New Nintendo Platform Teased at Conference, "NX"

[curl-6]

Materia-Blade said:

curl-6 said:

UC4 is increased in scope over UC3, so the Wii U's extra power over PS3 would have to be put to work on that.

And eDRAM is very useful for some things, like triple buffering to prevent screen tearing or graphics data that reqires fast access, but it's ultimately 32MB. It doesn't magically expand to cover the 4GB difference in RAM between Wii U and its rivals. And Xbone has 32MB eDRAM as well, so it's not a Wii U exclusive advantage. Shrinking a game's memory footprint from 5GB to 1GB would require significant work.

If I recall, x1 has esram, not edram.the edram may not cover 4gb of difference but it definetely reduces the gap. And there's a little something called "porting" and "scaling" down, those things are what put money on 3rd party's pockets. just reducing resolution to 720p must help a lot without even considering downscaling. finally, it's not like those ps4/x1 games really need all 5gb of ram.

eDRAM is more about compensating for RAM latency and bandwidth, not size. The idea is it's this small bank of super-fast memory that you use for tasks where main RAM is too slow. But that's the thing, it's small. It makes up just 3% of Wii U's total memory.

Downscaling can be a difficult process; not only do you have to reduce certain assets while maintaining acceptable fidelity, you often have to entirely rework in-game systems, like streaming higher resolution assets from the disc, which raises problems like disc access speed and optical drive bandwidth. You may have to partition levels that were originally seamless into chunks that load and unload separately to remain within RAM parameters.