| vivster said: The ESRAM makes a pretty huge difference. The developers are pretty much forced to use it if they want to leverage the sparse power of the X1. If it is utilized correctly it can surpass the GDDR5 in speed. But that's very hard and time consuming. Of course nothing can replace the missing GPU units but with good utilization it can come a bit closer to the PS4s power. On the PS4s side I see nothing to improve. I would regard this architecture as the most simple architecture for consoles ever conceived. CPU and GPU on one dice and unified extremely fast RAM for both. Sure there may be some optimizations of code and multiple core utilization but that will happen on the X1 as well. |
The big problem is that 32 ESRAM isnt big enough so whatever speed improvements developers get from moving the small data chunks on it is negated by the small amount of memory they have., so trying to improve it to such an extent wont overtake the PS4.. Unified 8GB GDDR5 is a much better overall prospect, especially with games having larger textures to place into memory.
As far as the PS4, where it will improve is when they start to move CPU processes onto the GPU, this will apparently improve the performance greatly in 2/3 years time, and apparently is the direction that PC dev is going in.
So unfortunately I think the gap wont close, but then again it may not widen, depends on how much more effort developers put into it. For example if your un-optimised game is already running 40 FPS you are not going to work as hard on it if the competitor has only 25 FPS. But as engines improve they will take advantage, but it takes longer, which I think it is why Cerny said it will be 2-3 years before you start to see the real advantages of the PS4 GPU.
Making an indie game : Dead of Day!
