Super Stardust Dev: ‘PS4’s GDDR5 is an advantage over Xbox One’

The makers of Super Stardust, Housemarque, have praised the PS4's hardware offerings over that of the Xbox One for its GDDR5 high bandwidth memory.

Despite having the same amount of memory as its Sony counterpart, the 3 gigabytes of the Xbox One's 8gb are dedicated to the console's operating system, leaving only 5gb for developers to play with. Furthermore, the system uses DDR3 memory, which offers much less bandwidth than GDDR5.

Speaking to German gaming magazine PCGames.de, the developers stated that the PS4 allows them much more bandwidth to perform demanding tasks.

"These include obvious as the graphics display with higher resolution textures or more sampling and filtering for visual effects – such as volumetric lighting and global illumination in real-time," he said. "Also processor cores and CUs use the same memory – calculation results can thus be easily shared between them. This will make it easier to distribute some demanding calculations from the processor to the CUs.

"As for the 8 gigabyte, I'm not sure but I think the price of the memory modules since played a role. However, there is another important variable that you should consider: The load times. Blu-ray drives do not come with the transfer speeds and hard drives will have their effort to come along since. So when it comes to games, will be the big problem is how best to load all data into memory in order to use it effectively. When considered as an upgrade from 8GB to 16GB would provide a great advantage less than the upgrade from 4GB to 8GB."