But it's far too slow to be counted on for much. That's why some current gen games on PC stutter with 8gb + ssd for pagefile and it's remedied with 16gb ram.
It's been a good few months since I saw a 100k demo promising a breakthrough.I gave the example of using a NVMe bus based off PCIe 4.0 for a theoretical maximum of 4GB/s.
Can you give any examples? AI for world simulation doesn't need to have ten thousand agents in RAM at once. Physics potentially doesn't need lots. Yes, you could do more with more RAM for certain, but we're cost constrained here. If something's got to give, more RAM + lower storage speed is in most cases going to be a less flexible solution than less RAM + fast storage speed.
If it were between 2.5 HDDs again with 24-32gb vs 16gb with ssd yes i would agree. But that's an extreme example.
PCs with 16 GBs RAM and 8 GBs VRAM are expensive and the top end. Isn't it more usual that consoles have about half, if not less, than the gaming PC standard? Haven't found a clear answer to that through Google but a PC around PS360 launch was apparently 512 MB VRAM and 512 MB RAM going up to multiple GBs. This article suggests a 2000 PC had 256-512 MB RAM when PS2 had ~36 MB.
If latency is low enough, you can effectively work from storage in smaller pages. Or basically, all memory is just a bucket to speed data availability to the CPU's L1 caches. All the work is done in the caches, but they need to be small, so then it's moved to the L2 cache. But that can't be too big, so then it's moved out to the L3. Then RAM. Then storage. Now if RAM is fast enough for the work, you could skip the L3 altogether, and if the storage was fast enough, you could skip the RAM altogether. Everything on screen and in the local vicinity will need to be in RAM (which can be very minimal with tiled resources) but everything beyond that can be cached in small workable units and swapped in and out, potentially.
PC benchmarks aren't at all representative of what consoles can do. The engine cannot be optimised for a specific amount of VRAM, so it'll probably just copy resources ad hoc from system RAM under DirectX calls, unless they're all in VRAM which removes that bottleneck. The amount of data needed is how much is rendered on screen plus world simulation. If hypothetically you can swap in all the data needed from storage in a single frame, you'd need only as much data as one frame - the principle of tiled resources.
I don't think you or they should be looking at it in terms of how many times the previous generation, but what can they do with $x of their limited BOM spent here or there. PS4, for example, is a great freak. It was set to get 4 GBs, then got a last minute upgrade. Sony knew they could plan for the 8GB option without changing anything fundamentally in the architecture and just being able to support the double sized chips if they became available in time. They did. The rend result was a jump in RAM from PS2 > PS3 of 12x, and from PS3 > PS4 of 16x where it would have been 8x. Now if PS4 had come with 4 GBs, we'd be looking at 16 GBs now and saying, "that's 4x as much, and when you factor in the OS footprint, more." The ratios could easily be different to what we got.
lol I was hoping someone would make mention of this. I haven't done much looking into this area, what is the major culprit about procedural that makes it impossible to use outside of tech demos?It's still puzzling how audio and subtitled seem weirdly packages and limited by region. I generally do not want more than English audio, occasionally Japanese, to be installed but there could be licensing implications.
Audio still has scope for compression but this adds a challenge to realtime re-mixing for audio output. There's probably some marginal improvements on large texture storage but TANSTAAFL. Heavily compressed saving RAM but you may take a hit to performance as you're not just processing a a texture but decompressing it in realtime.
Of course, there is procedural texture generation.
Realtime compression of other data has been around a few years in most operating systems but I wonder how much you could meaningfully save in a console. A general purpose OS knows that not all apps need to be active all of the time.
My friend two years ago bought laptop with 32GB of RAM, and i think 4GB video RAM, and that was two years ago in 2016.Yes that 24GB plan is really good. But maybe there will be same situation like with PS4. They will plan console with 16GB RAM, but will double RAM and will make console with 32GB RAM.
But you canna change the laws of physics! There are three factors in play : time, price, and power. If you absolutely pick a power level, 8x PS4, and you pick a price of $400, you'll have to wait until the time allows that power at that price point. Which may be 2025. If you pick a release time, 2020, and a price, $400, you'll have to pick power that's available then at that price.
