nightsurge said: To be honest, the leaked Xbox specs showed a lot of ESRAM and other fancy move engines or whatnot. The specs included some custom tech to make the data access "faster" than the DDR3's data rate limit. It may be a tad different to program for, but if the end results are very similar data transfer speeds with considerably less cost, MS may go that route and have a $100 cheaper console than Sony with once again very similar level of graphics/performance. |
MS undoubtedly considered GDDR5, as they pioneered the unified GDDR3 360. They probably have enough bandwidth to satisfy the more modest GPU, whereas Sony may have gone overkill on the bandwidth at the expense of price. No point having the fastest RAM possible if the GPU can't actually utilize it.
MS will likely also handle the programming issue by supplying pre-baked routines and interfaces with their always-good devkit. One of the issues with the PS3 and Cell wasn't just that it was difficult to program, it's that for many years Sony shipped a poor devkit and devs were left to their own devices on how to deal with Cell optimization.