Yeah at 4 gb you are talking a very different machine it would seem. Stuff like sharing and game resume/switching and the like might not have been in the cards for that machine or they would have had to have had more discrete modules for different things.
- Status
Yeah at 4 gb you are talking a very different machine it would seem. Stuff like sharing and game resume/switching and the like might not have been in the cards for that machine or they would have had to have had more discrete modules for different things.
Games got an extra 1GB of RAM, and potentially a little more from the "flexible" memory, which put it on par with Xbox One. So they achieved parity on both the game and system sides of the device, instead of pushing for a game advantage and staying short on the other. That's probably a good move because the device can appeal to more people, and a huge memory advantage on the game side may have only been pushed by first parties.
I lost a GB there.
It was always a smart move to mach up at the start. You can give back to games later, but you can't take away.
Absolutely agree with you. This is repugnant- what in the hell am I expected to be doing while I'm gaming? I mean even if you include app's like Facebook, Twitter and G+.. That's tiny stuff. A web browser with decent tab support wouldn't require anywhere near this.
The 'essentials' were covered last gen in the 32-54MB range. How did we go from that to 3.5GB?
I mean this is just ludicrous. That is over a 100x increase in memory allottment for non-game use.
I also want to point out, that the OS is probably very small. Based on some posts I keep seeing in forums that say things like, "OMG!!!! 2.5GB is a huge bloated OS!!!!!!!!" people seem to be under the impression that this is a huge 2.5 GB kernel. The OS itself is probably 256MB to 1GB, including most system level features like media server etc, and the rest is just free memory for apps. If it was only 1 GB free for apps I'd be surprised.
Which is fairly horrifying, because if they give that much memory to app developers then it isn't like they can take it back basically. That's it.
"Oh we changed our mind, so you guys will only get 512MB now for your apps instead of the 1-2GB you had before. Our bad."
Don't take my word for it, but I believe iOS has a limit on how much memory a single app can use, which is well below the total free memory on those devices. I may be wrong on that, or it might be Android. They have weird multitasking environments, so I don't know what the reasoning is exactly for the limit, but something like that could be the case here. They say your app can use 1GB max, even though there's 2GB free. That way you are guaranteed to have some free memory for multitasking even with one larger app running. No idea. All speculation. There's just no way the PS4 OS is sitting there using 2.5GB of RAM at all times. A very large chunk of that has to be free RAM for apps.
lol what? Just like Windows 7 runs at 1GB usage it will run more apps at the same time @4GB usage. Windows 7 @1GB will have to load from HDD every time you start a app that was not previously loaded to RAM slowing it down and old apps get closed in way of new apps.
Windows 7 even tries to use as much mem as possible preloading software to RAM from HDD which people dont get their head around on the internet.
They used that much because it was necessity and PS3 was above 100MB at launch. With these machines above 5GB is really questionable returns for gaming because texture streaming has been invented.
How much time does take to jump between apps on 360? 30s? To a game from netfix 1 minute? It cant do anything that is expected today
Last edited by a moderator:
Maybe I'm weird, but I actually like the idea of a system that can do more than just play games. So I think this could turn out to be a very good thing. The only worry I'd have is on the software side. Sony isn't exactly known for their software prowess and to jump from a 512MB platform for OS + apps to a 2.5GB platform for OS + apps is a huge change. I'd be worried about them cramming in a bunch of poorly though out features in a short time to turn it into a more flexible or diverse platform. Even if they had decided internally to go this route in January, that's still a really short time to change the entire outlook of what the platform is going to be.
Apps and/or system services. It was brought up that one likely reason that the CPU reservation went up this gen is that there are libraries that use system functions which were taken out of the game's CPU budget. With a reserved amount of CPU, the game's budget is not impacted, and that library has a consistent resource to draw upon.
If that works for CPU cycles, why not RAM?
There are buffers that could be used for some of that functionality, on top of the 15 minutes of footage, plus whatever the file system puts aside for caching.
They can wait and see if they want to scale back the reserve in the future, while they can't do the opposite. Either they are just being overly prudent, or there's a feature we haven't heard of yet, or the flexible 1GB memory somehow provides an advantage compared to a hard line reservation. It could be simple future proofing for apps of the next 10 years (which was MS reason given I think). If the reservation provides useful shared services and helpers, disk caching, etc... it gets interesting, and it can't be considered "lost" to the OS, but actually useful for the game. But I would really like to know what they are.
A year ago it was only 1.5GB for games. Now THAT was a good reason for a classic internet melt down.
A year ago it was only 1.5GB for games. Now THAT was a good reason for a classic internet melt down.
Last edited by a moderator:
The poor devs will have 10x the memory (in the beginning), available RAM is still the spec that grew the largest from gen to gen.
You can always give back RAM, you can never take more later.
You can't compare a base BSD system with virtual memory to a console with none. There's no swapping to disk in these consoles, so any app has to be fully resident in RAM.
They can wait and see if they want to scale back the reserve in the future, while they can't do the opposite. Either they are just being overly prudent, or there's a feature we haven't heard of yet, or the flexible 1GB memory somehow provides an advantage compared to a hard line reservation. It could be simple future proofing for apps of the next 10 years (which was MS reason given I think). If the reservation provides useful shared services and helpers, disk caching, etc... it gets interesting, and it can't be considered "lost" to the OS, but actually useful for the game. But I would really like to know what they are.
A year ago it was only 1.5GB for games. Now THAT was a good reason for a classic internet melt down.
I honestly doubt there is one or even several features that explain the 2.5 GB reservation, unless you're counting a large pool of free memory for running apps a feature.
Considering 1.5 to 2GB would be used for CPU stuff, what´s left for the GPU is much less than 4 GB.
Billy Idol
Legend
If true, I must say that I would be extremely disappointed.
I am really one of those 'core' gamers that just want a pure, 100% gaming machine as a console. I have absolutely zero interest in all the possible multimedia apps. Why should I? PCs are 100 times better in everything multi media related and way more comfortable, with a huge free software support plus community.
The huge amount of VRAM is indeed what interests me most in a PS4 (of course as all other specs are mediocre at best compared to my gaming PC I already have), and of course the possible implication this would have for Sony's first party devs.
I fear that Gamescom is going to be boring...as I believe now that both will focus on non-gaming stuff.
I am really one of those 'core' gamers that just want a pure, 100% gaming machine as a console. I have absolutely zero interest in all the possible multimedia apps. Why should I? PCs are 100 times better in everything multi media related and way more comfortable, with a huge free software support plus community.
The huge amount of VRAM is indeed what interests me most in a PS4 (of course as all other specs are mediocre at best compared to my gaming PC I already have), and of course the possible implication this would have for Sony's first party devs.
I fear that Gamescom is going to be boring...as I believe now that both will focus on non-gaming stuff.
You can do lots of things. You just need the swap from game to Netflix to be instantaneous. 15 seconds of load time won't be the end of the world! We ahve that already on the current consoles, quitting the game and loading iPlayer, say, because you only do one at a time that's consuming your display. I don't see a need for multiple concurrent apps like maps and Facebook. Anyone that into multitasking will surely already be doing all that on their phone, so why eat into the console as well? It's overkill IMO. Hell, 1 GB should be plenty for decent base experience anyhow, even with live apps resident. An app is a few MBs in size typically.
- Status