I/O Throughput Data Speeds

[vivster]

KratosLives said:

Do you know what the maximum data of game textures in gb that can be rendered on screen per second? Just curious as to how much more detail can be shown per frame compared to ps4.

That's not really how GPUs work.

First of all, how much can be rendered in any given second is up to the GPU performance and the graphics memory bandwidth, as well as the CPU and its cache. So has absolutely nothing to do with the slowest storage in the system, the SSD. The SSD is just there to quickly refill the faster memory with new assets that haven't been previously needed.

It's also very much dependent on the resolution. The GPU takes all the data from the CPU and constructs a flat image consisting of pixels from it. To produce many pixels at a high refresh rate and to render with high polygon models you need a fast GPU and to use very high detail textures you need a lot of memory to store them in. The speed of the graphics memory(GDDR) is also important as it needs to provide the GPU with lots of high detail textures fast.

"Detail" is not a great way to quantify performance as there are huge differences between many forms of "detail" in games. For example: detailed textures are mostly dependent on the size of the graphics memory and its speed because highly detailed textures can be quite huge and are the main reason why games have blown up so much in size. Detailed models i.e. high polygon count is mostly dependent on GPU (and CPU) performance because it takes a lot of time to calculate how the models look when you rotate them i.e. when you move around in the world. Detailed particle effects and fluid simulations are very much CPU dependent (but can also be offloaded to GPU), because of the huge calculations and number of particles moving around at the same time. Then there is high detail in the distance (draw distance) which is a mixture of everything.

So you can't just look at one part of the console and extrapolate power. The new consoles are vastly superior in every single area and each area compliments another. So you'll see vast improvements in all kinds of "details" and in the end it's up to the developer which kind they would like to focus on, the more different kind of details they want to improve, the more taxing it'll become to the whole system. So you'll see a wide range of different performance across many games.