News & Rumours: Playstation 4/ Orbis *spin*

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DF: "We understand that this is a 1GB virtual address space, split into two areas - 512MB of on-chip RAM is used (the physical area) and another 512MB is "paged", perhaps like a Windows swap file. But to be clear, of the 8GB of GDDR5 on PS4, our contention is that 5GB of it is available to developers.
The good news is that the amount is static and not dictated by OS functions as we stated in our original post, making it a lot easier for developers to work with."

I probably should have posted the whole thing.
Sorry.
 
Cjail said:
Sony's comment:
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DF updates the article:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-ps3-system-software-memory

So this where I see a philosophical issue with Sony. Sony is making specific choices for the dev as opposed to allowing access to as much memory as possible given the reserved memory constraints of the OS and future OS/App use.

Still I think some of this goes along with ease of development. Maybe Sony is creating these buffers and boundaries to make it easier to extract as much "power" as possible without having to reinvent the wheel so to speak. All the talk about "time to triangle" and all of that come to mind.

Maybe this is something that can be overridden depending on the developer ?
 
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dagamer said:
Forgive my ignorance but virtual memory implies that if it's not actually in memory, it will grab it from the hard drive. So that 512MB is acting as a cache?
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They probably mean that in the way that when you minimise a game or the game is no longer up as the main app (ie switching between game and twitter or something) that the 512mb virtual might be pushed back to the HDD.
 
It seems Sony itself is looking to establish it's own Lowest Common Denominator situation with the Xbox. It makes some sense in many respects but I do share many core gamers and other technically minded enthusiasts disappointment with the fact that not all resources are going to be as available as they should theoretically be. At some point I really want to see what the PS4 can do when devs are allowed to "firewall the throttle".
 
Wynix said:
This is enough evidence for me, i understand why they are being cautious but i don't give a shit about most of the OS features that would make the OS so bloated.

I do not regret cancelling my pre-order last week(before the article), will wait for White PS4, more games & less wasteful OS.
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OS memory and reserved memory are not the same thing. Can we not fall into that silly line of thinking around here? :rolleyes:
 
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People from GAF are saying its fake, and that one of the posters in the thread has passed the credibility test and has but will not reveal hard numbers.

Gets more interesting as the day goes on :p.
 
The stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.

Most of GAF seems to still be in the Denial stages, with those who cancelled their pre-orders clearly falling in at the Anger stage.

This is truly a great thing to behold. :LOL:


The part I question though is why Sony would or how Sony would make use of that memory. On the other camp side you have an entire full blown OS running (Win8 RT) along with a NUI device (Kinect). On the PS4 you have some customized flavor of BSD and no mandatory NUI device (PS4 Eye).
 
Cjail said:
DF: "We understand that this is a 1GB virtual address space, split into two areas - 512MB of on-chip RAM is used (the physical area) and another 512MB is "paged", perhaps like a Windows swap file. But to be clear, of the 8GB of GDDR5 on PS4, our contention is that 5GB of it is available to developers.
The good news is that the amount is static and not dictated by OS functions as we stated in our original post, making it a lot easier for developers to work with."

I probably should have posted the whole thing.
Sorry.
Click to expand...

So this o_sharp dude is right
http://bbs.a9vg.com/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=3546518&page=48&authorid=483741
by google translate http://translate.google.com/transla...iewthread&tid=3546518&page=48&authorid=483741

He claimed PS4 can use 5GB for game at april
http://bbs.a9vg.com/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=3453777&extra=&authorid=483741&page=1
by google translatehttp://translate.google.com/transla...ead&tid=3453777&extra=&authorid=483741&page=1
Well,not surprised since he is Ratloop studio developer,he even written a PR in playstation blog
http://forum.gamer.com.tw/Co.php?bsn=60547&sn=38738&subbsn=7
http://blog.asia.playstation.com/view-blog-post.jspa?blog=1064&blogPost=5888
 
BRiT said:
The part I question though is why Sony would or how Sony would make use of that memory. On the other camp side you have an entire full blown OS running (Win8 RT) along with a NUI device (Kinect). On the PS4 you have some customized flavor of BSD and no mandatory NUI device (PS4 Eye).
Click to expand...

As I posted back in early June:

It depends how frictionless Sony want the UI to be. Microsoft, whether you like their direction or not, showed a very slick interface and that kind of rapid response is something that is only possible with a crazy amount of software optimisation or a large amount of RAM to keep everything persistent. If Sony want to let you switch quickly (as in near instantly) between the PlayStation Store, Blu-ray playback, Netflix, a web browser and whatever else they have yet to show, they'll need a fair bit of RAM.

Who knows what they might want/need to add to the OS in three years time. They don't want to restrict themselves by not being able to add something of value that Xbox One manages with ease and PS4 does not.​

I think folks are looking at this rumoured OS reservation amount, which is a lot, and thinking why does the OS need all this but if they want it fluid then lots of it will need to be persistent.

To those folks here who are saying their desktop OS does fine in X megabytes, I suggest you disable paging/vm for the next week and see how you fair, because if you have 4Gb or less you may have to make some compromises.
 
BRiT said:
The stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.

Most of GAF seems to still be in the Denial stages, with those who cancelled their pre-orders clearly falling in at the Anger stage.

This is truly a great thing to behold. :LOL:


The part I question though is why Sony would or how Sony would make use of that memory. On the other camp side you have an entire full blown OS running (Win8 RT) along with a NUI device (Kinect). On the PS4 you have some customized flavor of BSD and no mandatory NUI device (PS4 Eye).
Click to expand...

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:
 
You act like any Modern operating system in these consoles isn't going to have paging\vm of the background tasks to begin with. Also thinking about it using resources to compress and decompress from FRAM those resoiurces could save space while still saving time vs the hit of going to disk.
 
Wow, so Sony is introducing paging to consoles. Nice. "Ok, time to render... Oops! Page fault! Never mind..."

That paged memory will never be used for anything that has to be there on a moments notice. So it'll probably get used to reduce load times if you, say, go back to an earlier area.

I recall predicting much earlier this year that with Sony's stated features, their reservations would be similar to MS, so I'm not really surprised in the least.

As for the "But hardware is taking care of those functions", hardware still needs RAM. The only thing that hardware is designed to reduce is CPU utilization. It can also reduce RAM utilization over a pure software stack, but that's just because its faster, so can sometimes get away with smaller buffers.
 
Xenus said:
You act like any Modern operating system in these consoles isn't going to have paging\vm of the background tasks to begin with. Also thinking about it using resources to compress and decompress from FRAM those resoiurces could save space while still saving time vs the hit of going to disk.
Click to expand...
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.
 
DSoup said:
I think folks are looking at this rumoured OS reservation amount, which is a lot, and thinking why does the OS need all this but if they want it fluid then lots of it will need to be persistent.
Click to expand...
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.
 
Xenus said:
You act like any Modern operating system in these consoles isn't going to have paging\vm of the background tasks to begin with.
Click to expand...
Until I see evidence to the contrary, I'm not assuming the game or the OS are making use of memory beyond the physical RAM in the PS4.

Although Sony, in their recent statement, have implied that 512mb of the flexible RAM is VM, it would be folly to assume that VM is used more widely, particularly by the OS. Indeed, if the RAM rumour is true, that would suggest otherwise unless you believe the OS really needs 3.5Gb physical RAM + VM for operation? I'm not buying that one yet. :nope:

But the Sony comment suggests to me that they want to clearly categorise RAM clearly: physical (instant) or VM (may be some delay) so devs are plan accordingly.
 
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