PlayStation 4 (codename Orbis) technical hardware investigation (news and rumours)
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I don't understand why speed would need to be throttled. HDD performance can't be relied upon for timings as you don't know what background access the OS will be making, so it's not like a game can assume loading some data is going to take precisely 1.3 ms and time access based on that. Even more, you don't know where on the platter the game data is, and whether it'll be accessed faster or slower. HDD performance is too erratic. HDD access by games must be very tolerant and I can't see how faster access could be a problem. As I say, we've already seen replacement drives run faster, both HDDs and SSDs.
The only 'need' for throttling would be the limits imposed by a slow input bus.
The only 'need' for throttling would be the limits imposed by a slow input bus.
Sony pushed for user-replaceable hard drives, which probably forced them to create "baseline speed" that will happen no matter if user added very fast or very slow hard drive [old hard drive from very old laptop for example]. So they went with conservative speeds, but speeds that can be 100% guaranteed so that devs will not have to worry about variable performance.
That's my take on it.
So why do SSD's provide improvements beyond the base spec?
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-ps4-hard-drive-upgrade-guide
Not only faster loading times, but also some improvements in game with texture loading. PS3 showed even better improvements in some cases with an SSD. Surely that's evidence enough that HDD performance is flexibly relied upon and needn't be limited to maintain a base spec? If it is/was being capped to the base HDD performance, there ought to be no difference between faster and slower drives.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-ps4-hard-drive-upgrade-guide
Not only faster loading times, but also some improvements in game with texture loading. PS3 showed even better improvements in some cases with an SSD. Surely that's evidence enough that HDD performance is flexibly relied upon and needn't be limited to maintain a base spec? If it is/was being capped to the base HDD performance, there ought to be no difference between faster and slower drives.
But don't they have Move Engines to handle that?
D
Deleted member 11852
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I don't believe the Move engines in Xbox One have any decryption capability - at least I've not read evidence that they do. The PS4 has a hardware block that does some of the equivalent functions of Xbox's Move engines, including hardware zlib compression and decompression, but decryption on both consoles is likely using the AES instruction set of Jaguar itself and it just part of the filesystem code.
Generally you wouldn't want to bake security functionality in hardware, not unless the hardware is very programmable and can be changed entirely in future firmware/OS updates and I think it unlikely (from what I know of the costs of such hardware) that either console has this hardware onboard.
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DF/NX need to do an updated version with newer games...maybe target games that have issues (Fallout 4 would be a good start) and see how much SSDs help
Michellstar
Regular
they did, at least with the One version
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/d...d-drives-boost-xbox-one-fallout-4-performance
Metal_Spirit
Regular
There is more on Neogaf.
Quoting:
1. FMOD, Eurogamer's source(Which might be FMOD) and lherre(thanks for info as always) all point to it not being completely unlocked. Although they are all third party devs.
2. Zoetis says it's completely unlocked for first party devs atm and says this has been the case for about 2 months which lines about with what lherre said (2-3 months).
So hard to say atm.
Quoting:
1. FMOD, Eurogamer's source(Which might be FMOD) and lherre(thanks for info as always) all point to it not being completely unlocked. Although they are all third party devs.
2. Zoetis says it's completely unlocked for first party devs atm and says this has been the case for about 2 months which lines about with what lherre said (2-3 months).
So hard to say atm.
djskribbles
Legend
Zoetis also said one poster was correct in assuming that they're probably making it available for first-party only at the moment for testing before they make it fully available for all. I'll try to find the post.
edit: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=187303017&postcount=582
edit: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=187303017&postcount=582
Fully unlocked 7th door beta tested in the future by your favorite dog.
Why would they partially unlock it for 3rd parties but fully for 1st parties? That's a bit... discriminatory. Just unlock the bloody thing and move on!
Testing for stability/perf with first party i would guess? Kinda like beta testing.
D
Deleted member 11852
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I can understand while Sony might want to restrict access to recently reserved resources until it's been extensively tested but this does give Sony first party devs a technical advantage in what is otherwise a free(ish) competetive market which is unfair in my view.
there may be additional complexities to using the 7th core that requires additional support and back and forth working with Sony engineers. It would be some time until they worked out most kinks before opening it up to 3rd party and freely supporting it.
I don't think they are purposefully giving advantages to 1st party, it's just due process imo.
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