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VGLeaks: PlayStation 4 "Orbis" Roadmap

Baki

Member
General specs seem fine. Medium/strong GPU, plenty of RAM, single RAM pool. I only doubt the 8 GB DDR3 for Xbox3. See the images above comparing GPU performance between a weak ass GPU for email checkers, and a medium GPU. Notice the medium GPU gets a bigger hit. A high end GPU would be crippled by DDR3. Either Xbox3's GPU is weak or it's a potential design flaw (I'm not buying the magical ED RAM argument).



LOL, Wii U has yet to beat 360.

I wouldn't go that far. The WiiU has a better GPU than the X360. Unfortunately the GPU is held back by the piss poor CPU and low bandwidth for the RAM.

Anyways, back on topic. Around this time in 2011, Sony announced a PlayStation meeting for the PSVita which was held 2 weeks afterwards. Any bets on them doing that again considering that's how they revealed the PS3.
 
the only thing about capacity that should be considered is that there won't be as much room to store assets. it suggests sony wants to move forward with more streaming solutions. it also makes me curious as to what kind of hard drive it will pack, as well as what the read speed of the BD drive will be. fast, high bandwidth ram will need to be fed assets quickly.

AFAIK, the 360's DVD drive could ramp up to higher overall read speeds, where as the BD drive in the PS3 read at a steady, albeit moderate, rate. if sony can tackle both the BD read speed and put a quality hard drive in each PS4 they could make it easier for devs to incorporate asset streaming tech developed over the last handful of years.

then the capacity difference won't matter much, to sony and/or PS4 devs.

The PS3 has a 2x BD read speed, and the most common Blu-Ray drives nowadays have 6x, so if Sony uses a 6x drive in the PS4 it would stream about twice as fast as the current 12x DVD drive in a 360. As seen here-

http://www.gamespot.com/pages/profile/show_blog_entry.php?topic_id=23916169&user=skektek

LPgKU.png
 

stryke

Member
General specs seem fine. Medium/strong GPU, plenty of RAM, single RAM pool. I only doubt the 8 GB DDR3 for Xbox3. See the images above comparing GPU performance between a weak ass GPU for email checkers, and a medium GPU. Notice the medium GPU gets a bigger hit. A high end GPU would be crippled by DDR3. Either Xbox3's GPU is weak or it's a potential design flaw (I'm not buying the magical ED RAM argument).

Not a tech dude, but would anything about that HSA or AMD pre-emptive stuff help?
 
General specs seem fine. Medium/strong GPU, plenty of RAM, single RAM pool. I only doubt the 8 GB DDR3 for Xbox3. See the images above comparing GPU performance between a weak ass GPU for email checkers, and a medium GPU. Notice the medium GPU gets a bigger hit. A high end GPU would be crippled by DDR3. Either Xbox3's GPU is weak or it's a potential design flaw (I'm not buying the magical ED RAM argument).

Those graphs aren't a good indicator by themselves, the first is comparing 1g gddr5 to 1g ddr3 of course the gddr5 comes out on top there. The second is comparing completely different card levels so is even more irrelevant
 
The PS3 has a 2x BD read speed, and the most common Blu-Ray drives nowadays have 6x, so if Sony uses a 6x drive in the PS4 it would stream about twice as fast as the current 12x DVD drive in a 360. As seen here-

http://www.gamespot.com/pages/profile/show_blog_entry.php?topic_id=23916169&user=skektek

LPgKU.png

can we be friends? i didn't think anyone was going to pitch in some data on the topic. :)

i believe it's also rumored that sony will use the new quad layer BD drive too, but the discs will only be used for movies...??
 
the only thing about capacity that should be considered is that there won't be as much room to store assets. it suggests sony wants to move forward with more streaming solutions. it also makes me curious as to what kind of hard drive it will pack, as well as what the read speed of the BD drive will be. fast, high bandwidth ram will need to be fed assets quickly.

AFAIK, the 360's DVD drive could ramp up to higher overall read speeds, where as the BD drive in the PS3 read at a steady, albeit moderate, rate. if sony can tackle both the BD read speed and put a quality hard drive in each PS4 they could make it easier for devs to incorporate asset streaming tech developed over the last handful of years.

then the capacity difference won't matter much, to sony and/or PS4 devs.

They could also use flash memory, no?
 

Orayn

Member
so from the preview info who has the beefier hardware?

At this point, the differences between them fall well within the error bars of us only having rumors to go on. They look very similar.

They could also use flash memory, no?

Yes, but it'd be a step back in terms of storage offered at a given price, and consumers would react poorly. Can't see Microsoft or Sony doing it for the system's main storage device.
 

meta4

Junior Member
What about rumors of 720 inbuilt with Kinect 2.0. If that is the case wouldn't some amount of processing power be dedicated to that?
 
At this point, the differences between them fall well within the error bars of us only having rumors to go on. They look very similar.



Yes, but it'd be a step back in terms of storage offered at a given price, and consumers would react poorly. Can't see Microsoft or Sony doing it for the system's main storage device.

Would it be feasible to include say 16gb flash for OS + streaming for games plus whatever amount hdd?

I know for a fact ND like streaming tech.
 

teh_pwn

"Saturated fat causes heart disease as much as Brawndo is what plants crave."

Orayn

Member
Would it be feasible to include say 16gb flash for OS + streaming for games plus whatever amount hdd?

A hybrid drive would be an interesting solution, actually. The limited read/write lifespan of flash always makes me nervous, but it's a neat possibility. Then again, if you include it as a standard feature that lots of developers are going to use, you've just made a more expensive, specialized part into a necessity.
 

quest

Not Banned from OT
I'll be there day one if these specs hold and it launches at 399.99 and 499.99 SKUs. Already sucked in with PS+ so really wanna go PS4.
 
the only thing about capacity that should be considered is that there won't be as much room to store assets. it suggests sony wants to move forward with more streaming solutions. it also makes me curious as to what kind of hard drive it will pack, as well as what the read speed of the BD drive will be. fast, high bandwidth ram will need to be fed assets quickly.

AFAIK, the 360's DVD drive could ramp up to higher overall read speeds, where as the BD drive in the PS3 read at a steady, albeit moderate, rate. if sony can tackle both the BD read speed and put a quality hard drive in each PS4 they could make it easier for devs to incorporate asset streaming tech developed over the last handful of years.

then the capacity difference won't matter much, to sony and/or PS4 devs.

This is incorrect, DVDs data read speed fluctate depending on what part of the disk is being read. On Blu Ray regardless of what part is being read data transfers at the same speed. As you increase the drive speed on each the data speed difference between BR and DVD will increase in BR's favor.

As an example a 6x BR drive can shuffle 27MB/s worth of data. It'd take a DVD 20x speed to match that and that's maximum speed no average speed. Seek times however will favor DVD.

But it begs the question....do you prefer lower seek times but also lower read speed and storage capacity. Or longer seek times, but quicker read speed and storage capacity?

And I don't think you want a 20x DVD spinning for extended periods of time. Heat and all that jazz
 

Iacobellis

Junior Member
I wouldn't go that far. The WiiU has a better GPU than the X360. Unfortunately the GPU is held back by the piss poor CPU and low bandwidth for the RAM.

Anyways, back on topic. Around this time in 2011, Sony announced a PlayStation meeting for the PSVita which was held 2 weeks afterwards. Any bets on them doing that again considering that's how they revealed the PS3.

I said the same thing to my friend. The earliest article I could find about PM 2011 was on January 24th. The meeting happened on the 27th of that month.
 
A hybrid drive would be an interesting solution, actually. The limited read/write lifespan of flash always makes me nervous, but it's a neat possibility. Then again, if you include it as a standard feature that lots of developers are going to use, you've just made a more expensive, specialized part into a necessity.

So how else can Sony make up for the difference in RAM? Since adding separate memory for the OS (which we are assuming will take ~1 GB) isnt feasible, are they really going to only dedicate 3 GB for games?
 

longdi

Banned
4gb is too little against 8gb for a same gen hardware release.
not even ps2 had half the ram of xbox.
a next gen OS would consume 512mb to 1gb of it.
developers have said more ram is better than faster ram. and durango has ultra fast esram. ps4 gddr5 would not be clocked too high anyway too.
i hope sony add another 2gb solely for OS and audio etc. if not ps4 will have to enter as mid range console and sell for $50 to $100 less than durango.
 

RamzaIsCool

The Amiga Brotherhood
What happened to the double GPU setup for the Orbis? Wasn't it going to be something like "strong" GPU + 4 gig GDDR5 ram for games and "weak" GPU + 1.5 gig DDR3 ram for the OS.
 
Too slow.

Put fat HDD in there with 100 MB/s read and install to disc standard.

Oh yeah, that's clearly the way to go... Well, maybe not mandatory installs, since those are pretty annoying when you just want to play, but I defiently think it will have the option to fully install onto the HDD. But I think a 6x drive speed would be enough to play off still, just not ideal.
 

BlackJace

Member
4gb is too little against 8gb for a same gen hardware release.
not even ps2 had half the ram of xbox.
a next gen OS would consume 512mb to 1gb of it.
developers have said more ram is better than faster ram. and durango has ultra fast esram. ps4 gddr5 would not be clocked too high anyway too.
i hope sony add another 2gb solely for OS and audio etc. if not ps4 will have to enter as mid range console and sell for $50 to $100 less than durango.

More, but slower RAM versus less but faster RAM essentially cancel each other out. It will make little difference that the durango has more RAM.
 

rdrr gnr

Member
So how else can Sony make up for the difference in RAM? Since adding separate memory for the OS (which we are assuming will take ~1 GB) isnt feasible, are they really going to only dedicate 3 GB for games?
What difference? And I hope the damn OS doesn't take up an entire gig.
 
4gb is too little against 8gb for a same gen hardware release.
not even ps2 had half the ram of xbox.
a next gen OS would consume 512mb to 1gb of it.
developers have said more ram is better than faster ram. and durango has ultra fast esram. ps4 gddr5 would not be clocked too high anyway too.
i hope sony add another 2gb solely for OS and audio etc. if not ps4 will have to enter as mid range console and sell for $50 to $100 less than durango.

Come on now
 
What happened to the double GPU setup for the Orbis? Wasn't it going to be something like "strong" GPU + 4 gig GDDR5 ram for games and "weak" GPU + 1.5 gig DDR3 ram for the OS.

...I want to know what happened to this, too. Sounded good.

What difference? And I hope the damn OS doesn't take up an entire gig.

My understanding is that they were originally shooting for a larger amount of RAM.
 

thuway

Member
4gb is too little against 8gb for a same gen hardware release.
not even ps2 had half the ram of xbox.
a next gen OS would consume 512mb to 1gb of it.
developers have said more ram is better than faster ram. and durango has ultra fast esram. ps4 gddr5 would not be clocked too high anyway too.
i hope sony add another 2gb solely for OS and audio etc. if not ps4 will have to enter as mid range console and sell for $50 to $100 less than durango.

First, you are complete and utterly wrong.
Second, developers would prefer quality RAM over slow RAM. Sony is leveraging a balancing act. 4 GB of GDDR5 is nothing to scoff at. Microsoft will use 8 GB of DDR4 in a brute force fashion to compensate for bandwith issues. It is a giant wash.
Third, Sony is going for RAM with 192 GB/S. It is clocked just right.
 
that's what i was saying. dvd has a variable speed and bd has a constant speed. dvd's max is higher (in 360 than ps3) than the 1x BD. if you're purely talking about transfer rates. we saw an uncomfortably large number of PS3 games force large install files earlier on this gen to run as well as 360 games that had none, so it's safe to say that the 1x BD vs the 12x DVD drive caused a discrepancy.

devs this gen built a lot of asset streaming tech into their engines to minimize loading and also to navigate the differences between the consoles and also to PC's. that's all im saying really. and PS4 is shaping up to help devs make use of that momentum.
 

DR3AM

Member
i was just listening to the invisible walls podcast and 4 guys think that ps4 and 720 will be out this year and they seems pretty confident.
 

Xiaoki

Member
Those graphs aren't a good indicator by themselves, the first is comparing 1g gddr5 to 1g ddr3 of course the gddr5 comes out on top there. The second is comparing completely different card levels so is even more irrelevant

The first graph says 1GB GDDR5 but the website the graph comes from says 512MB. Its supposed to be 512MB.


The second graph is far from irrelevant.
 

rdrr gnr

Member
...I want to know what happened to this, too. Sounded good.



My understanding is that they were originally shooting for a larger amount of RAM.
More than 4GB of GDDR5? As apposed to Durango's 8GB of GDDR3? I'd say both those amounts seem fairly reasonable. I think what you heard (though I'm sure 3rd parties who don't have to, you know, pay for the hardware itself would want more) is a sentiment expressed for not retarding next-gen tech. Aspire for more; settle for less (though it would not be settling in actuality).
 
More than 4GB of GDDR5? As apposed to Durango's 8GB of GDDR3? I'd say both those amounts seem fairly reasonable. I think what you heard (though I'm sure 3rd parties who don't have to, you know, pay for the hardware itself would want more) is a sentiment expressed for not retarding next-gen tech. Aspire for more; settle for less (though it would not be settling in actuality).

It was the other thread but I thought it was going to be 4 GB GDDR5 + some amount of DDR3 for the OS.

If it was all of 4 GB of GDDR5 for games, then I would be happy. In fact, it would be kind of amazing...
 
4gb is too little against 8gb for a same gen hardware release.
not even ps2 had half the ram of xbox.
a next gen OS would consume 512mb to 1gb of it.
developers have said more ram is better than faster ram. and durango has ultra fast esram. ps4 gddr5 would not be clocked too high anyway too.
i hope sony add another 2gb solely for OS and audio etc. if not ps4 will have to enter as mid range console and sell for $50 to $100 less than durango.
Keep telling yourself that, my friend
 

rdrr gnr

Member
It was the other thread but I thought it was going to be 4 GB GDDR5 + some amount of DDR3 for the OS.

If it was all of 4 GB of GDDR5 for games, then I would be happy. In fact, it would be kind of amazing...
Someone more informed will have to answer your questions but I do not think the OS footprint will be so large. And I think having DDR3 on board just for the OS presents some issues as well. But I would say of all the things that could disappoint -- RAM doesn't really seem like one of them at this point.
 

Orayn

Member
What am I supposed to make of DDR3 giving the same result for different games? How are the results decided anyway? Framerate?

Don't make anything of it, these only compare how video cards with those memory configurations performed. It's not really salient to whether you get better performance out of X gigs of GDDR5 or 2X gigs of DDR3 + eDRAM as the main memory pool in a console.
 
Someone more informed will have to answer your questions but I do not think the OS footprint will be so large. And I think having DDR3 on board just for the OS presents some issues as well. But I would say of all the things that could disappoint -- RAM doesn't really seem like one of them at this point.

Yeah someone already answered this.

And yeah Im just a little worried about RAM since it seems like the big thing developers care about. Im not looking to buy all the consoles next gen (just 1, most likely PS4), so I just dont wanna deal with shitty ports.
 

Lord Error

Insane For Sony
4gb is too little against 8gb for a same gen hardware release.
not even ps2 had half the ram of xbox.
a next gen OS would consume 512mb to 1gb of it.
developers have said more ram is better than faster ram. and durango has ultra fast esram. ps4 gddr5 would not be clocked too high anyway too.
i hope sony add another 2gb solely for OS and audio etc. if not ps4 will have to enter as mid range console and sell for $50 to $100 less than durango.
I don't know about that, especially price. I'm pretty sure 4GB of GDDR5 is more expensive than 8GB of DDR3, so what you're saying wouldn't really make sense. That said, I too hope they won't waste damn GDDR5 on trivial OS stuff like running web browsers and video players and other such crap in it.


I hate when companies put out misleading graphs like that. The visual makes it look 2-3x faster but the numbers are actually only 10-30% faster.
With faster cards, up to 50%, but even 30% is far from insignificant. It can be a difference between having to lock down to 30FPS or being able to have 60.
 

stryke

Member
behind what curve? I'm interested lol

Ah, just saying that if anyone was suffer delays (therefore no news), it'd most likely be Sony.

*although saying delay is kind of a misnomer, considering there's no set date yet.

EDIT: unless, did you mean 'game' releases?

What am I supposed to make of DDR3 giving the same result for different games? How are the results decided anyway? Framerate?

They're not absolute numbers, it's all relative.
 
Don't make anything of it, these only compare how video cards with those memory configurations performed. It's not really salient to whether you get better performance out of X gigs of GDDR5 or 2X gigs of DDR3 + eDRAM as the main memory pool in a console.

Ok, I think I have no idea what to make of this thread then. Maybe this I'll be able understand however... why go x86 over ARM this gen?
 

longdi

Banned
First, you are complete and utterly wrong.
Second, developers would prefer quality RAM over slow RAM. Sony is leveraging a balancing act. 4 GB of GDDR5 is nothing to scoff at. Microsoft will use 8 GB of DDR4 in a brute force fashion to compensate for bandwith issues. It is a giant wash.
Third, Sony is going for RAM with 192 GB/S. It is clocked just right.

no im not wrong.
if durango runs only ddr3 than maybe. but it will be compensated by the ultra fast pool of esram as stated. both 360 and ps2 had the ultra fast ram and it enables them to keep up with systems with more bandwidth. 360 only has 22gb/s while ps3 has 48gb/s or so.
even ps2 which has much inferior gpu due to the time of its release, it had about 3.2gb/s while xbox has 6.4gb/s and it fought well though hampered by low res IQ. now imagine if ps2 had as good gpu as xbox but with 128mb of 3.2gb/s main ram, it would easily be the superior hardware. this looks like the case of ps4 vs durango.

in the end 8gb vs 4gb is a huge win for Durango developers and i also browse beyond3d, developers have stated more ram is better when the speed difference is not that great with esram in the picture. furthermore, 192gb/s is no big deal. my pc gpu has 300gb/s now and games like crysis2 still runs sluggish at certain points with only 1200p full settings.

the expectation of a more advanced mulit tasking OS seated in the background will suck a portion of the 4GB.

so no, 4GB is not enough for PS4 to compete with Durango in the same price bracket. either Sony put another 2GB or they have to market PS4 as a mid range between Wii U and Durango.
 

Thoraxes

Member
Wow, those are pretty disappointing specs compared to what I was expecting.

I'll just stick to my PC and borrow a friend's PS4 whenever FF XV comes out to play that.
 
the only interesting thing about this is ps4 2013

damn i'm right a lot.

I thought Sony was ~6 months behind in their schedule due to silicon issues? Something said in a previous thread, sorry no link. If it's true, for them to still launch in 2013 would mean that they were aiming for roughly mid-2013 or earlier initially. What's your take?
 
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