By: Jukka Larja (roskakori2006.delete@this.gmail.com), April 24, 2013 6:21 am
Room: Moderated Discussions
Antti-Ville Tuunainen (avtuunainen.delete@this.gmail.com) on April 23, 2013 5:25 pm wrote:
> All present-day games have been designed and programmed with the latency and bandwidth of the
> PCIe link in mind. I personally believe that bringing the GPU closer to the CPU will be a major
> win that will help much more than just raw power, but that is only *after* games can rely that
> they are indeed close. Right now, the PCIe link is just a common design constraint, meaning
> that bringing the GPU and CPU closer together buys you *nothing* on present games.
>
> PS4/the next XBOX should help with this, as they are APU designs that will teach game
> programmers how to exploit such architectures. For the shelf life of Haswell, I don't
> believe that a single game will exist that takes proper advantage of this.
On the other hand, current generation consoles only have about 256 MB GPU memory, so most games should at least have pretty good lower quality mode that's optimized for rather low memory amount. That won't win any performance tests for Intel, but the actual drop in quality may not be too bad if you can just stay above what consoles can push.
-JLarja
> All present-day games have been designed and programmed with the latency and bandwidth of the
> PCIe link in mind. I personally believe that bringing the GPU closer to the CPU will be a major
> win that will help much more than just raw power, but that is only *after* games can rely that
> they are indeed close. Right now, the PCIe link is just a common design constraint, meaning
> that bringing the GPU and CPU closer together buys you *nothing* on present games.
>
> PS4/the next XBOX should help with this, as they are APU designs that will teach game
> programmers how to exploit such architectures. For the shelf life of Haswell, I don't
> believe that a single game will exist that takes proper advantage of this.
On the other hand, current generation consoles only have about 256 MB GPU memory, so most games should at least have pretty good lower quality mode that's optimized for rather low memory amount. That won't win any performance tests for Intel, but the actual drop in quality may not be too bad if you can just stay above what consoles can push.
-JLarja
