The American Who Designed the PlayStation 4 and Remade Sony

Post by Arelius » Fri, Nov 08, 2013, 11:11 PM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #67

supergauntlet wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is not true at all. You can get video cards that are better than the PS4's (by enough to counter any initial optimization, if not end-of-life optimization) for $150. Specifically, 7870 GHz editions.

The only thing you can't get in a PC is the high-bandwidth shared memory. You can probably make up for it by having tons of RAM on your PC's video card, but I still think the shared memory architecture will be the most interesting part of the current generation of consoles.

Post by Arelius » Sat, Nov 09, 2013, 12:59 AM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #122

Arelius wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can probably make up for it by having tons of RAM on your PC's video card. You can't "make up" for having shared memory unless the developer is just using it to pretend that they have a machine with like 6 GB of vram. Of particular relevance is the fact that the PS4 has cache coherent shared memory. Which is a separate ball game entirely.

By "make up" for it I mean you might get the same performance by moving more of your processing to the GPU and avoiding the CPU altogether. Obviously you can't do the same kind of close interaction between CPU and GPU like you could with shared, cache-coherent memory. I can't wait until there's a PC that has that kind of memory architecture, though, if we ever get one.