Xbox One vs PS4: ESRAM slower than GDDR5, It's Bottleneck"

[freedquaker]

mutantsushi said:

If Sony didn't luck out with GDDR prices moving down and enabling parity with 8GB RAM,
PS4 would itself have had performance bottlenecks and programming restrictions with 4GB of total RAM.
(although it's plausible that the end result would at least have been on par with XBone)
...

 

So if anything, it's odd that NEITHER Sony nor MS went with split pools, even though it was plausibly equal or superior benefits.... if anything that makes me wonder MORE why they didn't just take the truly conservative proven approach and use a split pool, for max RAM + VRAM + GPU cores/etc....

The answer is really simple why Microsoft went the "8 GB DDR3 + Esram" way instead of the more traditional split memort "4 GB DDR3 + 4 GB GDDR5" way. Because they have always applied the "unified memory architecture as it has traditionally been more convenient to developers, easier to manufacture, and cheaper to produce. This has been the case with original Xbox, X360, and they thought it would be the case for XB1 as well, to their mistake! The Esram just didn't improve enough to cut the deal from 720 to 1080p and it cost them arms and legs with the die space. They overestimated the gained performance and advantages of the unified memory through the bottleneck of esram. Yes it is the bottleneck because the whole architecture is wrapped around it yet it is too small to support the architecture.

PS4, even with 4 GB GDDR5, would still be a much better. Because

a) Most games even today, are 32 bit, and do not use more than 3 GB.

b) Hardly any of the games to be released in PS4 has had access to more than 4 GB.

c) For most games, which were prepared for 512 MB or less memory for the last decade, 4 GB will be immensely sufficient for a long time.

d) One way or another, no amount of memory is enough, but the difference between 8 GB and 4 GB is usually a matter of time to fit the data, which is usually done in terms of compression or decrease in quality in graphics. Lucky though, with this immense amount of memory (8 GB vs 4 GB), there won't be much of difference due to diminishing returns to scale.

e) Memory footprint vs Bandwidth or Speed is usually tradable. In other words, faster RAM usually makes up for more RAM; but it doesn't always work the other way around.

f) The only limitation would be respect to some first party titles which really would take advantage of the full potential of the console, graphics wise or content wise (down the road). For example, Killzone graphics could have been more compressed than it is today. Another limitation would be the non-gaming content & multitasking would take a hit.

Overall the gaming performance of PS4 with 4 GB GDDR5 would hardly be any different, but possibly slightly higher due to the unoccupied space on the die which can be used for extra compute units etc. However, we'd still see slight degradation in some 1st party exclusives, and a bit longer development time due to memory reallocation issues and degradation in non-gaming features.