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Locknuts on 26 November 2014
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torok said:
Locknuts said:
 

1. I'm not trying to be rude, but on paper specs rarely tell the whole story. But if you are going to quote specs, why just the main RAM bandwidth? Surely that doesn't tell the whole story as far as memory bandwidth goes? There's supposedly high bandwidth RAM in both the 360 and Wii U. My understanding from various dev quotes is that the Wii Us setup allows for far greater uses of that RAM than the 360s due to its GPGPU nature and larger size. Also, I've never once read about a dev complaining of RAM bandwidth on the WIi U. They complain about a lot of other things like SDKs and lack of 'next gen power', but never the RAM bandwidth.

2. There's also worse performance in COD:AW and DAI according to Digital Foundry despite the slightly higher res. GTAV is a mixed bag depending on what's happening on screen and both run at native 1080p in that one. These latest round of games seem to indicate to me that the dev in the OP might actually know what he's talking about.

1 - The EDRAM/ESRAM configuration is similar on X360 and Wii U. Anyway, it's small and just helps to improve a little bit the lack of bandwidth. The main memory specs are correct, the 360 uses GDDR3, the PS3 uses XDR and the U uses DDR3, with equivalent clock speeds.

The devs are complaining about CPU, that's the big bottleneck. The lack of RAM bandwidth however is probably the culprit behind games with low resolution and no AA. The console has a pretty bad CPU, a bad to average RAM setup and a average to half-decent GPU (compareed to the competitors).

2 - It isn't a slightly higher res. DAI runs at a 44% higher resolution on PS4 and CoD runs at a 41% higher resolution. Is this "marginal"? GTA V on PS4 has way more vegetation and higher quality alpha effects. The difference in fps is in all cases hardly 5%. Doing the math we still have a lot of things here. There isn't any mistery. Both PS4 and X1 uses very similar APUs. The slightly higher clock speed on the X1 CPU is just a 10% increase in performance, while the PS4 GPU is 50% better and the memory architecture allows 8GB of fast memory, instead of 8GB of slow memory coupled with 32MB of EDRAM that can't even hold an entire 1080p frame without tiling.

I know that on paper the number of pixels seems great, but to me, on my 42" screen that upscales quite well, I don't feel that the reduced resolution is all that noticeable. And is certainly not detrimental to the overall experience. That said, I play most multiplats on PC anyway in order to ensure 60fps in all cases. I'll always reduce effects to achieve a locked 60fps if necessary.

It seems like you base a lot of your opinions on specs you've read about. If you're a dev I apologise, but if not I can't really take what you are saying seriously as you haven't gone hands on with the systems. All my information is gained from dev quotes, as I can't determine how the on paper specs will translate into real world performance.

Finally, I said 'slight' not 'marginal'.  It may sound like I'm being pedantic but you used inverted commas. Don't misquote me please.