PS4 And Xbox One Feature Modern CPUs, Having Faster Memory Isn’t Useful If The Processor Stalls

GamingBolt got in touch with David Miles who is the CTO of BabelFlux. BabelFlux are behind Navpower, a path finding tool which has been used extensively in several AAA games. We asked David about how exactly does the middleware take advantage of specific features of the new consoles i.e. the unified GDDR5 Memory of the PS4 and the extremely fast memory eSRAM of the Xbox One which has a bandwidth of 204 Gb/s.

“Even though the memory bandwidth on both the PS4 and the Xbox One is fabulous, the critical thing for us is that both machines feature very modern processor designs which include features such as out of order execution,” David said to GamingBolt.

“That’s critical for anyone writing path-finding or AI systems, because it’s rare to be able to execute any significant portion of code without having to make a decision based on the data you’re traversing, and conditionally go off to execute a different piece of code. So having the fastest memory in the world isn’t useful if the processor stalls whenever you have to branch to another part of the code.”

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