| Drakester said: Wow how can you say that there is no advantage by the PS4 having ddr5 ram? The ddr5 ram is a pretty decent improvement upon the aged ddr3 ram the the XBONE is using. Also with the PS4 using Gaikai I find it very unlikely that the PS4 will not have a similar cloud service to that offered by MS. The only difference is it isnt forced onto gamers. |
None of the consoles use DDR5 Ram, it doesn't exist yet, DDR4 is coming to the PC however.
Semantics aside, it doesn't matter if it uses DDR3 or GDDR5, 256Bit DDR3 can equal 128bit GDDR5 in terms of bandwidth at the same clocks.
If Microsoft pushed for 512bit DDR3 they could potentially have had more memory bandwidth than the Playstation 4.
However, that would have meant more PCB layers and thus traces and a more complex memory controller which would have driven up costs.
That could *potentially* have been mitigated by dropping 1.6 Billion transisters spent on the eSRAM.
I personally wouldn't have a clue if a 512bit DDR3 memory bus would have been cheaper in the short-term even with the eSRAM dropped, in the long term it won't be as Microsoft gets the APU fabbed at a lower fabrication process.
Also on average, DDR3 has lower latency than GDDR5, however we are only talking roughly 20% here, not to mention GPU's tend not to give a rats ass about memory latency anyway or what kind of advantage/disadvantage the eSRAM does to memory access latency either.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
