Liabe Brave
Member
I'd argue that better shadows and DOF happen slightly more than seldom, but it doesn't matter really. The point is that the gap seen in games maps very well to what you'd expect purely from simply comparing coarse stats of the two consoles. Of course every piece of hardware inside is doing something to help, or else it wouldn't be there. But it's pretty clear that there's not a significant, consistent benefit applied to DX12 titles that appreciably closes the gap.The bolded happens just about as often as we see better framerates on the XBO, which is pretty seldom really.
I never said it doesn't help, I said it doesn't push notably beyond the paper specs. Microsoft themselves have said that DX12 and the command processor together can reduce overhead by about 50% in some titles. But we have developer statements that DX11 was far more than twice as slow as PS4 to begin with. So while things were improved on the Xbox side, DX12 and the hardware didn't gnaw away at the paper gap even a little--they just moved Microsoft's performance closer to the specs.You're too eager to dismiss or downplay how much the command processor can help. Yes DX12 reduced overhead, but that doesn't mean that the command processor can't help in addition to the efficiencies brought on by the more refined APIs.
And that's the ultimate takeaway about most "secret sauce" claims, for any machine. Typically, they're about making code more streamlined (either in creation or execution), so that the final product uses every ounce of available power without much waste. Claims about some feature or another permitting over 100% efficiency--"punching above its weight"--are liable to be complete bunk, or a vastly oversold misunderstanding of a helpful, but minor, trait.
There is a category of such factors that can be potent, which are newly-invented tradeoffs. CBR, for example, really does let a GPU push bigger framebuffers than you'd expect...but at the cost of reduced IQ and effect precision. Scorpio hasn't really claimed any advances of this kind. (As should be expected--it's powerful enough that it doesn't need them to easily exceed PS4 Pro performance.)