[EurogamerDF] Orbis Unmasked: what to expect from the next-gen PlayStation

[disolitude]

enditall727 said:

disolitude said:

VGKing said:
The RAM different between Xbox 720 and PS4 comes down to a quantity vs quality.
Xbox has the quanity, PS4 has the quality. The question is which games work best with which set-up?

Nah it really doesn't come down to that at all. 

If this rumor is to be believed it comes down to the following:

PS4 GDDR5 - able to push larger amounts of data at once, but much slower cycle rate

360 DDR3 - able to push less data at once but do it more rapidly + having more memory to work with.

PS4 - .50 caliber machine gun firing 5 rounds per second

360 - .30 caliber machine gun firing 10 rounds per second and having more ammo to fire with.

 

I really don't know how else I can illustrate this to people...GDDR5 doesn't necessarily mean faster performance. Infact for non GPU tasks its much worse. 

this is confusing..

 

you basically just said that the 720's ddr3 is faster AND has more ammo than the PS4's GDDR5

 

I thought the GDDR5 was faster though..

No GDDR5 is faster overall but doesn't really work for non GPU based tasks.

I may have blown this out of proportion... GDDR5 = DDR3 just tuned slightly differently. If PS4 has GDDR5 unified structure, the CPU RAM will work just fine, however not nearly as fast as the GPU.

Without getting too technical.. GDDR5 memory is often laid out in parallel, and connecting chunks of memory together. With the way GPU's work, this means that a GPU processor can be instructed to access only specific memory 'chunks' and process things in parallel much faster. For the rest of the system this doesn't work because the CPU needs to be able to access any memory data, regardless of where it stored on the SDRAM.

So GDDR5 memory = good for GPU(parallel tasks), but not nearly as fast for CPU(sequential tasks).

Also, there is no way microsoft will use DDR3 memory only. They will most likely have DDR3 or 4 for system and GDDR5 for GPU.