PlayStation 4 (codename Orbis) technical hardware investigation (news and rumours)

For video recording, using GDDR5 sounds so inefficient ...

 

At the time, Shadow Fall wasn't using much of the available RAM, so they may have either tweaked it specifically for the show, or reduced the involuntary recording limit from February, or simply used the voluntary recording option and didn't show that part to not ruin the surprise.

As for the flash ssd, I was expecting them to have 8 or 16MB of flash ssd for faster OS, fast bootup and switching, and it might have even aided in streaming (flash + HD + Bluray concurrently streaming).. No one ever mentioned a flash ssd till now and I think there won't be..

 

hesido why should be "problematic" for the HDD to record the footage not to mention that the PS4 compression unit for video is probably there to help the Game DVR?
Also Game DVR most likely predates the upgrade to 8GB and back then there were not 512Mb left for it to use so the only option was to use the HDD.

P.S.
If remember well also we estimated around 1-2Mb/s for DVR so DF 10Mb/s figures comes from where?

 

AFAIR, constantly writing to flash storage is a bad idea.

 

Well, if it is 1-2Mb/s, it would require even less memory for 7 or 15 minutes, and it would be even easier to just use the RAM for it. 1-2Mb/s on 1080p video might be a little blocky but would be more suitable for uploading as many have ADSL lines.

The reason to keep it in RAM would be, HDD would already be doing streaming stuff, and whenever the HDD is idle, the OS would be installing the game from bluray. I think it would be pretty busy as is, and the constant recording activity may make the performance a bit unpredictable because of seek times. That's my guess, I'm probably wrong.

 

According to the comments to this DF tweet, it may be a simple misunderstanding. Presumably Neil Brown didn't mention any specific number, but said the PS4 would record the last "several minutes" (and not "seven minutes", which would be a strange number to start with, btw.). That means the announced 15 mins from the PS4 reveal event could very well be still valid.

 

Actually, the quote reveals that the Xbox One is streaming to Harddrive, just like I expected for the Playstation 4. So i'm not quite ready to buy that it uses GDDR5 on PS4.

 

Maybe there is a minimal performance penalty in using HDD but I too don't see why they should use precocious GDDR5 for game DVR.

 

On second thought, I'd hate to use 512MB for that function. That would have been a waste indeed, 512MB is too much. I think DF is obsessed with super high bit rate videos and that 512MB was mentioned for no other particular reason.

But 128MB or less with lesser bitrates mentioned here wouldn't be too much in the grand scheme of things, if RAM would be used, after all, there's even a button called "share" on the game pad That said, we could also have a look at the bitrate for the Killzone upload to get an idea.

Maybe games are ever guaranteed 80%-90% of available hard-disk bandwidth, and they use even a smaller amount of RAM for recording, and write in bursts every second. These would probably be mentioned in design documents if we had one. And these were also probably discussed in the previous 100 pages.

 

no worries ! its 15min

 

Any perceived benefit by the openGL update to PS4 development?

 

Sony is using their own API to access the hardware. I dont see why a OpenGL update would effect that. Presumably anything the hardware is capable of is already exposed.

 

Well, presumably some may have code targeting the OpenGL equivalent APIs which would now map better.

 

Yeah, I heard that Sony was allowing native OpenGL on PS4. If thats true the new announcement can only be seen as a good thing.

 

I hope they will remove this feature in future updates. After all, it will not affect game compatibility, also will free additional resources for games (RAM, CPU, HDD)

 

I'm sure this is being done with the secondary chip in the PS4 so it's not taking anything away from the game side.

 

Even if it were somehow being done with no CPU or memory overhead, it would still impact HDD performance, the write itself is largely irrelevant, but the HDD has to seek to the area with the circular buffer and back. This minimally impacts the worst case latency and available throughput of the drive, the exact amount being dependent on how big the memory buffer is.

But given the focus on the social aspects of gaming it isn't going anywhere.

 

I'm sure this is being handled by a VCE engine inside the APU. It will only take some of the reserved RAM, and a measly ammount of bandwidth (1 to 10 MB/s is being romoured here in B3D).

 

There's no such thing as "native OpenGL" and Sony's API is called GNM as revealed in last week's DF article.

 

Looks like the ps4 is using the same spec power supply as ps3 slim. Its a 250 watt s. It also uses an
universal power supply.

Info from fcc filing.