Esram in Scorpio as L3 cache in non-BC mode.

[ProspectorPete]

Excuse for the misquoting, it was all I could find. I remember an article quoting this forum, but I cannot find the article. It argued that Xbox One-successor compatibility with Xbox One software would be extremely difficult without ESRAM, next to impossible as all titles would need to be recompiled and retested before it could work with the successor.

But apparently it will be easier? I mean I hope so as it would be great to sell the Xbox One S, and upgrade to the Scorpio later without having to worry about my games still working. It's a shame though, ESRAM seemed really cool to me.

 

[iroboto]

Excuse for the misquoting, it was all I could find. I remember an article quoting this forum, but I cannot find the article. It argued that Xbox One-successor compatibility with Xbox One software would be extremely difficult without ESRAM, next to impossible as all titles would need to be recompiled and retested before it could work with the successor.

But apparently it will be easier? I mean I hope so as it would be great to sell the Xbox One S, and upgrade to the Scorpio later without having to worry about my games still working. It's a shame though, ESRAM seemed really cool to me.

That's the unfortunate part of journalism these days, forum posts without proper validation are enough to pass as an article. It's why when people link certain sites I immediately take what they have as a grain of salt. Those sites tend to be just repeaters at best, few hardware sites are actually capable of breaking down and bring understanding of hardware to the masses.

Its difficult enough for most common developers to understand and get correct, and I say this with as much respect as possible. Graphics expertise splits into two categories: hardware and software, and we have so few in both. I think we have less people that understand graphics hardware than we do programming them.

It's easy to misinterpret Opinion for fact. This happens when you don't have deep understanding of things. As well, English is not everyone's first language and a lot of people write and talk English with context in mind, but that does not imply that those statements can and have been absurdly misinterpreted.

 

[sebbbi]

Excuse for the misquoting, it was all I could find. I remember an article quoting this forum, but I cannot find the article. It argued that Xbox One-successor compatibility with Xbox One software would be extremely difficult without ESRAM, next to impossible as all titles would need to be recompiled and retested before it could work with the successor.

I believe the original discussion was about using a discrete GPU on a future console (separate GPU memory). It would be very hard to emulate UMA with non-UMA architecture. UMA code can assume that GPU and CPU can efficiently read & write to same memory location. Without UMA this isn't true.

The ESRAM is however a completely different matter. As multiple people have said already, it should be possible (at least in theory) to map the ESRAM address space to a fixed 32 MB region inside the larger GDDR memory address space. It could be that they don't even need any hardware to emulate it. But even if they need some hardware extensions for address mapping, they still could likely store the data into GDDR instead. As long as the memory throughput is significantly faster on average, there shouldn't be any problems.