Frequency said:
Pemalite said:
fatslob-:O said:
If both DDR3 and GDDR5 had the same clocks and bus width i'd say never because the most fundamental difference is the fact that GDDR5 can do both read and writes at the same cycle compared to DDR3 which can only do either one of them at a cycle.
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Well of course if you keep everything equal, GDDR5 is going to be faster.
But you don't have to keep everything equal.
Microsoft could have wen't with 3ghz DDR3 on a 512bit bus and it would have been faster than the GDDR5 in the Playstation 4, unfortunatly however being a very cost sensitive device, it would have driven up the PCB layers, added more traces and probably required a more complex memory controller amongst other things.
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512b DDR would only bump top speed to around 140gb/s which is still slower, at the cost of pay transistor space, higher memory cost and more heat produced, the most likely would have had to drop the esram to fit the controller in and the end result is its still slower
Microsoft bet their horses on ddr3 remaining cheap and continuing to drop in price as the industry moves to ddr4 so in the long term its more about lining pockets than providing performance
Everyone says its about the games but are hung up on launch titles, launch titles never showcase a systems strengths but its rather telling that at such an early stage with such similar architectures the ps4 versions are mostly running at higher resolutions
Give it a year and nobody will be claiming silly 'not so different' threads anymore as the difference is going to be a hell of a lot more obvious than ps3 and 360.
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They probably if anything bet that Sony wouldn't be able to have 8GB with GDDR5.
If the X1 was 8GB and PS4 had stayed 4GB, the decision of DDR3 would have looked mighty nice...
BTW MS talked a lot about Cloud recently. It's pretty evident it's a real thing and will help on the CPU side eventually...
For example:
http://news.xbox.com/2013/10/xbox-one-cloud
Higher fidelity game experiences – As I mentioned before, cloud compute can enable developers to offload computations for all sorts of environmental elements. In a typical game development scenario, the game creator needs to balance resource allocation across each area – world management, rendering, controls, networking, lighting, physics, AI, as well as networking and multiplayer. Balancing the local computing resources for all of these elements often results in developers making tradeoffs that result in more focus on core gameplay, and less on environments, NPC and other elements of world fidelity. However, when cloud compute is available to support the various computationally-intensive elements of the game, these kinds of tradeoffs become much easier for developers to make. Games can afford to provide higher fidelity worlds and deeply intelligent NPC AI all at the same time. These experiences could only be accomplished by leveraging the resources of servers.
