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[Vincent Alexander]

Big deal, open up a dozen Firefox tabs and bam 5GB RAM used.

I opened 20 for the fuck of it. I've not even dented 5 GB. Shocking.

 

[dimb]

They're probably aiming for 4 GB then, to ensure lower end PC users aren't left out.

4GBs of RAM isn't really low end for PCs.

 

[goomba]

nothing wrong with streaming and they will have to stream anyway once they run out of ram

 

[IHaveCandy]

"The Witness wants"......Is it sentient?

 

[Kyon]

How is a game like KillZone look like that and have all that going on with only 4GB? But this indie(?) game doesnt and is using more? I'm not techy so plz explain someone cause this makes no sense

 

[Man-is-Obsolete]

I don't understand the backlash, if it's there why not use it? Would you rather it be loaded off of your hard drive or super fast RAM? Sure it's unoptimized, that only strengthens his point that he and his small team can instead focus on their game.

 

[Radec]

"Wants to use over 5GB.."

?

Anyway, how is this game so ram extensive?

The game looks like a current gen game IMO.

 

[KingFire]

Next gen: We have so much RAM we don't need to optimize. Expect more half-baked games with day1, day 30 patches.

Well that can be said about the games that were released at the beginning of this generation. I mean we jumped from 64 MB of DDR SDRAM @ 200 MHz on the Xbox to 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM clocked at 700 MHz which is quite large. Yet devs at some point hit a wall and were limited by the RAM. Smart memory management enabled us to enjoy games that would otherwise be impossible on current consoles.

While 8GB sounds big for consoles today, think 2 to 4 years from now. I guarantee you that you will be reading more about devs complaining that consoles have no RAM (hell Crytek is already doing that).

 

[wutwutwut]

Yes, I know where he's coming from. I myself work on software that needs 30+ GB RAM to be remotely fast.


Luckily the machines I deploy it on have 144 GB of RAM.

 

[Hypron]

Crysis 2 is. Not so sure about Crysis 1 and 3...

Crysis 1 was released a few years too early and wasn't super well optimised, I'll give you that. However, it got way too much flack just because it hurt people's ego as they couldn't put all the sliders on maximum and run the game at a playable framerate, even though at the time it looked way better than absolutely anything else out there.

 

[Vincent Alexander]

I don't understand the backlash, if it's there why not use it? Would you rather it be loaded off of your hard drive or super fast RAM? Sure it's unoptimized, that only strengthens his point that he and his small team can instead focus on their game.

Blow could tell us murder is wrong and there'd still be a few here who'd attack him---it's the cool thing to do.

 

[joeblow]

Guys remember when more than 2gb of ram was impossible? Now 8 isn't enough.

Yeah it is.

 

[SMT]

Forcing cloud streaming down the throats of devs, thus making games shittier, and all consoles/systems suffer due to the parity policy.

Terrible.

 

[Brofist]

I opened 20 for the fuck of it. I've not even dented 5 GB. Shocking.

Admittedly I switched to Chrome back in the days where that may have actually been close to true, but I hear Firefox has come a long way as far as memory issues.

 

[Anteater]

Guys remember when more than 2gb of ram was impossible? Now 8 isn't enough.

I remember the 32mb ram pc days, now my browser wants to use 800mb of my ram.

 

[Surface of Me]

What's stopping Sony or MS releasing RAM expansion packs like Nintendo did in the N64 days?

 

[-COOLIO-]

"Wants to use over 5GB.."

?

Anyway, how is this game so ram extensive?

The game looks like a current gen game IMO.

you pull more from disk at a time rather than less, every game could benefit from more ram, you never really hit a ceiling on what you could use unless you've already loaded your entire game into the ram. correct me if i'm wrong.

also, i love johnathon blow.

 

[Salacious Crumb]

What's stopping Sony or MS releasing RAM expansion packs like Nintendo did in the N64 days?

Good sense.

 

[Blades64]

If DDR3 is so inexpensive like he says, it kinda makes me wonder how Nintendo couldn't put a measly 4GB of RAM in the Wii U.

 

[Katzenjammer]

Why is it unoptimized? If you have the memory, you should use it. He can have tons of stuff loaded/cached in memory without the need to manage it extensively. If he can essentially fit the entire game in memory, then that's a huge plus.

This. The uninformed conclusions that the majority of the people are reaching here...just wow

 

[ElectricKaibutsu]

Does this mean no Witness on Wii U?

 

[Net_Wrecker]

How is a game like KillZone look like that and have all that going on with only 4GB? But this indie(?) game doesnt and is using more? I'm not techy so plz explain someone cause this makes no sense

Because The Witness' dev team no longer HAS to try and cram all their ideas into 512MBs of RAM. They're just adding and adding so the game is hogging memory, but for the next gen systems, it's OK. For now anyway.

Killzone looked like it did on 4GB because Guerrilla busted their asses to work within the restraints they were handed. But you can bet with 8GB they'll be putting up with a little "unoptimization" as well. If you aren't trying to squeeze everything out of the system, why bother controlling how much RAM the game uses or creating some insane streaming engine? I'm sure Naughty Dog & Sony Santa Monica will once again become optimization beasts in 2016-2017 when the time calls for it.

 

[DidntKnowJack]

Hehe. That seems...excessive.

 

[-COOLIO-]

Guys remember when more than 2gb of ram was impossible? Now 8 isn't enough.

to be fair, people were excepting 2gbs of gddr ram.

 

[xJavonta]

Sounds like Blow is talking out of his ass again.

I used to respect him, but he's been an annoying fuck lately. 5GB of RAM is a huge step over last gen, and if The Witness, a game that looks last gen, is using 5GB, that's called lack of optimization.

And don't even give me that bullshit about spending less time to optimize gives you more time to make the game better. An optimized game is better than a piece of shit.

 

[Marmaladefire]

If DDR3 is so inexpensive like he says, it kinda makes me wonder how Nintendo couldn't put a measly 4GB of RAM in the Wii U.

Gamepad already cost too much

 

[-COOLIO-]

Does this mean no Witness on Wii U?

going by their blog it seems that there's an ipad version in the works.

 

[toastyToast]

I'm pretty sure he's saying since the Xbone uses DDR3 and it's really cheap, bumping it up wouldn't have added to much to the total.

And yeah, I'd rather devs not waste time thinking about how to compartmentalise their games if the tech allows it.

 

[MartyStu]

Optimize your shitty code brah.

 

[reptilescorpio]

Super excited for this next generation, another leap forward especially for indie devs which is going to be delicious.

Agreed. Why does this game developer think he has any merit speaking of game developing?

.

 

[Surface of Me]

If DDR3 is so inexpensive like he says, it kinda makes me wonder how Nintendo couldn't put a measly 4GB of RAM in the Wii U.

I doubt just adding more ram to an otherwise not very powerful system would help that much.

 

[Hypron]

It's sad how many people in this thread are entirely missing the point he's making...

 

[whitehawk]

A lot of people in here don't understand what he's doing. Pretty sure he's planning to load the entire game into the RAM upon start up, which would mean no load times once the game has started. This is awesome.

 

[Salacious Crumb]

Sounds like Blow is talking out of his ass again.

I used to respect him, but he's been an annoying fuck lately. 5GB of RAM is a huge step over last gen, and if The Witness, a game that looks last gen, is using 5GB, that's called lack of optimization.

And don't even give me that bullshit about spending less time to optimize gives you more time to make the game better. An optimized game is better than a piece of shit.

Wow.

 

[Anteater]

Optimize your shitty code brah.

Why should he? There're still 2 gigs left to use! No point of all those ram if they're not going to use them.

 

[Reg]

Sounds like Blow is talking out of his ass again.

I used to respect him, but he's been an annoying fuck lately. 5GB of RAM is a huge step over last gen, and if The Witness, a game that looks last gen, is using 5GB, that's called lack of optimization.

And don't even give me that bullshit about spending less time to optimize gives you more time to make the game better. An optimized game is better than a piece of shit.

Why so much hostility?

 

[x3sphere]

Sounds like Blow is talking out of his ass again.

I used to respect him, but he's been an annoying fuck lately. 5GB of RAM is a huge step over last gen, and if The Witness, a game that looks last gen, is using 5GB, that's called lack of optimization.

And don't even give me that bullshit about spending less time to optimize gives you more time to make the game better. An optimized game is better than a piece of shit.

He's wanting to load all the assets in RAM instead of wasting time with a streaming solution. Clearly a lot of armchair developers in this thread don't get it.

 

[CrunchinJelly]

A lot of people in here don't understand what he's doing. Pretty sure he's planning to load the entire game into the RAM upon start up, which would mean no load times once the game has started. This is awesome.

He's said he's using streaming on PS4.

 

[amardilo]

I wish MS would up the RAM just for better future proofing. 5GB for games might seem OK now but more RAM means more data in memory and bigger worlds.

I really hope with all this bad press they are getting they do something like up the hardware specs without upping the cost to consumers (it's unlikely but I hope they do it).

 

[mattiewheels]

So it's like moving into a mansion, and people start complaining about why you aren't stacking all the furniture on top of itself.

 

[Sho_Nuff82]

Blow is going in hard for Sony, damn.

 

[op_ivy]

this fucking guy

 

[Vincent Alexander]

Sounds like Blow is talking out of his ass again.

I used to respect him, but he's been an annoying fuck lately. 5GB of RAM is a huge step over last gen, and if The Witness, a game that looks last gen, is using 5GB, that's called lack of optimization.

And don't even give me that bullshit about spending less time to optimize gives you more time to make the game better. An optimized game is better than a piece of shit.

Just because something is optimized doesn't mean it is good. And just because a game is good doesn't mean it is optimized. You seem to be confusing the two while giving no real argument in return.

 

[xJavonta]

Why so much hostility?

Because he makes good games and I don't want him starting a trend of getting lazy with his code because the hardware is so powerful. Is it really so wrong to ask for devs to optimize their code and not give half-assed excuses to the uninformed to justify it?

Just because something is optimized doesn't mean it is good. And just because a good is good doesn't mean it is optimized. You seem to be confusing the two while giving no real argument in return.

Agreed. But I can't enjoy a game no matter how good it is if it runs like ass. Especially if I KNOW it could have been done better if it weren't for lack of trying on the devs part.

 

[MemoryHumanity]

Yeah, I know he said it's 'not about optimisitaion', but it is. There's no way this game needs 5GB RAM if something like Xenoblade/Super Mario Galaxy can run on 88MB.

I was worried that having so much RAM would result in devs just writing lazy, bloated, unoptimised code, rather than actually making good use of the extra power. I guess it makes sense for indie games, but I hope we don't see this kind of thing in AAA releases

Spoiler

lol

EDIT: In fairness, we haven't seen anything of the game, so saying there's 'no way' is a bit short sighted I guess. But still, I highly doubt it.

 

[Angelus Errare]

Big deal, open up a dozen Firefox tabs and bam 5GB RAM used.

Weird, I have 3 Firefox Windows open across 3 monitors, on two are flash videos from Giantbomb and Twitch, and on the other monitor are 21 tabs open 3 of which are javascript heavy and I'm sitting at 566,292K for Firefox and 71,780k for Flash Player 11.7r700

 

[mackaveli]

Because he makes good games and I don't want him starting a trend of getting lazy with his code because the hardware is so powerful. Is it really so wrong to ask for devs to optimize their code and not give half-assed excuses to the uninformed to justify it?

Why optimize the code if it doesn't need to be as the hardware is more powerful?

Why waste his time when he can concentrate on the gaming experience and other things that may need work if he has sufficient ram and can just stream it instead of optimizing it?

What benefit would their be if there is ram left over?

 

[Brad Grenz]

How is a game like KillZone look like that and have all that going on with only 4GB? But this indie(?) game doesnt and is using more? I'm not techy so plz explain someone cause this makes no sense

Killzone's final size will probably be 40-50GB. I think the 5GB figure Blow references is about the total size of the whole game, which up to now they've just been loading completely into RAM.

 

[-COOLIO-]

Sounds like Blow is talking out of his ass again.

I used to respect him, but he's been an annoying fuck lately. 5GB of RAM is a huge step over last gen, and if The Witness, a game that looks last gen, is using 5GB, that's called lack of optimization.

And don't even give me that bullshit about spending less time to optimize gives you more time to make the game better. An optimized game is better than a piece of shit.

p1: ram usage != graphics. does photoshop look next gen to you?

p2: thats not bullshit. it's truth no matter how you try to spin it.

also, it's just the dudes opinion. he's not attacking anybody. why are you getting so aggressive about it?

 

[JWong]

Next gen: We have so much RAM we don't need to optimize. Expect more half-baked games with day1, day 30 patches.

Optimization has nothing to do with bugs.

In fact, it will mean less bugs because of the time reduced on optimization.