Xbox One X bottlenecked?

<p>I don't doubt it. The Jaguar architecture is, like all pre-Zen AMD CPU architectures, not that good in terms of single-thread performance. That limits how fast the CPU can issue instructions to the GPU. I'd rate the Jaguar CPU as the second-slowest component in the Xbox One X (behind the spinning hard drive disk). It's beefed up compared to the CPU on the regular Xbox One, but higher clocks aren't going to fix an inherently slow microarchitecture.</p><p><br></p><p>As to whether it's really bottlenecking the GPU, I think it's less of a bottleneck than it would be in a PC of equivalent specs. The reason is that Microsoft and AMD worked together to implement a bunch of DirectX command translations in hardware, so the main CPU doesn't need to go through the process of translating command bundles into low-level GPU instructions. So the weak CPU doesn't hurt Xbox One X performance as much as if you placed that same CPU in a PC and tried to run the same workloads.</p><p><br></p><p>Now it's telling that the focus of both of the current gen+ consoles (XB1X and PS4 Pro) is higher resolutions. Resolution is pretty much entirely GPU-dependent. Nearly every enhanced title for Xbox One X has a higher resolution than the standard version; a minority of them allow for higher frame rates. Frame rate is more CPU-dependent than resolution (though the GPU also plays a significant role). And the algorithmic complexity of the games (number of objects in the simulation, complexity of the game systems and simulation) is rarely increased in the enhanced titles; expanding the simulation is entirely CPU-dependent. Thus the marketing push for these enhanced consoles lines up with their major hardware improvements: a huge increase in GPU power, with a smaller bump in CPU power. This lends well for enabling higher resolutions, but doesn't help much in increasing framerate or game complexity. So in that sense, the lower CPU:GPU power ratio is limiting the enhancements in games to graphics and resolution rather than framerate or complexity.</p><p><br></p><p>I think it's interesting that Project Scarlett is supposed to enable 120 fps gameplay; pushing 120 fps consistently requires good CPU performance, and putting that feature in the marketing shows that Microsoft has some confidence in the level of CPU performance in the upcoming console.</p>