Maximilian Kolbe
Member
360->720 is pretty normal jump even with this rumored spec
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VGLeaks: First look as Durango XDK (always connected, kinect required, must install)
- Thread starter DieH@rd
- Start date
ChosenPredator
Banned
just wait & see what MS has to offer lol
we are all anticipating to see if these rumors are true or not but damn MS is going to have a shit load of people watching purely based on these negative rumors.
Beerman462
Member
That's why I said based on the information we have so far. I am not saying emphatically that the PS4 will be more powerful and the games will look better no matter what, but based on the rumors thus far(which have been pretty accurate regarding the PS4). The PS4 will have the advantage graphically.
I can't wait and the event is rumored for the 26th of April(my birthday). So much anticipation. I hope they have better then the rumored specs, but in the end I don't think it will matter that much. I primarily game on PC and the fact that both consoles have 8GB of ram and DX11+ GPUs is good enough for me.
Uno Venova
Banned
so what do people do with the leaks so far
Not really. Usually there's a bigger jump across generations. In the 360's case, it was roughly 15x more capable than the Xbox. 360 to rumoured Nextbox is roughly 6x~ more.
Brad Grenz
Member
We don't have any pricing information. MS invested a huge amount of die space in embedded memory so it's premature to claim they come out on top in a cost analysis.
And I don't know what you think "relatively less" is supposed to mean. We know the aggregate bandwidth of both. In ABSOLUTE terms PS4 has more bandwidth AND more shader power. To try and spin that as a Durango advantage is purely delusional. In BW limited workloads the PS4 wins. In shader limited work loads, PS4 wins again. In terms of total available memory: PS4 is rumored to win once more. In any case, any "relative" benefits it might have in terms of shader to BW ratios goes out the window when you factor in the cost of moving data between the two memory pools, something that will be required to use them to any effect.
Durango's badwidth may be "fine" and in fact well balanced, but that doesn't mean it isn't also significantly less capable than the PS4.
No, it is unequivocally true. The Durango memory topography is more complex, fullstop. When you compare otherwise very similar architectures where one has a single highspeed memory bus, and the other has two memory buses where the majority of the bandwidth is concentrated in a very small amount of memory, the second will be harder to use effectively. It is not even debatable, and that's before you add in all the specialized hardware intended to alleviate the limitations: DMEs with built in compression hardware. On Durango you have all these different buses, and units, and data formats to juggle in hopes that you get your data where it needs to be in time, and all that moving stuff around and preloading, and decompressing on the fly, all that consumes bandwidth as well. And all of that is completely unnecessary on the PS4.
James Sawyer Ford
Member
Selling more on a yearly basis than your competitor isn't exactly analogous to "getting your ass handed to you".
PS3 has performed better than the 360, even if its lost marketshare and Microsoft has gained.
And that's with some colossal cock-ups by Sony. Next gen is a new slate, and Sony isn't making any mistakes from my perspective.
You bring up the Vita, but the Vita is irrelevant to the discussion of consoles. Consoles in the past haven't won because of power, but they ushered in the right mix of content + power + interface + timing that was compelling for the masses.
I'd like to know what Microsoft have that could be "way more than Kinect". I can't think of anything honestly. Kinect is likely the centerpiece of their "why hello thar Batman" dream, I just don't think in practice people will care about it. Kinect certainly wasn't much of a success.
Maximilian Kolbe
Member
Wat?
Btw wasn't EA said next gen consoles will be 8-10x better
lowhighkang_LHK
Member
Don't the 360 and Ps3 have roughly similar worldwide LTD's?
Take them with a grain of salt?
I don't think it is. If it was, who would only game on a PS3, given the number of cross-platform games that look and perform better on the 360 and PC? When you ask why the PS3 failed to sell like the PS2, nobody says "cos it had tons of shit ports". They say "because the price was too high". But now performance is "really important"? Nah.
Sure, but Sony went from dominant market leader to scraping at the heels of the 360 (with its RROD, noisy fans, proprietary expensive add-ons, paid online and ads) by selling their console at the greatest loss for the longest time and by running PSN at a loss for years. That's not something that should be considered a success. The fucked up and they know it, which is why they're trying to get it right with the PS4.lowhighkang_LHK said:
Uno Venova
Banned
i don't see why everyone needs too, these outlets have been pretty good so far. the 'judgements' people are making can always change in the future.
For a guy with your reputation that's quite an assumption to peddle.
I've to say, your arguments are getting more ridiculous by the day. First it was SuperDAE hacking into Sony and now 128 bit vs 256bit despite the fact that it is already well known that both Durango and PS4 both use 256bit bus.
How in the world would you know that it will be "emphatically more expensive"? And how does PS4 have relatively less bandwidth that if you added up Durango's rumoured set up? First of all there is growing consensus here and the ESRAM will act like a large cache instead of what EDRAM did for 360. Secondly, that adding them up doesn't really work as a sustainable overall bandwidth. Thirdly, despite adding it up, unless math took wrong turn since inception, it doesn't equal the bandwidth of PS4. For Durango, current rumour puts it at 68+102GB/sec which in fantasy land can be added and kept running at 170GB/sec for all time.
I am sure that XB3 will be more than sufficiently powerful to handle next gen. But trying to enforce some sort of equivalence at every turn is becoming sad.
I have to say that I used to enjoy your posts back before this whole Durango/Orbis charts started to show up. The closer things to got to PS4's reveal the worse things got and now these arguments have no head or tail. Sadly, it's time to put you on my ignore list till the consoles are out for a while.
Baconsammy
Banned
I'm speaking more in terms of money. The PS3 lost more money than Sony made on the PS1 and PS2 combined. Selling more consoles doesn't matter when you lose that much cash. And as you pointed out, they lost marketshare. They lost North America and the UK. That's gigantic. But what you lose, you can also gain back. In my opinion, the worst thing for everyone would be if the Xbox and PS4 were nearly identical again. That's just so boring. And on the other hand, third parties need them to be semi-similar to keep the cost of porting down. As a consumer, I know I'm buying both, so I don't want to be buying similar experiences.
Every "insider" we've ever heard speak has said the same thing(you know, people that actually know stuff). What's my reputation, btw? I'm open to all the consoles. Is it because I'm not all "Hallelujah Sony" after their seemingly endless string of fuckups the past 8 or so years? I'll give them the benefit of the doubt again once they're earned it back. This need to believe that one console is vastly superior to the other without ever actually seeing them both is just hilarious to me. The same thing happened at the start of this gen. The whole "PS3 is godly and lol Xbox 1.5" nonsense blew up in people's faces. Sony's included. Let's wait and see what we actually have to choose from this time around.
regardless of the history repeating itself with Sony specs
games will be like this gen... Sony people will be awww yea check out those effects, that AA, that Res, that frame rate!
and when compared to 720 most people with 720 version will say, hey looks pretty good on both!
and once again it will come down to services exclusives and where your friends are... same old, same old, rinse, repeat.
exactly and lets' not pretend dominating NA & winning UK doesn't matter either. Love the revisionist history going on since 8GB GDDR day
the Powa of Cell!
and when compared to 720 most people with 720 version will say, hey looks pretty good on both!
and once again it will come down to services exclusives and where your friends are... same old, same old, rinse, repeat.
but was other way around with PS360
exactly and lets' not pretend dominating NA & winning UK doesn't matter either. Love the revisionist history going on since 8GB GDDR day
Or a better thing to do would be to say "I just don't know so I'm going to wait and see". That's not much good for the people who have an agenda and turn up in all the Durango threads trying to imply that negative rumours are almost certainly true because they'd rather people bought a PS4 though.
Uno Venova
Banned
that makes for pretty vanilla discussion. it's better it the way it is, actually discussing the info we have.
I kind of see where you're coming from, but even if the experiences were similar, the exclusives still set them apart.
Baconsammy
Banned
But they don't to most people. Look at the sales figures from this gen. It's pretty much all Nintendo exclusives and third party cross-platform stuff. My desire to have different experiences is a pipe-dream, though. I don't think third parties could afford to support two diverse consoles at the same time.
James Sawyer Ford
Member
Sony has not lost more money on PS3 than PS2 + PS1 combined, it was close during the PS3's darkest days, but they were still profitable overall for the entire playstation business to the tune of nearly a billion. Since then, as PS3 has become profitable, it's started inching back up.
Microsoft on the other hand is still in the red on the entire Xbox project. Both companies are now profitable going forward.
BTW: "miniscule" power difference can mean many things to different people.
A 50% increase in framerate isn't going to result in a generational gap, but it's hardly insignificant.
ionicbluebird
Member
Durango is like apple juice from concentrate; PS4 is like fresh squeezed Orange juice.
Wii U is like powdered ice tea mix... Blue ocean and all that.
This info comes from deep inside my insiderness.
Wii U is like powdered ice tea mix... Blue ocean and all that.
This info comes from deep inside my insiderness.
Don't you get bored of saying the same thing over and over again though? You have 24 posts just in this thread about the Edge "must be connected to even play games" rumours. Is that "a conversation" or is it someone thinking "if I say the same thing enough times, people might start to believe it"? Whatever floats your boat I suppose.
Baconsammy
Banned
Is this the track the hype train is on now? A 50% framerate difference? Good lord.
Syphon Filter
Member
lol
Uno Venova
Banned
It's not really something you have to convince people to believe though, a lot of people take stock in it, and it gets talked about a lot. First pages of the thread is good evidence of that. Not sure what you counted up posts to prove.
Your reputation being for allied on the side of facts. Given we have yet to see games on both platforms and how it will turn out down the line, that is a big assumption to put forth that makes a judgement call for all "average consumers".
Plus, if the rumours are true a difference of around 600GFLOPs where all else (besides the RAM) being nigh identical, is not really insignificant on paper.
Liabe Brave
Member
About 7-10 fps is a small absolute number, you're right. But the difference between locked 30fps and 22fps-with-constant-tearing can be enormous for some players.
That's not to say the PS4/Durango split will definitely be like this, as without a Microsoft announcement everything is still vague conjecture. Just pointing out that even small differences in numbers can result in big differences in player experience.
When looking at the equivalent PC graphics cards, the frame-rate difference is about 50%. Now who know what it will actually translate to in multiplatform games going forward but regardless of how much you want to downplay such a difference, anyone who's familiar with hardware can tell you that 600 gflops between GPUs based on the same architecture is a very big gap. You can plug your ears and close your eyes and try to downplay the validity of the leaks all your want but it's very likely you'll just be more disappointed when it's all official.
Like I've said before, the leaks are all we have to go on. That information is more credible than what people want the system to be. If I based all my hype on wishful thinking I''d end up disappointed with every announcement ever.
SenjutsuSage
Banned
60% of Durango's overall memory bandwidth is allocated inside 32MB of ESRAM.
Around 92% of the Xbox 360's overall memory bandwidth is allocated inside 10MB of EDRAM.
I've just shown with this that the Xbox 360 is an even more egregious offender on the very terms that you yourself just set. Why would Durango's memory bandwidth setup be any more difficult to manage for developers than the Xbox 360's was if this is the case?
The PS4 will have to move data to and from system memory, just like the new Xbox will have to. Moving stuff around, as you put it, will also very much be necessary on the PS4, as will preloading and decompressing on the fly, which will also consume bandwidth on the PS4. The PS4 isn't somehow magically immune from having to do these things. The PS4 will just do so in more traditional ways, presumably, of course, without using fixed function hardware such as Durango's Move Engines. Durango isn't somehow forced to use the move engines at all times and can move data around in the same traditional ways that the PS4 can. Microsoft's own people basically attest to this very fact in their predicted typical usage scenario for Durango, where the move engines are idle and consuming none of the bandwidth. The PS4 will utilize shaders to move data around, which will, in turn, consume bandwidth every bit as much as it would on Durango. The important thing about Durango's move engines is that they are able to operate simultaneously with GPU computation. In compute heavy situations, Move Engine operations essentially come for free because the available bandwidth will be there to supply them to do their job without necessarily taking away from needed bandwidth elsewhere. The more interesting thing about them, and is a situation in which the memory setup of Durango becomes very convenient, is that even in bandwidth heavy situations, the move engines may still have plenty enough free bandwidth to do their work effectively free if the move engine is using a different memory pathway from the pathway being used by a shader.
The move engines aren't something that I see as a disadvantage. They only help and can be perfectly idle if the develop doesn't need them for anything. Developers don't have to use the move engines, but it makes complete sense that they would want to, because they seem to do a very effective job of unloading work from the GPU, which can only help performance further. Even saying all this, of course the PS4 has the power edge, but this idea that Durango is made even weaker by the fact that it will somehow also be difficult for developers to leverage the available power is pure sensationalism.
Durango may not have the most raw power, but it will be a very easy system to design for, and it's an especially appropriate design for Microsoft's needs, as it seems well positioned for many of the things that Microsoft seemed to take advantage of effectively with the 360. All 4 move engines are capable of performing tiling and untiling, which is just a perfect evolution of tiling that is used so heavily on the Xbox 360. It couldn't hurt to help to try and assist developers in alleviating the costs of tiling. It makes complete sense, and if the 360 is any indication, tiling will be a heavily used feature. What's more, a Radeon 7970, for example, comes with 2 DMA engines. All 4 of Durango's Move Engines each have a DMA engine, thus doubling the amount. The DMA's purpose in the 7970 is to allow for more efficient use of available bandwidth by allowing 2 streams of data simultaneous use of both directions on a pci-express link. Durango being able to handle 4 streams of data in both directions is something developers will likely find helpful. The peak performance gets divided between the 4 (more realistically 3 in most instances, since Move Engine 0 is partly shared with the system, but it can also help out with games as well), but that doesn't exactly make them any less useful.
And, finally, considering that games will be played off of the hard drive with every game installed on Durango, it also has to help that one of the move engines has a dedicated LZ decoder for decompressing compressed data on the hard drive. That's essentially what's going on with Durango. The Move Engines don't somehow make developing games more complex, as they can be idle if I wish, and Durango would still perform well in games. Will some developers use Move Engines better than others? Absolutely, but they don't hold Durango development back, they aide it. And I haven't even touched on another very helpful feature of Durango's GPU, the 3 display planes. The main one reserved by the system basically decouples system rendering from game rendering, meaning that the console OS can not only be at a different resolution from the game, but more importantly, the OS can run at a steady frame rate, even if there was a situation where a game was not. On the 360 right now if a game is demanding to a certain degree or is even experiencing unsteady frame rates, this also impacts the performance of the system OS. Durango apparently fixes this. But more than that, the display planes can further assist to reduce memory and bandwidth consumption if developers take advantage of each display plane's ability to use multiple image rectangles. Each display plane can handle up to 4. May even work well with tiling, too?
Again, not something that hurts development, but that likely aides it more than it hurts it using specialized hardware. Microsoft have built a damn good system. Just because they've apparently done quite a bit of customization to their console's GPU, doesn't mean that they've made development dramatically more difficult. They have not. There are basically 3 customizations on Durango's GPU.
4 Move Engines.
3 Hardware Display Planes
32MB of Low Latency ESRAM in place of traditional VRAM.
With all these customizations, I think it makes sense that they structured Durango in such a way that the ESRAM's memory bandwidth belongs exclusively to the GPU and doesn't have to be shared with the CPU, like the DDR3 bandwidth is. Raw power may not have been Microsoft's intent with Durango, but they still find themselves with a powerful system regardless that is essentially like a swiss army knife of very useful sounding customizations. And this is all before the potential development benefits of that low latency ESRAM and the possibilities that may exist for some wholly unique approaches to certain aspects of development.
This is not true really. It's not the same kind of setup.
For example to sample a texture in PS4, from a shader, you'll just do
tex2d(blahblahblah)
And that's it. You don't have to worry about where the texture is. It can only be in one place. There is caching but it's transparent to the programmer.
To sample a texture on Durango, you can do the same
tex2d(blahblahblah)
But if you want to have that texture in eSRAM instead, you'll first have to call a command on a move engine to put it into eSRAM, and then sample.
On PS4 there is no 'other pool' to swap data in and out of. It's one pool with one pipe of bandwidth. On Durango there's two, with two pipes, and maximising bandwidth will require manual juggling between the two - programmers deciding what data should be in which pool, and when, and scheduling movements.
edit - it's true you could more or less ignore the move engines and do all your GPU reads, for example, out of main memory and leave it at that. And in fact, I expect many games might do this - put their output buffers in eSRAM while doing their reads from main memory. But you'll lose flexibility around how to apportion bandwidth, it becomes dictated by the system. You may not be making maximal use of available bandwidths.
This post is right. Everything except 720p versus 1080p, it will be 945 versus 1080p or a modified 1080 versus full 1080.
great write up very enlightening.
But sadly not wholly appreciated here since it can't be boiled down into a catch phrase.
Miles Quaritch
Member
It's become increasingly obvious the leaked specifications are indeed real. Time to let go of any expectations that the specifications will be drastically different.
Good. Because they don't need to.
Ms expected Sony to have more power and they have their own plan which will keep them close enough in graphics to be completely viable and reach their goals.
These thoughts of destruction based on the specs also needs to be let go.
SenjutsuSage
Banned
True, the setup isn't entirely the same, but it is similar enough. This juggling you're referring to is between 8GB of DDR3 and 32MB of ESRAM. With 32MB being a rather small amount, developers won't take very long deciding what they want to put in there and when, at least not enough to negatively impact Durango game development enough for the PS4 to gain yet another edge on top of the power advantage we know it has. That's basically what we are discussing here. Will Durango development be so much more difficult in comparison to the 360, which shares strong similarities with Durango, and the PS4, which shares even stronger similarities to Durango architecturally than even the 360 (which again aides development on Durango as it aides development on PS4), to the point that it leads to frequently badly optimized games compared to the PS4? This is far from a PS3 vs 360 situation. Durango is easier to develop on than the 360. I don't need to go through the list again for why that is.
But I also have to address the comment that in order to have a texture in ESRAM instead of the DDR3, you have to call a command to the move engine to move it there. Not true, you can simply use a shader to move it there from main ram to ESRAM very easily while leaving the Move Engines completely idle the entire time if you please.
Does 1440x1080 sound fair? Maybe with slightly better effects to make up for the slightly egregious res cut? That would be extremely simple to scale.
afaik you don't need to call the move engines explicitly. The compiler can optimize stuff on it's own. Problem is, that you can't rely on that.
specialguy
Banned
Simple. GDDR5 costs>DDR3
Do you know for a very topical example, MSRP on 650Ti Boost 1GB=149, MSRP on 2GB Boost=169?
That's a $20 difference for 1 extra GB. That's the normal premium, as well.
Now, the real cost probably isn't $20. But it might not be that far off. But even if it's $10, that's a lot.
DDR3, I can get 8GB for what, $40?
umm no, I was simply mentioning (admittedly far fetched) reasons why superdae may have been able to play PS4 games already as he claimed, and I said he hacked Epic and Valve, not Sony. You cant even get facts straight.
The 2nd part, you dont get at all. I said in my very post that one was 128 and one was 256. My point was people have become so enamored with GDDR5, they dont realize it's just a meaningless name. Under the right circumstances, DDR3 could have more BW than GDDR5. And this was in relation to the fact that a retail 7770 (~1.2 teraflops) with GDDR5 has about the same bandwidth as Durango with DDR3. If a 7770 came with the same DDR3 on the same bus as Durango, it would not be bandwidth starved. That's leaving the ESRAM out entirely. Now, Durango also has a CPU to feed, but still.
Miles Quaritch
Member
You're back. Care to elaborate on your comments that next Xbox games wil undergo a noticeable dowgarade from E3 to release?
Perhaps, I think it would depend on the shape of your software. If you've got a balance of reads and rights that doesn't naturally fit the eSRAM/main RAM split it will require some overhead to work around, but whether it's significant or not, I don't know. My point was simply that PS4 and Durango are not the same in terms of shuttling data around.
That being true, from a programming complexity point of view, it's still the same thing really. Whether the command is executed by the move engine or something else, it's an extra thing the developer has to think about (and I don't just mean the syntax of the command, but thinking about what data is where, and when it should be in one or other pool, at different parts of the pipeline).
SenjutsuSage
Banned
They won't. Technically any game being developed and released for PC as well, which will likely be a lot more games due to the architectural similarities that the two consoles share with pcs, will receive a downgrade because they won't be quite as powerful as some super high end computer running the same game (many developers will be able to get away with displaying games using high end computers since the consoles be able to get close enough), but will it be an actual downgrade in a real sense? Probably not, because it likely won't be an actual downgrade from what was already being targeted for the consoles to begin with, so what we'll be left with is people finding differences between the consoles and what was essentially high end pc gameplay before. Even exclusives will be able to get away with this trick.
Suggesting next xbox games will receive some downgrade from now till release is a pretty big statement to make. It sounds more like an attempt to explain why next xbox titles will almost certainly look a hell of a lot more impressive than many people have been leading people to believe they would based on how it stacks up to the PS4.
SlickShoesRUCrazy
Member
Liabe Brave
Member
This argument is very confused. You state categorically that no noticeable downgrades will happen...yet you then say that for some games downgrades will definitely happen (due to being shown initially on PC hardware and later on final silicon). Only, somehow they won't count because the downgraded version is what developers were aiming for all along?
That makes no sense. This sort of downgrade is exactly the kind of thing enthusiasts find noticeable and complain about. See Metal Gear Solid 4, for example.
Maximilian Kolbe
Member
I recommend you don't ask him this question again
Dowgarade from E3 to release just no way,too close to release date(some rumors even said they're gonna release at September,man that just 3 months after E3) and they should have playable demo at E3
SenjutsuSage
Banned
No, they aren't the same, but I also never suggested that they were, only that the Durango's methods won't be so much more difficult by comparison that it becomes enough of a detriment to Durango development that the PS4 benefits further, beyond the power advantage we know it has. It won't lead to many situations where Durango titles are badly optimized in comparison to their PS4 counterparts. They'd sooner reduce resolution before it ever came to that. Also, although there are developers that like the 360's EDRAM setup, many developers clearly wanted and asked Microsoft to rectify the limitations that existed for EDRAM, which actually made things more difficult for developers than they could have been, because they were simply unable to do certain things that they wanted to, and the framebuffer had to be in EDRAM. The removing of those limitations makes things easier for developers, not harder, unless if by harder we mean giving them more versatility to make incredible games. If it sounded like I was suggesting they are the same, which it certainly did out of context, but in the context of the post I was responding to, there was a suggestion that the PS4 simply wouldn't have to do basic things that it will have to do regardless of having the single pool of GDDR5.
Well, on that basic point you're right, but developers are somewhat familiar with some of this to a large extent already on the 360, and removing the limitations of EDRAM is something developers asked Microsoft for. Would it be a big detriment to game development if developers wanted it? Durango's setup won't be quite as problematic as the PS3's memory setup was. We are still very much dealing with 8GB of unified memory on Durango. And what challenges there may be, keep in mind that by the fact that the PS4 and Durango are so identical architecturally, a lot of the development challenges between 360 and PS3 simply won't exist to anywhere near the same degree between Durango and PS4. So, in more ways than not, Sony's architectural decisions, ironically, actually benefit Microsoft, and Microsoft's architectural designs benefit Sony. If their similarities make things easier on developers, it's a win for both. So, even in the event that Durango's memory setup is a headache (which I don't believe it is, especially not if devs liked edram, but wanted it to be less limited), their similarities change the landscape drastically, with identical x86 processors with out of order execution, by identical GPU architectures, 8GB unified on both sides, and both being APUs.
great write up very enlightening.
But sadly not wholly appreciated here since it can't be boiled down into a catch phrase.
When I get back from work today, I'll have a nice catch phrase ready to go.
SenjutsuSage
Banned
What I mean is the power of these consoles will lead to lots of situations where games, because they can look even better on super high end pc hardware, may more regularly be displayed on pc than ever before, because devs will feel they can achieve more or less a similar look with changes more appropriate for each console without people noticing. I really believe people are underestimating just how difficult it will be for people to nitpick a really talented developers game visually this gen. A lot of power has been providing for them to do things for real they had to fake before, but now they have an even greater ability to fake ever more impressive things. Art and game design are going to be hugely important this gen for further distinguishing your game from all the other amazing titles that will surely be out there.
------- Oops, sorry, double post
The current devkits have 7970's inside them. If games were designed using that part, when moving to beta devkits (which btw most third parties don't have yet, and are quite pissed about) they will receive a downgrade of some form.
Just out of interest, where do you get all your 'insider' information from? I know you can't be specific obviously.
The first few lines of your fourth paragraph is what led me to believe you were saying that but if it's not what you meant that's fair enough.
There are all the 'normal' processes of getting data into main memory on PS4, but the point of difference is that you get to divvy up and use the full whack of bandwidth without (programmer-controlled) movement of data to another pool of memory. On Durango if you want to maximise bandwidth in ways that aren't a trivial mapping to the eSRAM/main memory split, you'll have an extra layer of stuff to think about.
I've no idea whether this will be a big deal or not, just that it exists. We'll find out over the coming years, I guess.
Of course, if you're going to have this split, it is indeed desirable to make the eSRAM more flexible. However whether the split is desirable in the first place (assuming you can have similar bandwidth without it), is another matter.
For sure I can agree with that - PS3 was a split of both bandwidth and capacity (and in its case, vs 360, the capacity split was most problematic, since bandwidth). Durango is more a case of a bandwidth split.