Isn't that argument a bit obvious though? I mean, the analogue is that unified shaders are a dead-end if implimented as in Xenos, despite US being the future!Technology moves on, and rather than reuse the hardware designs of yesteryear, if new designs offer a better soution, go with them. So eDRAM remains an option, only as a more versatile local scratch-pad RAM pool, and unified shaders are an option (a given!), only in a more versatile form than Xenos.
Although I do wonder, why was Xenos' eDRAM implimented as it was? What's the overhead in adding texture-reads from it, that this functionality wasn't included?
A proper TBDR GPU would probably work well with a smaller amount of eDRAM. I'd have thought TBDR would work well with shader-heavy pixels too. A nice chunk of eDRAM could be very fast and pretty flexible.
I think these come down to cost more than anything. #4 is ideal, and the tech should exist, but wide busses are too costly. I'm still holding out for XDR to hit their targets!
If you can't afford a big blob of fast RAM, split pools could offer a fair compromise of performance and cost. eg. A Flash RAM cache could add several gigabytes of low-latency virtual RAM.
Well, it'd need a fast bus, and that costs, which I guess is the reason for the limited solution.
It could also have been an engineering afterthought.
Uncharted 2 water reflects and refracts properly, flows, and ripples when the player(s) runs through, in SP as well as MP.
But you would rather have R2 water that looks more like jelly, doesn't really behave like normal water, and worse yet, it visually represent water poorly with no reflections and the distortion is over-exaggerated, like jelly, and the so-called "fluid dynamics" doesn't factor into the gameplay at all, they never really took advantage of the buoyancy in any meaningful way, if you want to complain about static water, R2 water is the definition of static water, there were basically static pools of water. The player is enjoying none of the benefits of their implementation, yet you would prefer a feature that does nothing to help the game and hurts the game's overall look when reflective water this generation is an expected feature.
As a GRAPHICAL feature R2 water is a failure, the game doesn't look better because of it, it didn't do anything as far as the gameplay is concerned and processing power could have been better spent elsewhere.
from what I remember Uncharted1 was supposed to have better water like R2 that moves a lot better.
All Uncharted has better is reflections and imho that effect is NOTHING if the water just gives a weak splash.
An example from last gen would be something like self-shadowing. Only a few games had it, but it's standard across the board now.
I'll start with muzzleflash shadows. Examples of its use this gen are:
Killzone 2:
http://i9.tinypic.com/664vgcp.gif
and Crysis:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0y5u4uchsM&hd=1
The Crysis video is actually a comparison and it shows very nicely how much shadows enhance the effect.
Now it's your turn
Well, to do it "right" you'd need soft body (cloth) simulation -- including rather fine-grained collision detection -- for each piece of clothing on every single character.
DOAXBV did it on the Xbox and so did DOAX 2. I think the main problem people have with it is the extra time that has to be put into creating such models.