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

[Cjail]

To be frank I still don't see the benefits of the huge reservation for the OS.
Sure browsing the PS store now is faster (on PS3 it's painfully slow) but performing elementary tasks such as checking the trophies while the game is running or sending a friend request to a newly met players are not as a fluid or fast.
Paradoxically PS3 handles those tasks better and has less convoluted menus.
Also there's no "exotic" feature right now that can possibly explain why they reserved 3Gb, not to mention that many of the features that are present on PS3 are absent on PS4.

 

[DrJay24]

To be frank I still don't see the benefits of the huge reservation for the OS.
Sure browsing the PS store now is faster (on PS3 it's painfully slow) but performing elementary tasks such as checking the trophies while the game is running or sending a friend request to a newly met players are not as a fluid or fast.
Paradoxically PS3 handles those tasks better and has less convoluted menus.
Also there's no "exotic" feature right now that can possibly explain why they reserved 3Gb, not to mention that many of the features that are present on PS3 are absent on PS4.

I think you answered your own question. They made the reserve and they have not necessarily used it. It is easy to give back memory later, they did it with the PS3. It is impossible to grab more later if they need it. They knew they would have to compete with the XB1 with services and since they doubled their memory at the last moment they just made a comparable reserve so they could adapt to any unforeseen feature they may need.

 

[London Geezer]

They knew they would have to compete with the XB1 with services

Funny how things turn out in the end. PS4 is selling like hot cakes without those features, so, in my fantasy world there's a case here for claiming a bit back since it's clearly not what the market wants?

 

[Globalisateur]

To be frank I still don't see the benefits of the huge reservation for the OS.
Sure browsing the PS store now is faster (on PS3 it's painfully slow) but performing elementary tasks such as checking the trophies while the game is running or sending a friend request to a newly met players are not as a fluid or fast.
Paradoxically PS3 handles those tasks better and has less convoluted menus.
Also there's no "exotic" feature right now that can possibly explain why they reserved 3Gb, not to mention that many of the features that are present on PS3 are absent on PS4.

The huge reservation (~2/3GB) is not only for the OS.

It's for the OS + debugging software tools. I fully expect that they'll allow at least 7GB for games when they'll inevitably release 12GB PS4 devkits.

 

[Gradthrawn]

Funny how things turn out in the end. PS4 is selling like hot cakes without those features, so, in my fantasy world there's a case here for claiming a bit back since it's clearly not what the market wants?

Approaching 4 months after launch I'm not sure its safe to say what the market as a whole wants. First and foremast, it could easily be said we're still very much in the price insensitive, issue tolerant, hopeful of future potential early adopter phase. What that market wants is not necessarily reflective of what the broader, 100 million global, "console buyer" market wants.

 

[London Geezer]

Approaching 4 months after launch I'm not sure its safe to say what the market as a whole wants. First and foremast, it could easily be said we're still very much in the price insensitive, issue tolerant, hopeful of future potential early adopter phase. What that market wants is not necessarily reflective of what the broader, 100 million global, "console buyer" market wants.

I did specify 'in my fantasy world'

Seriously though, what's the extra 512MB/1GB of RAM really going to do to a game using 5GB already? I don't think it would make much of a difference to the overall experience.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I did specify 'in my fantasy world'

Seriously though, what's the extra 512MB/1GB of RAM really going to do to a game using 5GB already? I don't think it would make much of a difference to the overall experience.

Wait until we start getting nextgen GTA games with more complex geometry and more detailed textures and the ability to whiz around the world at high speed. This will put a hell of a strain on the streaming tech. An extra 512mb or 1Gb of RAM could make a massive difference to frame rates and keeping geometry and texture pop-in under control.

 

[Inuhanyou]

I did specify 'in my fantasy world'

Seriously though, what's the extra 512MB/1GB of RAM really going to do to a game using 5GB already? I don't think it would make much of a difference to the overall experience.

Before we say such a thing, we have to think back to the level of optimization games like LoU and GTA5 had to go to on 512 MB of ram for 360 and PS3 on much lower bandwidth constraints. We've gotten tons and tons of stories of devs scraping for even just several MB in order to fit motion capture data into it.

And before that, devs scraped crazy amounts of greatness onto 32mb for PS2 and similar small numbers across the 6th generation.


Having another GB is no joke. I mean while optimizing all your gaming code, if you can fit those non graphics related commands into 1 gb or say 512gb, that's potentially 5 gigs of ram for graphics and other things right there. That's way more than enough for a while. And if the rumors of them eventually increasing the ps4 game reservation to 6gb, that level of optimization increases the chances of more leeway for developers and better games.

I don't think it would be a stretch to say that instead of the GPU power, CPU power or anything like that, its the RAM that will make the biggest difference in this next generation of consoles compared to the last.

 

[London Geezer]

Before we say such a thing, we have to think back to the level of optimization games like LoU and GTA5 had to go to on 512 MB of ram for 360 and PS3 on much lower bandwidth constraints. We've gotten tons and tons of stories of devs scraping for even just several MB in order to fit motion capture data into it.

And before that, devs scraped crazy amounts of greatness onto 32mb for PS2 and similar small numbers across the 6th generation.


Having another GB is no joke. I mean while optimizing all your gaming code, if you can fit those non graphics related commands into 1 gb or say 512gb, that's potentially 5 gigs of ram for graphics and other things right there. That's way more than enough for a while. And if the rumors of them eventually increasing the ps4 game reservation to 6gb, that level of optimization increases the chances of more leeway for developers and better games.

I don't think it would be a stretch to say that instead of the GPU power, CPU power or anything like that, its the RAM that will make the biggest difference in this next generation of consoles compared to the last.

Well, in terms of comparing to older generations, I was just thinking the same but my train of thought was that an extra 512MB of Ram would be an extra 10% available for games.

Which would be as if PS2 had an extra 3MB and PS3 an extra 51MB.

My point is that in both cases, I'm sure the devs would be happy for the extra resources. But on our side, we wouldn't see a hell of a difference from MGS2 running on a PS2 with 35MB RAM, or TLOU on a PS3 with around 600MB RAM.

But as always I stand to be corrected.

 

[Npl]

512MB would be >= 5 seconds that you dont need to stream from HDD/Bluray (just think of restarting checkpoints) or could be some 10 thousands of persistent object states.

Its alot of those little bits, which are nice to have :smile:

 

[SedentaryJourney]

Well, in terms of comparing to older generations, I was just thinking the same but my train of thought was that an extra 512MB of Ram would be an extra 10% available for games.

Which would be as if PS2 had an extra 3MB and PS3 an extra 51MB.

My point is that in both cases, I'm sure the devs would be happy for the extra resources. But on our side, we wouldn't see a hell of a difference from MGS2 running on a PS2 with 35MB RAM, or TLOU on a PS3 with around 600MB RAM.

But as always I stand to be corrected.

On PS3 you had games like Crysis 2 and 3 running at lower resolutions vs. the 360 so they could claw back 14mb. I'm pretty sure an extra 51mb on PS3 would have made a noticeable difference on the user side, as would an extra 3mb of VRAM on PS2.

I do agree that on PS4 this seems to matter less since we haven't heard anything about memory being a limiting factor. Still early days though.

 

[Sander]

.....

I don't think it would be a stretch to say that instead of the GPU power, CPU power or anything like that, its the RAM that will make the biggest difference in this next generation of consoles compared to the last.

How would you compare PS4 to a PS3 pumped with 8GB of GDDR5?
I do believe PS3 would do the magic! Cell is fantastic.

 

[Grall]

8GB GDDR3 in PS3 would be a complete waste. The GPU in PS3 is ancient and slow in conjunction to the hardware just being old and wonky in general, doesn't matter how much RAM you couple to that old system, you'd bottleneck elsewhere than the RAM in very short order.

 

[Boxercide]

8GB GDDR3 in PS3 would be a complete waste. The GPU in PS3 is ancient and slow in conjunction to the hardware just being old and wonky in general, doesn't matter how much RAM you couple to that old system, you'd bottleneck elsewhere than the RAM in very short order.

I've wondered what more RAM would have done for the previous gen. Like what if the PS3 had 512 VRAM and 256 system. Or if each system had 1 GB, though I wonder how Sony would have split it. 768/256? 512/512?

 

[Alucardx23]

I've wondered what more RAM would have done for the previous gen. Like what if the PS3 had 512 VRAM and 256 system. Or if each system had 1 GB, though I wonder how Sony would have split it. 768/256? 512/512?

8GB could have been a waste for the PS3, but it is clear that more memory would have been used to do more. Check out these quotes from Crytek principle graphics engineer.

"The SPUs do indeed allow for easing the workload for the RSX. We decided not to go too crazy in this direction as it requires render targets and assets to reside in main memory. We are able to run skinning for example on SPUs as well, but we could not afford the additional memory required in the end," Glück explains.

"It is possible to use the SPUs to support deferred shading, run post-process effects and do triangle culling. But again, it all requires main memory we did not have as our levels are fairly large compared to other games and our SPUs were in fact pretty loaded with particles, animations, physics, low-level rendering and culling already."

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-the-making-of-crysis-2?page=2

 

[Rangers]

Yes, Crytek said RAM always ends up being the worst performance limiter later in any consoles life...they were the guys that originally called for 8+GB in next gen back when it sounded crazy.

Hah, I still remember those days. Guys like Alstrong implied anything more than 2GB was unlikely

Offhand I think PS3/360 would have benefited well up to maybe 2GB. 1GB at the very very least would have helped.

That's the relative plus of these next-gen consoles I guess. The GPU's are clearly mid-low, but the RAM is plentiful.

 

[Inuhanyou]

I think we just need to look back at 360 and PS3 to see what happened and why things were prioritized for next gen. The very first thing that ended up showing the limitations of the hardware, is the much lower resolution textures on 360 and PS3 in comparison to PC ports, as well as the hits to IQ.

Both of these immediate things can be solved with more memory and more memory bandwidth, of which both PS4 and Xbox one have in spades over the 7th generation.

Hence why i believe that it wasn't really necessary to have that much of a GPU increase or even a CPU increase really, as long as the ram and bandwidth was there. Hence why the lower powered CPU and midrange GPU never bothered me for PS4 really....

Sony could have cut out 2 CU's and stripped the PS4's GPU down below a 7850 for a respectable 1.62 tflops without having really changed anything from right now....the main critical element is that easy to use unified memory set up and the large amount of ram and bandwidth involved. Cerny said that was the number one request of developers above anything else in the unit by far.

 

[pMax]

An extra 512mb or 1Gb of RAM could make a massive difference to frame rates and keeping geometry and texture pop-in under control.

Mah, PRT should heavily reduce the issue way more than having GBs of additional RAM.
If you can load the texture chunk from the disk on demand in a "nearly" transparent way -just some event management on PRT- that's way more important to keep your effective texture resolution 'very high'.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Mah, PRT should heavily reduce the issue way more than having GBs of additional RAM.

The PS4 already has gigabytes of RAM. So you use use the RAM, or you don't and employ PRT, having sliced all your textures up into 64k tiles. Awesome.

PRT may have been a prerequisite had PS4 shipped with the previous 4Gb RAM target but it didn't.

 

[hesido]

Even though PS4 has gigs of mem, what it doesn't have is 500MB/sec drive, so PRT could help reduce loading times, no?