Think Bayonetta 360 vs Bayonetta PS3 difference, but reversed and applicable to most multiplatform games.
Come on, that's dishonest at best. Please don't believe that. Bayonetta performed that way because it wasn't a development priority and, I believe, farmed off to a much less capable team that didn't do a rather good job coding for the system. Durango will never be anywhere near that complicated to program for, hence you don't have to be in constant fear that multiplatform games would ever run so horribly on the next Xbox. The PS4 is simpler to code for, but the coding difficulty between the PS4 and Durango is much, much tinier than the one between the Xbox 360 and the PS3.
Durango also has 8GB of unified memory, and the ESRAM is no significant challenge for developers who are already quite familiar with the use of EDRAM on the 360. The advantage for ESRAM is its low latency, which Microsoft suggested in that vgleaks information, will be key to maintaining peak ROP performance, which in turn I believe will be rather beneficial especially when developers attempt to target 1080p on Durango. Aside from that, ESRAM is also a lot more flexible than the EDRAM on the Xbox 360, so developers will be able to do much more with it by comparison. I don't think
every developer was a fan mostly due to the limitations, but for those that were, I think they really liked it. Honestly, by comparison to the Xbox 360, Durango actually looks to be
easier to code for, not more difficult. This becomes further true when you consider that the CPU is x86 and out of order execution. The move engines are useful and hardly look as if they will somehow add tremendous complexity to the mix.
The PS4, based on the specs we've seen, should have the edge power wise, but I think we have to be very careful about exaggerating Durango's supposed power deficit, which is nowhere nearly as big as some would have everyone believe.
Yeah, look at that, it's only 50% faster! Hey, you drive your car 60mph, and I'll go 90 and we'll see who gets to the end of the track first.
Yeah, when you include the embedded memory bandwidth in the 360 it has vastly more than the PS3, even combining busses. Of course, when you do the same for Durango and PS4, PS4 still has more memory bandwidth. Durango's bandwidth is both harder to use effectively, and lesser in total. Obviously no embedded memory would be a disaster, but the PS4 solution is emphatically better.
Not exactly true. It's merely different. It's not so much more difficult where this somehow becomes a serious enough PS4 advantage during development that will hurt games on Durango. Give developers a bit more credit. They know how to deal with different approaches. Durango is easier to develop for than the Xbox 360, which was a console that was already easy to develop for. And, as an example, despite the amount of bandwidth that the 360 had, there was, in reality, quite a bit less bandwidth going to the GPU than what the theoretical limits would imply. Even the PS4 memory bandwidth total argument is one I don't entirely think is worthy of this automatic performance win for the simple reason that we have no idea how the memory system of the console might operate under a typical load. And technically, we don't have a 100% accurate idea of how things might shake out on Durango either, since the memory example provided through vgleaks is one that was cautioned to be purely predictions, and not based on actual measured numbers. the 6GB/s advantage provided by the PS4 memory system isn't big enough to be as significant as some people are making it out to be, particularly when we have no idea how each console's memory system feeds each respective console under a typical game load. And, no I'm not combining memory bandwidths on Durango, I'm simply restating what was already stated in the vgleaks information, that the Durango GPU can simultaneously access both the memory bandwidth available to the DDR3, and the memory bandwidth available to the ESRAM.