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

[Gradthrawn]

How can they be using 4.6Gb of RAM when they knew NOTHING about the machine having 8Gb prior to the announcement at the event?

Good question. It may very well be the case that whether the PS4 was going to have 8 GB or 4, the demo would use 4.6 because they haven't finished their memory optimization yet (they mention lack of memory optimization a couple of times in the slides). Although I would be thoroughly surprised if they really had no idea before the reveal considering Edge got wind of it a week before the announcement. Seems like GG would be one of the first to know that's what SCE was aiming for, and one of the first to know when it was finalized. Time spent on these public demo builds run all the way up to the last minute from what I've heard.

 

[Kb-Smoker]

How can they be using 4.6Gb of RAM when they knew NOTHING about the machine having 8Gb prior to the announcement at the event?

well its running on a dev kit.

Its does seem like they were targeting 4GB. But again it safe to assume 5GB at this point and 6 out of 7/8 cores for games

 

[dagamer]

How can they be using 4.6Gb of RAM when they knew NOTHING about the machine having 8Gb prior to the announcement at the event?

Which developers are you talking about? Guerilla Games certainly did, but third parties probably didn't.

 

[patsu]

Because in reality they did.

If Edge knew about it, do you really believe a first party dev, and possibly one of the first party devs that actually had a hand in the design of PS4 really didn't know about it?

According to one of the first party devs, they had a hunch Sony may switch to 8GB but nothing was confirmed until the announcement. They were still targeting 4GB.

Was (still am) completely swarmed today. What's this 3 OSes in one thing in Xbox One ? >_<
Is that why they need 3GB for OS ? I sure hope Sony don't go there if true. 1GB is enough.

That Chinese dude who spoke about 5GB reserved for game also mentioned that the heap is not counted in this 5GB (if his description is accurate).

 

[DJ12]

I am sorry patsu but that is not true. If a third party dev told edge before the reveal first parties would've known. They can say they didn't know all they want but its completely unbelievable. Unless it was a new employee in the marketting department that wasnt currently in the need to know group.

 

[patsu]

I am sorry patsu but that is not true. If a third party dev told edge before the reveal first parties would've known. They can say they didn't know all they want but its completely unbelievable. Unless it was a new employee in the marketting department that wasnt currently in the need to know group.

Where is that third party post ?

 

[Gradthrawn]

Was (still am) completely swarmed today. What's this 3 OSes in one thing in Xbox One ? >_<
Is that why they need 3GB for OS ? I sure hope Sony don't go there if true. 1GB is enough.

Xbox One runs a in-house hypervisor (that's the base OS). The hypervisor then runs 2 VMs actively on top of it. One VM is what they referred to as the App OS. It's essentially the console OS as we currently now it. Its starts at boot and runs the various media apps that enable interoperability like the TV guide (for the HDMI in port), sport stats, etc. It is always running. The second OS is the Game OS. According to interference's sources (which have been pretty accurate in this regards), each game is its only self contained VM that has its own game OS. So, starting a game essentially launches a new VM. Each OS (Game and App) has its own pool of "guaranteed" resources. Each OS has its own display plane, so switching between them is just a matter of the console switching which plane is on top. Very interesting stuff. This is extremely OT, though, so I suggest you check out Wired's article and maybe GI's (haven't read theirs yet).

 

[patsu]

I see. It's different from Sony's prefer-closer-to-metal approach. It sounds very heavy weight.

 

[DJ12]

Where is that third party post ?

I assume it was a third party as first party wouldn't leak anything. Either way its not critical to my point. Someobe told edge so guerrila knew

 

[patsu]

I assume it was a third party as first party wouldn't leak anything. Either way its not critical to my point. Someobe told edge so guerrila knew

If someone else told Edge, then it's possible that GG don't know too. The source could be supply chain folks, or just speculating. What else did the dude say ?

 

[DJ12]

That sony told him/her they were trying to get 8gb in there. If I wasnt on my phone I'd give you the link.

It's inconceivable gg didn't know being their technical prowess and standing within sony.

 

[patsu]

It is possible that GG's higher management may know more, but it's not uncommon for engineers to not know the full picture. Those guys were/are busy porting PS3 components to PS4, plus creating their own tools to run on the devkit.

If the devkits were for 4GB, they won't be able to develop for a 8GB console anyway. Send the link when you're home ! ^_^

 

[ERP]

Does it matter, if they did know they certainly didn't have a lot of forewarning.
And If I were targeting a demo I knew would run on a devkit 8 or more months before I was due to ship, I can't say I'd spend a lot of time optimizing the memory usage.

 

[Gradthrawn]

patsu I'm pretty sure you've seen the article in question. It was probably one of the most debated articles due to it claiming 8 GB of GDDR5 before the reveal.

We have confirmed with sources that recently leaked tech specs are accurate. Though Durango devkits offer 8GB of DDR3 RAM, compared to Orbis’s 4GB, Sony’s GDDR5 solution is capable of moving data at 176 gigabytes per second, which should eliminate the sort of bottlenecks that hampered PS3 game performance. Importantly, we’ve learned that Sony has told developers that it is pushing for the final PS4 RAM to match up to Microsoft’s 8GB.

 

[patsu]

Ah, but during active development, a lot of things will be "shooting for", "targeting", "ETA", "best effort", "just 2 more weeks", "need it yesterday" and "asap". The developers can't believe in all of them. They will look at the timeline and their talent pool, then make a "reasonable" mad dash for it. In this time period, I assume their tools suck *ss. So they have to be really careful about it.

In my experience, after a while, you forget about what's in the future, and focus on the pressing issues on-hand.

 

[Aeoniss]

What's the (rumored) throughput for the PS4 GPU?

2 tri/clock * 800 MHz = 1.6 Gtri/sec

Is what I've heard quoted elsewhere, I don't remember reading this on here though.

 

[Wynix]

Does it matter, if they did know they certainly didn't have a lot of forewarning.
And If I were targeting a demo I knew would run on a devkit 8 or more months before I was due to ship, I can't say I'd spend a lot of time optimizing the memory usage.

Yeah, the way i see it is that 8GB was a 'maybe' and only really late was that changed to a 'yes' so the developers would of had to play safe and stick to 4GB targets.
After all 4Gb GDDR5 has pretty much only just become available, even Nvidias newest and most expensive cards won't be using them(at launch).

 

[babcat]

What's the (rumored) throughput for the PS4 GPU?

2 tri/clock * 800 MHz = 1.6 Gtri/sec

Is what I've heard quoted elsewhere, I don't remember reading this on here though.

I would like to learn, realistically, how many millions of polygons the PS4 can produce.

 

[ERP]

I would like to learn, realistically, how many millions of polygons the PS4 can produce.

You first have to define polygon.
There are a lot of things that restrict the peak number, number of inputs, number of interpolators, vertex shader complexity, vertex cache hit rate, number of pixels, how those pixels align with quads, pixel shader complexity etc etc etc.

So unfortunately the answer is it depends.

 

[babcat]

You first have to define polygon.
There are a lot of things that restrict the peak number, number of inputs, number of interpolators, vertex shader complexity, vertex cache hit rate, number of pixels, how those pixels align with quads, pixel shader complexity etc etc etc.

So unfortunately the answer is it depends.

What if you took typical figures for inputs, interpolators, vertex shaders, cache hit rate, etc? I mean, there is no way the Ps4 can produce 1.6 billion polygons per second. But would a hundred million polygons be realistic?