By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close

Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Did SOny just prove Wii U RAM is better than PS4 RAM? Video inside

HoloDust said:
curl-6 said:
What the thread should have been titled is "did Sony just explain why Wii U's RAM isn't too slow", but no, it had to be framed as a console war pissing contest. *Sigh*


"Sony" did no such thing - Cerny was explaining two approaches they were considering for PS4 (and btw, that was quite some time ago), and why they decided to go with unified pool (and that he stated in even older interview on Gamasutra). Not sure why people even pay attention to some random guy on Youtube who obviously has absolutely zero understanding of how hardware works, and decided to share his "knowledge" with rest of the world weeks after that conference.

For the rest who know a thing or two about hardware, WiiU's approach is something that was around for quite some time now, so not sure what the fuss is all about. I was giving example of how (rumored) WiiU equivalent GPU performs with different memory bandwidths several times, but here it is again (PS4 is between 7850 and 7870, XOne is between 7770 and 7790):

7870 = 1.22x 7850= 1.15x 7790 = 1.28x 7770 = 3.56x 5550 (GDDR5; 51.2GB/s) = 1.24x 5550 (GDDR3; 25.6GB/s) = 1.32x 5550 (DDR2; 12.8GB/s)

Last 5550 has same bandwidth as WiiU's main system memory, but due to eDRAM it is not to be expected for WiiU to perform on that level - the question remains how good you can use eDRAM to get more toward that GDDR5 level...that question is valid for XOne too, specially since it has MOVE engines in addition to eSRAM.

 

DISCLAIMER - I will not be replying to either NintendoWitness or ShinobiTroll, so don't bother jumping in.

As I explained, earlier, it's that his  simple explanation of the benefits of eDRAM debunks the technically uninformed claims about the Wii U that ignore these benefits. 



Around the Network

it's wishful thinking based on superficial evidence and nothing more, WiiU is not designed as high-end machine, it's designed as efficient machine, its similar in power to current gen systems with more modern feature set.

some Nintendo fans are boring their wishful thinking is laughable it sounds like scream of typical Sony fan.



Sensei said:

Ok, so let's assume Wii U's RAM is faster. It's still bottelenecked by nearly everything else. It's like putting 8GB RAM on a Sega Genesis. It just doesn't do much when its CPU and GPU aren't up to speed.

Could be good news to the Xbone against PS4, though, because it is overall more powerful than Wii U to take advantage of that RAM architecture's potential, like Cerny said.


The GPU is not the "gimped" component in the hardware. It's the underclocked, fairly basic CPU. The GPU itself is fine and perfectly capable of keeping up with next gen demands.



A small, fast eDRAM or eSRAM used basically like a 3rd level cache offers a speed advantage when it scores a "hit", when you have a "miss", the speed drops down to that of main RAM. Now, if the data and/or program code in the eSRAM and those in the main RAM are independent enough from each other, the overall speed is the weighted average of the speeds of the two RAM weighted with their hit rate, but if you must process an amount of data larger than the eSRAM and they can be used only when they all have been processed, or if the result of computations on data in one of the memories is necessary to do other computation on the other memory's data, the slowest memory becomes a bottleneck just like when there is a "miss" looking for data in the fastest one, overall speed drops to the slowest one. Small and fast caches are great, and having some L1 and L2 cache has been essential to use efficiently the computing power of CPUs and GPUs since the 486, but L3 caches show their limits when amounts of data larger then them must be processed altogether. Nevertheless, even in the most extreme of these cases, the typical work of GPUs, a small but fast memory can still be very beneficial if it's large enough to fully contain a frame buffer and possibly also z-buffer and double or triple buffer, and a texture cache too if there is some space left.



Stwike him, Centuwion. Stwike him vewy wuffly! (Pontius Pilate, "Life of Brian")
A fart without stink is like a sky without stars.
TGS, Third Grade Shooter: brand new genre invented by Kevin Butler exclusively for Natal WiiToo Kinect. PEW! PEW-PEW-PEW! 
 


Alby_da_Wolf said:
. Nevertheless, even in the most extreme of these cases, the typical work of GPUs, a small but fast memory can still be very beneficial if it's large enough to fully contain a frame buffer and possibly also z-buffer and double or triple buffer, and a texture cache too if there is some space left.

I'm no expert, but if the 360 managed just fine with 10MB of eDRAM, shouldn't 32MB be enough for a framebuffer with lots to spare?



Around the Network
curl-6 said:
Alby_da_Wolf said:
. Nevertheless, even in the most extreme of these cases, the typical work of GPUs, a small but fast memory can still be very beneficial if it's large enough to fully contain a frame buffer and possibly also z-buffer and double or triple buffer, and a texture cache too if there is some space left.

I'm no expert, but if the 360 managed just fine with 10MB of eDRAM, shouldn't 32MB be enough for a framebuffer with lots to spare?

Yes, it should be enough even for 1080p 32bit colour triple buffer + 32bit z buffer, or double + z buffer + a small texture cache.



Stwike him, Centuwion. Stwike him vewy wuffly! (Pontius Pilate, "Life of Brian")
A fart without stink is like a sky without stars.
TGS, Third Grade Shooter: brand new genre invented by Kevin Butler exclusively for Natal WiiToo Kinect. PEW! PEW-PEW-PEW! 
 


No.



ListerOfSmeg said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFaKX2YnH0I&feature=player_embedded

Seems Wii U has a(Theoretical) 1k gigabyte a second bandwidth while PS4 only has 176. If Sony is right, Wii U wont be as hindered as many people want consumers to beleive.


One of the worst threads Ive seen on vgchartz. What is the bandwith on the Wiiu? Its 17GB/s , PS4 ram is at 176GB/s

Please dont make any more threads if all you can do is this.



snowdog said:
Sensei said:

Ok, so let's assume Wii U's RAM is faster. It's still bottelenecked by nearly everything else. It's like putting 8GB RAM on a Sega Genesis. It just doesn't do much when its CPU and GPU aren't up to speed.

Could be good news to the Xbone against PS4, though, because it is overall more powerful than Wii U to take advantage of that RAM architecture's potential, like Cerny said.



The Wii U hardware has been designed from the ground up to be efficient. Nintendo are aware that bottlenecks are the bane of developers and have designed a balanced console as a result. Efficiency plus balance equals less bottlenecks.


That's a nice sentament for sure but one that has little grounding in fact. Nintendo have a history of bottlenecks in their systems. N64 had it's high latency shared RAM plus a miniscule 4K texture cache. Gamecube had it's small amount of main RAM and complicated memory system (2 shared RAM pools + 3MB  eDRAM). NDS had it's fixed 2048 triangles per frame budget, at least it had 512KB of texture memory lol.

Nintendo are good but they aren't that good...



@TheVoxelman on twitter

Check out my hype threads: Cyberpunk, and The Witcher 3!

People forget about the things that history teaches us sometimes.

When IBM released their first desktop system containing onboard cache, they found that it could outperform some of their higher end server solutions in certain tasks (the ones containing nothing but high speed RAM for the time). Even if this eDRAM is used purely for caching methods, it will still outperform a ton of higher speed RAM for particular tasks.

Those benefits can be broadened if the developer has control over the eDRAM, though at the cost of a little more complexity. Still this should pose no different to the use of "zero page" memory for more efficient use of the CPU back in the earlier eras.