Early this week, Microsoft explained that Sampler Feedback Streaming (SFS) is the key component that will allow Xbox Series X to offer better effective I/O throughput than Sony PS5.
PS5 SSD is faster than Xbox Series X SSD. There is no question about it. But the efficiency provided by Sampler Feedback Streaming tech will allow game developers to enjoy better I/O throughput on Xbox Series X. Consider a game that wants to load 20GB of data.
Sampler Feedback Streaming is a brand new method of rendering game textures. They render at far less quality the further away the player is. The resolution then increases the closer the player gets.
Jason Ronald, Director of Program Management on Xbox Series X, wrote an article on Xbox Wire.
Jason details SFS by saying:
Speaking in an interview with Spanish site Xataka, Jason Ronald explains:
EDIT:
In an interview with Windows Central, Studio Technical Director at The Coalition Mike Rayner commented on the console’s Sampler Feedback Streaming, a new feature in the console’s architect. He says that it will greatly increase the visual detail of worlds:
EDIT 2:
From Eurogamer:
A technique called Sampler Feedback Streaming - SFS - was built to more closely marry the memory demands of the GPU, intelligently loading in the texture mip data that's actually required with the guarantee of a lower quality mip available if the higher quality version isn't readily available, stopping GPU stalls and frame-time spikes. Bespoke hardware within the GPU is available to smooth the transition between mips, on the off-chance that the higher quality texture arrives a frame or two later
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-inside-xbox-series-x-full-specs
PS5 SSD is faster than Xbox Series X SSD. There is no question about it. But the efficiency provided by Sampler Feedback Streaming tech will allow game developers to enjoy better I/O throughput on Xbox Series X. Consider a game that wants to load 20GB of data.
- Sony PS5 SSD will take 3.63 seconds to load the data.
- Theoretically, Xbox Series X SSD will take 8.33 seconds to load the same amount of data. But thanks to SFS, entire 20GB data need not be loaded, only 8GB is required. So, Xbox Series X SSD will load the 8GB data in 3.3 seconds.
- Even though Xbox Series X loaded 2.5 times less data when compared to Sony PS5, gamers will have the same visual experience on their screens.
Sampler Feedback Streaming is a brand new method of rendering game textures. They render at far less quality the further away the player is. The resolution then increases the closer the player gets.
Jason Ronald, Director of Program Management on Xbox Series X, wrote an article on Xbox Wire.
Jason details SFS by saying:
https://loadingxp.com/xbox-velocity-architecture-explained-by-microsoft/“We were able to create and add new capabilities to the Xbox Series X GPU which enables it to only load the sub-portions of a mip level into memory, on-demand, just in time for when the GPU requires the data. This innovation results in approximately 2.5x the effective I/O throughput and memory usage above and beyond the raw hardware capabilities on average”
Speaking in an interview with Spanish site Xataka, Jason Ronald explains:
https://www.techradar.com/in/news/t...l-than-ps5-if-microsoft-copied-sonys-approach"Sampler Feedback Streaming (SMS) allows us to load textures and makes the SSD drive act as a multiplier of physical memory that adds to the memory that the machine itself has,”
EDIT:
In an interview with Windows Central, Studio Technical Director at The Coalition Mike Rayner commented on the console’s Sampler Feedback Streaming, a new feature in the console’s architect. He says that it will greatly increase the visual detail of worlds:
https://gamingbolt.com/xbox-series-...treaming-is-game-changer-says-gears-developer"We will be exploring how we can use it in future titles to both increase the texture detail in our game beyond what we can fit into memory, as well as reduce load times further by increasing on-demand loading to just before we need it, instead of pre-loading everything up-front as we would use a more traditional ‘level loading’ approach.”
EDIT 2:
From Eurogamer:
A technique called Sampler Feedback Streaming - SFS - was built to more closely marry the memory demands of the GPU, intelligently loading in the texture mip data that's actually required with the guarantee of a lower quality mip available if the higher quality version isn't readily available, stopping GPU stalls and frame-time spikes. Bespoke hardware within the GPU is available to smooth the transition between mips, on the off-chance that the higher quality texture arrives a frame or two later
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-inside-xbox-series-x-full-specs
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