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Forums - Microsoft Discussion - DirectX 12 Might Not Have A Big Effect On Xbox One, Mostly Targeted For PC

selnor1983 said:

No. You are confusing IDs tech. It isnt the same. Here this explains it better. The 360 took around 2 years fo devs to work the technique out properly on that machine. Xbox One is the same. Also its important to note that the ESRAM makes the Xbox One much more capable of doing Cloud compute over PS4 on normal connnection speeds. Also noo games so far  out use Tiling techniqus on Xbox One.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the Xbox One’s 32 MB eSRAM and how it is a limiter to the console’s overall performance. Although some developers such as Capybara Games deny any bottlenecks with the technology, there is still a feeling of it being limiting despite potentially being able to store up to 6 GB of tiled textures when used in conjunction with DirectX 11.2.

Interestingly, for a normal forward renderer, 32 MB is the exact amount of space necessary to store one 4x MSAA 32 bpp 1080p frame buffer. However, due to the need to output more than just the pixel colour with the renderer, you’ll require multiple buffers. This explains why the anti-aliasing and resolution needs to be turned down for some games on the Xbox One – the 32 MB eSRAM is somewhat of a limiting factor.

The Xbox 360 had the same trouble with eDRAM and solved it by rendering only specific portions of a scene at a time, exchanging different buffers as necessary. Tiled resources are better, since you can avoid drawing your scene twice, but are difficult to properly implement. So a creative approach in the case of first person shooter games, would be to render the bottom half of your screen, which features more objects, using eSRAM while the top half – which is usually empty using the normal VRAM. This allows you to effectively remove less intensive portions from the frame buffer in order to have the eSRAM working on the more complicated bits.

Will this be the de facto solution for the Xbox One, especially since it took developers a while to implement the same approach on the Xbox 360 using eDRAM? It’s unlikely in the beginning stages of the Xbox One’s life cycle, resulting in a drop of resolution and AA, but given a couple of years, we could see some creative use of the eSRAM without a serious hit in performance or visuals.

Why include eSRAM at all if it becomes a limiting factor? Simply due to its bandwidth for tiled texture middleware, which is reportedly 192 GB/s. Also, it appropriately helps make Cloud gaming more possible on normal internet connections thanks to its LZ encode/decode compression abilities. So whether we believe so or not, Microsoft knew what it was doing when it included eSRAM into the Xbox One. We’ll just have to wait and see if devs can deliver the best visual experience possible while taking advantage of the eSRAM’s many benefits.


Sorry any article that also mentions that other secret sauce of the cloud has no weight imo.

It's funny, with the XBO it goes from one thing to another, and when thats unproven (as nearly everyone states) we just get something else to replace it with. Tiled Resources is not going to suddenly make the XBO more powerful or suddenly close the gap. But now you are saying "Wait" it took 2 years for them to get it working on X360... it's going to take a while... i.e we wont even know if TR is improving the games or its just simple "game code" improvements that happen through the gen.

As for Quantum Break, there were suggestions from the last video that it had been downgraded graphically, to me it look ok, but still had that grainy look which isn't a look that I like, which makes me think it wont be the "Best looking next gen so far"... are you suggesting that QB is using Tiled Resources? If not then any improvements were made from just coding and not TR. We dont know the resolution of QB or the scale of the game, I do have alot of respect for Remedy though, alan wake was awesome.

Too many unanswered questions imho to be considering DX12 have an impact on XBO. 

I think you will find that 99% of developers would say that 32 eSRAM is a bad thing and not something that is a benefit, regardless of TR or any future tech.. unfortunately that is the truth.



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Madword said:
selnor1983 said:

No. You are confusing IDs tech. It isnt the same. Here this explains it better. The 360 took around 2 years fo devs to work the technique out properly on that machine. Xbox One is the same. Also its important to note that the ESRAM makes the Xbox One much more capable of doing Cloud compute over PS4 on normal connnection speeds. Also noo games so far  out use Tiling techniqus on Xbox One.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the Xbox One’s 32 MB eSRAM and how it is a limiter to the console’s overall performance. Although some developers such as Capybara Games deny any bottlenecks with the technology, there is still a feeling of it being limiting despite potentially being able to store up to 6 GB of tiled textures when used in conjunction with DirectX 11.2.

Interestingly, for a normal forward renderer, 32 MB is the exact amount of space necessary to store one 4x MSAA 32 bpp 1080p frame buffer. However, due to the need to output more than just the pixel colour with the renderer, you’ll require multiple buffers. This explains why the anti-aliasing and resolution needs to be turned down for some games on the Xbox One – the 32 MB eSRAM is somewhat of a limiting factor.

The Xbox 360 had the same trouble with eDRAM and solved it by rendering only specific portions of a scene at a time, exchanging different buffers as necessary. Tiled resources are better, since you can avoid drawing your scene twice, but are difficult to properly implement. So a creative approach in the case of first person shooter games, would be to render the bottom half of your screen, which features more objects, using eSRAM while the top half – which is usually empty using the normal VRAM. This allows you to effectively remove less intensive portions from the frame buffer in order to have the eSRAM working on the more complicated bits.

Will this be the de facto solution for the Xbox One, especially since it took developers a while to implement the same approach on the Xbox 360 using eDRAM? It’s unlikely in the beginning stages of the Xbox One’s life cycle, resulting in a drop of resolution and AA, but given a couple of years, we could see some creative use of the eSRAM without a serious hit in performance or visuals.

Why include eSRAM at all if it becomes a limiting factor? Simply due to its bandwidth for tiled texture middleware, which is reportedly 192 GB/s. Also, it appropriately helps make Cloud gaming more possible on normal internet connections thanks to its LZ encode/decode compression abilities. So whether we believe so or not, Microsoft knew what it was doing when it included eSRAM into the Xbox One. We’ll just have to wait and see if devs can deliver the best visual experience possible while taking advantage of the eSRAM’s many benefits.


Sorry any article that also mentions that other secret sauce of the cloud has no weight imo.

It's funny, with the XBO it goes from one thing to another, and when thats unproven (as nearly everyone states) we just get something else to replace it with. Tiled Resources is not going to suddenly make the XBO more powerful or suddenly close the gap. But now you are saying "Wait" it took 2 years for them to get it working on X360... it's going to take a while... i.e we wont even know if TR is improving the games or its just simple "game code" improvements that happen through the gen.

As for Quantum Break, there were suggestions from the last video that it had been downgraded graphically, to me it look ok, but still had that grainy look which isn't a look that I like, which makes me think it wont be the "Best looking next gen so far"... are you suggesting that QB is using Tiled Resources? If not then any improvements were made from just coding and not TR. We dont know the resolution of QB or the scale of the game, I do have alot of respect for Remedy though, alan wake was awesome.

Too many unanswered questions imho to be considering DX12 have an impact on XBO. 

I think you will find that 99% of developers would say that 32 eSRAM is a bad thing and not something that is a benefit, regardless of TR or any future tech.. unfortunately that is the truth.

No nothing has gone from one thing to another. MS have only ever talked about tiling. All the other stuff was BS made up by  internet. Tiling is real. 360 did it. An Xbox One will also  in time. And MS talked about Cloud compute way before Xbox one was out. 99% of developers said PS3 was a bad thing, but that didnt stop fist party showing its hand. 90% of games looked better on 360 than PS3 yet PS3 took more graphicss awards thanks to exclusive games. On paper 360s GPU was 30% more powerful than PS3 and ad a 512 mb unified architecture for memory where PS3 did not. Yet exclusive titles used Cell were almost all 3rd parties didnt.

ESRAM when used right will from 2015 onwards in the hands of Remedy, 343 Industries, Black Tusk Studios etc will show just how its done. Or do you have an explanation why Quantum Break gameplay has so much detail and amazing lighting yet is 1080p native? Makes games like Wathcdogs or Battlefield 4 look like last gen games. 



selnor1983 said:

No nothing has gone from one thing to another. MS have only ever talked about tiling. All the other stuff was BS made up by  internet. Tiling is real. 360 did it. An Xbox One will also  in time. And MS talked about Cloud compute way before Xbox one was out. 99% of developers said PS3 was a bad thing, but that didnt stop fist party showing its hand. 90% of games looked better on 360 than PS3 yet PS3 took more graphicss awards thanks to exclusive games. On paper 360s GPU was 30% more powerful than PS3 and ad a 512 mb unified architecture for memory where PS3 did not. Yet exclusive titles used Cell were almost all 3rd parties didnt.

ESRAM when used right will from 2015 onwards in the hands of Remedy, 343 Industries, Black Tusk Studios etc will show just how its done. Or do you have an explanation why Quantum Break gameplay has so much detail and amazing lighting yet is 1080p native? Makes games like Wathcdogs or Battlefield 4 look like last gen games. 

Games on the 360 didnt look/perform substantially better on the 360 though (in most cases were minor with FPS taking a hit to 1 digit differences), the PS3 was hamstrung on the whole by a totally painful architecture and split memory. The XB360 was better because it was easier to program for, that had *nothing* to do with Tiled Resources. Perhaps I am confused, are you saying that 360 was better because of Tiled Resources or are you saying that the PS3 had issues in the hardware... because I can agree with the second statement, but not that Tiled Resources has delivered a set of better games. 

Because in most cases once developers finally got their game engines improved the PS3 versions on the whole performed quite close the Xb360 versions.

So now I'm really confused on what you are suggesting. What I am saying is on in most cases there were minor differences between the PS3 and X360 games and if Tiled Resources were such an improvement why didnt we see it, and why did we see PS3 exclusives on the whole look better. This makes no sense,.. so what I am saying is that it wont make a difference on XBO either.



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Madword said:
selnor1983 said:

No nothing has gone from one thing to another. MS have only ever talked about tiling. All the other stuff was BS made up by  internet. Tiling is real. 360 did it. An Xbox One will also  in time. And MS talked about Cloud compute way before Xbox one was out. 99% of developers said PS3 was a bad thing, but that didnt stop fist party showing its hand. 90% of games looked better on 360 than PS3 yet PS3 took more graphicss awards thanks to exclusive games. On paper 360s GPU was 30% more powerful than PS3 and ad a 512 mb unified architecture for memory where PS3 did not. Yet exclusive titles used Cell were almost all 3rd parties didnt.

ESRAM when used right will from 2015 onwards in the hands of Remedy, 343 Industries, Black Tusk Studios etc will show just how its done. Or do you have an explanation why Quantum Break gameplay has so much detail and amazing lighting yet is 1080p native? Makes games like Wathcdogs or Battlefield 4 look like last gen games. 

Games on the 360 didnt look/perform substantially better on the 360 though (in most cases were minor with FPS taking a hit to 1 digit differences), the PS3 was hamstrung on the whole by a totally painful architecture and split memory. The XB360 was better because it was easier to program for, that had *nothing* to do with Tiled Resources. Perhaps I am confused, are you saying that 360 was better because of Tiled Resources or are you saying that the PS3 had issues in the hardware... because I can agree with the second statement, but not that Tiled Resources has delivered a set of better games. 

Because in most cases once developers finally got their game engines improved the PS3 versions on the whole performed quite close the Xb360 versions.

So now I'm really confused on what you are suggesting. What I am saying is on in most cases there were minor differences between the PS3 and X360 games and if Tiled Resources were such an improvement why didnt we see it, and why did we see PS3 exclusives on the whole look better. This makes no sense,.. so what I am saying is that it wont make a difference on XBO either.

On 360 Tiled resources were used to achieve higher resolutions and framerate together. From 2007 onwards most FPS games for example started to buffer the bottom of the screen entirely on the EDRAM with  the top half being done in the V-Sync. Before this happened many games barely did 540p 2x msaa or 720p with AA. Gears OF War was the first 360 game in native 720p. Yet it didnt include AA. It wasnt until Gears 2 where Epic used Tiling to achieve native 720p and 2x MSAA on 360. Halo 4 is beyond a shadow of a doubt the best tiled game. IT achieves native 720p while achieving 4 x FXAA.

It will take time to see the results on Xbox One. But this E3 and ESPECIALLY Gamescom will show just how good Xbox One is in the right hands. Lucky us we got a decent gameplay glimpse of Quantum Break. The gameplay detail is astouunding. And it can be paused sped up slowed down at any time.

 



You are talking about exclusives, Gears of War... Could you tell me which 3rd party games uses tiled resources and how much a difference it made.. i.e. the resolution differences between PS3 and XB360 as well as FPS....be interested to see that data.

As for PS3... TLOU is 720p as far as i understand it, and early PS3 games were not... what I am getting at is, how can you state any of this is due to tiled resources on the X360 and not just general programming improvements that *will* happen over the course of the life of a console.

As for QB, it's an exclusive, of course it should be better graphically than 3rd party multi platform games... this is going to be no surprise to anyone. It's very much easier to make a better looking game on a single platform than 3 or 4. But is QB using Tiled Resources?



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selnor1983 said:

No. You are confusing IDs tech. It isnt the same. Here this explains it better. The 360 took around 2 years fo devs to work the technique out properly on that machine. Xbox One is the same. Also its important to note that the ESRAM makes the Xbox One much more capable of doing Cloud compute over PS4 on normal connnection speeds. Also noo games so far  out use Tiling techniqus on Xbox One.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the Xbox One’s 32 MB eSRAM and how it is a limiter to the console’s overall performance. Although some developers such as Capybara Games deny any bottlenecks with the technology, there is still a feeling of it being limiting despite potentially being able to store up to 6 GB of tiled textures when used in conjunction with DirectX 11.2.

Interestingly, for a normal forward renderer, 32 MB is the exact amount of space necessary to store one 4x MSAA 32 bpp 1080p frame buffer. However, due to the need to output more than just the pixel colour with the renderer, you’ll require multiple buffers. This explains why the anti-aliasing and resolution needs to be turned down for some games on the Xbox One – the 32 MB eSRAM is somewhat of a limiting factor.

The Xbox 360 had the same trouble with eDRAM and solved it by rendering only specific portions of a scene at a time, exchanging different buffers as necessary. Tiled resources are better, since you can avoid drawing your scene twice, but are difficult to properly implement. So a creative approach in the case of first person shooter games, would be to render the bottom half of your screen, which features more objects, using eSRAM while the top half – which is usually empty using the normal VRAM. This allows you to effectively remove less intensive portions from the frame buffer in order to have the eSRAM working on the more complicated bits.

Will this be the de facto solution for the Xbox One, especially since it took developers a while to implement the same approach on the Xbox 360 using eDRAM? It’s unlikely in the beginning stages of the Xbox One’s life cycle, resulting in a drop of resolution and AA, but given a couple of years, we could see some creative use of the eSRAM without a serious hit in performance or visuals.

Why include eSRAM at all if it becomes a limiting factor? Simply due to its bandwidth for tiled texture middleware, which is reportedly 192 GB/s. Also, it appropriately helps make Cloud gaming more possible on normal internet connections thanks to its LZ encode/decode compression abilities. So whether we believe so or not, Microsoft knew what it was doing when it included eSRAM into the Xbox One. We’ll just have to wait and see if devs can deliver the best visual experience possible while taking advantage of the eSRAM’s many benefits.


Whoever wrote that article you are quoting is totally clueless, or a troll. Ignore that bullshit intirely. And there are games that use tiled resources on XBOne Battlefeild 4 uses tiled rendering (mainly for lighting so only some buffers are tiled iirc) and Wolfenstien uses id Tech's virtual texture system for tiled textures (aka megatextures). DX11.2's tiled resources works on the same principle of breaking up Textures into small chunks then performing an occlusion test so you can load just the tiles needed instead of the whole texture. It's useful when you have a small amount of VRAM but very large textures but it is still limited by the size of your texture cache and your avalable bandwidth. ESRAM doesn't make it any faster as it is too small to hold more than 1-2 tiles at once so you will still need to read the hundreds of MB of tiles from main memory (which is still slow) every frame, and still need to load tiles from disc as well. ESRAM is too small to be used as a tile cache. So it's great if you have a lot of low res texture data hence why id Tech games are designed around every surface being uniquely textured but the individual textures are all low resolution. There are novel other uses such as using it for more effeciant shadow maps etc and it does allow you to stream more effeciantly but the PS4 has the same capabilities so not an advantage.

The example used in the article of drawing the bottom half of the frame in ESRAM and the top in main RAM is also nonsense. Frame buffer size has nothing to do with how many assets are drawn into it, and having half of your framebuffer in a seperate pool of memory doesn't require Tiled Resources. There are just as many pixels in the top and bottom of the frame, so it's the same size and there is no advantage to doing half in a slower pool. Half of it being in a slower pool of memory would only slow down the whole proccess as you would have to wait for the slow half anyway or have a permant scanline. No a good tiled aproach would be to split the frame up into lets say 16 peices and then you render the first chunk and then as you render the second chunck you are moving the first chunk into main memory, and then as you are drawing the third chunck you start moving the second chunk etc. And then you combine the final frame before output. This method allows you to use the full ESRAM bandwidth for rendering without having to have the whole framebuffer in ESRAM at once. However that does lead to some overhead from moving the chunks around, and from having more overdraw (you have to render things past the boundries of the screen for various reasons and that means you would have overdraw for every chunck which adds up).But as I said games already use tiled rendering

LZ Compression isn't really bandwidth bound and has little to nothing to do with cloud proccessing. And even if it did the PS4's extra compute units in the GPU would actually be a much bigger advantage as it is massively parallel and well suited to GPGPU.

MS knew what they were doing when they added ESRAM for sure. They knew that DDR3 memory would not have nearly enough bandwidth so they needed another faster pool of memory for the GPU. And as a second memory bus on the SoC would be prohibitive they had to use a large on chip cache to make up for it.



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Hahaha you believe that's xb1 qb footage? It's just a bs reel run on a high end PC. The final product will be massively downgraded. We've been through this a million times, and both Sony and Microsoft have done it. Microsoft more notoriously of late.

If the game was as complete on xb hardware as seen in the video, it would be a 2014 release. But it's complete bs, and anyone who believed it was the real deal will look pretty silly. Weak GPU + ddr3 sorry, the lighting, aa, framerate, model detail, resolution, lighting/fx all can't be high. Several things will take a solid hit. The downgrade will be epic.



zarx said:
selnor1983 said:

Interesting that they mention resolution difference then mention DX12. DX 11.2 was the update in February for Xbox One that bought the tiling technique for the console so the ESRAM can fit up to 6gb of data on 32 mb. And this is why 3rd parties arent hitting 1080p yet. They have to programme the ram differently and they arent taking the time to bother with it ( well at least some arent ). Games like Quantum Break which blow 3rd party games away are 1080p native. 

DX 12 will have some liitle effects on Xbox One, but the biggest changes we will see are from first party developers who use Tiling Techniques on the Xbox One fast ESRAM. I expect 1080p 60 FPS Halo 5 to look absolutely out of this world. As will Gears Of War 4. Quantum Break alreay looks best next gen visuals so far and appears 1080p native.

Tiled Resources or Partialy Resident Textures as AMD called it when they implemented it in their GPUs years ago. Has nothing to do with resolution. It is a technique for texture streaming, id Tech 5's Meagtexture is a software implementation of Virtual Textures which if you played Quake Wars, RAGE, or Wolfenstein you would know it has it's drawbacks along with it's advantages of lower RAM footprint. If you have a small cache for tiles then you will have lots of pop-in as you stream in textures. It doesn't make the textures any smaller it just allows you to more effeciantly break it up and stream into memory from disc.

And tiled rendering for the framebuffer which will effect resolution is also not a new technique. a few X360 games used it to manage the EDRAM there already. Frostbyte 2 (and I assume 3) for example uses a tiled rendering aproach there.


Oh a lot more games than that, pretty much every single x360 game not running at 1024x600 MSAA2x is tile rendered, mostly in 2 tiles for the majority of the games (in 720p with or w/o AA depending on rendereing complexity). A few uses more tiles, but at this point it becomes complicated (and not very effective)

It's kind of the same problem with the X1 but this time its embedded RAM is not only used for framebuffer, and not directly connected to ROPs, that's why we don't see much 1080p games (otherwise 32MB would be enough), it's still possible but again not very effective as it produces a lot of tiles. Basically after 2 tiles you get half the bandwidth, etc..

About PRT, i agree, nothing new it's one of the core hardware managed features of the GCN architecture.

I said it here a few times, DX12 is already in the X1 in some sens, so it's a bit funny to wait for something that is already there.



BTW the xb1 dev kits are high end PCs. The industry is rife with bullshots these days (famous even from Sony killzone 2, which fanboys loved believing back in the day lol).

You'll notice that they are VERY careful with their language. "In-engine", which is essentially meaningless. "On Xbox hardware" which they didn't even say for qb, is another dead giveaway, as that is cover for them using a pumped up dev kit PC.

The only believable footage is real time in hand irrevocably proven gameplay from an actual retail console.

I can absolutely guarantee that the qb footage so far is utterly and completely meant for one thing, and that's to hype their vision of the game in the most exciting way possible, and if they can generate more hype with ludicrous bleeding edge PC footage, that's what they'll do. A few stalwarts refuse to bs the gamers, but for the most part it's all fake for all practical purposes. I have very deep connections to the game publishing world, and it's hardly a secret, nor is it anything new. But don't attach your rep to unachievable shenanigans, it just ends up making you look foolish for being gullible.



zarx said:
selnor1983 said:

No. You are confusing IDs tech. It isnt the same. Here this explains it better. The 360 took around 2 years fo devs to work the technique out properly on that machine. Xbox One is the same. Also its important to note that the ESRAM makes the Xbox One much more capable of doing Cloud compute over PS4 on normal connnection speeds. Also noo games so far  out use Tiling techniqus on Xbox One.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the Xbox One’s 32 MB eSRAM and how it is a limiter to the console’s overall performance. Although some developers such as Capybara Games deny any bottlenecks with the technology, there is still a feeling of it being limiting despite potentially being able to store up to 6 GB of tiled textures when used in conjunction with DirectX 11.2.

Interestingly, for a normal forward renderer, 32 MB is the exact amount of space necessary to store one 4x MSAA 32 bpp 1080p frame buffer. However, due to the need to output more than just the pixel colour with the renderer, you’ll require multiple buffers. This explains why the anti-aliasing and resolution needs to be turned down for some games on the Xbox One – the 32 MB eSRAM is somewhat of a limiting factor.

The Xbox 360 had the same trouble with eDRAM and solved it by rendering only specific portions of a scene at a time, exchanging different buffers as necessary. Tiled resources are better, since you can avoid drawing your scene twice, but are difficult to properly implement. So a creative approach in the case of first person shooter games, would be to render the bottom half of your screen, which features more objects, using eSRAM while the top half – which is usually empty using the normal VRAM. This allows you to effectively remove less intensive portions from the frame buffer in order to have the eSRAM working on the more complicated bits.

Will this be the de facto solution for the Xbox One, especially since it took developers a while to implement the same approach on the Xbox 360 using eDRAM? It’s unlikely in the beginning stages of the Xbox One’s life cycle, resulting in a drop of resolution and AA, but given a couple of years, we could see some creative use of the eSRAM without a serious hit in performance or visuals.

Why include eSRAM at all if it becomes a limiting factor? Simply due to its bandwidth for tiled texture middleware, which is reportedly 192 GB/s. Also, it appropriately helps make Cloud gaming more possible on normal internet connections thanks to its LZ encode/decode compression abilities. So whether we believe so or not, Microsoft knew what it was doing when it included eSRAM into the Xbox One. We’ll just have to wait and see if devs can deliver the best visual experience possible while taking advantage of the eSRAM’s many benefits.


Whoever wrote that article you are quoting is totally clueless, or a troll. Ignore that bullshit intirely. And there are games that use tiled resources on XBOne Battlefeild 4 uses tiled rendering (mainly for lighting so only some buffers are tiled iirc) and Wolfenstien uses id Tech's virtual texture system for tiled textures (aka megatextures). DX11.2's tiled resources works on the same principle of breaking up Textures into small chunks then performing an occlusion test so you can load just the tiles needed instead of the whole texture. It's useful when you have a small amount of VRAM but very large textures but it is still limited by the size of your texture cache and your avalable bandwidth. ESRAM doesn't make it any faster as it is too small to hold more than 1-2 tiles at once so you will still need to read the hundreds of MB of tiles from main memory (which is still slow) every frame, and still need to load tiles from disc as well. ESRAM is too small to be used as a tile cache. So it's great if you have a lot of low res texture data hence why id Tech games are designed around every surface being uniquely textured but the individual textures are all low resolution. There are novel other uses such as using it for more effeciant shadow maps etc and it does allow you to stream more effeciantly but the PS4 has the same capabilities so not an advantage.

The example used in the article of drawing the bottom half of the frame in ESRAM and the top in main RAM is also nonsense. Frame buffer size has nothing to do with how many assets are drawn into it, and having half of your framebuffer in a seperate pool of memory doesn't require Tiled Resources. There are just as many pixels in the top and bottom of the frame, so it's the same size and there is no advantage to doing half in a slower pool. Half of it being in a slower pool of memory would only slow down the whole proccess as you would have to wait for the slow half anyway or have a permant scanline. No a good tiled aproach would be to split the frame up into lets say 16 peices and then you render the first chunk and then as you render the second chunck you are moving the first chunk into main memory, and then as you are drawing the third chunck you start moving the second chunk etc. And then you combine the final frame before output. This method allows you to use the full ESRAM bandwidth for rendering without having to have the whole framebuffer in ESRAM at once. However that does lead to some overhead from moving the chunks around, and from having more overdraw (you have to render things past the boundries of the screen for various reasons and that means you would have overdraw for every chunck which adds up).But as I said games already use tiled rendering

LZ Compression isn't really bandwidth bound and has little to nothing to do with cloud proccessing. And even if it did the PS4's extra compute units in the GPU would actually be a much bigger advantage as it is massively parallel and well suited to GPGPU.

MS knew what they were doing when they added ESRAM for sure. They knew that DDR3 memory would not have nearly enough bandwidth so they needed another faster pool of memory for the GPU. And as a second memory bus on the SoC would be prohibitive they had to use a large on chip cache to make up for it.


I wouldnt bother talking to Selnor if i were you he will not listen and just keep saying "Tiling" till he is blue in the face, i dont think he has any background in tech at all.

Here is the article he quoted verbatum. 

http://gamingbolt.com/why-xbox-ones-esram-feels-limited-despite-potential-to-store-6gb-of-tiled-textures-using-dx-11-2