> While I have no insider knowledge here, weird memory architectures like that are often a cost measure.
It depends on what you're comparing to. It costs more than having 8x2GB, but costs less than 10x2GB.
> I believe NVIDIA released at least one card where part of its VRAM had certain limitations.
Well there was the fiasco that was the GTX 970, because one chunk of memory was one seventh as fast as the rest. Plus a couple other quirky models. This move should be much easier to deal with, and making developers deal with it is the kind of thing a console can do much more easily than PC hardware.
It depends on what you're comparing to. It costs more than having 8x2GB, but costs less than 10x2GB.
> I believe NVIDIA released at least one card where part of its VRAM had certain limitations.
Well there was the fiasco that was the GTX 970, because one chunk of memory was one seventh as fast as the rest. Plus a couple other quirky models. This move should be much easier to deal with, and making developers deal with it is the kind of thing a console can do much more easily than PC hardware.