Consoles and Their Wannabe Resolution.

[Jizz_Beard_thePirate]

DonFerrari said:

Captain_Yuri said:

Yea 4k isn't coming until next gen... If it's hard to achieve 4k on PC even with top of the line cards (at least at 60fps + ultra settings), it's not gonna be achieved by a $400-$500 box without compromises regardless of how magical people think these boxes are.

My guess is that it is due to the way they implemented the Memory Bandwidth since AMD has done a similar implementation way back during the 7xxx series which did not pay out very much. According to AnandTech, if you cut out the amount of memory bandwidth that has been added by this implementation, the amount that is left is around 220GB/s instead of 326GB/s which is more around ps4 pro's level. And Memory Bandwidth is really important when it comes to 4k gaming as well as having a large pool of Vram which the xbox one X has checked.

All in all, people more or less saw this coming. What I didn't realize when I made my prediction of it being able to run most games at 4k is how the bandwidth was implemented due to limited information. We will see how it all pans out in the end though.

What implementation and if it doesn't add much why was it added? Just to show a pretty number?

You can read more here since it is quite a deep analysis.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/11250/microsofts-project-scorpio-more-hardware-details-revealed

Remember that he didn't have the actual hardware at the time however due to the details from DF and etc, he did make a pretty well educated guess as to what was happening and really, as we are starting to see, his guesses were right so far.

"What makes things especially interesting though is that Microsoft didn’t just switch out DDR3 for GDDR5, but they’re using a wider memory bus as well; expanding it by 50% to 384-bits wide. Not only does this even further expand the console’s memory bandwidth – now to a total of 326GB/sec, or 4.8x the XB1’s DDR3 – but it means we have an odd mismatch between the ROP backends and the memory bus. Briefly, the ROP backends and memory bus are typically balanced 1-to-1 in a GPU, so a single memory controller will feed 1 or two ROP partitions. However in this case, we have a 384-bit bus feeding 32 ROPs, which is not a compatible mapping."

"What this means is that at some level, Microsoft is running an additional memory crossbar in the SoC, which would be very similar to what AMD did back in 2012 with the Radeon HD 7970. Because the console SoC needs to split its memory bandwidth between the CPU and the GPU, things aren’t as cut and dry here as they are with discrete GPUs. But, at a high level, what we saw from the 7970 is that the extra bandwidth + crossbar setup did not offer much of a benefit over a straight-connected, lower bandwidth configuration. Accordingly, AMD has never done it again in their dGPUs. So I think it will be very interesting to see if developers can consistently consume more than 218GB/sec or so of bandwidth using the GPU."