walsufnir said:
And no, engines do not "magically" evolve, they just do. We read several comments from devs already who said that they will adjust and improve their engines for next-gen and this will of course affect PC-games aswell. |
I covered the unified memory, you know full well i did, i drew direct comparisons between closed and modular systems
Do you *genuinely* believe that memory usage and framerates have no link what so ever?, increasing memory allows for increased texture, shader and geometrical detail, increasing these impacts GPU performance, conversely framerate as performance drops in response to the increased ladder of processes and job complexity.
Of course, if youre saying "nooo they will just use the ram for store things not process more" then the benefits are minimal, load times are increased as streaming the required data when its needed rather than loading it all in to ram in one go is a much more effective solution.
But, of course, youll completely ignore that and stick with your gun on the "hur dur but its different, it will benefit" because you do not have a background in GPU fabrication and operation.
Pemalite said:
Firstly, you are "predicting" the future, not stating fact, thus it should be taken with a grain of salt. - Don't get me wrong, I believe the Xbox One won't be getting a Ram boost anyway. - Edit: I was right from the beginning on the memory upgrade not happening. :P |
A prediction based on knowledge, knowledge from my previous employer, which I will cover later on in this post.
There is a direct correlation between the framebuffer size and the relative vram usage, with an equilibrium between performance and video quality, at their current specification that equilibrium sits at around 2.3-3gb vram, 2-2.5gb system ram for current and in-development engines, and for engines which render the scene multiple times and store the data in memory to be combined later into a single frame, 3-5.5gb vram at maximum for the framebuffer, once you pass this equilibrium between performance and memory usage you start impacting framerates in favor of visual quality over performance, adding more ram upsets this equilibrium by increasing the address space and upsetting the way the closed system has been designed to handle that addressable space.
So we can look at this three ways, i will spell it out clean and clear so you can understand each scenario
increased texture, bumpmap, shader, detailmap resolution making use of additional memory:
- higher load on GPU as more data to process
- should other data need to be loaded, current data needs to be purged and new data loaded which results in:
- increased loading times
- Minimal increase in graphical fidelity as target framebuffer resolution limits how much of these higher resolution textures are actually visable.
store more game-data in ram rather than streaming what is needed
- higher load times
- more system resources used on managing the larger memory pool to keep track of resources
using extra memory to handle multiple render stream outputs or using downsampling rendering higher resolutions internally but writing 1080p to FB
- increased CPU overheads which impact GPU functions on APU
- increased resource management results in lower output performance
The only benefit additional ram would give to the system would be for background services and OS-level functions such as increasing how much can be recording, by dumping a framebuffer stream to a portion of memory then writing to disk or encoding on the fly and uploading to cloud services, the problem here is that youre not actually giving benefit to the game environment and as a result the increased memory does not result in a "its better" outcome for game graphics.
i would be saying these exact words if it was PS4 rumored and not the Xbox One, the benefits are minimal and the downsides far outweigh the benefits, but here i will list you some anyway.
Benefits:
- More space to store game data
- Extra space to framebuffer content to ram to be used later (increased system-side memory)
- Storing multiple applications states in memory at low power mode (sleep) (can be done anyway, with 8gb, though)
Downside:
- Increased costs
- Higher pcb complexity to handle memory trace arrangement
- Increase chance of failure (see notes *1)
- Increased heat generated (see notes *2)
- Increased retail-level costs / Increased loss-per-sale if shouldering cost to maintain price point
- Increased resource needed to manage additional modules (very minor, but still worth noting)
- Upsets ballance between number of modules, memory size and dual/quad channel arrangement
- Increased PCB size to accomodate additional modules / Decreased space for other components if packed tighter
Note *1 - For each additional electrical component you attach via BGA, you increased the likelyhood of one of those BGA mounted comppnents failing - its because of the size limitation and number of gddr5 modules being used by the PS4 that i believe in the longterm the PS4 may end up suffering a higher failure rate than the xbox one.
Note *2 - Ram generates heat, even if that head is not on the same level of that of a gpu/cpu/apu, it is non the less heat, and depending on how heavy the usage of these components gets, these modules still do approach quite a high temperature, if they didnt there would be no reason for higher spec DDR3 modules to come with heat spreaders, and some graphics cards to utilize ram coolers, If you genuinely believe RAM does not generate "a lot" of heat, please stick your hand in your PC, or flip the AUX cover off your laptop base and touch a module while its running a game, the pain will be a nice "told you so".
I spent several years of my life after leaving university doing fabrication for what was then ATI, working on the Rodin core, RV516 and R600, and lastly the RV670 for FireGL shortly before leaving the company, which was later merged with AMD, so i'd like to think i know a thing or two about GPUS >_>
But alas, my point was that the rumor is BS, because it makes no sense, technically, to give it more ram, and Microsoft have gone and confirmed that it does not have the additional ram as rumored, so the discussion is over regardless.
