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Gamingbolt: Xbox Series X’s BCPack Texture Compression Technique Reportedly Better than the PS5’s Kraken
- Thread starter Garrison
- Start date
Sort of a tangential question, but this part "Special filtering hardware allows graceful fallback to the resident mip levels." Can someone help me to better understand this.
Everyone, please listen to this. We already know that BCPack is better, due to the already released numbers. The 4.8GB/s is WITH BCPack already, and it's a 100% increase over the 2.4GB/s raw speed. PS5 only gets a 64% increase from 5.5GB/s to 9GB/s. So yes, it's better, but we already know how much better and it's not nearly enough to make up for the massive advantage PS5 has here.
This article is basically a clickbait article with no actual information in it.
Between the zlib and bcpack decompression hardware, they have claimed output of 6GB/s.
Even if you didn't compress your textures at all beyond GPU native formats, depending on the proportion of texture data you're streaming vs other data, the PS5 solution would probably be faster.
However, you can use Kraken to compress GPU native, block compressed textures. By between 2-4x on a variety of formats, as surveyed here: http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2018/03/improving-compression-of-block.html. A more specific compressor like crunch does compress better, but not by very much according to that article - and afaik, it is lossier, i.e. there is a quality tradeoff.
How much better again is BCPack?
What is the decompression cost of using a texture specific compression on PS5 if there's no decompression silicon specifically for it? Could it sustain a higher texture decompression rate anyway at a CPU/GPU/Tempest cost?
These are the unknowns, but tbh, I have my doubts based on the figure MS gave themselves for the decompression unit output rate, that it's even a contest.
OMG hahahaha.
This is brilliant.....does he know of this?
All this tech talk yet this post is the most confusing thing in the thread.
Well done.
What sare you saying exactly? The texture formats you can use depend on the hardware. PS4 and XONE have the exact same texture format hardware support, so there's no difference there.
I assume they're just saying that if you try to sample a non-resident mip level in a texture it'll automatically fallback to the highest level available until the missing bits are streamed in.
There's no public information about this, but BCPack has the potential to be quite a bit more efficient than Kraken.
Texture data is very structured and by limiting the scope of what you're compressing you can actually do a much better job than a generic compressor.
That said ofc, nothing prevents Sony from offering a similar library to its developer (outside of years of research that Microsoft have likely invested in this).
I really want the consoles to come out. I'm not bothered about actually getting them yet, I just want these types of threads and console warriors stances to stop XD
But would that then not be a software solution when bcpack is done in hardware (as in: dedicated silicon)? Or do I miss something here?
Fanboy colors are so transparent these days.
I can't wait for actual games to come out on both platforms so we can see the differences. My hunch is that both will be amazing consoles. :)
I can't wait for actual games to come out on both platforms so we can see the differences. My hunch is that both will be amazing consoles. :)
I share the sentiment, but launch will be only the beginning. The first year is going to be insufferable.
"it's possible", "might", and "maybe" does not equal "reportedly better".
The title of the article is garbage and I know you just took the title of the article, but the content does not match it.
I'm just excited to see games already and see what all this amounts to.
The title of the article is garbage and I know you just took the title of the article, but the content does not match it.
I'm just excited to see games already and see what all this amounts to.
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Thanks for the video. Love seeing stuff like this. We talk too much hardware but not enough of the great strides in the software which makes it all more efficient. Would be cool to know when devs will go at it with stuff like this on PC games.
I meant vs crunch, rather than vs Kraken. Per the article linked, crunch is 'only' 20% better than RDO+general compressors, that seems to bear out in Unity's findings also. Crunch is what Richard was referring to as another 'modern' texture specific compressor. BCPack would have to go much further than that over RDO+LZ (or Kraken) to bridge or exceed the raw throughput gap, as hypothesised.
I think MS has given us something of a data point though - 'over 6GB/s' of output output from the decompressor unit. Whether that's based on some typical split of texture to non texture data, or is a hard cap regardless of data mix, it doesn't IMO speak to a radical jump forward. A 2.5x rate vs the assumed 'typical' 2x rate in PS5 (neatly 20% better funnily enough!).
A lot of the word "might" in there and the tweet it's based on literally starts like this:
i mean...
i mean...
I guess we can at least agree that both companies saw lossless compression as a crucial thing and both invested time, hard- and software to compression and both should be applauded. Why does everything have to be compared...
People are trying to make news out of everything. :)
Can't blame them, though, not a lot of technical info is out there, but hopefully that will start being released the closer we get to these platforms launching.
Sony and ms can talk about it all they want. 99% of us will have no clue how these things work or how they help even with after a "for dummies" explanation
That's true and I'm glad to see it going that way. The better and easier this makes development for them the better off our experiences will be.
And I mean the title and the content directly talks about comparisons so it's not surprising people are comparing in here.
"Developer at Dice believes Xbox Series X's BCPack Texture Compression Technique is big news."
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Yeah gamingbolt placed a clickbait title for the clicks for sure but the compression technique development piece is interesting to me at least. I guess Microsoft placed quite a bit of emphasis on this type of tech and it can be used not just on their own console but in upcoming PC hardware and of course have more resources to do so.
At the end nothing prevents Sony from doing a similar action as well which would actually be really cool for games in general.
I don't respond to the fanboy diatribe as it's just noise really. It was clear on my OP on what type of discussion would be good to have in regards to this.
In regards to compression even the dev himself is happy that people at least throw the word "kraken" around since compression is something no one talks about out there:
We have gone well past accepting specs at face value. I take the specs at face value until we get actual benchmarks and then direct comparisons of 3rd party titles. Right now though people see what they want to see about what the specs COULD mean.
This isn't remotely true. There are actual devs on Era who are working on these consoles and know the kind of compression options beyond assumptions and guesswork, but obviously they'd be under NDA, especially if said details haven't been officially announced or discussed.
So yes, whilst Richard is clearly extremely knowledgeable on the subject (it's his field of expertise), the reality is he doesn't actually know what Sony has in store, nor what Microsoft has beyond what either have talked about. He's not actually developing on either anymore, nor does he have any sort of first hand experience or knowledge, hence he repeatedly clarifies with terms like "we don't have any details" "it's possible" "could" "might" "I'd be surprised if" etc.
He's making educated assumptions based on what little we know, which isn't the same thing as posting actual substantiated information or facts.
Even a DICE dev in this very thread talks of news being made over every little thing, and how they hope more details will be released closer to the respective launches.
I'm guessing this means they'll be able to stay closer to that 4.8 GB/s for the majority of the time? Still not as fast as PS5's SSD, but the important thing is that it's more than 50x faster than current 5400rpm HDD. That's what has me excited
Isn't infinite cross-gen? You think they'll utilize the SSD for a weider view? That'd be a great use for it, actually. Highlighting the benefits of next-gen.
In other words, about the same quality as a typical article by PushSquare who are often quoted here.
The battlefield had changed from playgrounds to twitter......lmao.
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The DICE dev literally came in and might as well said nothing really. Looked like they were referencing gaminbolts clickbait headline saying that people make news out of every little thing.
The article talked about Richard's tweet regarding MS upcoming compression solution which indeed is cool tech which will be used in games. Which to an industry vet like himself see's it as something greater than what he calls a generic solution like Kraken. As I've said many times, the tweet themselves are great to read in regard to this.
Don't get why saying "making news out of anything!" would be valid here on Era where the threads next to this one are all opinion based threads we talk about about all day, hell next to this thread was talk about:
AMD: Statement about the theft of some test files related to a subset of current and future GPUs
Nintendo Direct Speculation Thread
Devs react to PS5 Specs
Starting to think DLSS will be a central feature to Switch 2
All full of opinion pieces because it's an internet forum go figure.
Microsoft has provided not just theoretical values, but also real-world measurements. Those measurements will already include the effect of the decompression block they've built. And the results are still much slower than Sony's real-world measurements.
I think the question isn't necessarily compared to Kraken. It seems unlikely that PS5 will only support that; far more plausible is that they'll support a wide range of formats already in use. So the question would be, say, how much more efficient is BCPack than BC7?
Also, people assume that both consoles having dedicated I/O hardware means they'll be doing decompression faster than usual. But decompression is typically already designed to be a very fast operation (compression is where speed can slow, but that's done offline for the disc package). And the stated theoretical-vs-actual ratios for next-gen machines don't seem to indicate that decompression is going a lot faster than currently. I think the dedicated hardware isn't to make the process faster, it's just to take the burden off the CPU. That's a very useful thing, but it's quite different from thinking we'll see a huge jump in decompression speed itself.
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Don't the current gen consoles also support a wide range of formats themselves even?
First thing I thought when I read the end of the title. "Reportedly Better than" oh ok.gif. May as well wait until you know for sure.
PFFFFFFFFFT Bahahhahah That's how I feel a lot of the time when Richard speaks.
I'm not aware of any specific quotes about it by developers, but that seems logical to me. Maybe I'm wrong and on the closed console platforms you have to use only approved formats.
I agree with this.
Now the real question is however, does it actually matter? Will the XBOX be bottlenecked in feeding assets to the VRAM in 99% of game scenarios? The answer is probably no. At best maybe Sony first party can come up with some wild gameplay elements that need to rewrite VRAM textures at an incredible pace. I'd venture that they'd have to go out of their way to highlight this strength however. Outside of that faster loading would be the main benefit which is pretty cool.
"EA developer OBLITERATES Xbox SSD! Spencer on Suicide watch!"