Predict: The Next Generation Console Tech

[Laa-Yosh]

As things stand I think the 360s extra available memory has been an advantage against the PS3, but it's hard to say how much.

At this point of the system's life cycle devs are fighting for a few megabytes of memory, so of course it can make a difference at some level.

On the other hand I'd say 95% of the console owners can't see that difference even if you point it out to them. Just recently I've told someone that COD Black Ops on PS3 is not only not 1920*1080, but not even 1024*640 as the X360 version is. So it's more about dev convinience and far less about competitive advantages on the market.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

To me it would make more sense to use some of the BOM towards making streaming work as good as possible rather than increasing ram over 2GB.

Exactly. At this point of the console cycle every AA game has to use some kind of streaming, because it'll always provide an advantage over games that don't do it. So it makes all kinds of sense to design the hardware to accomodate it as much as possible, even to the expense of runtime memory.

I mean look at the PS2, even there the most advanced games used streaming technologies to make better use of the existing resources. It's even more important in this generation and it'll keep on growing with the new systems.

Any realtime raytracing system or voxel based tech would not work without some kind of streaming, for example. But virtual texturing is also depending on it and that's almost certainly going to become widespread with new game engines.

 

[Persistantthug]

Just as a ballpark figure, how many console games texture direct from the optical drive when they run out of memory?

See, and that's really where the problem is.

And I don't mean to be disrespectful, but many of you seem to have nearsighted vision, where all you can think about is today.....what's being done and needed for today.

2 to 4 gigs would be great for a machine of today....but it would be absurdly low for the long haul. 10 years from now, when the machine(s) would still be going, they'd be starved and famished for more memory.

Again....today isn't where the visions should be coming from, especially since a PS4 won't even get here until 2014.

Again....no offense to any of you but to suggest 2 to 4 GiGs is gonna be good enough for a "do it all" machine that needs to go to 2022...that's fairly absurd to me.

These things aren't upgradable PC's. They need to last 8 years now

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Again: streaming, virtual texturing, clever management of resources instead of brute force methods.

Try to compare Battlefield 3 or Rage with Call of Duty 2. Noone would've thought that these games could be done on 512MB of memory.

 

[Persistantthug]

Again: streaming, virtual texturing, clever management of resources instead of brute force methods.

Try to compare Battlefield 3 or Rage with Call of Duty 2. Noone would've thought that these games could be done on 512MB of memory.

Those things are referred to as tricks.

You resort to tricks, when you've exhausted your "brute force".

You mean to tell me you want the next PS console to have to resort to "tricks" almost upon release?

Yeah.....I don't think so....and I don't think Sony thinks so either.

 

[AlphaWolf]

from another perspective, brute force is what you do, when you don't know better.

It's only a trick when it's new, if it's designed into the box, it's not really a trick is it?

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Yeah, brute force is dumb, and the "tricks" are simply doing things the smart way.

Most of the time, first generation projects don't have the time to be clever, so they chose to be brute force instead. But even 4 GB will offer plenty of advantages compared to even the cleverest games in 2012-2013, after all it's about 10 times the texture memory in the end. There will be an immediate jump in quality, even 2 GB would be more than enough to do that.

And again I have to stress - investing in better background storage is going to pay off in the end. The vast majority of consoles is sold in the second half of their life cycle, and the games released at that time belong to the second and third generations of titles. Sacrificing those titles for the launch has never really payed off.

 

[joker454]

PS3 already 'does everything' with 512 MBs. Tablets and mobile devices can do everything in 512 MBs. What changes are going to happen over the coming years that'll see 4GBs struggle to be enough storage?

Thing is, quite a bit may change next gen. For example, Microsoft has finally woken up and realized that they need to unify all their platforms together and make them interoperable. So on the Xbox 720, will they perhaps want the user to be able to pop up a fully functional Windows App Store while playing any game? That's going to take some ram. They bought Skype, will they want fully functional video calling Skype aviailable while people play games? Gonna need some ram for that. Maybe there will be some new killer use for Kinect that they want running all the time in the background in some way, might need some ram for that. Would be cool to have a music service running all the time in the background streaming your tunes, hmm might need some ram for that as well. Who knows at this point what they will come up with...but point being that the next boxes may be about more than just playing games. I'd agree that 4gb would be enough for just playing games, but as do-it-all boxes it may not be enough.

 

[homerdog]

What multimedia features require even 1GB of RAM at a given time?

Chicken and egg Al! If the consoles had 4GB of RAM I guarantee almost every game would require that much + a 64bit OS. As it stands only PC exclusives could even attempt to use that much memory, and no PC exclusive is going to require a 64bit OS so basically they're limited to 2GB.

 

[Persistantthug]

Thing is, quite a bit may change next gen. For example, Microsoft has finally woken up and realized that they need to unify all their platforms together and make them interoperable. So on the Xbox 720, will they perhaps want the user to be able to pop up a fully functional Windows App Store while playing any game? That's going to take some ram. They bought Skype, will they want fully functional video calling Skype aviailable while people play games? Gonna need some ram for that. Maybe there will be some new killer use for Kinect that they want running all the time in the background in some way, might need some ram for that. Would be cool to have a music service running all the time in the background streaming your tunes, hmm might need some ram for that as well. Who knows at this point what they will come up with...but point being that the next boxes may be about more than just playing games. I'd agree that 4gb would be enough for just playing games, but as do-it-all boxes it may not be enough.

Thank you sir.

This is exactly what I'm trying to tell these poor lads.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

I wouldn't put myself in the same league with an actual game developer, despite working in the industry as an artist for 10+ years... He's got a quite different perspective compared to yours, and what he talks about is totally not the same either...

 

[manux]

PC games tend to be let's load whole level to ram and play after everything is done. This wastes memory and gives atrocious loadtimes. This is natural as it's easier to scale down textures to support different hw(less memory). Also streaming on pc's is a huge bother as there is no good baseline hardware to do that(there is everything from 4200rpm 2.5" drives to SSD raids and to add insult to the injury operating system might be doing virus scan on the background).

On next gen consoles streaming to fill memory is much more reasonable than on pc side because certain Good minimum performance can be guaranteed on every box. To me it just doesn't make sense to bruteforce performance by adding memory when there are better ways to handle the situation if and when the BOM is limited. Proper fast cache should make multitasking also that much better because swapping can be implemented without too much of a performance hit(fairly fast ssd versus 2.5" hard drive which needs to move physical parts while swapping + running a game streaming content in...)

If I was designing next gen console OS I would definately think about always running certain backends to be able to handle events like incoming calls and messages. On the other hand I would most likely prefer to not run the user interfaces all the time and this is where efficient swapping comes into play. Perhaps the OS can run 100 services in the background but user only needs to use one or two service actively at the same time. Think about having messaging, voice calls, background updates, facebook and so on... it doesn't make sense to allocate memory for all the UI statically. It's perfectly enough to see a notification new facebook message arrived while gaming and not run the full facebook UI until user chooses to do so.

 

[Persistantthug]

I wouldn't put myself in the same league with an actual game developer, despite working in the industry as an artist for 10+ years... He's got a quite different perspective compared to yours, and what he talks about is totally not the same either...

I don't know him, but His perspective is spot on here.


His vision is about tomorrow, whereas many of you seem to be hamstrung by the vision of today.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

I think you should think twice before posting stuff like that, and read a lot more.

Joker's a dev and the points he raised are in a completely different field compared to your ideas.
And those issues have been discussed and put to rest by manux anyway.

So I think Joker's opinions are far closer to mine in general than to yours, please consider this possibility before hitting the reply button again...

 

[manux]

I don't know him, but His perspective is spot on here.


His vision is about tomorrow, whereas many of you seem to be hamstrung by the vision of today.

Game developers will always want more of everything(except less cpu cores and more GHz), nothing is ever enough. Console maker on the other hand works within constraints of cost and needs to optimize hardware within that cost. It just might be that more memory doesn't give as good overall experience as some other configuration(i.e. fast caching+swapping). It just might be cheaper to solve part of the multitasking problem by clever programming than throwing more memory in.

I don't expect to see more than 4GB memory next gen, though I wouldn't be surprised if next gen only has 2GB.

For ram some analysis would be needed that what kind of processing power can consume whole 4GB(or more) worth of ram every frame and is such power doable next gen. On the other hand of equation is stuff like megatexture which starts from the fact that there is only so much visible in each frame and streaming the proper content in is right thing to do. Extra ram is just extra cost if the RAM is not used to do anything but cache data that will be used 2 minutes later once user is closer to the end of level.

edit. Just to make this more explicit, if console maker has design that uses efficiently 2GB of ram doubling ram to 4GB would imho. require up to doubling the computing power and ram speed. Otherwise either of the designs was imbalanced to begin with(either too fast ram for 2GB system or 4GB system will be either computing and/or bandwidth bound). Doubling ram from balanced hw is not just the cost of motherboard area and ram cost, you need faster ram, cpu and gpu to balance the new design. I think consoles is all about balancing the design within the given cost and other constraints(size, noise, reliability,...). On pc's it makes all the sense in the world let some users slab in more memory and use it as expensive cache, on consoles that just doesn't make any sense if you are the guy paying for the millions of launch boxes sold at loss.

Think about even if extra ram only added average cost of 5$ per console at the end of console cycle that would have been 5$*100million equalling to 500 million dollars of lost money(not even counting if the extra ram happened to cause more consoles to break and require warranty repairs). I think 5$ is random number but on the lower side assuming adding ram caused changes to motherboard and required faster cpu+gpu+ram speeds. Balancing console hw is difficult and I wouldn't call adding lot's of ram trivial in the grand scheme of things.

 

[rpg.314]

With tessellation and hw support for PRT, I don't think RAM amount is as big a deal.

 

[Persistantthug]

Game developers will always want more of everything(except less cpu cores and more GHz), nothing is ever enough. Console maker on the other hand works within constraints of cost and needs to optimize hardware within that cost. It just might be that more memory doesn't give as good overall experience as some other configuration(i.e. fast caching+swapping). It just might be cheaper to solve part of the multitasking problem by clever programming than throwing more memory in.

I don't expect to see more than 4GB memory next gen, though I wouldn't be surprised if next gen only has 2GB.

For ram some analysis would be needed that what kind of processing power can consume whole 4GB(or more) worth of ram every frame and is such power doable next gen. On the other hand of equation is stuff like megatexture which starts from the fact that there is only so much visible in each frame and streaming the proper content in is right thing to do. Extra ram is just extra cost if the RAM is not used to do anything but cache data that will be used 2 minutes later once user is closer to the end of level.

edit. Just to make this more explicit, if console maker has design that uses let's say 2GB of ram efficiently doubling ram would imho. require roughly doubling the computing power and ram speed also. Otherwise either of the designs was imbalanced to begin with(either too fast ram for 2GB system or 4GB system will be either computing or bandwidth bound). Doubling ram from balanced hw is not just the cost of motherboard area and ram cost, you need faster ram, cpu and gpu to balance the new design. I think consoles is all about balancing the design within the given cost and other constraints(size, noise, reliability,...). On pc's it makes all the sense in the world let some users slab in more memory and used it as expensive cache, on consoles that just doesn't make any sense if you are the guy paying for the millions of launch boxes sold at loss.

Doubling everything got it.

But I don't see a problem with that either, considering every Playstation iteration is 10x the CPU power of its predecessor anyways.

I'd be willing to put money on it that the next Playstation console unit and/or the next XBOX will have more than 4GB of total memory.

I'm aware that consoles need to be balanced, but if you telling me that the rest of the system needs to be hamstrung by the 2 to 4 GB of ram, which is basically a PC of today....basically....then neither Sony nor Microsoft need to upgrade....and that system is truly gonna be sucking vapor wind come 2020

No thanks 2 that.

 

[Blazkowicz]

too much ram is always better than not enough ram. this is why an Atom with 2GB memory can run fat OS and fat applications while a pentium 3 or 4 with 256MB is almost a door stop, even with comparable CPU power.

as for multitasking I don't see a big deal.

 

[manux]

Doubling everything got it.

But I don't see a problem with that either, considering every Playstation iteration is 10x the CPU power of its predecessor anyways.

I'd be willing to put money on it that the next Playstation console unit and/or the next XBOX will have more than 4GB of total memory.

I'm aware that consoles need to be balanced, but if you telling me that the rest of the system needs to be hamstrung by the 2 to 4 GB of ram, which is basically a PC of today....basically....then neither Sony nor Microsoft need to upgrade....and that system is truly gonna be sucking vapor wind come 2020

No thanks 2 that.

You are having argument of having more of everything where the reality is console needs to be the best possible box for under 500$ BOM. PC's and their memory usage have pretty much nothing to do with consoles. What does win7 eat on bootup, closer to 1GB? PS3 and xbox360 use something like 32-50MB for OS.

Think about megatextures and megamodels and how to render only visible stuff efficiently not how to load whole level once incurring cost every frame for lot's of stuff that is not visible. Streaming is the way to go and it helps to bring down BOM and usability and leaves money to spend on other things than excessive amount of ram.

At best consoles have limited multitasking, it's not like you leave your firefox with 10 tabs, photoshop, email client, facebook and bazillion other apps to memory when running games... Probably console apps need to be split to engine component running always and optional UI component loaded only when user needs it. This is completely different to what pc developers are used to (unless you write services).

 

[manux]

I think one of my edits got lost. think about this:

If adding more memory after all the changes costs average of 5$ per console then the cost after cycle would have been something like 5$*100million=500$ million. This is 500 million dollars away from profits. BOM really starts to matter when you get to such scale of manufacturing. 5$ is random number and I expect it to be much on the lower side... Also if the console ends up being hugely popular number is closer to 150million sold than 100 million.(ps2 numbers)

In the end I'm sure sony and microsoft will do the best possible box from their respective goals. It's just not very trivial to add huge amount of really fast memory when in console scope it's possible to optimize streaming very well and get brilliant results with less and use the money elsewhere more productively or just pocket the winnings. If I had to choose between 2GB of ram+ 64GB of fast ssd on console I would rather take that than 4GB of ram and optional slow 2.5" HDD and game developers having to rely streaming from optical media due to lowend sku. Optimizing engines and streaming using that fast SSD will give really nice boost to megatextures and megamodels.

edit. I wouldn't also be surprised if plenty of next gen games still run in 720p or some sub 1080p resolution giving nice scaling to 1080p. I'm guessing devs will want to push fancier pixels rather than more pixels. 720p requires almost magnitude less memory than on pc side where resolutions on highend rigs start to be ridiculous.