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

[Deleted member 11852]

What could Sony possibly do with the machine in the future that could warrant 2Gb of RAM???

You people are crazy..... These are consoles and you're talking of OS memory requirements higher then a PC with no where near the functionality.

A web browser alone can eat through hundreds of megabytes of RAM and when you throw in things like YouTube, it gets worse.

It depends how frictionless Sony want the UI to be. Microsoft, whether you like their direction or not, showed a very slick interface a few weeks back and that kind of rapid response is something that is only possible with a crazy amount of software optimisation or a large amount of RAM to keep everything persistent. If Sony want to let you switch quickly (as in near instantly) between the PlayStation Store, Blu-ray playback, Netflix, a web browser and whatever else they have yet to show, they'll need a fair bit of RAM.

Even navigating around today's PS Store, when you first load it up the top level stuff takes a while to load in and if you navigate around it a bit, then go back to the top level menu, it loads it all in again! It needs RAM and lots of it.

And, like I said above, who knows what the might want/need to add to the OS in three years time. They don't want to restrict themselves by not being able to add something of value that Xbox One manages with ease and PS4 does not.

 

[Xenus]

Those aren't relevant. The context in both the tweets I posted are self-evident and built into the messages themselves in a fully self-contained manner. The first establishes that they aim to hit 5GB for RAM usage...the second establishes that they expect PS4 to have less than their target RAM usage and will thus have to use some streaming. Thus, he is effectively suggesting there is a cap at 5GB max available for games.

Someone else tried to claim he pushed back against that but when someone on twitter asked him about 1GB for PS4 OS reservations Blow immediately distanced himself from the question, implying the question's assert was incorrect.

Couple all of that with what Sony reportedly told devs while making the move to 8GB (they were trying to match MS) and you see the evidence pointing towards both being 5GB/3GB RAM configurations. Sony was either stuck at 3GB for gaming and 1GB for OS (both severe disadvantages for them) or they make the jump to 5GB and 3GB to be on par. They NEED flexibility in their OS ambitions over the next decade to compete with MS.

That's not what they imply at all. All that is shown in their quotes is they currently using 5GB's and the team thinks they can use more. Saying they are capped at 5GB's out of that is nothing more then confirmation bias. It could be 1-# or anything inbetween but getting that it's anything for those tweets is tenious at best.

 

[patsu]

A web browser alone can eat through hundreds of megabytes of RAM and when you throw in things like YouTube, it gets worse.

It depends how frictionless Sony want the UI to be. Microsoft, whether you like their direction or not, showed a very slick interface a few weeks back and that kind of rapid response is something that is only possible with a crazy amount of software optimisation or a large amount of RAM to keep everything persistent. If Sony want to let you switch quickly (as in near instantly) between the PlayStation Store, Blu-ray playback, Netflix, a web browser and whatever else they have yet to show, they'll need a fair bit of RAM.

Even navigating around today's PS Store, when you first load it up the top level stuff takes a while to load in and if you navigate around it a bit, then go back to the top level menu, it loads it all in again! It needs RAM and lots of it.

And, like I said above, who knows what the might want/need to add to the OS in three years time. They don't want to restrict themselves by not being able to add something of value that Xbox One manages with ease and PS4 does not.

YouTube should not use more memory than NetFlix. If NetFlix can run on so many small devices, so can YouTube. From Arwin's description, it sounds more like Vita's YouTube app has a limitation/bug playing large file. Streaming video should not use up a lot of disk space. Otherwise it would be called progressive download video.

 

[hesido]

Does anyone think Sony might use 500GB/sec flash ssd's (8GB or 16GB) to keep the OS snappy, very fast bootup, and reserve some of it for streaming critical game data maybe? The super-slims have flash memories, but they are not being utilized for this, but if PS4 has this as a standard feature with support in OS, devs could really make good use of it IMHO.

If they have an flash SSD as standard and keep the OS stuff there, it would allow easier HD upgrade, lower power requirement at networked standby, very fast swap memory space for future-proofing for additional OS functions and Web browsing (which doesn't work in a controlled environment and very variable memory footprints), and like I mentioned, even some portions of it could be used for faster data streaming for games.

 

[temesgen]

YouTube should not use more memory than NetFlix. If NetFlix can run on so many small devices, so can YouTube. From Arwin's description, it sounds more like Vita's YouTube app has a limitation/bug playing large file. Streaming video should not use up a lot of disk space. Otherwise it would be called progressive download video.

I agree with you and further Vita lacks a hard drive so its kinda silly to be using any comparisons based on that fact alone.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

YouTube should not use more memory than NetFlix. If NetFlix can run on so many small devices, so can YouTube. From Arwin's description, it sounds more like Vita's YouTube app has a limitation/bug playing large file. Streaming video should not use up a lot of disk space. Otherwise it would be called progressive download video.

I don't use YouTube on the Vita but I do on my iPad 3 and the resource resources Safari uses increase by around 60-107mb when YouTube videos are streaming in any tab in the browser. And I'm bettering, that Apple being heavily invested in webkit development, likely have a much more optimised mobile browser that whatever Sony are putting into the PS4.

Now Sony may provide a dedicated YouTube app which is more optimised but since they've chosen Ustream as their streaming partner and not YouTube, that may be less likely. Why build an app if the browser can do the job.

 

[patsu]

The resource increment should not scale linearly with the length of the video. All the file segments are cached on disk unless the device is out of space. At any one time, there should only be 2 segments in memory (The current and next segments). This is assuming HTTP Live Streaming.

The iOS YouTube app should also use less resources since it doesn't need WebKit.

The Vita YouTube should be able to remove old segments when its card is full.

 

[Mianca]

Microsoft aims to run at least two operation systems (one of which is based upon bloated Windows kernel) simultaneously on Xbox One.

There's no way devs won't end up having more usable RAM on PS4.

 

[itsmydamnation]

when it comes to this whole O/S memory foot print, people hear are on crack. people expect to need more then 1 gb of ram for BACKGROUND tasks!?!?!?!?!!!?!!@@. a web browser/etc state can be quickly moved to disk when a game is started. The only thing that need to consume memory while a game is running are things you want to interact with while playing a game .would anyone want more then a steam style interface, sure have more features but you really only want one "page" of chooses, you dont have a mouse afterall.

 

[scf]

The witness wasn't announced for x1, but most probably it's a multiplatform title and will be released for x1 too. In such case Blow has to being limited by 5GB limit. So he has a choice to make the game "universal" for x1/ps4 and use up to 5GB, or follow own platform RAM limits in two versions. Though the second has no sense imho. If he goes universal way it could be an explanation of his tweets about 5GB usage.

 

[scf]

As to OS footprints I think it could be solved without taking significant amount of RAM from games but providing rich features still. For example you are playing a game, then switch to browser. The game goes into pause mode. Next your browser usage lead to high RAM requirement which is higher than reserved OS amount. In that case just a part of the game RAM could be suspended to storage (some 200MB won't take long to write) and become available for browser. When you return to the game all goes the same but vice versa, or browser data is just flushed away and if you go back again it will reload the page.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Has everyone currently discussing this really missed the three previous conversations on the matter of OS footprints and what they can be used for?

 

[Deleted member 11852]

The resource increment should not scale linearly with the length of the video. All the file segments are cached on disk unless the device is out of space. At any one time, there should only be 2 segments in memory (The current and next segments). This is assuming HTTP Live Streaming.

The iOS YouTube app should also use less resources since it doesn't need WebKit

The length of the video shouldn't make a difference, the resolution does as does the type of the connection - Safari appears to buffer more on certain types of connection or if it determines that the connection is poor. This isn't documented but is observable. AFAIK there is no such API for getting this information in iOS, so it's doing something arbitrary or using a close function taking I/O across the platform as a whole. But back to the point, I'd like think that the PS4 would likewise be smart about buffering streams, depending on what else is going on, e.g. HDD activity, network activity.

Also, I'm not using the iOS YouTube app. Most of the videos I watch are those on the webpages of sites like EuroGamer or C&VG, which appear inline on the webpage. I'm not using the Vita for YouTube and I didn't bring it up, why do people keep mentioning this?

 

[DJ12]

1) His game wants to use more than 5gb at the moment
2) He wants to avoid streaming and just load everything into ram
3) He can't do 2) because he can't fit it all into PS4 at once so he needs to stream

That's how I read it.

or his game does use more than 5gb and he was making a comparison to xbox like he's been doing ever since he jumped out of ms's bed and into sony's.

'Not even his small team can make a game using less than 5gb to fit xbox one' is the message I believe. Obviously theu could but he's just out to make ms look bad at every opportunity lately.

 

[Aeoniss]

or his game does use more than 5gb and he was making a comparison to xbox like he's been doing ever since he jumped out of ms's bed and into sony's.

'Not even his small team can make a game using less than 5gb to fit xbox one' is the message I believe. Obviously theu could but he's just out to make ms look bad at every opportunity lately.

In his case, why is that exactly?

Don't get me wrong, MS has been going out of their way to piss off gamers\consumers recently imo. PR nightmare. But what's the deal with Blow?

Is there some history between the two of them I'm unaware of?

 

[DJ12]

Something about the barriers ms put up in front of independent developers I believe. I don't remeber his entire issue but it's on twitter, neogaf and here you've just got to read between the lines a bit.

 

[scf]

Just curious, does ps4 record gameplay as exactly what you see on screen, or as direct game stream. As example will a trophy notification, or chat message get into recording or not?

 

[DJ12]

Don't think its been mentioned.

Hope it's without though.

 

[Aeoniss]

Just curious, does ps4 record gameplay as exactly what you see on screen, or as direct game stream. As example will a trophy notification, or chat message get into recording or not?

That's a damn good question.

 

[KongRudi]

when it comes to this whole O/S memory foot print, people hear are on crack. people expect to need more then 1 gb of ram for BACKGROUND tasks!?!?!?!?!!!?!!@@. a web browser/etc state can be quickly moved to disk when a game is started. The only thing that need to consume memory while a game is running are things you want to interact with while playing a game .would anyone want more then a steam style interface, sure have more features but you really only want one "page" of chooses, you dont have a mouse afterall.

I think the share-functionality would eat abit of memory.
Atleast if it records your gameplay all the time, so you more easily can share the cool stuff after your latest session, even if you didn't know cool stuff were going to happen. :-/