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curl-6 on 18 February 2014
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fatslob-:O said:
curl-6 said:
fatslob-:O said:
curl-6 said:
fatslob-:O said:

They can still pull it off without the eDRAM ... These eshop titles are not texture or shading intensive ... In this sense they would mostly be bounded by the ROPs because the setup, shading, and texture mapping/filtering stages are mostly negligible and or insignificant.

And could you expand on their reasoning on why it would be useful for the CPU to have access to the eDRAM in a significant effect ?

You still need to store your frame in a framebuffer before outputting it.

And what they said was this: "We use the eDRAM in the Wii U for the actual framebuffers, intermediate framebuffer captures, as a fast scratch memory for some CPU intense work and for other GPU memory writes. Using eDRAM properly is a simple way to get extra performance without any other optimizations."

They can do that on the main memory instead. The eDRAM isn't the only one that holds the framebuffer but that also applies to the video memory as well. Hence why graphics cards on PCs don't need eDRAM.

The question is though does usage of eDRAM by the CPU make any noticeable difference ?

It's faster and easier to do it in eDRAM though.

And if it didn't make a difference, they wouldn't do it. Shin'en's whole programming background is one of efficiency; getting the most use out of your resources.

That doesn't mean that the indie developers would have an uphill battle without the eDRAM though. It would still be just as easy without the eDRAM.

I didn't say that it didn't make a difference ... I was asking if it made at the very least a marginal difference. Single threaded performance is as good as it gets today even with the latest break throughs in caching, prefetching, and branch prediction. So I really can't see how the eDRAM would make alot of difference if much at all.

But you can still fit a 1080p frame into 32MB of eDRAM with plenty of room to spare, while 10MB is just too small unless you tile the hell out of it, which is less efficient.

And you'd have to ask Shin'en: info@shinen.com