It’s easy to get caught up in the resolution war and the power of graphics with the Xbox One and PS4 but there are several other benefits that the technology bestows. Speaking to Firelight Technologies’ Brett Paterson, GamingBolt learned how the PS4’s GDDR5 RAM presents advantages to the audio framework FMOD. Firelight’s FMOD is a special set of tools for creating interactive audio and is used across just about every single game you can think. Dragon Age, World of Warcraft, Forza – roughly 1500 different games use FMOD.
So what advantage does the PS4 bring to FMOD with its memory? Paterson stated that, “Audio deals with large amounts of raw compressed sound information. The faster memory bandwidth is, the less cycles it takes to read and decompress audio data. There is certainly a benefit, because unintuitively, less compressed information can consume CPU more times to manipulate than highly compressed data, because there is more data to transfer.
“Higher bitrates in MP3 for example can now be used at the cost of more memory being used, but without the overhead of the bandwidth stalls.”
What are your thoughts on this, especially with the emphasis on updates for the PS4 and Xbox One serving to unlock more of the their respective consoles’ power? Let us know in the comments.