News & Rumours: Playstation 4/ Orbis *spin*

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Shifty Geezer said:
The price of changing from game to browser to webstore to BRD player in an instant instead of in 10 seconds isn't worth it IMO. If people really are that impatient, I worry for society.
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I'm with you on this. I'm buying PS4 purely for gaming, Blu-ray playback and some Netflix, none of which I need to switch between near instantly.

However I'll start to panic if, and only if, actual devs start complaining. This obviously isn't news to the devs and none of them are complaining even under the guide of anonymity. If Sony do what they did with PS3 and free up more RAM down the line, that's cool.
 
lostones said:
What i funny is they're trying to cover up EG findings by spreading "insider "fud without saying what's wrong with their findings; mods are even going as far as renaming threads to divert attention :LOL:
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These are the times that separate the Fan Boys from the Fan Men :LOL:
 
bkilian said:
The One has no paging in the Game VM. The apps VM might have it, but that is irrelevant to the game. The PS4 has a paged pool in the game section. This is the first time it has happened in a console, and it's not a good development.
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FWIW I know of at least 1 high profile PS3 game where the devs implemented virtual memory.
But from Sony's response if the developer assigns less than 512MB of flexible memory virtual address space it won't page.
 
Crazy theory here: what if Sony originally had a 7gb/1gb split or even a 6gb/2gb split, but once they found out Microsoft was going with 5gb/3gb split & wasn't budging they decided to match MS in order to keep cross-platform devs from convincing MS to upgrade the total RAM to 12gb & giving them a 9gb/3gb split instead? MS has shown they are open to the idea when devs convinced them to upgrade the 360 to 512MB. Maybe Sony was worried they might do the same on the XB1?

Tommy McClain
 
DSoup said:
I'm with you on this. I'm buying PS4 purely for gaming, Blu-ray playback and some Netflix, none of which I need to switch between near instantly.

However I'll start to panic if, and only if, actual devs start complaining. This obviously isn't news to the devs and none of them are complaining even under the guide of anonymity. If Sony do what they did with PS3 and free up more RAM down the line, that's cool.
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I would like the PS4 to also function as a great media hub as well but the overtly social stuff like helping others play games over the network or stuff like that isn't as much of an issue. If it sells consoles then such features aren't a waste. Hopefully devs will eventually get the memory that WE deserve :smile:
 
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Paging on the game OS might cause interesting isses but I don't see why the hell you wouldn't want to use it on System OS side.
 
bkilian said:
The One has no paging in the Game VM. The apps VM might have it, but that is irrelevant to the game.
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Games will be reading/writing data from HDD and in terms of performance tuning on a console game you want a few variations and uncertainties as possible. The more I/O occurring on the HDD - game video capture, background downloads, app OS using VM - the higher the tolerances need to be for game devs. If you have the HDD and its cache just to yourself, it's much easier to optimise. Although maybe it'll be less of an issue this gen.
 
AzBat said:
Crazy theory here: what if Sony originally had a 7gb/1gb split or even a 6gb/2gb split, but once they found out Microsoft was going with 5gb/3gb split & wasn't budging they decided to match MS in order to keep cross-platform devs from convincing MS to upgrade the total RAM to 12gb & giving them a 9gb/3gb split instead? MS has shown they are open to the idea when devs convinced them to upgrade the 360 to 512MB. Maybe Sony was worried they might do the same on the XB1?

Tommy McClain
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I think that Sony finds it useful to match 5 gigs for cross platform reasons but trying to influence MS is a bit of a reach. There is obviously no need for a 12 GB this generation.
 
AzBat said:
Crazy theory here: what if Sony originally had a 7gb/1gb split or even a 6gb/2gb split, but once they found out Microsoft was going with 5gb/3gb split & wasn't budging they decided to match MS in order to keep cross-platform devs from convincing MS to upgrade the total RAM to 12gb & giving them a 9gb/3gb split instead? MS has shown they are open to the idea when devs convinced them to upgrade the 360 to 512MB. Maybe Sony was worried they might do the same on the XB1?

Tommy McClain
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Interesting idea but then it becomes will Sony forever reserve that to match feature for feature or go back to the 7/1 6/2 split soon after launch after MS has reached the point of no return. But I seriously doubt it happened that way. I hope next-next-gen if it exists we have two seperate SOCs for this. A lowpower one with it's own RAM to run the OS and all other functions and a midrange-highpower one with it's own RAM just for games. It seems like it would be the best split with only requiring minimum interaction between the SOC's.
 
Ah. That's interesting. :smile:

It's a very weird move to reduce the swap available, unless there's a performance issue on the OS side (why?). It shouldn't be an issue as long as the game is allocating this knowing it's swap memory. Linux and bsd have many choices of great i/o schedulers which would avoid priority issues (I guess Sony modified or coded their own). This slab is 100% owned by the game so the dev know exactly how much physical they can use. I can see an MMO, specially an MMO which is based on user-created content streamed from the network, could use this. (I'm not thinking of any specific game, really)

My wild guess is that there's probably some SLC flash in there, at least for the bootstrap which is more extensive than a normal console, since the HDD is replaceable. Could they use the remaining area of this flash as a swap partition? Maybe they thought 1GB would be available and it ended up only 512MB?
 
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I suspect the virtual memory pool is an artifact of when they only had 4GB in the console. It makes a lot of sense if you had 2.5GB physical plus another GB or more mapped onto 512 MB.
 
I agree for the OS side it does make sense, but it looks like a lot of effort to give access across the Game OS to the BSD allocation. (security, attack vectors, having both segregated regions now intertwined) If the issue was that BSD part didn't have nearly enough memory (no question here with 512MB), now all of a sudden they go crazy with a huge reservation. I do understand the need for vm on the app side, because it's impossible to control the browser tabs and the amount of dormant apps, it's reasonable to have vm there. but how would the lack of memory "on the OS side" would justify a significant memory path to give access to vm facilities to the game engine? Wouldn't that be a request from game devs?

It does seems too small to be considered significant anymore.
 
djskribbles said:
So DF's source is interference (and his source), or they have the same source? There's an insider at GAF saying the allocation numbers are wrong and the guy wasn't banned. So whose source is more credible?
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The gaf source was saying that the initial DF article/figures were wrong. He hasn't posted in the new thread or since the update from DF and Sony.

Also a poster there is now suggesting that the split is now 6/2.
 
That they felt it necessary to clarify the "flexible memory" part of the article, but not the amount reserved I think suggests that the numbers are not wrong, at this point.
 
warb said:
That they felt it necessary to clarify the "flexible memory" part of the article, but not the amount reserved I think suggests that the numbers are not wrong, at this point.
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Or maybe their allocation numbers are not finalized yet so they don't want to comment on it right now.
 
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