By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close

freedquaker said:
ESRAM is actually the bottleneck itself BECAUSE,

without Esram, and all that space it takes, they could have put GDDR5 there instead, and even put extra Compute Units.

So yes, Esram is there to alleviate the bottleneck created by DDR3 but because it's in a tiny capacity, so huge, not fast enough, and cripples the GPU, IT IS THE BOTTLENECK.

To go further, MS also has "Move Engines" on the APU which are dedicated to moving this memory data around thru the ESRAM. 

That also takes room, if not as much as the ESRAM itself.

You can characterize the ESRAM as a bottleneck vs. Sony's solution, because the real world thruut is still lower AND the 32MB window is choking potential workflows that you would like to do with it (and that Sony's GDDR imposes no barrier to), the 32MB window is restricting potential efficiencies.  That can also be characterized as a "development bottleneck", but if the best result a developer can come up with using ESRAM is still lower performance than GDDR, the ESRAM is also imposing a performance bottleneck.  If you want you can say that bottleneck is derived from the DDR, and ESRAM didn't fully compensate DDR's weaknesses, but same result: MS' DDR+ESRAM is a bottleneck.