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selnor1983 on 02 June 2014
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Madword said:
selnor1983 said:

No. You are confusing IDs tech. It isnt the same. Here this explains it better. The 360 took around 2 years fo devs to work the technique out properly on that machine. Xbox One is the same. Also its important to note that the ESRAM makes the Xbox One much more capable of doing Cloud compute over PS4 on normal connnection speeds. Also noo games so far  out use Tiling techniqus on Xbox One.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the Xbox One’s 32 MB eSRAM and how it is a limiter to the console’s overall performance. Although some developers such as Capybara Games deny any bottlenecks with the technology, there is still a feeling of it being limiting despite potentially being able to store up to 6 GB of tiled textures when used in conjunction with DirectX 11.2.

Interestingly, for a normal forward renderer, 32 MB is the exact amount of space necessary to store one 4x MSAA 32 bpp 1080p frame buffer. However, due to the need to output more than just the pixel colour with the renderer, you’ll require multiple buffers. This explains why the anti-aliasing and resolution needs to be turned down for some games on the Xbox One – the 32 MB eSRAM is somewhat of a limiting factor.

The Xbox 360 had the same trouble with eDRAM and solved it by rendering only specific portions of a scene at a time, exchanging different buffers as necessary. Tiled resources are better, since you can avoid drawing your scene twice, but are difficult to properly implement. So a creative approach in the case of first person shooter games, would be to render the bottom half of your screen, which features more objects, using eSRAM while the top half – which is usually empty using the normal VRAM. This allows you to effectively remove less intensive portions from the frame buffer in order to have the eSRAM working on the more complicated bits.

Will this be the de facto solution for the Xbox One, especially since it took developers a while to implement the same approach on the Xbox 360 using eDRAM? It’s unlikely in the beginning stages of the Xbox One’s life cycle, resulting in a drop of resolution and AA, but given a couple of years, we could see some creative use of the eSRAM without a serious hit in performance or visuals.

Why include eSRAM at all if it becomes a limiting factor? Simply due to its bandwidth for tiled texture middleware, which is reportedly 192 GB/s. Also, it appropriately helps make Cloud gaming more possible on normal internet connections thanks to its LZ encode/decode compression abilities. So whether we believe so or not, Microsoft knew what it was doing when it included eSRAM into the Xbox One. We’ll just have to wait and see if devs can deliver the best visual experience possible while taking advantage of the eSRAM’s many benefits.

Sorry any article that also mentions that other secret sauce of the cloud has no weight imo.

It's funny, with the XBO it goes from one thing to another, and when thats unproven (as nearly everyone states) we just get something else to replace it with. Tiled Resources is not going to suddenly make the XBO more powerful or suddenly close the gap. But now you are saying "Wait" it took 2 years for them to get it working on X360... it's going to take a while... i.e we wont even know if TR is improving the games or its just simple "game code" improvements that happen through the gen.

As for Quantum Break, there were suggestions from the last video that it had been downgraded graphically, to me it look ok, but still had that grainy look which isn't a look that I like, which makes me think it wont be the "Best looking next gen so far"... are you suggesting that QB is using Tiled Resources? If not then any improvements were made from just coding and not TR. We dont know the resolution of QB or the scale of the game, I do have alot of respect for Remedy though, alan wake was awesome.

Too many unanswered questions imho to be considering DX12 have an impact on XBO. 

I think you will find that 99% of developers would say that 32 eSRAM is a bad thing and not something that is a benefit, regardless of TR or any future tech.. unfortunately that is the truth.

No nothing has gone from one thing to another. MS have only ever talked about tiling. All the other stuff was BS made up by  internet. Tiling is real. 360 did it. An Xbox One will also  in time. And MS talked about Cloud compute way before Xbox one was out. 99% of developers said PS3 was a bad thing, but that didnt stop fist party showing its hand. 90% of games looked better on 360 than PS3 yet PS3 took more graphicss awards thanks to exclusive games. On paper 360s GPU was 30% more powerful than PS3 and ad a 512 mb unified architecture for memory where PS3 did not. Yet exclusive titles used Cell were almost all 3rd parties didnt.

ESRAM when used right will from 2015 onwards in the hands of Remedy, 343 Industries, Black Tusk Studios etc will show just how its done. Or do you have an explanation why Quantum Break gameplay has so much detail and amazing lighting yet is 1080p native? Makes games like Wathcdogs or Battlefield 4 look like last gen games.