3 ms·
This makes me wonder why PCs still haven't trended towards the same Heterogeneous System Architecture that the PS4 has. Instead of having 4GB DDR3 RAM and 4GB G
by jorvi 8y ago
This makes me wonder why PCs still haven't trended towards the same Heterogeneous System Architecture that the PS4 has. Instead of having 4GB DDR3 RAM and 4GB GDDR5 video RAM it just has 8GB GDDR5 and everything runs on that. I mean, how many PCs these days have 8GB RAM + 2-6GB video RAM, some of the system RAM sitting unused during gaming and most of the video RAM sitting unused during general use? Seems like a decent hardware optimization target..
- snops 8y agoGDDR generally has higher latency than DDR in return for higher bandwidth. The reason is that the minimum read/write size is much higher, so the overhead of addressing is lowered. For graphics applications, this is a good tradeoff as they generally use large objects (e.g. textures) but for existing compute applications, the latency penalty is often too high. The PS4 can presumably get away with this as applications will be specifically written for it, unlike PCs which have to support legacy software.
- exikyut 8y agoAnd, besides legacy software, to get benchmark numbers as high as possible.
- theandrewbailey 8y agoFor integrated graphics, that can happen. Practically all discrete GPUs are connected through PCI-e, and serving memory requests through that would slow things to a crawl. PCI-e 4.0 with 16 lanes has 32 GB/s of bandwidth. A Geforce 1050 has more memory bandwidth than that (84 GB/s), and that GPU is not high end.