| Xenostar said: Come on the proof is that AMD and Nvidia exclusivley run GDDR5 setups, a software company has not just discovered that these 2 hardware giants have been doing it wrong the last 10 years. They said in the EG interview, they chose DDR3 because they needed to balance the needs of 3 operating systems there choice was nothing to do with raw game performance, it was about sticking with what they know as there not really a hardware company. Im sure they guys there are very intellignet its not anyone that can architect a computer, but they should of got more outside help from AMD. Choosing DDR3 made it pointless having more than 16 ROPS which intern made it pointless having more than 12 CU's, without GDDR5 they chose the best graphics chip they could. |
It actually all comes down to cost.
nVidia and AMD *can* have dedicated caches equivalent to eSRAM on their GPU's in combination with GDDR5 or DDR3 for an even larger performance boost, however when you have transister counts already in the Billions, it really doesn't make sense to either: blow the die size up more (I.E. More expensive to make, lower yields) or sacrifice on compute performance.
AMD could have done it with Integrated Graphics but never did, instead they provided side-port memory as it was cheaper. (IGP's are cost sensitive!)
The IGP could even access the Sideport and System memory in tandem.
Intel however does provide eDRAM with it's Iris IGP's, but that's a premium solution and not available on all it's graphics solutions.
As for your opinion on DDR3 making more than 16 Rops and 12 CU's pointless, well. Yes and no.
Microsoft really couldn't throw more GPU hardware at the problem even if it wanted too, the APU is already giant and expensive to manufacture, yields would indeed be low.
The, eSram makes up for allot of the deficiencies in bandwidth anyway, not to mention the Xbox One has lower bandwidth requirements in order to achieve peak utilisation to begin with thanks to it's smaller Graphics processor.
Plus, you can do non-bandwidth sensitive tasks on the extra CU's anyway.
Personally though, both machines are a bit of a let-down in the hardware stakes, compared to last generation the GPU's are only mid-range and already we are seeing concessions in games on both platforms either with framerates and/or resolutions, that said, it's still only early days, but I wouldn't be surprised if later in the generation that a chunk of the PS4's games were only 720P. - Which is potentially sad, but the nature of the consoles fixed hardware.
The other issue is, I wont accept 720P on a 5 inch phone in 2013, on a gaming system with a 7+ year lifespan and with the image stretched over 60+ inches of real-estate? What were they thinking!?
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