AMD: PS4 performance advantage over XB1 bigger than many expect thanks to hUMA

[zarx]

Adinnieken said:

Sorry, it isn't.

Tiled Resources is a thing only two existing companies have worked on and have patents for, one of them is Microsoft.  None of them is AMD or NVidia.  The other is PowerVR owned by Imagination Technologies.  Neither AMD nor NVidia are licensees for PowerVR's patent technology.

You're mistaking Tiled Resources with Megatextures.  They are not the same.

Tiled Resources are akin to Paint-by-Number.  Where a letter represents a texture image used.  A tiled resource is made up of multiple small texture tile images, 32x32p, 64x64p, or whatever ratio the final image requires.  Tiled resources looks at the entire geometry of a scene and only applies a texture to the visible area.  Ultimately this requires fewer resources, making tiled resources both GPU and memory efficient.

Megatextures require a very large, final image to act as the texture.  Up to 128000x128000.  These textures are then overlaid, one on top of the other.  So as you move, the texture that offers the infocus terrain is more visible.  While this is less GPU intensive, it is heavily memory intensive.     

The Xbox One doesn't use hUMA because the Xbox One uses eSRAM.  The GPU and the CPU in the Xbox One, as in the Xbox 360, can access the same memory but the GPU also utilizes the eSRAM. 

Not true AMD's GCN has native support for tiled resources they called it Partially Resident Texture you can read about it here http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2012/10/Partially%20Resident%20Textures%20on%20Next-Generation%20GPUs.v04.pps (The implementation in DX 11.2 is the same) and Meagexture is actually a tiled bassed system implemented in software http://renderingpipeline.com/2012/03/megatextures-in-rage/.