| ICStats said: Tiling is not "Microsoft shitting rainbows". Tiling in fast RAM has been something used on AMD GPUs including the Xbox 360 and in all the Adreno mobile GPUs. This tiling does add some overhead though. The memory bandwidth is only half of the story though. A bigger problem is that by having eSRAM taking up area on the die, the XB1 had to cut Compute Units. The XB1 has 12 CUs compared to the PS4's 18 CUs. There are also other units reduced, like texture units and frame buffer units. Those are the units that do the actual shading, texturing, and writing of pixels. When going from 900p to 1080p there are 40% more pixels to shade, texture and write, and there is no way to "shit rainbows" and make up for those missing CUs and other units. |
Yes tiling adds some overhead, but its ultimaely the best way to make the XB1 perform better than without it.
Its all about the memory bandwidth. Every decision MS made in how the system was designed is tied to memory bandwidth. We shouldn't forget that sony were actually at one point shooting to have 4GB of GDDR5 even sny didn't know they could end up with 8GB of the stuff. They practically just lucked out. Why sony ended up with an all round more powerful APU was cause they probably figured that since they would have less RAM then they should make sure that their system spends less time actually crunching data. MS were playing it safe, 8GB of GDDR5 ram didn't exists t the time and they new they were gonna have lots of the system Ram going to the OS. So it was a no brainer for them. They had to put in 8Gb of DDR3 ram. And that automatically meant they would compensate with ESRAM.
Whats funny is that the 360 used 512Mb of graphic memory for their system, so MS was no stranger to the benefits of such an architecture. Sony just took a gamble that paid off.
