It has dedicated video encoding and decoding nearly all modern AMD GPU's do
The point im getting at is if you make your video buffer to small you end up thrashing the HDD and thats bad.
I think we can safely rule out multi decade old technology
Sony using the full 3GB reserve for the OS remains a possibility,I don't intend to discount the OS optimisation either.
But when you ESRAM you do not need to have as much bandwidth to the main memory when you don't have it. That's why 1:1 comparisons are silly, you can't pretend Xbone does not have that instant access memory pool that assists with framebuffer operations whereas on PS4 you need calls to the main memory. The overall memory setup is still slower, though I'm not sure it needs to be - the GPU has only 0.67 as many shader nits and half as many ROPs. Overall Xbone is clearly a more limited platform, but it should ot excuse making silly comparisons that make it appear 0.3 as fast lol.
This seems like a bad argument when talking about anything other than tech demos. It assumes that the only things in memory will be seen by the in-game virtual camera, so that if you turn your view to look at an object with textures or geometry that wasn't in the original view, you'll have to stream in from the hard drive. I'm pretty sure that even the most aggressive streaming engines save some memory for off-camera content (and little things like audio), at least at a low level of detail so there's something to show while the hard drive catches up. In short, games need memory beyond what's on screen.
