Holy Wall of Text: My impressions post Playstation 4 (PS4) unveil

[Arwin]

If Sony goes with 512 mb, you can kiss concurrent apps good bye. Sony has never been too good on the software front of things, so I can imagine them side stepping having Facebook / Skype / Twitter notifications running in the back ground.

If I were a betting man, I would say the Vita is a pretty good idea of what Sony is thinking in terms of OS. The Vita OS feedback is probably being used to architect PS4 OS.

They actually suggested during the conference that the Vita OS could be good enough for other devices, hint hint. Would make a lot of sense if you think about it (has all the suspend, small app/large app features, etc.), and improvements they make to it can feed back into the Vita version and vice versa.

I am assuming that when they had 4GB, they couldn't really afford to take more than 512MB for the OS. Now that the PS3 will have 8GB, I would guess that they can afford to raise that to 1GB of OS reserved memory, and although I think many features actually need very little memory (think of what the 360 did with 32MB), it would make concurrent web-browsing significantly more enjoyable, especially when supporting higher resolution displays.

 

[Brad Grenz]

I think a 1GB reservation is a fair bet, since they straight up doubled RAM they could double the amount held back with little issue. That said, if the OS is Vita derived and they're going to be saving App states in flash you don't even need large amounts of RAM for multiple active applications. You just need enough for the services and background tasks like communications, notifications, system level music and that kind of thing. Even 1GB is probably way more than you need. Smartphones manage that kind of capability with 512MB of RAM total.

 

[(((interference)))]

Are we assuming Sony will use 0 GB for OS now? If Microsoft is reserving 2-2.5 for OS, I expect Sony to follow suit.

Please do your math, a 2 - 2.5 GB RAM dvantage to the PS4 means it'd be reserving 512MB to 1 GB for the OS.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

If Sony goes with 512 mb, you can kiss concurrent apps good bye. Sony has never been too good on the software front of things, so I can imagine them side stepping having Facebook / Skype / Twitter notifications running in the back ground.

The core gamers are warming up their legs to jump ship to the Facebook Friendly console, I'm sure.

If I were a betting man, I would say the Vita is a pretty good idea of what Sony is thinking in terms of OS. The Vita OS feedback is probably being used to architect PS4 OS.

Vita has 512 RAM total excluding VRAM, so is using a fraction of that for OS. With 512 MBs RAM, PS4 could easily do everything Vita does. You don't need multi gigabytes to do a spot of multitasking.

 

[Grall]

If Sony goes with 512 mb, you can kiss concurrent apps good bye.

Why the shit do you want concurrent apps on a games console? How are you even going to use them with a game running on your only screen...? Also, why do you think you need more than half a gigabyte of RAM to run some crappy background apps, how do you think people managed at all when computers only had on the order of a few megabytes of RAM at most? (Hell, I once heard some rumors that back in the late 70s and early 80s, practically the stone age, you were lucky to have more than a few dozen kBs... )

I swear, I've had it up to here with the kids today who think that all computing devices always came with multiple gigs of RAM since forever, and have no sense of proportion of just how much you can fit into half a gig. It's not even very hard to fit a ton of stuff into that space. I browsed the web back in the 90s on a computer with 6 *megabytes* of RAM, and zero pagefile (no MMU, so no support for it.)

 

[(((interference)))]

Vita has 512 RAM total excluding VRAM, so is using a fraction of that for OS. With 512 MBs RAM, PS4 could easily do everything Vita does. You don't need multi gigabytes to do a spot of multitasking.

Exactly, the iPhone 4 and 4S manage to do plenty of multitasking with just 512 MB of RAM.

Let's not forget the two main reasons why MS are reserving so much RAM:
1. Durango runs WinRT with IE, Skype, Win8 apps etc + DVR functionality.
2. They have to keep the Kinect speech and skeletal databases in memory.

 

[arijoytunir]

Does ps4 have 32 or 18 ROPs ?

 

[Brad Grenz]

Does ps4 have 32 or 18 ROPs ?

32.

 

[eastmen]

Exactly, the iPhone 4 and 4S manage to do plenty of multitasking with just 512 MB of RAM.

Let's not forget the two main reasons why MS are reserving so much RAM:
1. Durango runs WinRT with IE, Skype, Win8 apps etc + DVR functionality.
2. They have to keep the Kinect speech and skeletal databases in memory.

Win RT works fine on the surface which is only 2 gigs of total ram while doing everything there except the dvr and Kinect stuff.

My dvr card only uses 130mb on windows 8. I'll try to watch more closely tonight to see if it spikes while recording multiple streams .


Lets not forget windows blue which is slated for summer and has multiple kernel enhancments like lower resource use and higher battery life . I don't buy the MS rumors of 3GB for the OS

 

[dagamer]

It's not that Durango OS needs 3GB, it's that developers aren't allowed to use those 3GB (there's a difference). By giving some breathing room even though the OS itself may only use 512MB or so, it means they can store a number of non-gaming apps in RAM without needing to shut them down. So, rapidly switch between web browser tabs without needing to reload pages. Instantly bring up the Marketplace/Store without needing to wait for it to load. Cache a bunch of data in RAM for a rainy day. The sky is the limit.

The worst thing about the 360 wasn't that it lasted 8 years, but the hardware specifically designed just to play games, and a miniscule amount or RAM was reserved for the OS, such that non-gaming apps basically acted like a game and switching to them ended your gaming session!

 

[(((interference)))]

Win RT works fine on the surface which is only 2 gigs of total ram while doing everything there except the dvr and Kinect stuff.

My dvr card only uses 130mb on windows 8. I'll try to watch more closely tonight to see if it spikes while recording multiple streams .

Lets not forget windows blue which is slated for summer and has multiple kernel enhancments like lower resource use and higher battery life . I don't buy the MS rumors of 3GB for the OS

This will be WinRT (or whatever Win8 without the desktop is called) for x86, might have different memory requirements to the ARM version used on Surface RT.

And what dagamer says about keeping Win8 apps in memory for backgrounding.

It's not just DVR but also streaming videos, recorded TV, games and whatever else to other devices (possibly even multiple devices at the same time) through Smartglass.

You should buy the rumors as nearly everyone is saying around 3GB is reserved - none of the GAF insiders are now disagreeing, Richard from DF has two separate sources saying 3GB and even ERP here has heard it's nearly 3GB - not to mention what Edge, Kotaku and the other media outlets have said.