Predict: The Next Generation Console Tech

[fehu]

even my cheap notebook gpu has 1GB of ram! (ddr3)
by 2012 developers will be targeting again pc for highbudget games, because ps3 and 360 will not able to run it, and at that point there'll be gpu with 2GB or more even on the middle end (there's a thread about the increasing use of gpu memory in modern games)

and what about in 2016? will be the year in wich you can buy a netbook to play better game than console?
I know that there's a technical problem to go upper than 2GB, but in some way they have to solve it

 

[ShadowRunner]

What sort of things are held in main RAM and how much is this likely to bloat next gen? Given 2GB of unified RAM what sort of split would we likely see for games between main and video RAM?

 

[liolio]

even my cheap notebook gpu has 1GB of ram! (ddr3)
by 2012 developers will be targeting again pc for highbudget games, because ps3 and 360 will not able to run it, and at that point there'll be gpu with 2GB or more even on the middle end (there's a thread about the increasing use of gpu memory in modern games)

and what about in 2016? will be the year in wich you can buy a netbook to play better game than console?
I know that there's a technical problem to go upper than 2GB, but in some way they have to solve it

Won't GPUs manufacturers face the same issue as consoles manufacturers in regard to the RAM amount?
Supposedly GDDR6 and bigger memory chips won't make it in time for next gen.

 

[wco81]

Netbooks are $300 and up, which is in the higher range of what consoles are priced at.

Which netbook comes with a dedicated 1 GB of GPU RAM? Not a $300 one.

 

[fehu]

yes, but gpu manufacturers can use 256bit bus and pack double the amount, and max a year later a middlerange gpu alone will pack more memory than the entire pool of a console
it's not an ideal situation, and will damage the ultimateness halo that sells console

 

[fehu]

Netbooks are $300 and up, which is in the higher range of what consoles are priced at.

Which netbook comes with a dedicated 1 GB of GPU RAM? Not a $300 one.

it was an exageration, but we are talking about 2012 or 2016 netbook

 

[lefizz]

Note to Shifty

If you had ever done compositing on HD footage or rendering extremely complicated CG work (most high end is these days) you would realize there are lots of pretty normal situations where the 4gig limit is a huge issue for a lot of people. I was upgrading machines to win 64 years and years ago in my old company and every box had 6-10 gig in it.

Photos, office and playing call of duty are a long way from the limit of what a lot of people use there PCs for.

Same of course applies to the number of core you can get in each box.

 

[eastmen]

Which begs the question...

Quote:
Considering its 2009 and I just bought my gf 12 gigs of ram

...what the heck is she wanting with 12 GBs RAM?? Most oflk, me included, don't fill a gig even editing large photos, and if it weren't for OS bloat, 1 GB would be serviceable. I've used this 1GB PC for 5 years now without hitting RAM limits except on some rare occassions, with large images and lots of layers. Are you installing entire DVD games to RAM or something??
]

Lots of video editing.

Its actually a really nice set up . She has 2 60 gig ssd's raided and a 120 gig for projects she is working on and then 2 2 TB drives and 2 1TB external drives.

I wish my system was that good .

 

[archangelmorph]

What sort of things are held in main RAM and how much is this likely to bloat next gen? Given 2GB of unified RAM what sort of split would we likely see for games between main and video RAM?

Depends on lots & lots of factors.. Usually you'd see things like your frame buffers, textures, render targets, display lists etc living in VRAM but depending on the specifics of the CPU/GPU access patterns, memory pool bandwidths & your own game engine setup then alot of this stuff may get juggled around a fair bit.. Like having some render targets in system RAM on PS3 so that the SPUs can do lots of post processing etc..

Overall though I'd say the least area of bloat next-gen will be game code, scripts etc however you'll still need lots of main ram for vertex/index buffers, game objects, physics objects, collision data etc..

 

[Shifty Geezer]

If you had ever done compositing on HD footage or rendering extremely complicated CG work (most high end is these days) you would realize there are lots of pretty normal situations where the 4gig limit is a huge issue for a lot of people.

Home users?!And more importantly, playing computer games? These consoles don't need anything like the quantities of RAM being spoken of here. That some people benefit from 10+ GBs of RAM doesn't prove anything beyond some activities wanting limitless resources. Ideally we'd be able to fit entire HD films uncompressed in RAM for editing!

What do we realistically need for next-gen games? We'll have detailed models and textures requiring VRAM. At 1080p, won't 2GBs be enough for what developers are able to produce and render? How much will game code and working space consume? I think 4GBs would be a nice and hopefully affordable limit. However, we also want bandwidth out the wazoo and that's going to push the price up. Thus my suggestion of the console companies going split pool, an economic compromise between fast RAM and copious amounts of RAM. My ideal would be 4GBs of 1TB/s XDR, but that's most unlikely.

 

[neliz]

My Laptop currently says it uses 1,86GB of RAM (Win7, firefox and one mp3 playing) my main rig occupies 1,36GB, Just installed 3 SQL servers on Win2003 this morning and they used about 530MB of RAM. It's obvious that the more media I'm'using (youtube, browser flash game and some applets.) The more we do with it then just "consoling" the more memory we could use. I'd like disk access to be kept to a minimum.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

This desktop PC of mine reports 847MB with me opening several moderate tabs (eg. GameTrailers), graphics app, programming app, and music player. IE is using 45 MB. Media player 32MBs, just to play an .ogg! I've known MSN Messenger take hundreds of megabytes, which I think is a dodgy Flash advert...

So lose all the Windows bloat, and the actual requirements for doing lots of things isn't actually that demanding. Most of what I'm doing now using up 800MBs could be managed in a couple of hundred MBs on an efficiently designed system (XP takes 500 MBs without runnig any applicaitons). And most of this multitasking a typical user isn't going to use. And none of that multitasking is particularly relevant to the consoles. An audio player is going to take kilobytes, not megabytes. You're not going to need to load whole videos into RAM when it can be streamed at the right time thanks to the deterministic nature of the software running.

Now of course, some multitasking will come into effect, custom playlists and maybe with a web-browser option. It's not going to be comparable to Windows use though. Unless the people writing the services are somewhat chumps. Hence out of 4 GBs, one or two hundred MBs could be allocated to OS stuff.

Also, as I understand it, your VRAM and RAM content is duplicated on PC thanks to the historically poopy bandwidth of the video-card bus. Thus you keep your assets in RAM, and copy them to VRAM to render, and swap data in and out. The GPU cannot see RAM nor work from it (yeah, yeah, I know there are exceptions and we're getting faster ). Thus as far as the GPU is concerned, the system RAM is basically a big RAM disk. With this architecture, an 8GB PC with 2GB VRAM would have 2GB's RAM duplicated data (sans framebuffers), and with dumb overheads as well, you'd find a 4GB console ought to be in the same ballpark. By the time PCs have 8GBs as a common amount, perhaps the typical GPU will be able to access the RAM as quickly as its VRAM, but I doubt it, and that's not really the point here either. We're not trying to build boxes that can go toe-to-toe with PC in everything, because these console boxes need to get as cheap as £99 in their lifetime! Thus, IMO, a (true) 4GB console should be very competitive in what it offers developers versus typical PCs over that generation. A 2+2GB split-pool system would have a disadvantage but not as pronounced as this gen, I think.

 

[V3]

Home users?!And more importantly, playing computer games? These consoles don't need anything like the quantities of RAM being spoken of here. That some people benefit from 10+ GBs of RAM doesn't prove anything beyond some activities wanting limitless resources. Ideally we'd be able to fit entire HD films uncompressed in RAM for editing!

What do we realistically need for next-gen games? We'll have detailed models and textures requiring VRAM. At 1080p, won't 2GBs be enough for what developers are able to produce and render? How much will game code and working space consume? I think 4GBs would be a nice and hopefully affordable limit. However, we also want bandwidth out the wazoo and that's going to push the price up. Thus my suggestion of the console companies going split pool, an economic compromise between fast RAM and copious amounts of RAM. My ideal would be 4GBs of 1TB/s XDR, but that's most unlikely.

I am sure if you give the developers 16 GB memory pool, they'll make use of it. But I think with technology such as iD Tech 5, they might be able to stream things so the consoles makers don't need to put that much of memory. Like I said before, I think PC graphic cards are a good indicator of what next gen console will have.

I reckon if they are going for split pool, they should go with twin GPU. If not stick to one pool.

 

[Squilliam]

even my cheap notebook gpu has 1GB of ram! (ddr3)
by 2012 developers will be targeting again pc for highbudget games, because ps3 and 360 will not able to run it, and at that point there'll be gpu with 2GB or more even on the middle end (there's a thread about the increasing use of gpu memory in modern games)

and what about in 2016? will be the year in wich you can buy a netbook to play better game than console?
I know that there's a technical problem to go upper than 2GB, but in some way they have to solve it

You're exaggerating. I don't think the average person cares too much about how much ram is in their console. They wouldn't even ask about it for the most part and most of them don't even know.

 

[brain_stew]

Netbooks are $300 and up, which is in the higher range of what consoles are priced at.

Which netbook comes with a dedicated 1 GB of GPU RAM? Not a $300 one.

Netbooks also come with a large LCD screen, a Windows license and need to sell with a sizeable profit margin for both the retailer and manufacturer. Its a poor comparison imo.

 

[ban25]

If you had ever done compositing on HD footage or rendering extremely complicated CG work (most high end is these days) you would realize there are lots of pretty normal situations where the 4gig limit is a huge issue for a lot of people. I was upgrading machines to win 64 years and years ago in my old company and every box had 6-10 gig in it.

Photos, office and playing call of duty are a long way from the limit of what a lot of people use there PCs for.

Same of course applies to the number of core you can get in each box.

All of our artists had major issues with 32-bit machines on the last project. For our current project, everyone is on 64-bit Windows 7 with SSDs and the artists have migrated to 64-bit Maya. I've been running 64-bit for at least three years now because I need to be able to keep several VS solutions open and run the game at the same time.

 

[Blazkowicz]

My Laptop currently says it uses 1,86GB of RAM (Win7, firefox and one mp3 playing) my main rig occupies 1,36GB, Just installed 3 SQL servers on Win2003 this morning and they used about 530MB of RAM. It's obvious that the more media I'm'using (youtube, browser flash game and some applets.) The more we do with it then just "consoling" the more memory we could use. I'd like disk access to be kept to a minimum.

windows vista/7 ram usage includes cache, unlike XP.
right now my XP is using 1.7GB with a firefox and a media player, but also a wasteful ramdisk and a virtualbox VM.
the debian in the VM has 552MB used and 14MB free. but 75% of that is cache

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 567 552 14 0 148 265
-/+ buffers/cache: 138 428
Swap: 400 0 400

 

[Kaotik]

indeed, optimum situation is practicly no free RAM

 

[NRP]

Just how much RAM is needed next gen is an interesting question. Obviously the "too much is never enough" mentality some of you have is not practical. They will sell tens of millions of units (probably at a loss too), so every extra cost (not matter how small) is significant.

I just hope the damn bean counters don't get the final say. The story about MS wanting 256MB initially, and Tim Sweeney interviening and showing them how short sighted that was, is somewhat disconcerting.

 

[fehu]

Stop making a windows vs. bloated vs. consoles
Next console must last about until 2016/17, it's a lot of time, and can't start with too low specs if they don't want to reincrease the popularity of pc gaming