Here's how Microsoft's $500 Xbox One X compares to a PC

Less than 10% of Steam users have a $1500 type PC. Probably more like 5% or less.

Best bang-for-buck cards are the GTX 1060 and RX 580 followed by the GTX 1070. I would never recommend that somebody start with a $1500 PC. Mid range is the best value imo, and the PC market seems to reflect that with $250-350 cards being the most popular by a longshot.

7.87% of users on Steam have a GPU as or more capable than the GPU found in Xbox One X, that's it, sub 8%.

That's only 13.7 million people across the entire planet.

Oh, so that's what it's all about. I often wondered about the underlying operations of MMO's that hit the performance compared to standalone games. And before I was getting unreliable info about how AMD's processors were generally poorer in dealing with the multitude of real-time player data that had to be correlated to your own in large scale hubs, along with the persistent world dynamic variables. This has been really informative.

PCPartPicker part list: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/tDZWvV

Price breakdown by merchant: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/tDZWvV/by_merchant/

CPU: AMD - Ryzen 5 1600X 3.6GHz 6-Core Processor ($226.59 @ OutletPC) <-------- similar gaming performance as 7-1800X, good for narrow and wide thread counts.

CPU Cooler: Cooler Master - MasterAir Pro 3 28.0 CFM CPU Cooler ($24.99 @ Newegg)

Motherboard: MSI - X370 GAMING PLUS ATX AM4 Motherboard ($118.00 @ Amazon) <-------- better quality motherboard and chipset for CPU overclock.

Memory: G.Skill - Ripjaws V Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3200 Memory ($124.99 @ Newegg) <-------- aiming for near top AMD Ryzen PC gaming performance. This is important for Ryzen PC gaming.

Storage: Hitachi - Ultrastar 7K4000 3TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($65.99 @ Amazon)

Video Card: Gigabyte - GeForce GTX 1080 8GB Turbo OC Video Card ($489.99 @ Amazon) <---------GTX 1080 has superior 4K gaming capability over GTX 1070.

Case: BitFenix - Comrade ATX Mid Tower Case ($29.99 @ NCIX US)

Power Supply: EVGA - 700W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply ($52.47 @ Amazon)

Optical Drive: Lite-On - DH-4O1S-11 Blu-Ray/DVD/CD Drive

Operating System: Microsoft - Windows 10 Home OEM 64-bit ($89.89 @ OutletPC)

Total: $1222.90

Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available

Better PC box below $1245.49,

Even a GPU on a PC will have similar stalls to its own memory when the it requires commands from the CPU. It probably depends heavily on the software running and a game by game work loads may have different utilization of hardware. If M$ has a good solution for insert cpu requests while the GPU is busy data crunching the effective cost of the CPU is 0 to the memory bandwidth the GPU requests. The goal for memory access isn't constant for GPU's, it's to pull a block of data into cache then operate in the cache so there is no continuous need for pulling data that the CPU may interrupt, so there may not be an actual latency hit in real world figures of reading memory from the GPU.

Also there are benefits that a 1070 won't receive. For instance compute on a GPU generally requires many main memory accesses that require copying data to vram.. and back on a regular basis. There are huge performance gains here that you just can't do on a PC because of the lack of shared memory architecture. So the 1070 will take a larger hit memory bandwidth if a compute heavy workload is introduced, where x1x needs only pointers. I was actually reading somewhere, not sure where, but this will be one of the main limiting factors to PC's compute abilities, the entire application really needs to be in the same memory space and that just is a huge limiting factor with traditional PC architectures and real time applications.

You also have to remember a lot of old MMOs are not properly multithreaded as their underlying game engine code is usually pretty old (but very stable). You can get around these networking bottlenecks using prediction of where a person is going to be in the next frame (FPSs do it constantly) and offloading network operations on another thread, thus freeing up the main game logic so it doesn't get caught waiting for networking. During periods of heavy network load you may see players jump around a bit more as their predicted position is not their actual, but as long as you don't design your game to be played in those situations, it's a minor annoyance than anything.

Planetside 2 is probably the best example of the most intensive MMO from a tech level. Trying to keep FPS gameplay smooth with literally hundreds of players in an area is a pain in the ass. They use a mix of prediction code, client side hit detection and server side hit detection, and have expanded the engine to better utilize multiple cores, but the FPS will still drop like a rock in a big fight. A lot of PS2's issues are actually draw call issues. Particle effects require draw calls and draw calls directly hit the CPU. So not only do you have a lot of players to track, you're constantly hitting the CPU with all of the various elements of a big battle (explosions and whatnot).

@ronvalencia: This is just me, but I wouldn't put all of those nice components in a cheap case like that. A 1080 puts out a decent amount of heat (I own one) so you're gonna want a case with a bit better cable management as to foster better airflow.

Otherwise that's a pretty decent rig for 4k. However you will be making sacrifices in fidelity at 4k with at 1080 to maintain a stable framerate. Even with a GTX 1080 TI, a single card is still not quite there for 4k60 gaming without compromise. We're probably a year off from that yet.

And I've disputed you where exactly? So no idea why you've stuck your nose in tbh.....

The BitFenix case design is OK.

The reason for my Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 8GB Turbo OC Video Card selection is due to the enclosed blower design.

Blower design minimize heat being dumped into the PC case.

Both items are factored together.

And you've posted this because?

Think you are overestimating the cable management effect in terms of heat quite a bit, but a case with cooler slots in the front is recommended(even rons one has 2 slots tho)

and for the lols https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDCMMf-_ASE

It sure beats my PC at this point, gpu-wise.

Fusion enabled game consoles has reduced main memory copy events which consumes memory bandwidth for both CPU and GPU side. On PC, it's PCI-E version 3.0 16X 16 GB/s read** and 16 GB/s write** directions.

In real life, it could be less e.g. PCI-E version 2.0 16X (8 GB/s read, 8 GB/s write) can do the job.

Its performance is somewhere around a 980Ti or 1070 however in order to build a pc is such a small form with such power would cost 3 times more. Microsoft certainly did a terrific job with the X1X, the only problem is the lack of games. It will always lose to PC and has no exclusives like the PS4PRO. If you have a high end PC theres no point in getting a X1X.

Asking ron for real world figures and ignoring figures that are probably more accurate in a real world setting than you believe is asking a dumb question. There is also a significant difference in cost with certain loads making 'real world' figures even harder as it's game to game. Since PC's will actually suffer greatly with particular work loads that shared memory architecture benefit heavily from.

Basically the numbers are fine if you have a good memory controller and it sorts out the bursty nature of memory accesses the effective cost of the CPU may actually be negligible with memory access contention. And the difference between PC and consoles even less when PC gpu's won't even access their full buss potential due to utilization not always being 100% of the memory and the gpu. Then you even have console's pulling ahead with efficiency with being able to work in the pointer domain and share memory between the cpu/gpu in compute heavy games.

@tormentos: I never said the 1x was a true 4k console. I just said that I have no intentions of paying $500 for a console and that I didn't buy into the whole true 4k. The best option for 4k is the 1080 imo. But both the 1070 and 1x are pretty close in performance from what we've seen so far. I think this is one of the reason devs keep comparing it to a 1070.

Think about it like this with a 1070 you don't have the option of checkerboarding like you do on console so you have to drop settings for 4k. 1x you have no control over settings so devs use checkerboarding, but bump up other settings.

The way I see it checkerboarding with higher setting does have the potential to make the 1x games look as good a 1070 game with lowered settings.

Weak hyperbole as expected.

http://imgur.com/7tYEC88

Trying to pass of a PC as a "word-processing spreadsheet maker" is utterly pathetic and not an argument, that's one tiny fragment of what a PC could do decades ago and a console could never.

I never buy anything from CDkeys or G2A so the fact they exist means nothing, there are massive discounts around all major stores for PC games al lthe time and earlier. If you can't handle creating an account to purchase things you are going to struggle as an adult in general, which is sad.

Different storefronts are actually a benefit as it creates competition which lowers prices and adds version choices in the case of GoG so you screwed yourself there as well.

That's a bit of a stretch. It's not stated black-and-white and it could simply imply that utilizing the razor model, they'd make money and break even/profit on software sales. A little disingenuous.

But that is the point Ron i picked several parts at random and put a PC cheaper than he was claiming,even less if i went RX580 and no UHD drive since not everyone want a drive an there are cases now that even reflect that they come without a optical drive bay.

That is without taking into notice that XBO X is $500 with no online play,in 4 years you would have sped $240 alone in online fees which could very well be use for better hardware.

Exactly i am thinking about building a new one and the RX580 is on my mind,it is between it an the XBO X,seeing all the Pro and Negatives about it like paying for live,which i save on PC if i get Scorpio i also lose allot of games on PS4 which land mostly on PC but not on xbox one,but scorpio is a cheaper entry upfront.

Well for $649AUD I am pretty sure I won't be able to build a PC that play games as well/better than it..so..its pretty good price to me. :P

XBO's IE Edge can run Office 365. Cheap retail-to-dev mode XBO can even run end user's WIndows UWP apps without Xbox store.

On PS4, respecting CPU's 2 MB + 2 MB L2 cache boundary software optimizations are very important since it's a 200 cycle trip to external memory, hence it's a tiling software optimization method.

For PS4, Sony is showing their worst to best case examples.

Let's use 2nd bar from right side with 125 GB/s memory bandwidth with about 5 GB/s CPU main memory usage example. The rest of the CPU's data writes are channeled via Fusion links. PS4's Fusion links are limited to 10 GB/s coherent and 10 GB/s non-coherent. Roughly equal to PCI version 2.0 16X lanes (8 GB/s read and 8GB/s write). XBO's CPU and GPU link is 30 GB/s.

That's 120 GB/s for the GPU.

Scale to X1X's 326 GB/s and DCC 1.361X factor, it yields about 303 GB/s. This memory bandwidth allocation is then backed by GPU's 2 MB L2 cache.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2017-project-scorpio-tech-revealed

We quadrupled the GPU L2 cache size, again for targeting the 4K performance."

XOX GPU's 2MB L2 cache was used to reach 4K rendering.

Existing AMD GPU's pixel engines are not even connected to L2 cache. R9-390X only has 1 MB L2 cache for Compute and Geometry Engines only.

PS4/Liverpool's memory subsystem efficiency, 135 / 176 = 76.7 percent efficient.

Polaris 10 's memory subsystem efficiency, 194/ 256 = 75.7 percent efficient. (techreport.com's beyond3d numbers)

Hawaii's memory subsystem efficiency, 263 / 320 = 82.2percent efficient. (techreport.com's beyond3d numbers)

PS4's bar graph results could increase with Hawaii's memory controller subsystem i.e. extra 5.5 percent increase.

Using Hawaii GCN's memory controller subsystem's 5.5 percent increase over PS4's 120 GB/s number yields 126 GB/s.

Scale to X1X's 326 GB/s and DCC 1.361X factor, it yields about 317.64 GB/s.

R9-390X's 384 GB/s x 82.2 percent efficient = 315.648GB/s.

There's a very high chance XOX's 40/44 CU GCN was Polaris/subset Vega improved Hawaii GCN i.e. the missing RX-490 SKU under RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64 SKUs.

MOAR CHARTS AND GRAPHS!

@tormentos:

I have the PowerColor Red Devil RX 480 8GB and it's been a good card. Best OC I could get was 1390MHz, but I generally play at 1375MHz core/2050MHz mem. RX 580 can get up around 1475MHz if you're lucky. TW3 and DOOM perform great and those have been my favorite games so it's win-win.

After seeing the first batch of games on Scorpio I don't think it can step to a heavily overclocked RX 580. I've just been flipping my cards on ebay before the new yearly models release and recouping most of my money. I could probably sell my 480 for more than I paid right now with the etherium rush going on.

Sell the box at cost and make money(profit) on software/accessories/etc.

1X price is decent so far but I think it's also because of the inflated GPU pricing recently.

Hope RX 580 "class" cards on 1X release would be much lower.

Hoping for GTX 1080 performance for $ 349 before 2018 before sales/discounts.

Mainstream Vega 11 will be replacing RX-580. http://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-rx-vega-11-mainstream-gpus-late-2017-launch/

You didn't add to what I said. I just stated the same thing. That's the razor/razorblade model. However, that still doesn't stipulate that the box is being sold at cost, as you can still loss-lead with that model.

Was it so hard to read his whole freaking post? Where's the gaming mouse? Where's the decent keyboard? Where's the sound system? You know, stuff that any self-respecting PC gamer uses. Add it and you're way above $1500. Surprise, surprise.

$1200 to get near a Xbox One X

$830 if you don't want a UHD drive and an inferior GPU

$500 is looking more of a bargain by the minute

In 4 years time you will be spending another $500 on a new console, so even with Live costs (WHICH INCLUDES FREE GAMES) its still way cheaper and you get a box that actually fits under your TV.

Well Done Microsoft

@ronvalencia: Consoles share memory with the CPU. Fail.

Those are the prices right now. AMD will supposedly release their new high end cards around XBONEX launch and will probably have new midrange cards early 2018 if not late 2017, which will likely mean that NVIDIA will probably also make a move to try and stomp AMD near the entry door. So probably it won't take long for a ~$250 midrange card to be trading blows with the XBONEX.

Its quite decent, but still serves very little purpose....

More games and more people playing on Playstation.

Powerful mid-range HTPC with NONE of the regular PC advantages....

wtf is the point still? "For those that don't want a PC?" ... dwindeling exclusives... only Forza has any power of the Playstation brand... and clearly not enough on its own.

So you have to include the price of the (minimum 50") 4K HDR TV and 7.1 surround sound system with the price of the Xbox. Got it.

So a PC gaming?

I know you're not talking about 30 fps XB1X that has like 1/3rd the aaa/aaa games per year than PC.

1. How many people own a XB1X?

2. That's just Steam.

3. A high end PC still has better graphics, frames, load times, and with cheaper games/online. Popularity =/= Quality.

Upgrading a PC every 3 years is cheaper than $500 every 3 years + XBL.

You guys keep going full price of a new PC when people actually just upgrade the parts they want to upgrade

Most powerful console plays Crackdown 3 at 30FPS. lol

Is it?

year 1 $1200 on PC

Year 4 $470 gpu upgrade (1070)

Year 7 New PC start again

Total - $1670

X1X twice - $1000+$350 (live)= $1350 and you get free games.

Share memory setup is better than non-shared memory setup which is the same argument for unified shares vs non-unified shaders.

A machine with CPU 128 bit bus + GPU 256 bit bus, the GPU is stuck to 256 bit bus width limits. You must factor in the additional memory copy events between the separate bus system.

A machine with 384 bit unified memory bus + CPU-to-GPU fusion links, the GPU can have memory transfer burst mode that uses the entire 384 bit bus width. Advantage with "zero copy" feature and direct CPU-to-GPU fusion communication links which is useful for GPU command list building.

Atm, X1X is beating RX-580 on Forza and Arc Survival Evolved (Unreal Engine 4).

R9-390X (5.9 TFLOPS) and MSI RX-480 GX (6 TFLOPS) hasn't defeated GTX 980 Ti (6 TFLOPS), but X1X was the first AMD GPU with 6 TFLOPS to do it.

You don't get free games on live. You are renting them.

Vega 10 an 11 has double rate FP16 feature which needs Volta update.

"New pc start again" lol no. This isn't how snowball upgrading works.

Overall the price almost evens with keeping a gaming rig maintained VS. constantly buying a completely new XB/PS model every 3 years on top of XBL or PSN and more expensive games. Only on PC you still get higher frames, better online, better gfx, faster load, faster install, and more aaa/aa games.

Yes, PC is going to be a little more expensive - you pay more for the superior product. Welcome to the free market/capitalism.

You don't need a gaming mouse you need a keyboard and mouse any would do,and if like me you own an xbox controller or Dual shock 4 you are even more set those work on PC.

Sound system? Since when scorpio comes with a sound system? Oh wait you are assuming we have to play is a speakerless Monitor no dude is 2017 any TV with HDMI will perfectly get sound from your PC HDMI the fact that you are asking for a sound system pretty much proves that you still in the early 2000,in fact i have my PC hook up to my LCD TV.

Yeah because a keyboard mouse and a speaker system sill actually rise the cost of that set up to $1500 from $1250...hahahaa

Or worse from $800...

Now since you LOVE to add stuff did you calculated the $300 you would spent on xbox live which on PC are not require.?

Did you also calculate that game prices on PC drop faster.?

That 1070GTX set up is not near xbox one X is superior in both CPU and GPU.

The $800 one is about the same and still we can cut more and make it like $750,which still is $250 over the XBO X but considering that the xbox one X price is not $500 is $560 with xbox live first year is even less of a blow.

And the true is you will continue to pay for xbox live,which in 5 years is $300 which rise that price $800.

NO that is not true and you will see how most xbox one owners will not run to buy an xbox one X,worse i am 100% fure the XBO will beat it easy this holiday,bearing in mind that the XBO is $250 and play the same games.

Sure the xbox one is a better value upfront,but long term is not such a great deal,even less if you consider that with a PC you can play most xbox one exclusives but with an xbox one you can't play most PC games exclusives.

Given smililar pools and bandwidths, split is better. But this isn't the case at all with PC. Fail.

Scorpio is a Custom Beast. You are not going to be able to put something together that can Perform like Scorpio for anywhere close to it's price.

It can run the Amazing looking Forza 7 in 4K 60 FPS with 4K textures AND the XB1X still has 30% Head room for improvements.

Forza 7 has 30% Head room at 4K 60FPS on XB1X

Devs that don't Choose to run their game at 4K are prioritizing Quality of settings over Resolutions. Games like AC are using the equivalent of PC Ultra settings. Consoles aren't designed with Ultra/Max settings in mind but are designed with High settings in mind.

Again, RX-580 couldn't exceed it's 256 bit bus width and can't temporary reallocate CPU's 128 bit bus to the GPU.

A single GDDR5-6800 x 32 bit channel already delivers peak theoretical 27 GB/s memory bandwidth. X1X has 12 32bit GDDR5-6800 channels.

PC with dGPU doesn't have fusion links to reduce external memory hit rates.

PC with dGPU doesn't have zero copy feature i.e. CPU passes the data pointer to GPU. On PCs, copy event is triggered.

@scatteh316:

Just for you.

On PS4, respecting CPU's 2 MB + 2 MB L2 cache boundary software optimizations are very important since it's a 200 cycle trip to external memory, hence it's a tiling software optimization method.

For PS4, Sony is showing their worst to best case examples.

Let's use 2nd bar from right side with 125 GB/s memory bandwidth with about 5 GB/s CPU main memory usage example. The rest of the CPU's data writes are channeled via Fusion links. PS4's Fusion links are limited to 10 GB/s coherent and 10 GB/s non-coherent. Roughly equal to PCI version 2.0 16X lanes (8 GB/s read and 8GB/s write). XBO's CPU and GPU link is 30 GB/s.

That's 120 GB/s for the GPU.

Scale to X1X's 326 GB/s and DCC 1.361X factor, it yields about 303 GB/s. This memory bandwidth allocation is then backed by GPU's 2 MB L2 cache.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2017-project-scorpio-tech-revealed

We quadrupled the GPU L2 cache size, again for targeting the 4K performance."

XOX GPU's 2MB L2 cache was used to reach 4K rendering.

Existing AMD GPU's pixel engines are not even connected to L2 cache. R9-390X only has 1 MB L2 cache for Compute and Geometry Engines only.

PS4/Liverpool's memory subsystem efficiency, 135 / 176 = 76.7 percentefficient.

Polaris 10 's memory subsystem efficiency, 194/ 256 = 75.7 percent efficient. (techreport.com's beyond3d numbers)

Hawaii's memory subsystem efficiency, 263 / 320 = 82.2 percent efficient. (techreport.com's beyond3d numbers)

PS4's bar graph results could increase with Hawaii's memory controller subsystem i.e. extra 5.5 percent increase.

Using Hawaii GCN's memory controller subsystem's 5.5 percent increase over PS4's 120 GB/s number yields 126 GB/s.

Scale to X1X's 326 GB/s and DCC 1.361X factor, it yields about 317.64 GB/s.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2017-the-scorpio-engine-in-depth

"For 4K assets, textures get larger and render targets get larger as well. This means a couple of things - you need more space, you need more bandwidth," explains Nick Baker. "The question though was how much? We'd hate to build this GPU and then end up having to be memory-starved. All the analysis that Andrew was talking about, we were able to look at the effect of different memory bandwidths, and it quickly led us to needing more than 300GB/s memory bandwidth. In the end we ended up choosing 326GB/s. On Scorpio we are using a 384-bit GDDR5 interface - that is 12 channels. Each channel is 32 bits, and then 6.8GHz on the signalling so you multiply those up and you get the 326GB/s."

R9-390X's 384 GB/s x 82.2 percent efficient = 315.648GB/s.

There's a very high chance XOX's 40/44 CU GCN was Polaris/subset Vega improved Hawaii GCN i.e. the missing RX-490 SKU under RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64 SKUs.

-------------

PS4 Pro, using Hawaii's memory controller efficiency, yields 212 GB/s.

RX-470 has about 217 GB/s, Not including memory copy event from PCI-E.

----------

264 / 6.17 = 44 GB/s per TFLOPS for MSI RX-480 GX with 6.0 TFLOPS. Not including memory copy event from PCI-E.

212 / 4.2 = 50 GB/s per TFLOPS for PS4 Pro with second bar from the right side with scaled to 218 GB/s physical.

317.64 / 6 TF = 53 GB/s per TFLOPS for X1X with second bar from the right side with scaled to 326 GB/s physical.