News & Rumours: Playstation 4/ Orbis *spin*

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*EIGHTGIGABYTEDDRFIVESUPERIORVRAMFORCEMIA* :LOL:

But honestly not really unexpected. I guess people will come to reality now and let it settle in over a bottle of prime whiskey.
 
If that additional 1GB isn't guaranteed, I image it will only end up being used for non-critical stuff like caching to hide load times.
 
If that additional 1GB isn't guaranteed, I image it will only end up being used for non-critical stuff like caching to hide load times.

That's the most reasonable assumption. You can't count on it, but it will help if you aren't running facebook, netflix, and browsing the internet with 15 tabs while trying to play a game.


They are using NetBSD. The 3.5GB reserved memory may include other apps and user services running concurrently.

Oh, for some reason I thought they started with FreeBSD. I was joking anyway, it's clearly reserved for app usage and isn't a 3.5GB os. :)
 
The 2.5GB was expected, but it's still a very large amount of system memory. Mapping a separate 1GB as some kind of shared caching area is surprising though. It's likely that it will be always available to the game except for some special situations, I suppose devs will use that for preloading levels, caching and the likes.

"the current allocation in terms of both CPU cores and memory could be reduced once the operating system is complete and then streamlined."


Yeah, I guess there's no harm in reserving too much and reducing later, since the reverse cannot be done.
 
8GB for games didnt make any sense in february and for machines of these specs. They are not powerful enough

Pretty obvious they are just trying to match the amount MS is giving to devs. Giving extra memory over Xbone for games is not going to do much of anything for PS4. But it is out of OS development

If PS4 only had 4GB RAM the OS would be just much worse. honestly they need MORE memory than MS to do an OS because they are not a software company
Devil advocate here, SOny doesnt have windows 8 and gave up on eye toy to reach 399$.
I would think that they could have include eye toy and 4GB and launch @399$, either way they could have gone with 4GB no eye toy and a may an even lower price or plam for aggressive price reduction scheme ie slashing the price as soon as the rumored 8Gb GDDR5 memory chips would have been available so most likely before shrinking the SOC is an option.

As for OS usage it is getting crazy, my old G2x phone has 256MB of RAM and back ground services are not taking all the space. It is not the most reactive phone ever but this has a lot to do with the slow RAM, SLow CPU, etc /the phone as the whole.
If switching is not instant not to background services but for example from game to browser well, it happens to be the same of plenty of cheap tablet or notebook...
Speak about losing track of priority... both MSFT and Sony think that instant switching and providing better multi tasking that most PC (not even laptop or tablet or phone) is critical to console, imo the market needs to be disrupt.
I hope Google will enter the show with Nvidia and others following its path.
 
I guess this is a problem with both manufacturers knowing about each other's hardware. They're turning into the same machine. Might as well have just built the same machine and stuck a MS label on one and a Sony label on the other
 
Oh, for some reason I thought they started with FreeBSD. I was joking anyway, it's clearly reserved for app usage and isn't a 3.5GB os. :)

They use both Free BSD and NetBSD on PS3. I think they use the network stack from NetBSD but I can't remember where I read it anymore.

It's not so clear for a layperson what those 2.5GB RAM may include. ^_^
The memory may be used for a concurrent BSD app/game, or a full-blown OS VM/environment like Android. :p
Need to see the final experience to know.

The 2.5GB was expected, but it's still a very large amount of system memory. Mapping a separate 1GB as some kind of shared caching area is surprising though.

I expected some shared heap memory since the beginning.

EDIT:
The OS dosen't use 3.5 GB of ram it uses 2.5. The extra gig is flexible between open applications or the game.

Thanks ! I corrected my posts.
 
If it means the game recording loop is in memory, at least it saves our plan for an SSD upgrade :LOL:
 
Don't assume it's the core OS, but what Sony wants to do with it. If BSd can run in 200 MBs, Sony may still dump 3 GBs of Sony special crap in there (free trial of McAfee? Yahoo toolbar? :rolleyes: ).

There was me thinking Nintendo's 1 GB excessive, and MS's 3 GBs including Kinect stuff obscene. I guess that's modern computing for you - extremely wasteful and inefficient. But more than that, I don't understand why Sony made the choices they did. If they want +4 GBs for OS, why not go split RAM for a massive saving? The whole unified RAM was a huge selling point, trumpeted to developers after the reveal - "eight gigabytes of unified RAM". In reality it's 4.5. All those devs asking for more RAM, I wonder what their reaction is? Kinda like asking for a 4 bedroomed house to be given a four bedroomed house with two bedrooms walled in.
 
IIRC, didn't the article read more like 2.75GB OS, .75GB shared cache? The title of the article seemed to round up.
 
What puzzles me is that PC BSD requires less memory than BSD on PS4.

That may be because you're comparing memory reserved for PC BSD OS alone with memory reserved for PS4 OS + PS4 apps and other overhead.

In the article, DF mentioned that a developer can allocate small or large memory setup for games (4.5GB vs 5.25GB). The latter mode is for debugging only. This is on top of the 1GB optional memory.

In large memory mode, the "OS" takes less than 2.5GB.
 
Well, yeah, we're deep in the territory of people who don't understand how this stuff works trying to spin certain functions as a drawback, even if it may actually be an enhancement. Eurogamer kinda presented this stuff as a "problem" with PS4 development, when it sounds like to me that 3 guys porting a whole game in 6 months where the hardest part was discovering the best way to use each memory path is really promising. I'd love to see a corresponding article for the Xbox One port. I bet those folks would love it if their biggest challenge was choosing between the garlic, onion and onion+ busses.
Well we don't know as it seems that devs are not allowed to speak about their efforts on the xb1.

as a side note your post is a testament to how successful Mark Cerny's communication campaign is at least on the web, all of sudden the Xb1 is a complicated system to deal with.
That is imo a felony, it should be easier, significantly easier to work with than the 360, relative to the resolution the scatchpad is bigger than in the 360, it is accessible to the GPU and so on.
Then there is the API and the tools provided by MSFT.

Imo till we hear serious complains about xb1 it is safer to not byte to hard into Sony communication campaign, the PS4 is super straight forward, the most straigh forward console ever, but it says nothing about the competitor machine being a hell to code for.

I don't think it will take much more time, if at all, to port to Xb1. At worse Devs will make a non optimal use of the scratchpad.
 
DVR doesn't make sense. They were probably caching to hdd when the PS4 was 4GB anyway. The reserve is probably for 'apps.'


I wonder if the devs that Cerny talked to when they increased the RAM weren't App devs? (honest question)
 
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