Intrinsic said:
Its just not that simple. Take the PS4 for instance. It's got around 190GB+(?) of memory bandwidth. All unified memory. When devs build for it, their engines are designed to run on ome pool of memory with a set bandwidth. On the XB1, there are two pools of memory. The on chip SDram (32MB@100GB+(?)) and the unified pool of slower ram. Sony actually can upgrade to HBM with the PS4 with less hassle than it would be for MS. If MS made a console without the sdram, then developers would be required to make two extremely different versions of their game for the XB1 platform. Trust me, coding with that SDram in mind completely changes how a game engine is designed to run on a platform. Ms could completely abandon the sdram approach tho, and basically make the XB1.5 as close to PC as possible so devs that build for the PC are technically also just building for the XB1.5 but that's another story. |
And the building of two game engines would only apply to games going FORWARD. On top of that, if MS ditches the eDRAM, then it would (most likely) instantly break compatability with all current Xbox One games. Imagine dropping $400+ on the Xbox One+ only to find out the 100s of current games don't play on it lol. Now, MS has shown they are willing to spend lots of time & engineers on software emulation, like bringing Xbox 360 games to Xbox One. Not surprising since I still consider Microsoft a software company at heart. So maybe they think they have figured out a great software emulation layer for current Xbox One games to run on hypotheotical XBOne+ with HBM2 memory. Even still, you are just asking for problems and glitches to happen with that approach. Wanna know the main reason the console market exists alongside the PC world? Because you buy a console, you buy a game for that console, and it just works. No settings, no compatibility problems. Start messing with that basic philosphy too much, and you can kiss your customers goodbye...
