Next Gen Gaming Consoles: A closer look at the technology in them
The current generation of gaming consoles have already been in the market for a while now and with the ever-increasing rapid improvements in technology, the performance of these gaming consoles is starting to lag behind the current technological standards. Every time this trend begins to occur, we begin to anticipate the arrival of a new and improved console from two of the industry leaders in this field; Microsoft and Sony with their updated Xbox and PlayStation consoles respectively. And, as expected, these companies have delivered. They have announced a few key details about these next generation of consoles and what we can expect from them with a release date announced for later half of 2020.
Microsoft has finally unveiled Xbox Project Scarlett, its next-generation console initiative and while we have yet to see the console itself, we do have a firm of idea of the Xbox Project Scarlett specs, giving us insight into what’s inside of this thing and how powerful it’ll be. Xbox is already touting that Project Scarlett will deliver the “most immersive console experience ever,” as stated during its Xbox E3 2019 media briefing. And honestly, looking at the Xbox Project Scarlett specs, there’s a very good chance that this could play out to be true.
To achieve this, Xbox Project Scarlett specs include custom-built tech based off of AMD’s ZEN 2 CPU and the Navi GPU architectures. The system will also come equipped with lightning-fast, high-bandwidth GDDR6 RAM that the company claimed will “usher in resolution and framerates we’ve never seen before” when it hyped up the system at E3 2019.
While it’ll be a while before we can see this console in action for ourselves, this does mean that Xbox Project Scarlett will be four times as powerful as the Xbox One X — which currently holds the title for the most powerful home console ever made, with capabilities comparable to a GeForce GTX 1060. To put that in perspective, the Navi chipset supposedly outperforms the extremely powerful GeForce RTX 2070 graphics card by a whole 10%.
What we’re looking at is a console that will natively support up to 8K resolution and 120 frames-per-second gaming experiences. If that wasn’t enough, Xbox Project Scarlett will also have support for variable refresh rate and real-time ray tracing. While AMD is yet to properly detail its ray tracing solution, Microsoft has made it clear that ray tracing is a priority and that it is “hardware accelerated” by the custom AMD chipset. Given that AMD is partnering with both Microsoft and Sony, we expect to hear more on this front soon enough.
Xbox Project Scarlett will also combine all of that super-fast GDDR6 memory mentioned earlier with an SSD drive, and the results sound incredibly impressive. Microsoft claims to have created a new generation of SSDs which are considerably faster than current industry standards and they’re going to be using these SSDs as virtual RAM in their consoles and the result will effectively make loading times a thing of the past. It’ll make your favorite games smoother and faster, ironing out creases in performance. In theory, this should boost core performance 40 times over what the current generation is offering in this department.
It’s also been confirmed that Xbox Project Scarlett will have a disk drive, with Microsoft committing to a future with physical media, and that the console will support four generations worth of backwards compatibility.
Microsoft is trying to define the next generation conversation early. It has outlined the Xbox Project Scarlett specs which definitely sound very impressive. The combination of the custom AMD architecture, the DDR6 RAM, and the SSD drive could well give us a console that feels truly revolutionary.
While Sony was notably absent from E3 this year, they too have made announcements for their new PlayStation 5 console. Sony’s console which is remarkably similar to Microsoft’s Project Scarlett will have a bespoke 8-core AMD chipset based on third generation Ryzen architecture Zen 2, with a GPU taking the best bits of the Radeon Navi GPU family; a built-for-purpose SSD storage system; 3D audio; backwards compatibility with PS4 games and PSVR hardware; 8K TV support.
Similar to Project Scarlett, while the look of the console remains a mystery, its internals are coming into focus, and they’re very promising. As discussed previously, the combination of AMD’s CPU and GPU unlocks the powers of ray tracing, an advanced lighting technique that can bring next-level immersion to gaming visuals. It’s a technique that’s used in big-budget CGI spectacles, putting into context the level of visual fidelity we can expect.
With 8K TV support comes far more detailed textures, and much larger ones at that. The news of a bespoke SSD drive will be heartening then — just because the games will be becoming more complex, that doesn’t mean they’ll be slower to load too. It’s estimated that the new SSD is 19 times faster than traditional SSD storage methods.
AMD’s 7nm lineup: Zen 2 and Navi architectures
Although Microsoft and Sony will play a huge part in the next generation of console games, one cannot deny that AMD’s Zen 2 and Navi architectures are the common factor in both these next gen consoles. To better understand, the performance of these consoles one must take a closer look at AMD’s technology itself.
Zen 2 is the codename for a successor of AMD’s Zen and Zen+ microarchitectures due to be fabricated on the 7-nanometer node from TSMC powering the third generation of Ryzen processors, known as Ryzen 3000 for the mainstream desktop chips, and Threadripper 3000 for high-end desktop systems.
Zen 2 is expected to bring an increase in instructions per clock over Zen, but not nearly as large as the jump from Excavator to Zen. At the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), AMD confirmed that Zen 2 design was complete.
Zen 2 is planned to include hardware mitigations to the Spectre security vulnerability. Zen 2-based EPYC server CPUs (codename “Rome”) use a design in which multiple CPU dies (up to eight in total) manufactured on a 7 nm process (“chiplets”) are combined with a 14 nm I/O die on each MCM package. Through this, up to 64 physical cores and 128 total compute threads (with simultaneous multithreading) are supported per socket. At 2019 CES, AMD showed a
Ryzen third-generation engineering sample that contains one chiplet with eight cores and 16 threads and we can expect more than eight cores in the final lineup.
Zen 2 is a significant departure from the physical design paradigm of AMD’s previous Zen architectures, Zen and Zen+. Zen 2 moves to a multi-chip module design where the I/O components of the CPU are laid out on its own, separate die. This separation has benefits in scalability and manufacturability. As physical interfaces don’t scale very well with shrinks in process technology, their separation into a different die allows these components to be manufactured using a larger, more mature process node than the CPU dies. The CPU dies, now more compact due to the move of I/O components onto another die, can be manufactured using a smaller process with fewer manufacturing defects than a larger monolithic die would exhibit. In addition, the central I/O die can service multiple chiplets, making it easier to construct processors with a large number of cores.
On the other hand. the new AMD Navi graphics cards will be the first to house the new RDNA GPU architecture. The AMD RX 5700 XT and Radeon RX 5700 cards will represent the vanguard of this new generation and will be the first since 2012 to replace the Graphics Core Next (GCN) design. The RDNA architecture is a completely new, ground up design, on a par with the way its CPU designers started afresh with Zen post-Bulldozer. AMD has mostly created this first iteration of the RDNA architecture using GCN building blocks. But the main thing to note is that this is a pseudo-hybrid of the Graphics Core Next design that has been reworked specifically with gaming as its main focus.
There are a lot of similarities between GCN and RDNA, but the big focus for the RDNA architecture is on reduced latency and improved efficiency specifically for gaming. That means Navi with RDNA is able to do more instructions on each clock cycle, while using less actual silicon. It’s also got a streamlined graphics pipeline and a much-improved cache structure too.
AMD is touting a 25% increase on a performance per clock basis compared with the previous pure-strain GCN architecture. AMD has also shown a 50% overall performance gain using the same power, and same configuration, on The Division 2 at 1440p between the RX Vega 64 and the full Navi 10 GPU, presumably in an RX 5700 XT. It’s also claiming a 1.5x increase in terms of performance per Watt compared with the Vega 64 card too, and that’s with this version of Navi using the more power hungry GDDR6 memory.
While it is well and good to see the improved specs of the Zen 2 and Navi architectures, a more real-world performance comparison would give us a better idea of what we can expect in our next gen consoles. And with a release date set to July 7, 2019, we will soon be able to test the performance of AMD’s new line of 7nm CPU and GPU. This will in turn give us a much clearer picture of what we can expect from our next generation of gaming consoles.
While we await the arrival of the next gen consoles with excitement and eagerness, there is still one particular aspect that must be addressed. Although, the release of new and more powerful consoles has been an industry trend for a long time, we may soon come upon a shift in this trend with the increasing popularity of game streaming services.
Microsoft and Sony themselves also provide cloud-based gaming services on their devices and with Google entering the market with Google Stadia we can expect game streaming to become increasingly popular and affordable. Thus, for the generation of games after the next one it would be very interesting to see if the industry continues as it previously has, or a new trend would begin.
