You need all the Gbuffer in eSRAM, you're not going to move Gbuffer from and to eSRAM, it will be really bad for performance.
TBH I'm not even sure you'd want to put the entire gbuffer in the esram most of the time... The low latency might be suitable for some screen space calculations, but in those you are probably just using the depth buffer, that by itself is not that big... The final render target, specially if there's too much transparency might be generally a better fit to go in the esram.
But it's definitely a possible, and performant, scenario. All the leaks points to this, and also was an example given by Ms themselves on good utilization on esram.
I don't think its this particular article in question that's biased but more so the recent trend of "positive news" DF have run since E3, most notably the June 28th Bandwidth article & the recent CPU GPU upclock article's, oh and a couple of comparisons that gave the XBone gpu way more leeway than required.
Seems to be the DF trend at present but they (by they I mean RL) doesn't paint the whole picture regarding the differences between the PS4 & XBone where the gap always seems to come out smaller than common sense equate's for.
What about the all the articles before? Where they "bashed" xboxone for being weak spec wise, to have high level apis that carried the legacy burden of directx, or how was Ms was using the cloud to take people's mind attention out of the weak specs of the console?
Look at the articles in the order they were published. He was very much certain about Ps4 being significantly faster at first, but once he started hearing feedback from developers and testing things himself he started changing tone. Unless he is lying about being told to the stuff he claims to be, there's nothing fishy about these articles at all.
Along with the title, there are a number of things in the authors recent history that show a Bias, ignoring that the pieces that show Bias in this interview IMO are:
generally acknowledged by who? Let's be honest, later in the article we have this Microsoft quote:
but of course generally acknowledge as overkill.
Ms is saying that in some cases, for a 1080p/60fps title that they might be ROP bound during a time slice of the frame... That means that for all the other times it's not ROP bound, they could get away with even less ROPs... So yeah, double that number might be an overkill?
Not to mention the interesting point they made about ROP/Bandwidth ratio...