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.
Xbox does not have console roots. Its a pc at heart.
…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.
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.
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.
This is true u rite, I just thought it funny that PPC took “PC” anywho. And yeah Amigas are “micros” usually…
See me either, thank you
I sat and puzzled over the comment trying to figure out what the point was. While we’re here, is the Xenon CPU in the 360 a native three-core die? That would make it I think the only native tricore die ever? Save maybe the Wii U’s thing?
no need to get mad at someone for just posting a comment
It’s a pointless entirely offtopic “heh gotcha” style comment that contributes nothing, in addition to lecturing me on things I already know. I wasn’t even being mean or rude really.
Also click their username, they are a lib.
Bad posts are one of the worst things ever.
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
Please I wish to knoooowwww! Scale it out of control!
And yeah, seriously. They’ve just been PCs since 2013.
Pedants gets no more answers
Says rhe redditor who came into this post to be pointlessly pedantic - "
You factually rebuked my well-ackshually so I will say no more 
"
You could always actually answer A) the OP question, B) how what you said is relevant.
Wouldn’t that imply the opposite though? AFAIK PCs had already been using independent VRAM by the 7th gen
That was / is slot-in, but yes. consoles was built more on the basis of coin-ups than what was the pc at the time. They had split personalities and was often compromised by several cpu/systems, while IBM’s pc was a single cpu thing. There was the co-processor but that was tightly knit to the processor and not independent.
This modular design what was made them able to do what they did - and imo what ps4 was the last iteration of for sony, with nintendo having the gamecube. The PS4 could do amazing things, but only like 12 programmers in the world was able to use it fully.
edit: Gc, not wii. Actually the gc was their first unified memory system. Sorry nintendo architects, my mistake