Is this the first attempt to comprehensively answer the big question? Fundamentally, what next-gen? In Xbox chief Phil Spencer’s latest blog for Xbox Wire, we get a smattering of tech specs for the new Series X, reaffirmation of a frictionless future for gaming thanks to solid-state storage and a reminder that as powerful as raw power is, technological innovation is just as important.
However, despite that focus on new ideas, there is still room for Microsoft to clarify and indeed emphasise the extent of the processing power crammed into the Xbox Series X GPU. In a GameSpot story at the tail end of 2019, Spencer invited us to ‘do the math’ based on the notion that the new console had twice the graphics power of Xbox One X and over 8x that of Xbox One. The implication was that the console packs a 12 teraflop GPU – but muddying the waters somewhat is the fact that innovations in GPU architecture meant that Microsoft wouldn’t 12TF to deliver 2x Xbox One X performance – our tests showed that a ballpark 9-10TF could conceivably get the job done.
The new blog clarifies the situation and it’s only good news. With 12TF unambiguously confirmed, Microsoft may well have twice the basic level of GPU compute on tap, but actual gaming performance should exceed that handily. However, the firm goes further in explicitly stating that AMD’s latest RDNA 2 architecture is at the heart of Series X, meaning that there may well be some further optimisations in the upcoming AMD Navi design implemented in the console that we are not yet aware of, simply because PC parts based on the latest architecture are not yet available for us to experiment with.
RDNA 2 does include variable rate shading – a feature highlighted by Spencer – which prioritises rendering precision to the areas of the screen that matter, reducing the work done on pixels that don’t need it (low contrast or high motion areas, for example). The revised Navi design also includes hardware accelerated ray tracing – and we now know that Series X uses the same DXR API as the majority of PC titles supporting RT. Again, this is good news – it’s been a fairly lengthy process for developers to get to grips with ray tracing on PC and much of that work should translate to Series X.
However, there’s still plenty we know about RDNA 2 though. In parallel with ray tracing, Microsoft has been working on hardware-accelerated machine learning via DirectML. Nvidia has its tensor cores for these workloads but does RDNA 2 have some kind of AMD or custom Microsoft equivalent? Also curious is that according to AMD’s roadmaps, the latest RDNA uses a refined version of the 7nm chip manufacturing process used in its existing Ryzen 3000 CPUs and Navi GPUs. Does Series X also use the updated process? This would be an unusual move for console, but not unprecedented. The bottom line is that in the here and now at least, not only does Microsoft’s new console feature a larger GPU than anything AMD has in the PC market, it’s also based on the very latest technology.