The final specifications of the Xbox Series X were released yesterday. A very fast graphics unit, especially for consoles, is said to provide 12 TeraFLOPs graphics power. But what about ray tracing performance?
Digital Foundry received an answer to this in an interview with Technical Fellow Andrew Goossen. Thanks to dedicated ray tracing cores, Microsoft's youngest console child is said to be deliver a total of 25 TFLOPs and more can. This could make real-time beam calculation socially acceptable.
How are the 25 TeraFLOPs composed?
The raw computing power of the 3,328 shader cores of the Xbox Series X is given by Microsoft with 12 TFLOPs. If ray tracing were also calculated via shaders and not via special RT computation cores, according to Goossen it would take around 13 TFLOPs alone. Taken together, the effective total computing power of the Xbox Series X is approximately 25 TFLOPs.
Similarity to Nvidia GPUs: As with Nvidia's RTX-2000 GPUs, the RT cores are architecturally separated (dedicated). However, this does not mean that they work independently of the shaders. With activated ray tracing, the shaders still have to perform tasks for the RT cores, such as lighting calculations, as Goossen reports.
Accordingly, ray tracing will continue to lead to lower frame rates, but thanks to the same console hardware, developers could compensate for this by better optimization.
Are consoles making the breakthrough in ray tracing?
The introduction of real-time beam calculation on the Xbox Series X (and Playstation 5) could help the technology break through.
Firstly, because a large new player base will benefit from the graphic advantages in addition to the PC players via the upcoming consoles, which means that ray tracing can quickly become a standard.
On the other hand, the experience gained potentially leads to better performance results on the PC, since DirectX Raytracing (DXR) uses the same programming interface. However, it is still unclear how close AMD's implementation of the whole thing is to Nvidia's variant for the RTX GPUs.
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What is certain is that the development of PC components with a view to ray tracing. Nvidia's Ampere GPUs (RTX 3000) are said to have significantly more RT cores than Turing (RTX 2000) and AMD plans to use the RDNA2 architecture to introduce dedicated RT cores for desktop graphics cards in addition to the console chips.
