System Reservations on PS4, 4Pro, PS5, XBox One, One S, One X, and Xbox Series X|S [2019-12, 2020-03]

[milk]

Can’t Sony or Microsoft render their OS UI at 720p base resolution and use FSR 2 or FSR 3 to upscale the OS UI to 4K?, wouldn’t that reduce the OS UI memory footprint therefore can allocate more memory to games, every little bit of memory matters when it comes to consoles.

These modern upscaling and reconstruction algorithms are only a performance win because the computational cost of each shaded pixel in a modern 3D game is so high.

That's not the case for OS and APP interfaces, though. They consist of half a dozen alpha mapped textured quads per pixel. Upscalling it would be more computationally expensive than simply rendering at full 4k from the start.

The kind of content that system GUI consists of benefits much more from native full-res rendering, and would suffer much more egregiously from temporal reconstruction / AI halucination. A bunch of vector shapes, still pictures, text and icons is probably the worst imaginable fit for modern reconstruction upscalers.

 

[eastmen]

Im struggling to find selling points for next gen. PS3 gen introduced “HD” gaming or rather sub-hd gaming for the most part, regardless, moving from SD TV’s to HDTV’s was a massive upgrade in itself, PS4 gen was more of the same just higher quality (much higher in some cases), mig-gen refreshes introduced 4K and HDR, this gen introduced RT and fast/no loading screens, though we haven’t seen much of it yet. Im confident and hope next gen won’t target 8K and spend rasterization performance on that as we’d get back to 30fps gaming again. I believe next gen will be another “more of the same“ gen with faster SSD’s and much better RT, the main difference will be that most games will be 120fps and few heavy ones will target 60fps. With that said there doesn’t always need to be big selling points as people will buy into them like they did with the PS4 gen (including myself) since we tend to forget that the selling point that always existed is that the latest and greatest games will shift gradually to the new machines. If next gen could deliver 4K/120 RT in most games I’d be very happy.

Wouldn't it just be easier to do a BIG/Little like intel and arm is doing ?

Adding in 4 zen 2 cpu's to a 12 or 16 core zen5/6 would easily handle the dashboard

 

[Allandor]

Wouldn't it just be easier to do a BIG/Little like intel and arm is doing ?

Adding in 4 zen 2 cpu's to a 12 or 16 core zen5/6 would easily handle the dashboard

Just makes the design more complex.
There is no point of using such a design, if there is no reason behind it. E.g. in a mobile device it is the power consumption / battery life.
If AMD has something like this as a base design, than they might use it, if not ... than not.
And currently the CPU cores are quite tiny. The biggest thing of current CPUs the cache and IO. Also there is still the problem that you can't really use too many cores efficiently. That's more or less always a problem with real time compute. Yes there might be solutions to use more cores e.g for npc AI etc, but that doesn't scale that good and you get bottlenecked by other resources quite fast.

 

[Davros]

Question : Do/can consoles use a swap file?

 

[vjPiedPiper]

Good Q.

I think that up until the most recent console gen it was basically no.
Although i suspect that the 360 and later generations possibly did some operation on the local hard drive,
but not really using it as a swap file.

However now that the consoles have SSD's I suspect that they ARE using the SSD to back the ram in a manner somewhat similar to a swap/page file.
Whilst i havent read any of the actual dev docs ( well not pertaining to this anyway ) they way that MS was talking about the series consoles early on,
did sound a lot like heres 100Gb of ram, beware 16Gb is uber fast, and the remaining 84Gb is only 2-3Gb/s, ie the SSD.
How carefully they manage the memory between the swap file and real ram i do not know.

 

[Khalid]

Good Q.

I think that up until the most recent console gen it was basically no.
Although i suspect that the 360 and later generations possibly did some operation on the local hard drive,
but not really using it as a swap file.

However now that the consoles have SSD's I suspect that they ARE using the SSD to back the ram in a manner somewhat similar to a swap/page file.
Whilst i havent read any of the actual dev docs ( well not pertaining to this anyway ) they way that MS was talking about the series consoles early on,
did sound a lot like heres 100Gb of ram, beware 16Gb is uber fast, and the remaining 84Gb is only 2-3Gb/s, ie the SSD.
How carefully they manage the memory between the swap file and real ram i do not know.

I am sure there are clever ways to use the fast SSD bandwidth in order to free system memory from non latency sensitive data. I believe that’s how “quick resume” features work is by taking an image of the game’s state from RAM and paste it to a reserved SSD space (that’s why there’s a chunk of the system memory you cannot utilize?). Currently playing Alan Wake 2 I wouldn’t be surprised if the

Spoiler: Potential spoiler

mind place

in the game that you can insta travel to is actually stored in the SSD. If the SSD is fast enough to load the

Spoiler: Potential spoiler

mind place

there’s no need for that data to exist in RAM all the time. As for latency, do SSD’s also provide much lower latency than regular HDD’s? cause I don’t remember it being a talking point in SSD vs HDD topics.

 

[Davros]

many nvme drives achieve latency rates below 20 microseconds (µs) and some below 10.
the average latency of HDD drive should be less than 150 msec.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

As for latency, do SSD’s also provide much lower latency than regular HDD’s? cause I don’t remember it being a talking point in SSD vs HDD topics.

It's been a huge talking point! That's the biggest advantage of SSDs over HDDs. It's low latency that enables JIT loading, and low seek rates that enable efficient streaming.

 

[Khalid]

It's been a huge talking point! That's the biggest advantage of SSDs over HDDs. It's low latency that enables JIT loading, and low seek rates that enable efficient streaming.

Looks like I haven’t factored in the nature of HDD head (needle) that needs to move while seeking the required sector, devs have tried some workarounds like duplicating frequently needed data into different sectors of the HDD in order to minimize HDD head movement. IIRC, Spiderman used this on PS4 but having to do so requires devs attention of managing data structure for their game to ensure how to properly scatter their duplicates and instruct the game to load which copy of said object in which scenario. Thankfully SSDs don’t need to have any duplicate data.

 

[LiveGamer]

Spec Analysis: PlayStation 5 Pro - the most powerful console yet

Tech specs for PlayStation 5 Pro have leaked - Digital Foundry verifies them and delivers analysis and further information.

www.eurogamer.net

So I wasn't aware the PS5 was confirmed to only have 12.5GBs of RAM for developers (Now 13.7GBs for the PS5 Pro). Compared to 13.5GBs for Series X.

Has any developer taken adavnatage of the extra 1GB available on the Series X?

What could that extra gig be used for?

 

[BRiT]

What could that extra gig be used for?

Given development may be targeted at least common denominator, it's possible that games only used 12.5 Gb and the extra 1GB memory on Series X was used as an I/O buffer to offset the slightly slower sustained NVME read speeds -- so read the data earlier and keep more of it in the read-ahead buffer.

The memory deltas available to games was publicly available from October 27th 2022 when stated in DF coverage.

 

[LiveGamer]

Given development may be targeted at least common denominator, it's possible that games only used 12.5 Gb and the extra 1GB memory on Series X was used as an I/O buffer to offset the slightly slower sustained NVME read speeds -- so read the data earlier and keep more of it in the read-ahead buffer.

The memory deltas available to games was publicly available from October 27th 2022 when stated in DF coverage.

Thanks! An extra buffer makes sense as an easy use case. Yeah I've been out of the loop for sure lol