JF_Aidan_Pryde
Regular
I was told at NVIDIA's Editor's Day that 3DMark 2005 uses up to 48MB of renderable sufraces. That is, it will write back to memory (render to texture or whatever effect it may be trying to achieve) up to 48MB worth of data.
The PS2 had 4MB of EDRAM and if I'm not mistaken, no way to access main memory without going through the CPU.
This kind of configuration (GPU with no access to main memory) can not be viable for the PS3 if render to texture operations are dominant.
One solution is EDRAM. If the GPU carries EDRAM, it would need to be at least 64MB. Given that renderable surface data is going to increase, that may not even be enough. 128MB or more of EDRAM would eat up too much die space.
It seems to me that unless severe rendering limitations are in place, the GPU would need to able to either access main memory or have its own memory.
The PS2 had 4MB of EDRAM and if I'm not mistaken, no way to access main memory without going through the CPU.
This kind of configuration (GPU with no access to main memory) can not be viable for the PS3 if render to texture operations are dominant.
One solution is EDRAM. If the GPU carries EDRAM, it would need to be at least 64MB. Given that renderable surface data is going to increase, that may not even be enough. 128MB or more of EDRAM would eat up too much die space.
It seems to me that unless severe rendering limitations are in place, the GPU would need to able to either access main memory or have its own memory.
