Not for everyone...

A developer's view
We asked an experienced games coder about the differences between Xbox One and PS4's approach to system memory. He has asked to remain anonymous, but this is what he wrote...

"Memory-wise there are really deep areas you can get into on how Sony has optimised certain paths to access the RAM. Microsoft will hopefully be doing similar stuff to that, I imagine – we're only disclosed on PS4 so I don't know for sure, they're not dumb though.

"Regarding the RAM type, however, GDDR5 equals 176gb/sec, DDR3 equals 68gb/sec – I don't know the exact numbers for the Xbox One RAM but it'll be around that. GDDR5 is slightly higher latency, which means the time between requesting a piece of data and getting it to the CPU/GPU to work with can be slightly longer than with DDR3. This latency can be hidden by well-written code on CPU and normally is hidden well by GPUs due to how their pipelines work (which is why GDDR is normally found on GPU's).

"Ultimately though, that 2.5x faster bandwidth number means that a larger amount of data can be taken from RAM, processed by the CPU (or more importantly on these new architectures, the Compute Units on the GPU) and spat back out to RAM to either process again or render. At the end of the day, everything in games comes down to: 'grab information'; 'transform that data somehow'; 'spit it back out' – so being faster at this is a very good thing.

"Microsoft is winning bandwidth back for the GPU through the 32MB ESRAM (102gb/sec I believe, and assuming you're using this RAM a lot, it means that the total Microsoft bandwidth is 168gb/sec); this will even things back out a bit but require a bit of extra management by developers and it is only 32MB which limits the amount of uses.

"This kind of architecture with faster RAM for the GPU to use for framebuffers (the block of data storing the image being rendererd out or nowadays temporary graphic buffers storing lighting/material information) is something developers are used to working with, but it's more complex than the approach needed on the PS4."

travisstrick said:

Xbox is out in my book. I'll never buy any product that attempts to control my choices like that.

cazzy said:

cazzy said:

My kids are killing the xbox1. They say none of their friends will buy one because of all the privacy/control issues. It's like a dinner topic at our house. I've never seen them so fired up about something.

Yeah, they're taking a big hit in sever communities. Initially, you couldn't lend games to friends, sell games, buy used games, and couldn't even play games offline for more than 24 hours. They pissed so many people off, they back tracked on everything and are going away from the cloud gaming concept. It will be similar to the Xbox 360 where you can upload the game to your HD (and authenticate at startup) or play off the disc. They had to do it! Make sure they read the article above.

I think they are so mad at what they wanted to do that they have totally lost trust in Microsoft. All those things are still integrated into the system. Just a switch away from being implemented. My kids think that they are only backing off to sell consoles and once people are stuck, they will start tightening the noose. It's obvious where this is headed. Just a matter of when and how much.

I like the way your kids think and love that they have opinions about it. It's also cool to hear what the youth is thinking about all this. I love Xbox Live and all of the media features, so that alone was a selling point for me. I've been a Sony fan boy for 20 years, so I love seeing PS find success in the US again. The original PS didn't have comp and the PS2 blew Xbox out the water, since they had soooo many great games. Xbox 360 killed PS3 in the US, but I blame that on the finicky processor in the the PS3. I honestly loved the 360 for its hackability. My 360 has two NANDS so I get the best of both worlds!

cazzy said:

cazzy said:

cazzy said:

My kids are killing the xbox1. They say none of their friends will buy one because of all the privacy/control issues. It's like a dinner topic at our house. I've never seen them so fired up about something.

Yeah, they're taking a big hit in sever communities. Initially, you couldn't lend games to friends, sell games, buy used games, and couldn't even play games offline for more than 24 hours. They pissed so many people off, they back tracked on everything and are going away from the cloud gaming concept. It will be similar to the Xbox 360 where you can upload the game to your HD (and authenticate at startup) or play off the disc. They had to do it! Make sure they read the article above.

I think they are so mad at what they wanted to do that they have totally lost trust in Microsoft. All those things are still integrated into the system. Just a switch away from being implemented. My kids think that they are only backing off to sell consoles and once people are stuck, they will start tightening the noose. It's obvious where this is headed. Just a matter of when and how much.

I like the way your kids think and love that they have opinions about it. It's also cool to hear what the youth is thinking about all this. I love Xbox Live and all of the media features, so that alone was a selling point for me. I've been a Sony fan boy for 20 years, so I love seeing PS find success in the US again. The original PS didn't have comp and the PS2 blew Xbox out the water, since they had soooo many great games. Xbox 360 killed PS3 in the US, but I blame that on the finicky processor in the the PS3. I honestly loved the 360 for its hackability. My 360 has two NANDS so I get the best of both worlds!

It is cool. They are really passionate about it. I love it. There is a huge and coming backlash toward privacy. They all hate Facebook and they are hyper vigilant about people trying to steal their privacy and companies who don't honor their unwritten honor codes. Kinda cool to watch.

Sounds like your boys were raised great. Most kids are oblivious to all that and blindly expose their entire life on social media. Good job Cen & GoG!