the xbox 360 Xenos GPU and anti aliasing..

[LkS]

The Xenos GPU has "a 10 MB eDRAM daughter-die," and because of this it "can do 4x FSAA, z-buffering, and alpha blending with no appreciable performance penalty on the GPU."

(According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_hardware#Graphics_processing_unit)

I was just wondering why they dont put something similar on graphics cards so that we can turn on the AA all the time without losing FPS (especially useful in Crysis I'd imagine). Maybe they already do. I dont know that much about GPU architecture.

Anyone know anything about this?

 

[righteous]

A guess would be that it would add cost to the video card and they would have to make modifications to the existing architecture to accomodate it that right now I do not believe they could afford mid-production run.

just a guess..

regarding the edram though. I can't see why they do not use this tech on a PC GPU....or are they unknown to me? from what i have read it is indeed pretty fast.

I also wonder why the Xenos GPU, never made it to a card form factor, or why they never made an entire xbox 360 card.

An entire xbox360 platform in card form factor would have been really cool. Only thing is that the resolution of the 360 is not what is typical for a pc these days.

There are a lot of things I do not know though and I won't pretend to know, so maybe someone else has an answer.

 

[homerdog]

The 360 is a closed platform and is only required to render at one resolution, usually 720p. It would be much more complicated for a PC GPU to implement an eDRAm type solution since there are so many possible hardware combinations, resolutions, levels of AA, etc.

Also the memory bus architecture of Xenos is much different than the memory buses of PC GPUs.

In short, I believe that eDRAM could be done on a PC GPU, but it would not be an easy thing to accomplish.