WiiU has only 1GB for running the game

[HappySqurriel]

drkohler said:

Viper1 said:

HappySqurriel said:

There are a few things I would like to know before I really comment on whether 1GB is too little or enough for games, how much embedded memory is on the CPU and GPU and whether that memory is included in the 1GB total is a good starting point.

It is plausable that the CPU would have 32MB of embedded dram built into it which would allow most of data that the CPU will manipulate on a per-frame basis to be stored in embedded memory, and if the GPU had 64MB (or more) embedded memory it could hold all of the screen buffers and have a high performance texture cache. If embedded memory was not included in the memory total, then the 1GB of memory would (mostly) be used for storing game assets (models, textures, etc) that are in the "level" but not necessarily being rendered to screen; and with decent streaming from the disk to memory 1GB would not be that bad.

This.

This.. what???

I wish people would stop calling the eDram "Ram". It is not "usable" ram, it is a frame buffer for the GPU - which has some advantages in speeding up rendering, and some disadvantages (out goes the deferred renderung technique, but nothing comes free).

"1G ram for the game" doesn't really say enough. Is it 1G ram for the game code or 1G ram for the game (which includes the space for textures etc for the GPU). In the latter case, the memory in the WiiU would only be roughly twice the memory of the PS360 (and leave an insane amount to the OS). I'd assume we have 1G code ram and 1G (OS + GPU ram) in the WiiU.

I really depends on what you mean as "useable" ...

On the CPU the eDram would (most likely) be a L3 cache which would generally hold everything that was accessed in memory regularly. On the GPU the eDram would (most likely) be the screen buffers and a texture cache. Depending on the resolution you're rendering at, and depending on how much eDram there is, would determine whether you would need to swap textures out of this cache while rendering a frame; hypothetically speaking, with 64MB of eDram while rendering at 720p, 16MB would (probably) be used by buffers leaving 48MB for a texture cache, and that would represent around 64 texels for every pixel you render (assuming a modest 6:1 compression on the texture).