Debunking the Myth that Next Gen Consoles are too weak

[freedquaker]

Pemalite said:

...
However, you're only comparing the PC's system Ram.
The majority video memory size is 1Gb or higher on the PC, on consoles that memory is shared. (In future, try to compare it apples to apples.)...

Games don't need to be designed with that in mind.
Ram doesn't do any form of processing, it's just a super fast piece of memory, no special programming techniques are needed.

Basically, you're saying Microsoft shouldn't have tried to build a different device and instead made a Playstation 4 clone?

Here is the thing, I agree with pretty much everything you said, so my arguments will be about trying to shed a light on where exactly I am coming or what perspective I am looking at it from... I have narrowed it down to the highlighted points above...

a) I know I was comparing the system RAM to all of the RAM on the consoles, but hey I did what you suggested also several times, it doesn't change anything, other than altering the numbers slightly. I was saving myself some time from this extra chore. The important thing there is that, whether it be with or without the video RAM, the relative amount of RAM on consoles had never been this abundant. So in terms of memory, in comparison to the PC, this generation is incredible. Again this is not actually a comparison to the PC, but a comparison to the earlier generation playstations compared to the PCs of their generation (so I take the PC as a yardstick for relative performance).

b) When I was saying that the games were not made with this in mind, I was referring to the new technologies such as HUMA in the next consoles, rather than GDDR5 RAM. but it's also likely that designing a game for slow RAM and then extrapolating to fast RAM will not yield the same results as designing it for the fast RAM from the scratch, which will effect the game design etc. Basically all console-specific (idiosyncratic) features will improve the performance.

c) I am not saying MS should have designed a PS clone at all. They tried to scale up the X360 design, and while the RAM increased 8 folds, the ESRAM increased only 3.2x which came at the expensive of compute units etc, crippling the machine. They were obviously very near-sighted and couldn't see the performance they'd get. If they had taken a non unified architecture, with 4 GB DDR3 + 4 GB GDDR5 or something like that (which is nothing like PS4 but rather like PS3), they wouldn't have to sacrifice any performance at all. The main problem today is not actually the 40-50% raw performance deficit (to some extent yes but not the major bottleneck), it's the slow RAM and too small of ESRAM, that's dragging the system down.