Consoles and Their Wannabe Resolution.

[DonFerrari]

Captain_Yuri said:

DonFerrari said:

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."

I see... I hope Pemalite gives an overview on it and tell us what to expect from this. Maybe the gain isn't linear, but I doubt it would be negible unless it's only for marketing and it costed almost zero but that would make no sense.

So perhaps AMD discovered a way to make it work