Special techniques possibles with 8GB of RAM

[Love_In_Rio]

Carmack wanted lots of RAM for megatexturing and EPIC for Voxel rendering ( maybe they will go back to it now?). What other techniques and algorithms are possible with such huge amount of RAM?.
From the top of my head i would say deferred rendering engines will also be result favored. No question why DICE are also very happy with PS4.

 

[milk]

My hopes are for Voxel cone tracing for GI and shadows. Developers, please? I believe that has great potential. Real time world-space indirect lighting and reflections with acurate occlusion (with screenspace aproximations reserved only for local high frequency detail) and potentially hundreds of shadowed lights, all in dinamic scenes? That is a trully next-gen feature. Even if it is costy, I think it might be worth it.
By the way, I never got to see the actual news of Epic droping their SVO GI, yet I see it mentioned all the time but never cared to ask for the source. Does anyone have a link or at least remember the info of when, how, who, and everything else about that anouncement?

 

[Love_In_Rio]

My hopes are for Voxel cone tracing for GI and shadows. Developers, please? I believe that has great potential. Real time world-space indirect lighting and reflections with acurate occlusion (with screenspace aproximations reserved only for local high frequency detail) and potentially hundreds of shadowed lights, all in dinamic scenes? That is a trully next-gen feature. Even if it is costy, I think it might be worth it.
By the way, I never got to see the actual news of Epic droping their SVO GI, yet I see it mentioned all the time but never cared to ask for the source. Does anyone have a link or at least remember the info of when, how, who, and everything else about that anouncement?

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1702582&postcount=1384

The conference Elemental demo was different from the last years one, so they may have go with an alternative, although Mark Rein seemed really shocked for the 8GB increment,so, maybe they will reconside the SVO effort.

 

[owen]

Hopefully this gen with all that ram they will be to stream a realtime city instead of snap shots around the player.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Carmack wanted lots of RAM for megatexturing

I don't think you understand megatextures at all... The very reason to use them is to keep runtime memory usage pretty low and consistent. If there's any tech that wouldn't care about 8GB it's virtual texturing.

What Carmack would actually need is 50+ GB of storage space to distribute their game, so that they don't have to compress it and remove spec/normal channels and such from the megatexture.

 

[fellix]

Carmack was actually complaining more about the dead slow optical drive in PS3 that dragged the texture streaming and page allocation. There's little point of all the gobs of system memory, if the primary storage source reads at a snail pace.

 

[onQ]

Ray-Tracing?

Wouldn't 8GB of Ram on the SoC be good for Ray-Tracing or Path-Tracing since it helps with one of the problems with GPU Ray-Tracing which is the low amount of Ram on a GPU?

I'm thinking Hustle King 2 with a Ray-Traced pool table.

 

[fellix]

Ray-Tracing?

Wouldn't 8GB of Ram on the SoC be good for Ray-Tracing or Path-Tracing since it helps with one of the problems with GPU Ray-Tracing which is the low amount of Ram on a GPU?

Memory allocation is important in this case, but mostly for the off-line renderers, where the asset size and quantity far outweighs anything found in a typical game. Ray/Path tracing for real-time applications is more sensitive to random access latency, as far as the memory performance is concerned. Caching is a good aiding measure, to begin with.

 

[bagofsuck]

8gigs won't make the GPU more powerful :/

 

[Love_In_Rio]

8gigs won't make the GPU more powerful :/

Nor more flops will make RAM bigger . Well, you understand what i mean, both are important for graphics.

 

[orangpelupa]

Hmm with ram that big, they can use crazy hi-res texture ?
or simply, just use the excess ram for cache. Eliminating all loading for player;s eye resulting in consisten gameplay and IQ

 

[Arwin]

Carmack was actually complaining more about the dead slow optical drive in PS3 that dragged the texture streaming and page allocation. There's little point of all the gobs of system memory, if the primary storage source reads at a snail pace.

It can never hurt to be able to have 4GB of cache then I would suppose ...

 

[Love_In_Rio]

This, from Tiago Sousa (Crytek lead graphics programmer) is quite ilustrative:

 

[Brad Grenz]

I wonder who he's talking about?

 

[Love_In_Rio]

I wonder who he's talking about?

EDRAM limits was talking about Xbox 360.

 

[McHuj]

What's PWL?

 

[Mobius1aic]

I'm wondering how necessary 8 GBs really is. They could go 192 bit bus and 6 GB and still have about 132 GB/s of bandwidth or go with faster GDDR5 to crank it further.

I'm sure 4 GB was enough until the whole on-demand social networking and loading while playing aspect was made a priority.

 

[Brad Grenz]

EDRAM limits was talking about Xbox 360.

I was teasing. The EDRAM thing, the DVD thing and the Gamma thing were all obviously swipes at the 360.

 

[scently]

Well all his concerns seems to have been addressed with the durango; the eDRAM has been replaced with eSRAM and it doesn't have the limitations of the 360 setup, BD drive is in place and the display plane have gamma correction hardware.

 

[milk]

I'm wondering how necessary 8 GBs really is. They could go 192 bit bus and 6 GB and still have about 132 GB/s of bandwidth or go with faster GDDR5 to crank it further.

I'm sure 4 GB was enough until the whole on-demand social networking and loading while playing aspect was made a priority.

I firmily believe "the whole on-demand social networking and loading while playing aspect" was set as a goal on the early stages of design. Big companies like sony, and big projects like ps4 are very carefully thought through.