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by nitrogen 4613 days ago
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.
2 comments
lucian1900 4613 days ago
That, and the usual low-level hardware access that consoles have always had. That counts for a lot, especially later in the console's life.
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Arelius 4613 days ago
> 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.

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nitrogen 4613 days ago
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.

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Arelius 4613 days ago
AMD has been working on it with their APUs... That's why it's in the PS4 now.
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