| Michael-5 said: Now I have a question, if Memory bandwidth is only a 5x improvement in the PS4 (38.4 -> 192 GB/s), will that hinder and help the PS4's performance? Is there a linear relationship, or exponential? |
Memory bandwidth is difficult.
Memory bandwidth will have a direct relationship with fillrate, however there comes a point where more memory bandwidth just won't improve anything.
Think of it like this, with memory bandwidth if it is too slow, the GPU has to wait on more data to arrive, that's wasted clock cycles and thus you receive a performance penalty.
Where-as if you have memory bandwidth that is too fast, the GPU has all the data it can possibly handle leaving memory bandwidth wasted, this is a waste of money as you could have gone with tech that is cheaper/slower clocked.
Microsoft and Sony would have done the math on this, same with AMD and nVidia and it seems for a GPU that's around the performance of the PS4's the magic number is around 150-200GB/s.
You also need to keep in mind that consoles are only rendering at 1080P or lower, it's not that demanding anymore so you don't need roughly 300GB/s of memory bandwidth like in high-end PC cards.
All in all, when running similar resolutions the memory bandwidth can have orders of magnitude performance benefits, provided the GPU can keep up and use it, that's not to mention that technology such as 3dc texture compression will save on memory bandwidth right out of the gate.
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