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Zekkyou on 24 May 2014
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PigPen said:
Zekkyou said:

I'm not going to bother explaining how totally wrong this is again (you'd have thought the GC having 16MB of eDRAM while the WiiU only twice more with 32MB would have been proof enough for you), but the PS4 not having eDRAM was a choice specifically made by Sony, as stated by Cerny in the interview i previously linked you. It makes development far more complicated than it needs to be, which somewhat defeats the point in it.


I know I'm not wrong, you are.  I've been ignoring you but now lets draw this out.  The PS4 has GDDR5: 256-Bit Bus at 176GB a second.  The large memory the Wii U has with eDRAM stomps it.  The large memory aid in making inpressive graphics.  The Wii U have not 4MB, 16MB but 32MB.  You are talking at least 1Tb or 1000GB a second. The Wii U also has a GPGPU, and the GPU and CPU fit perfectly.  The Wii U is a powerhouse. 

The WiiU's ram is fast, but that doesn't change the fact it has very little of it. 2GB of DDR3 ram and twice the eDRAM of a console that came out 13 years ago is nothing to shout about. You need 16MB just for a 1080p framebuffer with double buffering. Yep. Half of the magical eDRAM instantly gone just showing a 1080p image. That's without AA like MSAA by the way, if you want your game to utilize that too then you're going to need to hand over more of that eDRAM. It sure is disappearing quickly, huh? We haven't even gotten to the actual game yet.

Cerny quite blankly stated they could have put eDRAM in the PS4 with slower GDDR5, but chose not to because the negatives out way the benefits. To quote him exactly:

"If we used eDRAM for this on-chip memory, we knew that bandwidths of as much as one terabyte per second — that’s a thousand gigabytes per second — would be achievable. The catch though, is that the on-chip memory would need to be very small, and each game team would need to develop special techniques in order to manage it."

Faster bandwidth levels are pretty pointless if no one is going to properly utilize it. Look at MK8. Nintendo themselves developed it, yet not even that appears to take much use of the benefits. 720p with no AA, sub standard texture filtering and relatively simplistic to render graphics. The only thing impressive amount its performance is the frame rate, and that can't really be credited to the eDRAM. You could also praise its sharp textures, but they are someone spoiled by the texture filter (which is why they looked so murky in the screenshots we had before launch).

The funny thing is even if you were right and the WiiU's ram was better (which, quite obviously, it's not), it wouldn't matter. The eDRAM doesn't stop it having an awful CPU and GPU :P

It's also pretty amusing you bring up GPGPU, since the PS4's is several time more capable than the WiiU's :P