your game doesn't need dynamically scale down resolution as much, or stays within its framerate target more often. The coalition has an excellent blog on the subject.
The team at The Coalition haven’t stopped innovating since bringing Tier 1 VRS to Gears Tactics, and have brought Tier 2 VRS support to both Gears 5 and Gears Tactics. The team saw similarly large perf gains from VRS Tier 2 –
devblogs.microsoft.com
That 10% higher resolution is key performance savings. Don't underestimate how important that can be, and what it can mean
We found our approach allowed us to play to the strengths of both Dynamic Resolution Scaling and Variable Rate Shading. VRS takes a first stab at applying coarse shading based on the edge detection results. Next frame, Dynamic Resolution Scaling looks at the total GPU frame time with the VRS savings being factored in and adjusts the scaling if needed. As an example, VRS applied to the real-time cinematics on the Xbox Series X allowed for dynamic resolution to run an average of 10% higher, and in the best cases, removed the need for any downscaling altogether.
VRR is more of a luxury item that no developer for Series X, in my opinion, should ever count on, but they know its there to clean up any perceived performance imperfections to the end user who has a capable TV. I'm happy that I do have such a TV. This isn't included in any of what I'm saying. That's a luxury item for the end user and nothing more. It's an invaluable feature for situations where a game has issues, but we all want excellent optimization. I think we agree there. The developer can't do anything with that to my knowledge to make Xbox run any more or less good in a game.
Mesh Shaders are something we know to have tremendous potential for what it could end up meaning for the amount of geometry detail that could end up appearing in Xbox and PC titles designed for it. It could mean possibly getting more geometry work done, far superior culling on a level just not seen in games today, and with that more advanced geometry handling and processing combined with that superior, much faster and more efficient means of culling it all, you are again freeing up more of the GPU and other hardware to be able to do more effective work overall.
Hardware Accelerated Machine Learning - Microsoft has put in their official hotchips presentation that it can be used for resolution scaling, AI and I think animations. Two of these things can lead to more convincing looking games, one of them, the resolution scaling if it works, could lead to developers using much lower resolutions to push the system even harder, yet it still look very high resolution regardless. So I'm not talking about Series X getting anymore powerful than it already is. I'm talking about the system having tricks for days to open up more opportunities for devs to extract results from the system well beyond what people might have expected, not because it's suddenly getting more powerful, but because it's being a lot more intelligently utilized. Having power alone is nothing, it's pointless.
If you can spend 20% or 30% to get results that look like 90% of what the people want as opposed to spending 90% to get that same 90%, the choice of which is the more efficient option is clear.
All these features I talk about on Series X are about doing things smarter, not about the hardware becoming more powerful. Sony are masters at this shit. PS4 and PS4 Pro didn't get stronger as the gen went, the devs just got smarter with how they use it through the same innovations in efficiency and optimization. That's all I'm talking about. Not magical secret sauce.