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With all the OUYA debate raging, someone somewhere pointed out that current consoles have 512 MB total RAM while smartphones are starting to have 1 GB+ total RAM. What's happening? Will OUYA be the first Direct X 11.1/ OpenGL 4.X console?
I can't count the number of times where people equate the OUYA to a smartphone in their pocket.
But then these consoles have been using half-a-decade-plus year old technology. Some smartphones are going to have 1 GB RAM or even 2 GB RAM while current gen has a total of 512 MB of RAM (General + Video).
Keep in mind that I am computer science grad and not a computer engineer grad. This article is meant to raise questions about how old current gen consoles are and whats coming.
So okay okay... let's dive deeper.
What the current gen consoles have in memory
The PS3 splits it's general and video memory in half and the XBox 360 uses unified GDDR3.
The PS3 can be more powerful than XBox 360 but you need to develop for it specificly to take advatanage of it which affects porting games.
What Targa 3 has in memory
The general rule of thumb is that DDR2 video memory in cards usually suffers from a performance decrease compared to their GDDR-X versions. I don't quite remember where DDR3 places in terms of performance. Maybe they could just do the XBox 360 thing and make video memory for everything.
Let's look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tegra#Tegra_3
From the three current Targa 3 models you have 667 MHz DDR3, 1066 MHz LPDDR2 or 1500 MHz DDR3-L, or 1600 MHz DDR3. Those are the Tegra 3 T30L, T30, T33, In the kickstarter page it says there will be 1GB of memory. Hmm... and now all these variations come up with types of memory.
So the comparision is still a bit hard. But did anyone notice something interesting by scrolling down on the Tegra page a bit?
Tegra 3 Wayne? DX11.1 and OpenGL 4.X?! Targa 3 are a Series of Chips, not a Single Model!
You see NVidia is still making better Targa 3 models which get more powerful. And now guess what was in the plan for Q1 2013 which is around the time of OUYA release? Tegra 3 Wayne capabable of DX11.1 and OpenGL 4.X!
"Also thrown into the mix will be 24 GPU cores with support for DirectX 11.x, OpenGL 4.x and PhysX."
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Nvidia-Tegra-Wayne-Grey-Icera,15407.html
So if Current Gen Consoles can't do what some 2013 Tablets or OUYA can...
The big question is "Will OUYA use the Wayne chip and have DirectX 11.x, OpenGL 4.x and PhysX?" If they do then we can at least see why people think it's a OUYA's a revolution. This is regardless of OUYA's actual success.
This would be an interesting 2013 holiday season if people started to realize this early on. Or just chaos?
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