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

[Cjail]

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. :-/

Doesn't PS4 have dedicated hardware that does that?!

 

[scf]

Doesn't PS4 have dedicated hardware that does that?!

Hardware - yes, but you need to store encoded stream somewhere

 

[Cjail]

Ah in that sense!
Sorry I misread what he said completely, silly me

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Hardware - yes, but you need to store encoded stream somewhere

8 megabit video would need 1 MB/s, 900 MBs for 15 minutes. So a constant 1 GB buffer for cyclical recording is certainly a possible consumer of RAM. Although if using the HD, writing only 1 MB/s, you could get away with using a few MBs working space and cache which would also be more robust, and I expect the HDD to be used for recording.

I do hope that can be disabled. I'd rather save HDD wear and tear than record endless hours of video I have no interest in sharing!

 

[Trawler]

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

Off topic but the bloated kernel for Windows 7 32-bit weighs in at a hefty 11 Mb.

I expect both machines dashboards will take a chunk of RAM from the OS partition, the remainder will be available to applications that can be swapped/snapped to in game.

 

[scf]

8 megabit video would need 1 MB/s, 900 MBs for 15 minutes. So a constant 1 GB buffer for cyclical recording is certainly a possible consumer of RAM. Although if using the HD, writing only 1 MB/s, you could get away with using a few MBs working space and cache which would also be more robust, and I expect the HDD to be used for recording.

I do hope that can be disabled. I'd rather save HDD wear and tear than record endless hours of video I have no interest in sharing!

Good point. So RAM storage would help with HDD wear but will cut off about 1GB of mem. Interesting what decision sony have taken.

 

[MarkoIt]

At this point there is little sense for Sony to keep the OS requirement tight: they can take 2 GB, and watch what MS will do with their 3.

You can always reduce the OS footprint, but never increase it.

 

[Grall]

You can always reduce the OS footprint, but never increase it.

Sure you can increase it, you just make it so new features are only available for new games, not older.

 

[patsu]

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?

HTTP Live Streaming is adaptive. You specify the variable bitrate in the source file. Buffering is calculated as a function of network speed and resolution. Slower speed will use lower bitrate segments. The video tag in WebKit is indeed smart about buffering and caching. NetFlix should be similar and it runs in assorted "weak" devices.

I brought up Vita YouTube app because Arwin mentioned that it's not smart about caching. A long video may overflow the flash memory.

 

[patsu]

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.

There are 2 separate questions:
* how much resources does the OS take ?
* how much can a game use ?

If the OS takes 1GB, the game can be limited to 5GB for other reasons, like another app is running in the background in RemotePlay mode or vice versa.

 

[DJ12]

I hope sony are listening. Screw reserved memory for apps. Give us the resources for gaming as you originally promised!!!

I promise you I will never moan that I cannot stream a movie on lovefilm while playing a game.

 

[DrJay24]

I hope sony are listening. Screw reserved memory for apps. Give us the resources for gaming as you originally promised!!!

I promise you I will never moan that I cannot stream a movie on lovefilm while playing a game.

I think you want the ability to pause a game, open a browser or stream a movie. People want an end to endlessly having to launch the same game to pick up whee they left off. Suspending a game will the best feature this next gen.

 

[upnorthsox]

I think you want the ability to pause a game, open a browser or stream a movie. People want an end to endlessly having to launch the same game to pick up whee they left off. Suspending a game will the best feature this next gen.

Put that doesn't mean you should be able to keep 15 browser tabs open without consequence.

 

[DJ12]

I think you want the ability to pause a game, open a browser or stream a movie. People want an end to endlessly having to launch the same game to pick up whee they left off. Suspending a game will the best feature this next gen.

Personally I don't care about that. I have never paused my game to search the net and certainly not to watch a movie. Thats what my smart phone and saving is for.

 

[sebbbi]

Put that doesn't mean you should be able to keep 15 browser tabs open without consequence.

My Chrome has currently 5 tabs open, and uses 700 MB of memory. A browser that cannot keep at least 5 tabs open is useless. A good browser needs at least one GB of memory at 1080p to operate smoothly (when browsing rich multimedia web sites).

It would be really good if the browser could be fully integrated to the console experience. Games could have internal links to community forums, youtube video feeds (perfect for user created content, clans/teams, tournament videos, etc), tips/tricks/tutorials/walkthough sites, etc, etc. It's a pain to copy these addresses manually from your TV screen to your iPad touch screen (typing addresses with a touch screen is not as good as clicking a direct link).

You have to remember that Sony and Microsoft are no longer only competing against each other in the living room. Apple and Google both have plans to be there too. It could be quite an embarrassing story, if the console companies lost the battle, just by allocating a few bytes too little memory to run a good browser and a good application ecosystem. A lot of things have happened in the last 7 years (current gen console life time). A lot of things will happen during the next generation console life cycle. Don't reserve enough memory and you might be screwed in the long run.

 

[patsu]

It depends on the input mechanism. When playing Ico and Persona, I looked up the web for solutions in various places. If using iPad is more convenient, I access the walkthrough or YouTube video there. If it's more convenient to do it on the TV, I may not mind using the PS4.

 

[Arwin]

My Chrome has currently 5 tabs open, and uses 700 MB of memory. A browser that cannot keep at least 5 tabs open is useless. A good browser needs at least one GB of memory at 1080p to operate smoothly (when browsing rich multimedia web sites).

It would be really good if the browser could be fully integrated to the console experience. Games could have internal links to community forums, youtube video feeds (perfect for user created content, clans/teams, tournament videos, etc), tips/tricks/tutorials/walkthough sites, etc, etc. It's a pain to copy these addresses manually from your TV screen to your iPad touch screen (typing addresses with a touch screen is not as good as clicking a direct link).

You have to remember that Sony and Microsoft are no longer only competing against each other in the living room. Apple and Google both have plans to be there too. It could be quite an embarrassing story, if the console companies lost the battle, just by allocating a few bytes too little memory to run a good browser and a good application ecosystem. A lot of things have happened in the last 7 years (current gen console life time). A lot of things will happen during the next generation console life cycle. Don't reserve enough memory and you might be screwed in the long run.

Yeah, but my iPad 3 has 1GB in total, and is fine for all of these things, suspending and reloading stuff when needed. It has a higher native res too. Sure, when supporting 4k the consoles need 25% extra, but if Sony is about games first, then give games priority in the memory allocation ...

 

[patsu]

Competing with Apple and Google is fine and all, but I think we may gain more by figuring out whether and how to integrate browser technologies in game, and vice versa -- instead of or in addition to just launching a separate browser.

 

[upnorthsox]

My Chrome has currently 5 tabs open, and uses 700 MB of memory. A browser that cannot keep at least 5 tabs open is useless. A good browser needs at least one GB of memory at 1080p to operate smoothly (when browsing rich multimedia web sites).

It would be really good if the browser could be fully integrated to the console experience. Games could have internal links to community forums, youtube video feeds (perfect for user created content, clans/teams, tournament videos, etc), tips/tricks/tutorials/walkthough sites, etc, etc. It's a pain to copy these addresses manually from your TV screen to your iPad touch screen (typing addresses with a touch screen is not as good as clicking a direct link).

You have to remember that Sony and Microsoft are no longer only competing against each other in the living room. Apple and Google both have plans to be there too. It could be quite an embarrassing story, if the console companies lost the battle, just by allocating a few bytes too little memory to run a good browser and a good application ecosystem. A lot of things have happened in the last 7 years (current gen console life time). A lot of things will happen during the next generation console life cycle. Don't reserve enough memory and you might be screwed in the long run.

Memory reserve for PS4 only relates to what is actively in memory while actively haing a game running. It doesn't stop you from having 15 tabs open, it's that if you do keep 15 tabs open then you might have to wait on some of those to come back from virtual memory. If you have something that going to take up 1GB or 1.5GB or whatever Sony reserves and needs immediate response from it then maybe you should consider closing out of the game and then you'd have 8GB of memory to use for it.

 

[astrograd]

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.

No. The tweet says the game wants to use 5GB. It also says they don't think it fits on PS4. You guys are gonna be disappointed I think.