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Forums - Gaming Discussion - New Nintendo Platform Teased at Conference, "NX"

Zekkyou on 28 March 2015
curl-6 said:

UC4 is increased in scope over UC3, so the Wii U's extra power over PS3 would have to be put to work on that.

And eDRAM is very useful for some things, like triple buffering to prevent screen tearing or graphics data that reqires fast access, but it's ultimately 32MB. It doesn't magically expand to cover the 4GB difference in RAM between Wii U and its rivals. And Xbone has 32MB eDRAM as well, so it's not a Wii U exclusive advantage. Shrinking a game's memory footprint from 5GB to 1GB would require significant work.

The X1 has 32MB of eSRAM, not eDRAM, but past that you're right. Translating 5GB of DDR3 + 32MB of eSRAM into 1GB of DDR3 + 32MB eDRAM wouldn't be a simple affair.

The WiiU's eDRAM would be able to bridge the gap in specific situations (it's faster than the X1's eSRAM), but as you said, there's ultimately only 32MB of it. There are pretty firm limits as to what it can and can't do. Reducing a memory footprint by 13,000%~ falls outside those limits :p



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Soundwave on 28 March 2015

The New 3DS has 10MB of eDRAM (the same as the XBox 360), it's not like eDRAM is some magic do-all that dramatically alters a system's performance.

Nintendo just happens to like eDRAM as a memory architecture because they really, really (reeeeeeally) apparently hated the N64's RAM which had latency problems.



curl-6 on 28 March 2015
Zekkyou said:
curl-6 said:

UC4 is increased in scope over UC3, so the Wii U's extra power over PS3 would have to be put to work on that.

And eDRAM is very useful for some things, like triple buffering to prevent screen tearing or graphics data that reqires fast access, but it's ultimately 32MB. It doesn't magically expand to cover the 4GB difference in RAM between Wii U and its rivals. And Xbone has 32MB eDRAM as well, so it's not a Wii U exclusive advantage. Shrinking a game's memory footprint from 5GB to 1GB would require significant work.

The X1 has 32MB of eSRAM, not eDRAM, but past that you're right. Translating 5GB of DDR3 + 32MB of eSRAM into 1GB of DDR3 + 32MB eDRAM wouldn't be a simple affair.

The WiiU's eDRAM would be able to bridge the gap in specific situations (it's faster than the X1's eSRAM), but as you said, there's ultimately only 32MB of it. There are pretty firm limits as to what it can and can't do. Reducing a memory footprint by 13,000%~ falls outside those limits :p

I actually didn't know Wii U's eDRAM was faster than X1's eSRAM. Huh. You learn something new every day.

@Soundwave: Aren't VRAM and embedded DRAM two different things, or at least not necessarily the same?



Materia-Blade on 28 March 2015
curl-6 said:
Materia-Blade said:

"and the omission of subsurface scattering for skin. With the right amount of talent and resources applied, Wii U should be able to get what we've seen so far running at an Uncharted 3 level of fidelity."

Please, let's be serious, shall we? ps3 level of fidelity? we are talking about a console quite above ps3. as for the "subsurface scattering for skin", wii u would have no trouble doing that on cutscenes, after all, they are just cutscenes.

As for ACU, I don't see what's problematic about reducing the crowd that's already filler to begin with. I suppose any version of that game would be better with less people on the streets.

UC4 is increased in scope over UC3, so the Wii U's extra power over PS3 would have to be put to work on that.

And eDRAM is very useful for some things, like triple buffering to prevent screen tearing or graphics data that reqires fast access, but it's ultimately 32MB. It doesn't magically expand to cover the 4GB difference in RAM between Wii U and its rivals. And Xbone has 32MB eDRAM as well, so it's not a Wii U exclusive advantage. Shrinking a game's memory footprint from 5GB to 1GB would require significant work.

If I recall, x1 has esram, not edram.the edram may not cover 4gb of difference but it definetely reduces the gap. And there's a little something called "porting" and "scaling" down, those things are what put money on 3rd party's pockets. just reducing resolution to 720p must help a lot without even considering downscaling. finally, it's not like those ps4/x1 games really need all 5gb of ram.



curl-6 on 28 March 2015
Materia-Blade said:
curl-6 said:

UC4 is increased in scope over UC3, so the Wii U's extra power over PS3 would have to be put to work on that.

And eDRAM is very useful for some things, like triple buffering to prevent screen tearing or graphics data that reqires fast access, but it's ultimately 32MB. It doesn't magically expand to cover the 4GB difference in RAM between Wii U and its rivals. And Xbone has 32MB eDRAM as well, so it's not a Wii U exclusive advantage. Shrinking a game's memory footprint from 5GB to 1GB would require significant work.

If I recall, x1 has esram, not edram.the edram may not cover 4gb of difference but it definetely reduces the gap. And there's a little something called "porting" and "scaling" down, those things are what put money on 3rd party's pockets. just reducing resolution to 720p must help a lot without even considering downscaling. finally, it's not like those ps4/x1 games really need all 5gb of ram.

eDRAM is more about compensating for RAM latency and bandwidth, not size. The idea is it's this small bank of super-fast memory that you use for tasks where main RAM is too slow. But that's the thing, it's small. It makes up just 3% of Wii U's total memory.

Downscaling can be a difficult process; not only do you have to reduce certain assets while maintaining acceptable fidelity, you often have to entirely rework in-game systems, like streaming higher resolution assets from the disc, which raises problems like disc access speed and optical drive bandwidth. You may have to partition levels that were originally seamless into chunks that load and unload separately to remain within RAM parameters.



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Materia-Blade on 28 March 2015
curl-6 said:
Materia-Blade said:

If I recall, x1 has esram, not edram.the edram may not cover 4gb of difference but it definetely reduces the gap. And there's a little something called "porting" and "scaling" down, those things are what put money on 3rd party's pockets. just reducing resolution to 720p must help a lot without even considering downscaling. finally, it's not like those ps4/x1 games really need all 5gb of ram.

eDRAM is more about compensating for RAM latency and bandwidth, not size. The idea is it's this small bank of super-fast memory that you use for tasks where main RAM is too slow. But that's the thing, it's small. It makes up just 3% of Wii U's total memory.

Downscaling can be a difficult process; not only do you have to reduce certain assets while maintaining acceptable fidelity, you often have to entirely rework in-game systems, like streaming higher resolution assets from the disc, which raises problems like disc access speed and optical drive bandwidth. You may have to partition levels that were originally seamless into chunks that load and unload separately to remain within RAM parameters.

you're saying 32mb of edram is low? you realize it isn't like ram memory, wich is in the thousands of megabytes, right?

downscalling would be a difficult process if there too much difference in horsepower and engines weren't made to be scalable.



curl-6 on 28 March 2015
Materia-Blade said:
curl-6 said:

eDRAM is more about compensating for RAM latency and bandwidth, not size. The idea is it's this small bank of super-fast memory that you use for tasks where main RAM is too slow. But that's the thing, it's small. It makes up just 3% of Wii U's total memory.

Downscaling can be a difficult process; not only do you have to reduce certain assets while maintaining acceptable fidelity, you often have to entirely rework in-game systems, like streaming higher resolution assets from the disc, which raises problems like disc access speed and optical drive bandwidth. You may have to partition levels that were originally seamless into chunks that load and unload separately to remain within RAM parameters.

you're saying 32mb of edram is low? you realize it isn't like ram memory, wich is in the thousands of megabytes, right?

downscalling would be a difficult process if there too much difference in horsepower and engines weren't made to be scalable.

It's not low for what it is, no. As eDRAM for a system of Wii U's calibre, it's comfortably sized. But eDRAM by it's very nature is a small chunk of fast memory used for fast-access tasks, it compensates for RAM speed, not RAM size. And crunching a game's memory footprint to 1/5th it's original size can be very difficult.