Barkley said:
Stop spouting nonesense when you clearly have no idea how ram works. As I stated before all the edram does is increase memory access speed, the 360 used edram it's not some great magical thing. It's used to make up for speed not capacity. The XBO has esram for a similair reason and the ps4 uses gddr5 which is fast enough without needing either edram or esram to make up the differnce, but the point is that's just speed not capacity and it doesn't make up for having a quarter of the memory and it's laughable that you'd even argue that. It's like having a bike vs a fast car. You can shove a fancy engine in the bike and it can go as fast as the car but it can still only carry one person, while the car can carry four. Anyway I'm done with this conversation because my only point is that it's more difficult for third parties to port between WiiU and ps4/xbo than it is to port between ps4 and xbo, which you've not denied because it's a fact. The more different two systems are the more effort is required to port between them, undisputable fact. |
well, that about half right, although edram or sram provide speed they also provide huge amount of bandwidth and its something that is needed if you are going to use a lot frame buffers or techniques like the deffered rendering which require lots of memory bandwidth for the gbuffer, some games that use deffered redering are zombi u, fast racing neo, fatal frame V, mario kart, ryse of rome, etc
Even knowledgeable people like those of crytek had difficult time with the deffered rendering implementation on ryse of rome for the xbox one due to the limited bandwidth of the esram pool and thus had to come up with a tiled based solution to reduce the memory bandwidth requirements
here
http://wccftech.com/...andwidth-gains/
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Crytek Shares a Secret Method for Utilizing Xbox One eSRAM’s Full Potential – Resulted In High Bandwidth Gains
Recently, GamingBolt published a snippet of their interview with Crytek’s US Engine Business Development Manager Sean Tracy. Talking about utilization of CryEngine with tiled textures, Tracy talked about the role of Xbox One eSRAM in saving ‘big’ bandwidths, and shared a secret method that the Ryse development used to unlock Xbox One eSRAM’s full potential. He said:
This technique helped the developer a lot in optimizing Ryse: Son of Rome on Xbox One as it resulted into high bandwidth gains and allowed the development team to use just a single compute shader for lighting and culling.
“CryEngine has a unique and novel solution for this and was shipped with Ryse. One of the problems when using Deferred Shading is that it’s very heavy on bandwidth usage/memory traffic. This gets exponentially worse as overlapping lights cause considerable amounts of redundant read and write operations. In Ryse our graphics engineers created a system called tiled shading to take advantage of the Xbox One.”
“This splits the screen into tiles and generates a list of all the lights effective each title using a compute shader. It then cull’s light by min/max extents of the tile. We then loop over the light list for each tile and apply shading.”
“In practice this made for the biggest bandwidth save we could have hoped for, as just reading the Gbuffer once and writing shading results once at the end for each pixel. Only a single compute shader was used in Ryse for light culling and executing entire lighting and shading pipelines (with some small exceptions for complex surfaces like skin and hair).”
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So obviously if even 200GB/s of memory bandwidth on edram or esram fall short for the common deffered rendering implementation that means that the wii u edram has to have at least that or even more to be able to handle this technique in all those games, not to mention that fast racing neo uses triple 720p buffering+g-buffer(for the defferted rendering)+intermediate buffers. Xbox one could have had implemented edram to provide more memory bandwidth at lower cost but decided to change to esram for better performance(of course that depends if you use it well) and not just for bandwidth
here
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-the-xbox-one-architects
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The controversy surrounding ESRAM has taken the design team very much by surprise. The notion that Xbox One is difficult to work with is perhaps quite hard to swallow for the same team that produced Xbox 360 - by far and away the easier console to develop for, especially so in the early years of the current console generation.
"This controversy is rather surprising to me, especially when you view as ESRAM as the evolution of eDRAM from the Xbox 360. No-one questions on the Xbox 360 whether we can get the eDRAM bandwidth concurrent with the bandwidth coming out of system memory. In fact, the system design required it," explains Andrew Goossen.
"We had to pull over all of our vertex buffers and all of our textures out of system memory concurrent with going on with render targets, colour, depth, stencil buffers that were in eDRAM. Of course with Xbox One we're going with a design where ESRAM has the same natural extension that we had with eDRAM on Xbox 360, to have both going concurrently. It's a nice evolution of the Xbox 360 in that we could clean up a lot of the limitations that we had with the eDRAM.
"The Xbox 360 was the easiest console platform to develop for, it wasn't that hard for our developers to adapt to eDRAM, but there were a number of places where we said, 'gosh, it would sure be nice if an entire render target didn't have to live in eDRAM' and so we fixed that on Xbox One where we have the ability to overflow from ESRAM into DDR3, so the ESRAM is fully integrated into our page tables and so you can kind of mix and match the ESRAM and the DDR memory as you go... From my perspective it's very much an evolution and improvement - a big improvement - over the design we had with the Xbox 360. I'm kind of surprised by all this, quite frankly."
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