Sorry for this kinda gamerbrained question.
The Xbox 360, Playstation 4, Xbox One, honestly most consoles after the Playstation and Saturn have shared memory pools. It allows flexibility in how much memory and VRAM developers want to assign, right? Why does the PS3 not have a shared 512MB pool of GDDR3? It caused all kinds of problems, most notably with Bethesda games.
Is it the Cell Broadband Engine needing the specialty XDR memory? Is it an artifact of the Nvidia RSX graphics chip being added late in development? Looking back I a)most wonder if the split memory was more of a problem than the Cell tbh.
…yes comrade, all consoles do. All consoles are. MIPS (PS1, PS2) is from computers. PowerPC (Gamecube, Wii, Wii U) is from computers. 6502 (NES, SNES) is from computers. 68000 (Mega Drive) is from computers. Quick, what console is NOT a PC at heart?
The Xbox and One both use x86, and they have some software roots in Windows, but not only does that not really relate to the question I asked, all Xbox systems have shared memory anyway.
reddit-ass "well ackshually " comment
In a word: so?
I can outpedant both of you by saying that ”PC” is practically always used to mean ”IBM PC compatible”, meaning x86/x64 architecture, therefore most consoles aren’t based on PCs
The last four minus the Switch are that is pretty dang pedantic tho, “PC” usually means any home computer nowadays. Plus, PowerPC…
Serious, do you unironically think I was being pedantic? Given that “xbox has pc roots” is a sort of ambiguous nothing-statement that doesn’t relate in any way to my question, (which is about the PS3) I thought pointing out that all consoles are just specialised, simplified computers was apt.
”PC" usually means any home computer nowadays
Macs still exist, and if the only computer you had was a Mac, you wouldn’t say ”I have a PC”. The distinction is also useful for historical purposes, you wouldn’t call an Amiga or Commodore 64 a PC.
Serious, do you unironically think I was being pedantic?
No, not really, I also thought that statement was irrelevant. The only way I can interpret is as being in any way relevant is that the original Xbox was based on regular PC hardware, but the 360 wasn’t, it used a custom PowerPC chip, so I don’t know what their point was. If it was to say ”the 360 wasn’t based on custom hardware unlike the PS3”, then that’s flat out incorrect.
Good post, it really is just different types of computers (although game consoles continue to get less and less interesting architecturally :( )
Also I started writing a response to your original post (interesting question tbh) that is quickly scaling out of control
