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New Xbox One Rumors: PS4 PSN > XBL, snap crashes games, ES RAM life long bottleneck
- Thread starter Interfectum
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MysticGoujon
Banned
Any justice in the world? Fuck me, that's an absolute classic. Id forgotten that Sony was the knight in shining armour riding up on their gallant steed to save the gaming community from the evil Xbox tyranny.
SloaneRangerSW1
Banned
This...this is just sad and utterly cringeworthy. Imagine the mindset of someone who actually believe that their demographic would buy this as non-PR talk...
LukasTaves
Member
Exactly. But usually the biggest consumers of bandwidth are the ROPs, which is why you can get away with a slower ram + some type of on chip ram. Adding bandwidth makes sense not because xbone will have games that uses 270GB/s of asset data, but because if there is need the ROPs will have plenty of bandwidth to play with, while keeping the ddr3 free for assets and cpu.
Since the esram is fully addressable by the gpu this time, we might see it being used as a buffer for some interesting stuff like procedural synthesis... This could also be done without even touching the ddr3...
The 68gb/s ddr3 might sound like is terribly slow compared to 176, but compare the ratios of 360/Ps3 and Xbone/Ps4... You will see that xbone's ddr3 is actually not very much slower than 360's gddr3 compared to Ps3 ram setup... But that is something we should see soon enough: If the ddr3 is indeed slow we will probably see some games having reduced asset quality on xbone.
notoriousKTR
Member
Depends how big the TV is. The purpose of AA after all is to have pseudo curves on square pixels. Bigger the pixels, bigger the jaggies.
No problems, but you are reaching somewhat making statements like "You cannot add the two".. Now, we both know PS4 is a better design, but making up rationale is kind of not a good thing to do...
lifeexpectancy
Member
Taking this post out. Not sure if it violates ToS. Not taking any chances.
Shao Kahn Brewing a Stew
Banned
Life long bottleneck? Is that new? I thought CBOAT said that it will be a non-issue by 2014.
Edit: So many rumors, I am tripping balls.
Edit: So many rumors, I am tripping balls.
Really the biggest problem with ESRAM is just that it's tiny. Let's say I have several render passes - a few shadow map passes for the cascades maybe, a simple deferred pass, a resolve pass.
On the PC or PS4 I'd just fill in the command buffers and go. I'd have 2 places for sync points: after the shadow passes/the deferred render, and after the resolve. Once I've hit the second sync point, I just present.
On the the XB1 however, I need exclusive use of the ESRAM for my deferred pass, and I'd also like to have my shadow depth buffers in ESRAM during their passes, so I serialize them. First I do all my shadow passes, sync, then move them out and sync again.
Then I do my deferred pass and sync. At this point, I have to decide where I want to put all my buffers for post-processing/resolve pass. I want my final buffer to be there at least, and all the gbuffers I can fit after that. So I swap a buffer out for another, requiring a few more sync points, then do my resolve pass.
After the resolve's done my buffer is still in ESRAM. I don't want it locked there for a whole VSync interval, so I have to copy it out again before presentation. Already it's far more complicated than what I'd have to do on the PC/PS4, and each additional sync is potential time for CUs to sit idle and twiddle their thumbs. Imagine adding several post-processing passes to that.
And this scenario doesn't even take into account the idea of beginning to build the command buffer for the next frame while the GPU is till churning on this one. Just thinking about managing ESRAM contention in that scenario gives me a headache.
My brain hurts. Is this a real post?
Shao Kahn Brewing a Stew
Banned
Kagari
Asleep in the Fantasy
Neo 007
Member
You've only got to listen to one of his podcasts to realise he's a tool.
I did...was 1 too many.
Probably. He forgot to add "in negative way".
FeiRR
Banned
Version 3.0
Member
Grow up. Sony's playing their cards right at the moment because they learned from their PS3 screw ups - stemming from arrogance and greed - while they played catch up this gen. Sony currently has the correct stance - that pleasing customers is good business. They lost a lot of market share, and a lot of money, and rightly so, but they've come around...at least for now.
JimmyRustler
Gold Member
He is kinda right. As someone else said it depends on the how big your screen is though.
MysticGoujon
Banned
Me grow up? You're the one claiming that one companies console beating anothers is "justice", it's fanboyism at it's worst. They're both very good consoles, with pros and cons, which one is the best is not down to you, it's down to the individual purchasing it, so don't give me this justice talk.
If your TV is big enough to see, then you need AA.
Opus Angelorum
Member
I can't believe they would implement eSRAM knowing it would be a system life bottleneck. I just can't.
travisbickle
Member
I don't believe they knew it would be a bottleneck, it was probably beneficial in testing/on paper.
Miles Quaritch
Member
Maybe they thought it would work in the same way eDRAM works in the 360?
:shrugs:
What I do know is the division desperately needs J.Allard back to help stop the ship from capsizing...probably too late though.
JimmyRustler
Gold Member
I believe the common opinion is that they 100% needed 8 gigs of ram for running the three OS and the whole multi media function. Since they probably thought GDDR5 is too expensive they had to go with DDR3 and basically needed to implement esram because 8 gigs of DDR3 alone would never be enough for gaming.
ESRAM isn't the bottleneck. DDR3 is the bottleneck. ESRAM is the wide-mouthed Mountain Dew can. GDDR5 is this.
ConteZero76
Member
8GB GDDR5 wasn't an option until just before E3.
Sony was really lucky because they went for GDDR5 early and found a chip price cut that allowed them to move from 4 to 8.
Without that lucky strike it would've been XBox one (8GB DDR3) vs Playstation 4 (4 GB GDDR5) and we'll be seeing a more balanced brawl.
Sony was really lucky because they went for GDDR5 early and found a chip price cut that allowed them to move from 4 to 8.
Without that lucky strike it would've been XBox one (8GB DDR3) vs Playstation 4 (4 GB GDDR5) and we'll be seeing a more balanced brawl.
The point is, it's a compromise. They could have put in a sensible amount of eDRAM with a decent bandwidth, but they didn't want to because of cost. They knew it was a bottleneck all along, they just didn't care because it saves them money. Didn't one of the early Xbone prototypes have dual GPUs? There were beastly systems on the table at some point.
MysticGoujon
Banned
It will do eventually I speculate, once the drivers are sorted out. The advantage with the current ESRAM being open for the developers to handle as they please. The disadvantage at the moment is not having the option to have it handled for you like before. I imagine the optimal solution will be having it handled for you, but with the option for you to manually edit certain aspects, I imagine the driver will allow that with time.
something fishy
Member
yep, that's all it comes down to.
Android18a
Member
I watched the gif on page one for ages wondering why it was posted, I'd never have spotted this unless it'd been slowed down. I've never noticed a game do this before!
There is no other alternative if cost projections of GDDR5 or eDRAM on package do no meet your requirements during the design phase. Given those circumstances, the XBO's architecture is reasonable. 8GB for running Windows 8 in parallel to games was more important to them than game performance. And we can be justly mad at the people who made this a core requirement. It's not about providing a better "experience" for games, it's about boosting Microsoft's own apps ecosystem across all platforms in order to compete with iOS and Android.
He said it wasn't 720p on PS4, which is true.
andromeduck
Member
I kind of agree, but only if there's some blur/dof or similar effects and having AA would drop us down to 900p
at 60fps the jaggies should integrate fairly well over time
Haven't tried it on my TV yet but on my PC it looks fine to me
7870@800Mhz ... 900p seems to be right on the ball park.
Why they have ESRAM is simple
They wanted 8GB guaranteed for that you need a small scratchpad to meet bandwidth. Naturally you'd choose eDRAM, however they couldn't get that fabbed @28nm at a variety of places. So they had to go for the shitty solution. Good enough. They thought Sony would come in with 4GB max.
At the time they felt confident. That was before Cerny dropped 8GB GDDR5 and made their solution look redundant.
They wanted 8GB guaranteed for that you need a small scratchpad to meet bandwidth. Naturally you'd choose eDRAM, however they couldn't get that fabbed @28nm at a variety of places. So they had to go for the shitty solution. Good enough. They thought Sony would come in with 4GB max.
At the time they felt confident. That was before Cerny dropped 8GB GDDR5 and made their solution look redundant.
LiquidMetal14
hide your water-based mammals
First game has been shown which starts showing disparity in favor of PS4. That won't be the last, of course.
deputyspade
Member
Sounds like the COD disparity may be an even wider gap in the PS4's favor.
PatientRain
Member
Honestly, who doesn't delight in the console wars?!
Miles Quaritch
Member
Breaking: insider suggests Xbox One hardware prone to higher failure rate than Xbox 360.
I'm not suggesting it. I'm just saying it seems like the next course of action.
We've had two threads where the OS is bonkers or whatever. Stands to reason that Commisioner Gordon's law of escalation will come into effect, and there will be murmurs of Xbox One hardware failures now, and potential self-destruction sequences at launch.
Would fit in with all the Al-Qaeda rumours floating around.
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