Sony Gamescom 2013 conference

[patsu]

Yeah cache hits should be faster but the CPU have its own tasks to do.

There was a dev article/interview on porting their game to PS4. It sounds reasonable. All they need to do is to refine that approach. I assume there are many tasks they can refactor to squeeze more utility and speed from the hardware.

Moving and structuring data in the right memory zone sounds like a critical step. They can start processing the data in one zone, and write out the intermediate results to/in another more suitable zone for further processing too.

 

[KongRudi]

What did you guys think of the starting footage?

When Shuei, started the PS4.
He seemingly went to a Killzone Livearea, and proceeded to watch some of his friends livestream of playing a match in in Killzone and you could see he selected one of his friends wich were shooting abit and then ran over and stood on the stairs shooting - and then Shuhei launched his own Killzone directly into that match - and ran over besides his friend.

I tought it looked pretty quick.
At least that's what i think happened during the awfull filming. :-/

 

[Deleted member 11852]

He seemingly went to a Killzone Livearea, and proceeded to watch some of his friends livestream of playing a match in in Killzone and you could see he selected one of his friends wich were shooting abit and then ran over and stood on the stairs shooting - and then Shuhei launched his own Killzone directly into that match - and ran over besides his friend.

That's what it looked like to me too. The idea of being able to see what fun (or trouble) your friends are having in multiplayer like this is very cool indeed.

And that kind of immediacy, dispensing with starting the game, selecting multiplayer, going to the lobby etc, means I'll be able to cram in a bit of quality gaming in shorter 30 min slots between other things.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

What did you guys think of the starting footage?

When Shuei, started the PS4....

Yeah, I mentioned that as a highlight. It offers a very different experience to that I'm used to with PS3 online game matchmaking, long delays, etc. However, it looks susceptible to issues preventing it being quite so seamless, such as what if the match is full? I envisage something more like see a game, try to join, get bounced, try again, get bounced, try another game, get bounced, try another game, get in and find it's laggy, find another game, get bounced, start your own game, sit in a empty game for 15 minutes waiting for someone to join, quit, try another game, get bounced, try again, get in, find it's a spawn-killing nightmare, quit, find you've wasted 30 minutes of your life, go an play a solo game instead.

IMO the online experience should be somewhat better controlled, at least to appeal to me. There should be bots in every online game as standard so you can start a game and enjoy it until people turn up, instead of wandering around an empty world, and matchmaking should ensure balanced games (not the Naughty Dog standard of all the experienced players on one team, all the noobs on the other...). Well, that's a whole debate on online gaming. Back to the showcase, it had promise but I'll wait and see what's actually delivered. I doubt my upstream BW could manage any video streaming of what I'm playing.

 

[KongRudi]

Yeah, I mentioned that as a highlight. It offers a very different experience to that I'm used to with PS3 online game matchmaking, long delays, etc. However, it looks susceptible to issues preventing it being quite so seamless, such as what if the match is full? I envisage something more like see a game, try to join, get bounced, try again, get bounced, try another game, get bounced, try another game, get in and find it's laggy, find another game, get bounced, start your own game, sit in a empty game for 15 minutes waiting for someone to join, quit, try another game, get bounced, try again, get in, find it's a spawn-killing nightmare, quit, find you've wasted 30 minutes of your life, go an play a solo game instead.

IMO the online experience should be somewhat better controlled, at least to appeal to me. There should be bots in every online game as standard so you can start a game and enjoy it until people turn up, instead of wandering around an empty world, and matchmaking should ensure balanced games (not the Naughty Dog standard of all the experienced players on one team, all the noobs on the other...). Well, that's a whole debate on online gaming. Back to the showcase, it had promise but I'll wait and see what's actually delivered. I doubt my upstream BW could manage any video streaming of what I'm playing.

Seems like there were a rough session info status somewhere - so you could also see status on the current match before joining, so shouldn't be that many false starts with full rooms, etc. unless there is a tremendous amount of people joining constantly.. :-/

 

[dumbo11]

I tought it looked pretty quick.
At least that's what i think happened during the awfull filming. :-/

If you assume the disk is 100MB/s, then a 3GB game should take ~30 seconds... and it clearly didn't take 30 seconds.

One possibility is that when you enter the game 'preview page', the console loads the game from disk into memory. If/when you click 'join game' then the console loads any remaining data and enters the match.

 

[MrFox]

It could be that it's the last game he played and it remains in memory, even after power off (they said PS4 would do something like that).

But no, my best guess is that yosp is trolling us and he put a super fast SSD in there, it's not cheating

 

[patsu]

If you assume the disk is 100MB/s, then a 3GB game should take ~30 seconds... and it clearly didn't take 30 seconds.

One possibility is that when you enter the game 'preview page', the console loads the game from disk into memory. If/when you click 'join game' then the console loads any remaining data and enters the match.

I vaguely remember one of the articles mentioned that they hope to make game loading "instant" if the games are highlighted in the "XMB" UI (probably most recently played games, like in PS3's "What's New" icon ?).

According to a Gaffer, there's supposed to be another page listing your entire game library. My guess is arbitrary games there will take longer to start.

I may have read it wrong though.

 

[temesgen]

I'm not yet ready to buy the Eurogamer article as gospel, that the move from 4GB to 8GB only netted developers a 1GB increase of RAM (half of which would be some kind of virtual memory).

There have several mod confirmed developers on another board independently saying 6GB are available for games, not sure what the actual allocation is (what % is virtual) but its generally accepted the split is higher than 4.5 or 5GB.

Of course many things have been said and much of turns out to be inaccurate so who knows what the actual split will end up being. Although common sense says that if they were initially planning 4GB and doubled the memory to 8GB that decision most likely wasn't made exclusively to support apps which presently haven't proven to be important for game consoles. It just doesn't make any sense, why not 6GB? The cost is relevant here.

 

[djskribbles]

Ya, a few sources have said 5.5-6, and not just GAF sources.

 

[Rangers]

Interference mentioned something about 6GB being available as a certain mode, but not to the final game. he thought that's why the confusion but it's really 5GB.

BTW, where is Interference? :0

 

[patsu]

Before I went for Summer vacation...

Large mode is only available during development. Supposed to be 5.25GB instead of 4.5GB (basic) game RAM according to DF.

In total, regular mode should have 4.5GB ("Fixed" memory) + 0.5GB (physical RAM from the Flexible memory) + XGB (virtual RAM from the Flexible memory). Perhaps X=1GB to make up 6GB total.

I think in his latest interview, Cerny mentioned that things will/may change. They are picking the most straightforward implementation approach for launch.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

If you assume the disk is 100MB/s, then a 3GB game should take ~30 seconds... and it clearly didn't take 30 seconds.

One possibility is that when you enter the game 'preview page', the console loads the game from disk into memory. If/when you click 'join game' then the console loads any remaining data and enters the match.

If the disk is ~100 MB/s (outer tracks) then when loading a game you'll be lucky to get ~50 MB/s (likely less as everything won't be on the outer tracks) if it's a mechanical HDD due to the head seeks. And there isn't much they can do to optimize the loading on HDD without bloating the install size of the game.

Regards,
SB

 

[patsu]

Does the game really need to load all 3GB before it can put the player in the game ?

 

[upnorthsox]

If you assume the disk is 100MB/s, then a 3GB game should take ~30 seconds... and it clearly didn't take 30 seconds.

One possibility is that when you enter the game 'preview page', the console loads the game from disk into memory. If/when you click 'join game' then the console loads any remaining data and enters the match.

Yes, he entered the livearea at the :48 mark and didn't finish joining until 1:20 so thats 32 seconds.

But if you notice also, he went into a KZSF link at :05 which might have set off an early preload.

 

[patsu]

Does the "fast start" feature apply to HDD games as well ?

 

[KongRudi]

Does the game really need to load all 3GB before it can put the player in the game ?

Probably not, it just needs that levels assets and the game-engine.
And most of that might also be compressed/archieved, when it reads it off the hdd.

 

[rockaman]

Does the "fast start" feature apply to HDD games as well ?

Why would it only be exclusive to BD games? I don't get it.

 

[betan]

Why would it only be exclusive to BD games? I don't get it.

What is only exclusive to BD games? i.e. what is "fast start"?

I know "PlayGo" thingy for BD and DD games, but it makes no sense for already fully installed games.

 

[patsu]

Yes, yes, "PlayGo"
I had forgotten the name.

It sounds like the data on Blu-ray and servers are organized to facilitate fast loading for the first level.

But when the game is installed to HDD in the background, does the system (or game) organize/optimize data for fast loading later ?