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Forums - Nintendo - Did SOny just prove Wii U RAM is better than PS4 RAM? Video inside

AnthonyW86 on 14 July 2013

That eDRAM can never offset this difference though:

Wii-U DDR3 at 12.8 GB/s
PS4 GDDR5 at 176.0 GB/s



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Michelasso on 14 July 2013
ListerOfSmeg said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFaKX2YnH0I&feature=player_embedded

Seems Wii U has a(Theoretical) 1k gigabyte a second bandwidth while PS4 only has 176. If Sony is right, Wii U wont be as hindered as many people want consumers to beleive.


Mark Cerny already stated that the other possible memory solution for PS4 was a 8GB of GDDR5 RAM at 128 bits plus an eDRAM buffer at 1080GB/s. That solution has been discarded because, as Mark said: in this case 176 is bigger than 1080. 

Not to mention that the Wii U has only 2GB of RAM

Comparing apples with apples I am really curious to see how much it takes to move around 4GB of graphical data in the Xbox One 32MB eSRAM buffer at  102GB/s...



curl-6 on 14 July 2013
zarx said:
snowdog said:
Sensei said:

Ok, so let's assume Wii U's RAM is faster. It's still bottelenecked by nearly everything else. It's like putting 8GB RAM on a Sega Genesis. It just doesn't do much when its CPU and GPU aren't up to speed.

Could be good news to the Xbone against PS4, though, because it is overall more powerful than Wii U to take advantage of that RAM architecture's potential, like Cerny said.



The Wii U hardware has been designed from the ground up to be efficient. Nintendo are aware that bottlenecks are the bane of developers and have designed a balanced console as a result. Efficiency plus balance equals less bottlenecks.


That's a nice sentament for sure but one that has little grounding in fact. Nintendo have a history of bottlenecks in their systems. N64 had it's high latency shared RAM plus a miniscule 4K texture cache. Gamecube had it's small amount of main RAM and complicated memory system (2 shared RAM pools + 3MB  eDRAM). NDS had it's fixed 2048 triangles per frame budget, at least it had 512KB of texture memory lol.

Nintendo are good but they aren't that good...

The developer of Nano Assault on Wii U said of the hardware that: 

“The performance problem of hardware nowadays is not clock speed but ram latency. Fortunately Nintendo took great efforts to ensure developers can really work around that typical bottleneck on Wii U.

They put a lot of thought on how CPU, GPU, caches and memory controllers work together to amplify your code speed."

http://www.vg247.com/2012/11/05/wii-u-avoids-ram-bottleneck-says-nano-assault-dev/



biglittlesps on 14 July 2013
curl-6 said:
zarx said:
snowdog said:
Sensei said:

Ok, so let's assume Wii U's RAM is faster. It's still bottelenecked by nearly everything else. It's like putting 8GB RAM on a Sega Genesis. It just doesn't do much when its CPU and GPU aren't up to speed.

Could be good news to the Xbone against PS4, though, because it is overall more powerful than Wii U to take advantage of that RAM architecture's potential, like Cerny said.



The Wii U hardware has been designed from the ground up to be efficient. Nintendo are aware that bottlenecks are the bane of developers and have designed a balanced console as a result. Efficiency plus balance equals less bottlenecks.


That's a nice sentament for sure but one that has little grounding in fact. Nintendo have a history of bottlenecks in their systems. N64 had it's high latency shared RAM plus a miniscule 4K texture cache. Gamecube had it's small amount of main RAM and complicated memory system (2 shared RAM pools + 3MB  eDRAM). NDS had it's fixed 2048 triangles per frame budget, at least it had 512KB of texture memory lol.

Nintendo are good but they aren't that good...

The developer of Nano Assault on Wii U said of the hardware that: 

“The performance problem of hardware nowadays is not clock speed but ram latency. Fortunately Nintendo took great efforts to ensure developers can really work around that typical bottleneck on Wii U.

They put a lot of thought on how CPU, GPU, caches and memory controllers work together to amplify your code speed."

http://www.vg247.com/2012/11/05/wii-u-avoids-ram-bottleneck-says-nano-assault-dev/


So, Nintendo sacrificed horse power to the speed of caches and latency. They have only 320 Stream processors, when compared to PS4's 1152 and Xbox one 768 stream processors. They should have balanced the hardware atleast to the level of Xbox one.



GAMING is not about spending hours to pass/waste our time just for fun,

its a Feeling/Experience about a VIRTUAL WORLD we can never be in real, and realizing some of our dreams (also creating new ones).

So, Feel Emotions, Experience Adventure/Action, Challenge Game, Solve puzzles and Have fun.

PlayStation is about all-round "New experiences" using new IP's to provide great diversity for everyone.

Xbox is always about Online and Shooting.

Nintendo is always about Fun games and milking IP's.

curl-6 on 14 July 2013
biglittlesps said:
curl-6 said:
zarx said:

That's a nice sentament for sure but one that has little grounding in fact. Nintendo have a history of bottlenecks in their systems. N64 had it's high latency shared RAM plus a miniscule 4K texture cache. Gamecube had it's small amount of main RAM and complicated memory system (2 shared RAM pools + 3MB  eDRAM). NDS had it's fixed 2048 triangles per frame budget, at least it had 512KB of texture memory lol.

Nintendo are good but they aren't that good...

The developer of Nano Assault on Wii U said of the hardware that: 

“The performance problem of hardware nowadays is not clock speed but ram latency. Fortunately Nintendo took great efforts to ensure developers can really work around that typical bottleneck on Wii U.

They put a lot of thought on how CPU, GPU, caches and memory controllers work together to amplify your code speed."

http://www.vg247.com/2012/11/05/wii-u-avoids-ram-bottleneck-says-nano-assault-dev/


So, Nintendo sacrificed horse power to the speed of caches and latency. They have only 320 Stream processors, when compared to PS4's 1152 and Xbox one 768 stream processors. They should have balanced the hardware atleast to the level of Xbox one.

They choose they hardware they did because they prioritised the tablet controller, backwards compatibility, quietness, cool running, reliability, and affordability over raw power. Would they have been better off going for an X1 level of power? Probably, yes. In its current form, however, I don't believe it's as weak as is widely believed.



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biglittlesps on 14 July 2013
curl-6 said:
biglittlesps said:
curl-6 said:
zarx said:

That's a nice sentament for sure but one that has little grounding in fact. Nintendo have a history of bottlenecks in their systems. N64 had it's high latency shared RAM plus a miniscule 4K texture cache. Gamecube had it's small amount of main RAM and complicated memory system (2 shared RAM pools + 3MB  eDRAM). NDS had it's fixed 2048 triangles per frame budget, at least it had 512KB of texture memory lol.

Nintendo are good but they aren't that good...

The developer of Nano Assault on Wii U said of the hardware that: 

“The performance problem of hardware nowadays is not clock speed but ram latency. Fortunately Nintendo took great efforts to ensure developers can really work around that typical bottleneck on Wii U.

They put a lot of thought on how CPU, GPU, caches and memory controllers work together to amplify your code speed."

http://www.vg247.com/2012/11/05/wii-u-avoids-ram-bottleneck-says-nano-assault-dev/


So, Nintendo sacrificed horse power to the speed of caches and latency. They have only 320 Stream processors, when compared to PS4's 1152 and Xbox one 768 stream processors. They should have balanced the hardware atleast to the level of Xbox one.

They choose they hardware they did because they prioritised the tablet controller, backwards compatibility, quietness, cool running, reliability, and affordability over raw power. Would they have been better off going for an X1 level of power? Probably, yes. In its current form, however, I don't believe it's as weak as is widely believed.

Its not weak and better than Xbox 360 and PS3 but it needs more effort to port the games from PS4 and Xbox one.This really hurts Wii U for multiplatform games with third party support. So, only nintendo first party can utitlize the hardware very well to get most out of this.



GAMING is not about spending hours to pass/waste our time just for fun,

its a Feeling/Experience about a VIRTUAL WORLD we can never be in real, and realizing some of our dreams (also creating new ones).

So, Feel Emotions, Experience Adventure/Action, Challenge Game, Solve puzzles and Have fun.

PlayStation is about all-round "New experiences" using new IP's to provide great diversity for everyone.

Xbox is always about Online and Shooting.

Nintendo is always about Fun games and milking IP's.

biglittlesps on 14 July 2013
curl-6 said:
biglittlesps said:
curl-6 said:
zarx said:

That's a nice sentament for sure but one that has little grounding in fact. Nintendo have a history of bottlenecks in their systems. N64 had it's high latency shared RAM plus a miniscule 4K texture cache. Gamecube had it's small amount of main RAM and complicated memory system (2 shared RAM pools + 3MB  eDRAM). NDS had it's fixed 2048 triangles per frame budget, at least it had 512KB of texture memory lol.

Nintendo are good but they aren't that good...

The developer of Nano Assault on Wii U said of the hardware that: 

“The performance problem of hardware nowadays is not clock speed but ram latency. Fortunately Nintendo took great efforts to ensure developers can really work around that typical bottleneck on Wii U.

They put a lot of thought on how CPU, GPU, caches and memory controllers work together to amplify your code speed."

http://www.vg247.com/2012/11/05/wii-u-avoids-ram-bottleneck-says-nano-assault-dev/


So, Nintendo sacrificed horse power to the speed of caches and latency. They have only 320 Stream processors, when compared to PS4's 1152 and Xbox one 768 stream processors. They should have balanced the hardware atleast to the level of Xbox one.

They choose they hardware they did because they prioritised the tablet controller, backwards compatibility, quietness, cool running, reliability, and affordability over raw power. Would they have been better off going for an X1 level of power? Probably, yes. In its current form, however, I don't believe it's as weak as is widely believed.

Its not weak and better than Xbox 360 and PS3 but it needs more effort to port the games from PS4 and Xbox one.This really hurts Wii U for multiplatform games with third party support. So, only nintendo first party can utitlize the hardware very well to get most out of this.

Look at the comparison for three GPU's on next gen consoles I did:http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=164584



GAMING is not about spending hours to pass/waste our time just for fun,

its a Feeling/Experience about a VIRTUAL WORLD we can never be in real, and realizing some of our dreams (also creating new ones).

So, Feel Emotions, Experience Adventure/Action, Challenge Game, Solve puzzles and Have fun.

PlayStation is about all-round "New experiences" using new IP's to provide great diversity for everyone.

Xbox is always about Online and Shooting.

Nintendo is always about Fun games and milking IP's.

curl-6 on 14 July 2013
biglittlesps said:
curl-6 said:

They choose they hardware they did because they prioritised the tablet controller, backwards compatibility, quietness, cool running, reliability, and affordability over raw power. Would they have been better off going for an X1 level of power? Probably, yes. In its current form, however, I don't believe it's as weak as is widely believed.

Its not weak and better than Xbox 360 and PS3 but it needs more effort to port the games from PS4 and Xbox one.This really hurts Wii U for multiplatform games with third party support. So, only nintendo first party can utitlize the hardware very well to get most out of this.

Wii had poor third part support too, yet some of the games that  pushed its chipset the hardest were third party.



Scoobes on 14 July 2013
curl-6 said:
Alby_da_Wolf said:
. Nevertheless, even in the most extreme of these cases, the typical work of GPUs, a small but fast memory can still be very beneficial if it's large enough to fully contain a frame buffer and possibly also z-buffer and double or triple buffer, and a texture cache too if there is some space left.

I'm no expert, but if the 360 managed just fine with 10MB of eDRAM, shouldn't 32MB be enough for a framebuffer with lots to spare?

From what I remember the 10MB of EDRAM wasn't particularly useful (due to only being 10MB) and most third party devs scaled their games down to sub 720 resolution so they could get the benefits of 'free' anti-aliasing without having to go into tiling.

The impression I have is that the bandwidth of the GDDR3 RAM (22GB/s) was enough for most tasks in this generations' games, the eDRAM was used more as a bonus for AA and alpha blending. The WiiU on the other hand sounds like it will be a lot more reliant on its own eDRAM as the bandwidth of the system RAM is nearly half that of the 360.

It should be enough but it'll require more thought from the developer as to how it should be used.




Get your Portable ID!

curl-6 on 14 July 2013
pezus said:
curl-6 said:
jake_the_fake1 said:
Cerny makes an example of Edram having a potential bandwidth of 1TB with a small pool of memory paired with a much larger slower pool of memory, and how simply having one pool of high bandwidth memory is the better solution because it removes hurdles which developers have to jump through making their lives easier, hence their decision to with with 1 large and fast pool of memory, But you take this as Cerny stating that the WiiU has 1TB of bandwidth?.....wow....just wow.

For reference, the 360 has 10MB of Edram, it only has a bandwidth of 32GB/s from the GPU to the Edram, but internally the Edram has a bandwidth of 256GB/s to the ROPS.

Currently there is no definitive information about the bandwidth of the Edram in the WiiU, there are only educated guesses people can make, but if we take the whole WiiU design into consideration, one can easily see that although the WiiU has an efficient and somewhat customized architecture, the parts themselves aren't aren't top end, from an old GPU architecture, an even older CPU architecture, to the very slow DDR3 ram used. From this, one can make the assumption that the Edram bandwidth will not be on the top end of the scale rather it may be on the lower end of the scale, perhaps even lower than what is found on the 360, I say this because Edram is very expensive at high capacity and high speeds and the WiiU has 32MB of it, compromises would have to be made to balance the system and speed would most likely be the first thing cut. Why put in Edram with a bandwidth of 1TB/s if the current WiiU GPU will never be able to take advantage of it, kind of a waste. For reference the Nvidia Titan, only has a bandwidth of 288GB/s.

The point is, (technically uninformed) people ignore Wii U's eDRAM, point to its main memory and say, "oh look, it's so slow" without realizing the advantages eDRAM gives. This video nicely demonstrates how such an advantage works.

I'm pretty sure that wasn't ListerofSmeg's point, though. *looks at thread title*

True; as I said a page or so back, his OP was way off point and unnecessarily contentious.

I was talking about my point.