Adinnieken said:
VGKing said:
You're ignoring the fact that 3 of those 8 gigs of DDR3 are reserved for the OS. So no, the ESRAM doesn't make up for the lower bandwidth. Even if MS managed to make to bring the bandwidth up to par with the 4gig GDDR5, the PS4 would still have the advantage as this is a unified RAM pool. PS$ is easier to develop for and pretty straightforward at least in terms of RAM. Xbox 720 is the opposite. Microsoft has a huge bandwitdth disadvantage and they have resorted to using super expensive ESRAM to try and compensate.
So whatever money MS saved using the cheaper DDR3 RAM, its negated by the more expensive ESRAM they were forced to include. Again, this is all for the sake of Kinect and some RAM-eating features they have.(Which could be some kind of DVR feature or maybe Windows-based OS) They chose quantity over qualitly(in this case, speed). this is where Microsoft has made mistakes with the Xbox 720 design IMO. I doubt we'll see any big differences in multiplats, at least not for a few years. Where I expect things to really show is with exclusives.
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I'm not ignoring anything. You however are ignoring the very article you cited. In it, they say that the ESRAM does essentially make up for the lower bandwidth of the GDDR3 memory. It doesn't equate to a 1:1 relationship, but we're talking a difference of about 14 GBps. A negligible performance difference.
The ESRAM however doesn't do anything for Kinect. The purpose of ESRAM is to provide faster memory for portions of code where performance is necessary. Again, in the article you cited, a programmer from an actually game studio, goes on to explain that the majority of game code doesn't require the high speed memory. The game doesn't benefit from having access to it. Only in some specific instances does high speed memory benefit the code. And it's actually more difficult to put a 4GB bank of GDDR5 memory together than it is to put an 8GB GDDR3 memory bank together. As explained in the article you cited, GDDR5 memory only comes in 512MB banks, so getting anything more than 4GBs in a single memory configuration is painfully difficult. Again, read the article you cited.
Sony loads up the PS4 with extremely high-speed memory, but the majority of code that'll access it won't be able to take advantage of it. The next Xbox includes 8GB of slower memory, but includes 32MB of EDRAM. What you don't quite fathom is it becomes 6 of 1 and a half-dozen of another. If the PS4 has a performance gain it's negligible. It won't amount to a hill of beans.
The only way exclusives could be better is if they offer 4K resolution, which I doubt they will. Sony and it's 1st party developers may decide to present 4K games to the public, but I doubt they'll actually release any.
This was the whole reason why I made the thread about what was valid reason to buy a PS4. The two consoles will be about even in terms of performance, the majority of games, the same. The only difference will be the "hook" each brings to the market to get consumers/gamers hyped on buying the console. A new Dual Shock gamepad doesn't quite do it.
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