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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
The race for 4K gaming has begun. PlayStation 4 Pro is in the marketplace, and while success in supporting ultra HD gaming varies dramatically between releases, an established series of techniques is in place that is already capable of effectively servicing a 4K resolution with a comparatively modest level of GPU power. In the wake of its E3 2016 reveal for the new Project Scorpio console, Microsoft began to share details with developers on how they expect to see 4K supported on its new hardware. A whitepaper was released on its development portal, entitled 'Reaching 4K and GPU Scaling Across Multiple Xbox Devices'. It's a fascinating outlook on Microsoft's ultra HD plans - and it also reveals more about the Scorpio hardware itself. For starters, Xbox One's contentious ESRAM is gone.
No link provided to the whitepaper referred to in the article.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday January 29 2017, @09:11PM
What is the 32 MB limit exactly?
The PS4 memory design is medium speed main memory and no cache. The xbox one memory architecture is slow main memory and 32 megs of on chip very fast cache.
There's a lot of hand waving about memory bandwidth and what should vs should not be enough but in practice cache management seems to be a bottleneck somewhere above 720p and below or around 1080p much less 4K resolutions.
There's not a hell of a lot of difference in specs between the two systems other than the memory architecture.
And software devs find it easier to program around a constant medium speed of memory access ps4 style rather than access being either extremely fast if in the cache otherwise slowish.
There's an infinite amount of internet BS on the topic of what MS should do to fix it... invest an extra $5 in making main memory faster, perhaps as fast as the PS4, then telling devs not to sweat it, or invest $XXXXXXXXXX into improving the system-on-chip to have "enough cache memory that even dumb programmers don't reach the limit". And of course suggestions that the xbox one just sux and maybe we're in a post resolution world and all the usual gamer drama some of which might even be true.
Usually these kind of "accidents" don't happen at the EE technical level... Someone made a higher up application decision that the average gamer in 2017 is going to not shovel as much raw memory bandwidth as they predicted. Maybe they expected xbox games to look more like wii-U games or everyone would be playing minecraft instead of FPS, I donno the details but it was obviously a higher level mgmt mistake not a EE level mistake.
I have no dog in the fight, I own neither. Although I've always been interested in high performance computing and this is a classic example in that field of ur memory architecture sux (at least WRT xbox one playing FPS sequels)