7 replies to this topic

[Goodtwin]

Surprisingly enough, Microsoft talks about a lot of things that Nintendo voiced as an emphasis for the Wii U's architecture.  Its funny to hear Microsoft comment on the S-ram they use, and how surprised they are that any developers would actually complain about it being hard to use since its a straight evolution of the edram in the 360, but more capacity and more flexible in how they can use it.  I was also interested in seeing them say that they are finding the CPU to be the biggest culprit for framerate drops.  Apparently games arent as GPU limited as most people thought.  In a way, the X1 is kind of like the Wii U's big brother, they seem like they share a ton in common when it comes to architecture.  Check it out and let us know what you think.

 

     http://www.eurogamer...-one-architects

 

[Doc]

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*troll*

 

 

But I still don't know what you mean, I don't see the resemblance, and I wouldn't call the Xbone Wii U's big brother.

Edited by Doc, 24 September 2013 - 08:34 AM.

[Nollog]

Of course games aren't all GPU work.
It was stupid to think so.
Games now require complex Arithmetic to generate the world and physics etc.

[Azure-Edge]

This is gonna end well....

[alan123]

eDRAM is better than eSRAM.

 

eDRAM is also very expensive, eSRAM is also not cheap but much cheaper than eDRAM, there have been people saying that for the price of the eSRAM MS could of got GDDR5 & for the price of eDRAM Nintendo could of got a lot of extra RAM,one of the big problems with the WiiU is that it is not x86, having eSRAM or eDRAM is pointless really because it is just about cutting power use & space in the box, it will add pennies a year to the power usage & the space matters little, it just makes it more expensive to produce & also gives programmers a extra set of coding to do.

 

reason the x360 was easier to develop/program for was because the PS3 with its  cell CPU was a nightmare.

 

[Alex Atkin UK]

It is a very odd decision.  I guess Microsoft figured as it would be similar to Xbox 360 that developers wouldn't care that its a bit of a PITA.

 

Sony on the other hand learned their lesson with the PS3 and somewhat the PS2, that consoles getting harder to developer for was holding them back and would ultimately kill them if they didn't change.  So they went for the absolutely easiest solution to develop on, while tweaking it just enough so that a competent developer can still get more out of it.

 

Or at least that is what they SAID they have done, it remains to be seen how it actually works out.

[Goodtwin]

I think Microsoft looked at it from a performance standpoint, and determined that the performance would be very good by going this route, they would have 32MB sram for the bandwidth hogging frame buffers, and then have plenty of low latency DDR3 ram for the main memory pool.  People dont always understand that while the high bandwidth of GDDR5 makes it the memory of choice for GPU's, it also have very high latency, and thats not so good for the CPU.  In that article Microsoft talked about latency issues, and how memory latency tends to be a bottleneck for GPU's.  I think thats why they stuck with the setup they chose.  The 32MB of sram not only gives them tons of bandwidth, but also low latency, especially when we are comparing the sram to GDDR5.  Both designs yield very high performance, but it seems that the majority of developers prefer the more straight forward approach of one pool of GDDR5, but that doesnt mean that it is more capable, just that its less involved to get the performance.   

[Alex Atkin UK]

Absolutely. 

 

Which is why its interesting that Mark Cerny claimed they considered the same thing for PS4 and decided that the benefit of the bandwidth on a small pool of RAM was far outweighed by how much more awkward it would be for developers to use it effectively.