By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
fallen on 14 September 2013
Edit Thread
Pemalite said:
Captain_Tom said:

Exactly.  He can claim that 50% more cores doesn't net you 50% more power, but he is ignoring the fact that the PS4 also has 50% more ROP's/TMU's/etc.  A matter of fact, the 7970 has double the cores of the 7850 and gues what?  It performs twice as well! 

Then add in the fact that the PS4 has WAY more bandwidth and hUMA, and it is easy to see how it will perform twice as well like some developers have directly suggested.  Get your heads out of the cloud people...


It almost has 50%+ of everything, except for a few things like the Geometry Engines, which is going to be a big part for next generation, everything will have depth, hopefully no more flat blurry ground.

The bandwidth advantage of the PS4 isn't as big as you think either, the Xbox One has lower bandwidth requirements to begin with due to the slower GPU, the eSRAM will give it that little extra boost.
Of course ideally, Microsoft should have went with GDDR5, but probably due to immediate costs (And possibly CPU performance due to the roughly 20% added latency?), decided against it, GDDR5 doesn't enjoy the scale of economies like DDR3 does and it also requires a more complex memory controller, which costs transisters, the transister budget that could have been spent on the memory controller and GPU was pretty much all thrown at the eSRAM and then some.

On the flip side, once low-end GPU's and IGP's start using GDDR5, then it's going to be good news for Sony, it's going to get cheaper, high-end cards don't really sell much in terms of volume, so their shift to GDDR6 won't impact prices much.
Where-as DDR3 is going to be getting more costly from here-on-out, DDR3 prices have already increased over the past year, that cost should jump for Microsoft as the PC shifts it's focus to DDR4 production.


This is complete nonsense, DDR3 is produced an order of magnitude more (say, 1000 DDR3 sticks for every 10 GDDR5 sticks), so it will always be much cheaper than GDDR5, even say in 5 years 100 DRR3 are produced for every 1 GDDR5. Besides it's not just volume that matter, also production difficulty. GDDR5 is just harder to produce, period, because it's better.

 

There's probably not even going to be a GDDR6. It's pretty obvious you have no tech knowledge at all. The next step for GPU's is probably stacked memory.

GDDR5 is MASSIVELY more expensive than DDR3 currently. 2GB of GDDR5 difference makes the same video card often $60 more expensive. We just dont see the difference because MS put expensive Kinect in every box. But who knows, Kinect may help Xbox outsell PS4 anyway so it might have been a good move. Most casuals that would be interested in Kinect aren't on message boards.

The ESRAM was a tradeoff. It will likely especially pay off as time goes on, it will get easier and easier to fab the SOC, but the difference in RAM price will remain a huge disadvantage for Sony forever.

Heck, another factor is in order to have a 256 bit bus, the SOC must be above a certain size, say 200mm. After one process shrink, it's possible the XBO and PS4 SOC will be the exact same size/cost. We know the XBOx SOC is 363mm, lets say the PS4 SOC is 300mm (just a guess). A shrink tends to halve the size, but remember you cant go below 200mm anyway. So after one shrink, the PS4 SOC goes to 200m, and so does the XBO. So the ESRAM wont even matter in the future.

I would expect the XBO with Kinect to drop to 399 as early as fall 2014 for example. PS4 will remain 399. MS could also probably do a 299 Kinect free SKU if they need to. Whereas Sony will be at 399 for a long time.

Another factor is profit, MS has already said XBO is break even or profitable. Sony has not said the same about PS4. Sony is obviously very good at losing money, it's what they've been doing for years. But corporate strategies dont mean the PS4 is cheaper, it just means Sony is willing to lose yet more money on PS4, and MS may not be on XBO.