| lilbroex said:
I notice that the Wii U has 4 RAM chips. That means that it is 512X4 as opposed to 1024X2 as I thought before. This means that the consoles houses RAM equivelent to 4 PS3/360s. Now, being it that it resereves 1GB that would mean that it reserves 512X2. Now here are the big questions. Does it support loading RAM in parrallel and what type of RAM is it? If it loads in parralel then how much of an improvement would that be to loading and managing data? Also, it will more than likley free up one of the RAM chips for gaming in the future so how much would it benefit from loading to 3 chips at once? |
Parallel? Are you talking about dual channel memory? That's not dependant on the number of chips (number of DIMM's on a PC motherboard, yes, but not the number of chips itself). However, modern IBM CPU's are dual channel CPU's. So long as the motherboard itself can support dual channel, then yes it can be dual channel. But consoles are designed such that the memory bandwith is rarely a bottleneck to begin with.
| bananaking21 said: more than enough ram? lets be honest here thats no way "more than enough" modern day PC's usually have 8 GB of ram (a good one for gaming that is) some go up to 16 GB's. so 1 GB honestly is a littel ram, much better than the PS3 and 360. but in term of RAM the WiiU doesnt pack much |
1 GB for games on a console is actually enough. Take a look at the exe file for Battlefield 3 running at 2560 x 1600 on ultra high textures...uses 1.8 GB.
A PC runs a whole lot of extra stuff and your games either never take advantage of all of it or simply don't need to. Hell, most games are 32 bit applications and can't address more than 4 GB anyway.
And let's not forget about texture streaming. Given the Wii U's media drive gives 22.5 MB/s bandwidth, it can easily stream enough textures to never worry about taxing the system RAM.
| lilbroex said: I'm not talking about the amount so much as the design. The Wii U has multiple RAM chips that are likely faster than the ones in the PS3 and 360 individually. Say you have one chip that can transfer data at a rate of 25 MB/s(megabytes per second). If you load to two of those chips at once it would raise that to 50 MB/s on top of having less stress on the hardware as you could divide up the work. You could also load data onto one chip while receiving from the other thus prevents the system from being limited by the bandwith of the RAM. I'm asking how much of a benefit this will be to the games. |
All they need to do is make sure the data bandwidth is high enough. Doesn't matter if it's single channel or 8 channel. If have too much memory bandwidth, then it's going to waste. Consoles being closed systems with locked hardware tend ot balance that bandwidth exactly where they need it.
The rEVOLution is not being televised
