Gadgetory

today we're working on the Xbox one to 10x Xbox one X is what we're working on today and we have thermal power and gaming benchmarks for this so this is new for us we've done thermal and power stuff before with consoles with the switch but now we have software to do FPS benchmarks of games that we've developed internally thanks to Patrick Lathan who works on the team so pretty cool stuff we have destiny 2 call of duty World War 2 and then Assassin's Creed origins for benchmarks this will allow us to see what an Rx for 80-ish class type of hardware can handle in a console in terms of frame throughput and frame Layton sees before that this video is brought to you by thermal Grizzly makers of the conductor hot liquid metal that we recently used to drop 20 degrees off of our coffee leak temperatures thermal grizzly also makes traditional thermal compounds for use on top of the IHS like cryo not and hydro not pastes learn more at the link below for the testing set up long story short for thermals we have a thermocouple mounted to the back of the APU just on the back side of the PCB this happens with CPU testing too or you can mount a thermocouple in the socket for the CPU it's something you can do on a lot of the AC sports for example we've taken that idea and applied it's a console mounting the thermocouple on the opposite side of the apu so there will be a delta between the PCB but it's not gonna be that big of a delta we can pretty much change the temperature as 40 case so we measured with another thermocouple on the top of the GPU and we're able to determine that it has a shutdown temperature of about 85 degrees celsius for case temperature or external silicon temperature so that gives us a range of what we know we're working with there's a jaguar apu and that uses a an integrated graphics solution on the apu that has four TCU's operating at eleven seventy two megahertz with more or less polaris architecture at this point so that's what we're looking at for the hardware that means it's got more to use than an RX 480 or 580 but a slightly slower clock 100 sixty-eight ish megahertz slower than a gaming X for example 580 for a game benchmarking we are using three games shown here and those games will give us our first ever look at GM's new console game benchmarking methodology we're pretty excited about this but haven't fully fleshed out the software yet so this is a very first look that means the video presentation and the testing will definitely change in the future for now what we're doing is we are live and losslessly capturing frame rate the same way we do with a VR benchmarking which we introduced early this year and capturing it live then we feed that video file into our software and the video file is able to determine the dropped frames versus the delivered new frames which it basically does at a very high level by doing per pixel analysis of what's changed in the frame and what hasn't and then we determined from there whether or not the frame was actually new or as a repeat frame repeat frames happen on consoles because of vsync the games are basically all vsync and that means that vsync is your policy for when the bits flip in the pipeline so you have something like a front buffer and a back buffer for example in the GPU and the front buffer is your current frame that's being drawn the back buffer is the next frame that's coming up to be drawn and at some point in the process the GP receives a to say okay flip these buffers let's start drawing the back buffer consoles are V synced so or at least the games are pretty much always be synced so you don't really see tearing and what you can see is stuttering stuttering would occur from the the GPU missing the interval for refresh with the vsync cycle so if you're on sixty Hertz that's gonna be a sixteen point six six seven millisecond window if the GPU can't get a frame ready in sixteen point six six seven milliseconds then it will replay the previous frame in VR there's there are also drop frames and reproductions and like that we've talked about that before with traditional games it just repeats the frame so if it happens a lot it looks like a stutter so that's the very basics of it we might go into more detail at some point but the stutter shouldn't really happen too much with consoles but they do occasionally happen and ultimately the developers are all building for a single type of hardware so they should be pretty optimized more than PCs can be anyway so a last item is power monitoring we're using a plug load meter that we use for other GPU and CPU testing that we've talked about in the past this allows us to monitor second a second or actually down two milliseconds power consumption and then we can align that with thermals and frame times to determine the overall behavior of the console under different loads so let's start with assassin's creed because it has the most the most animated charts I suppose the other ones are pretty flat lines assassin's creed though following Ubisoft's policy is is a bit more sporadic with its optimization starting with assassin's creed origins and a standard G on charts we'll get to the new ones in a minute we quickly learn that the game is rendering at 30 fps despite the consoles claim to being the most powerful console on the market 30 FPS would be a frame time of thirty three point three three milliseconds and we somewhat regularly dip to sixty six point six seven milliseconds so that's a drop from 30 fps to about 15 that means if you drop one frame you now are basically out of 15 fps the question is whether it's sustained for a long period of time this is reflected in our 1% and 0.1% lowest frame rate values against the two-minute test window averaging out to 27 FPS again average with 15 FPS for 1% lows and 0.1% lows our our next measurements are presented as over time charts will highlight which is which before diving in we have thermal benchmarks which are using a thermocouple mounted to the back of side of the apu frame time benchmarks using our new software and then power benchmarks using a login plug load meter also note that our on-screen display has a marker for the present second which will highlight and then there are markers for what's coming up in the next few seconds and what has already had and this historical graph will allow you to look at what's coming up then focus on the gameplay footage in the background for any potential hiccups and stutters and then look back at the graph with this on-screen display you'll see that our frame times are being plotted as bouncing between 33 and 66 milliseconds or 30 and 15 FPS depending on the load to be fair to Assassin's Creed origins the game does not regularly drop to 15 fps it seems to primarily do so during combat scenes the game maintains a flat 30 FPS during city or on during exploration or other non-combat scenarios you'll see the thermals of power consumption and framerate plummet whenever we die and that's because we've hit a black loading screen so nothing's being rendered this is expected behavior the Xbox one X maintains what is it roughly a study state 62 degrees Celsius apu backside temperature and that's under gaming workloads with our thermal paste improvement so we don't actually know what it would be with the stock pasted unfortunately and this puts the front sight silicon temperature probably closer to 70 to 75 degrees Celsius we found that TK smacks is about 85 degrees C before a thermal shutdown event occurs we were not able to get the Xbox to ever thermally shut down without intentionally doing so there's no thermal throttling going on here and no temperature spikes aligned with framerate drops so it's just combat creating work for the APU power consumption is around 170 watts with a peak load of 181 watts and just to jump back to frame x for a second let's tab manually through one of these sequences that drop some frames we should be skipping every other frame because the game renders at 30fps and is captured at 60 every now and then we'll get to skipped frames and that's when we get there's latency spikes 266 milliseconds this can be seen commonly in combat there are a few examples of this during gameplay sequences as well but they aren't too common they are however common enough to Teeter on noticeable even to console players but for the most part they're not noticeable using some pixel counting we were able to determine that our capture of assassin's creed origins just for the sort of brief single frame that we pulled aside to look at was rendering at 1080p however we haven't yet tested we haven't really put emphasis on trying to make things work with 4k haven't tested 4k specific titles versus 1080p variants yet so there's a lot more to do here and the dynamic resolution could become something to pay more attention to as we continue to iterate on our benchmarks because a major concern with consoles versus PCs especially is if the console claims it can handle 4k as a maximum native output then what else is it doing in the background to achieve that because if you try to compare the two devices it's entirely possible that the frame quality on a console will be lower for some frames then on for example a PC and that's because the console is very likely implementing some sort of dynamic resolution policy to sustain its target frame rate of 30 in this instance so we did see 1080p for the single frame we tested but we're gonna have to look into that more in the future so stay tuned for that as we're now Assassin's Creed origins runs okay but it is the worst of the three titles that we've tested in terms of frame latency and frame time consistency it drops the most frames not super noticeable when you play it back unless you load it into software and tab through the frames one at a time so that means it's pretty much a non-issue however this game does drop frames in combat and if you have a lot of combat especially with a lot of enemies it's possible that you're gonna notice occasional stutters during gameplay for perspective let's look at what a perfectly flat framerate looks like on a console called DS campaign in-game cinematics managed to render a perfectly flat sixteen point six six seven millisecond frame latency which means we're running at a constant 60fps for the campaign as for thermals we do they're between 60 and 61 degrees Celsius which means we've reached steady state and it's not really changing at this point power consumption jumps around between at 157 watts and 181 watts with the average around 173 watts of power here's a multiplayer scene from call of duty moving on from campaign this is also rendering at 60fps flat and thermals plot around the same again 60 to 62 degrees Celsius peak power is also similar to the previous run the occasional spikes in frame latency or dips and performance aligned with the killcam for this game we experienced one to two dropped frames when transitioning from the killcam to spawning and that's not noticeable during regular play it only becomes apparent again when tabbing through the frames as you can see it's right before they kill cab that we get one of those repeated frames which means that the vsync window was missed and so the previous frame was rear-ended fortunately it's not game critical at this point in the respawn period so you're not missing anything call duty seems to maintain a 60 FPS steady output in this configuration we tested three scenes for destiny two but only two will make it into this video the others being saved for a future one the first is our multiplayer scene this is the first point at which other players can accompany you in the game and it was one of the bigger battles early on it's also the only scene where we plotted both frame time and framerate drops or spikes with a frame times ranging from 16 milliseconds to 66 milliseconds the average was 33 point 3 4 30 fps in destiny - so it's a 30 FPS game on the Xbox one axe we got 4 frames repeating of 6300 so that's 0.06 percent of all frames dropped and that's totally insignificant and not noticeable during gameplay it is 30 FPS though and that's pretty noticeable as a PC player a few frames also render as fast as sixteen point seven milliseconds oddly it's pretty uncommon but it does happen and that's an effect of 60 FPS when it happens the three frames that it does we can tab through a few examples of repeated frames here again they're not common and it basically requires manual scrubbing of footage to visually notice them still the Xbox one X does not always offer enough power to render every single frame and hit the vsync target thermals and power are largely where they were in the previous games looking at our next scene the market we never encounter any frame latency spikes is a constant 33 milliseconds for the entire playthrough giving us an unimpressive 30fps constantly the market was also the most intensive scene we encountered when benchmarking GPUs on PC but the Xbox one X is able to hand on through this scene let's now look at power and thermals from an idle state and then ramp into burnin there's no capture footage for this one with the console powered off and in an effective sleep state the device polls between zero and two watts from the wall at all times it also maintains pretty much a constant at least 40 degrees Celsius temperature versus about a 26 ambient as we wrap into Assassin's Creed origins workloads we see the initial power on spike at 110 watts then about 60 watts of draw during the menu and then it steps all the way up to 170 to 180 watts during the game thermals during this time are plotted as ramping from 40 C immediately upon power on which then slowly ramps to 62 degrees Celsius to the backside ap temperature and one more note here I think we configured our console to the instant on mode and in that mode for the last thermal test we did where it wraps from 40 to 60 something that was done by unplugging the console letting it cool down and then doing the test if we leave the console plugged in it maintains pretty much a constant 50 degree 55 degrees Celsius temperature on the backside of the apu plugged in but turned off so keep that in mind it runs fairly warm when it's just off apparently another note here the console does spit a lot of heat out the back of it so we showed in our tear down the massive blower fan it's a glorified reference card cooler it spits a ton of heat out the back and if you have any if you're planning to put this in a cabinet or a shelf or anywhere that hasn't enclosed back or against a wall then consider moving it somewhere can breathe because it's going to get really hot in those configurations you want it and as open and environment as possible console gets warm and the thermal paste that's on there stock is not very good so all these numbers were with our improved thermal paste application and that's just something to keep in mind as well the vrm is reasonably well cooled though as is the vram but the AP is they wanted to keep an eye out for so that's it for the the first look at console benchmarking from us we have a lot more to do with this and don't worry if you're here for PC stuff it's not going away and there's not gonna be a significant amount of this forcing that out or anything like that but for a new console launch like now with this we're gonna do what we do with games when they launch like destiny we're gonna focus on a lot of content pertaining to this for the short window of time after launch and we have plenty of other stuff like memory scale abilities have seen on PC coming up in the immediate future along with two or three new case reviews and a couple of other things so as always subscribe for more and you can go to store that gamers Nexus tonight to pick up a shirt like this one or one of our decals which I should put on this actually but other than that patreon.com slash gamers Nexus thumbs up directly thank you for watching I'll see you all next time yes if I put a decal on it it would probably melt off