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[lightchris]

From my experience CPUs aren't very good with physics calculations

Could you be more specific about what you mean by that?

Up to now all gameplay relevant physics calculations run on the CPU. Amongst others because the latency for GPGPU in traditional split memory architectures is too big. Thanks to hUMA PS4 might be the first device to change that.
The amount that can be offloaded will be limited though, so the CPU will remain to be important imo.

 

[Espada]

Have we seen any examples or talk of software being memory constrained? I think the additional memory would have very little impact on presentation output.

Nah, we don't need to hear that they were memory constrained in some things they wanted to do. More memory to work with is simply a good thing for developers, and the OS should cede as much of it to games while remaining stable and responsive. Its win-win for gamers.

 

[Rainy Dog]

3.5GB just seems like overkill to me.

It was probably decided in collaboration with the majority of developers. 4.5-5gb of ram was likely the max headroom any game in development as of a year or so ago really needed so they just reserved the rest for now. Doesn't mean the OS is using all what's reserved but best to do it that way around after the situation with the PS3.

When games really do need more ram allocating to them I'm sure they'll get it.

 

[Sickbean]

It just stuns me that there are people here that are arrogant enough to think that they know better than Sony how much RAM to allocate to the PS4 OS.

 

[ethomaz]

It just stuns me that there are people here that are arrogant enough to think that they know better than Sony how much RAM to allocate to the PS4 OS.

While nobody knows how many is allocate for OS... just that a game uses 4.5GB.

 

[Moral Panic]

True, but even if they were wrong, it was discussed quite a bit though, and some of the discussion was taking into account that it might have been accurate. And if Eurogamer was wrong about the 512MB Flex thing, its not really that far off the truth (which seems to be 4.5GB). It was a pretty big thread about it here:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=636106

It was discussed quite a bit until the "insiders" said it was false and then it pretty much became a DF hatefest with people comparing them to Fox News and unmoderated hatred against Leadbetter. I still can't figure out why the title was changed to what it is.

In any case it's interesting to see further confirmation of 6 cores. That means the OS allocation is currently 2 CPU cores + 3 GB Ram + X% GPU.

 

[LoveCake]

A interesting read, i wonder how much RAM Sony will be able to give back to dev's over time, it seems strange the amount of RAM used when considering how small the RAM on the PS3 & what was achieved graphics-wise.

Just think how people were when the 8th gen consoles were announced that they were having 8GB RAM (X1) & then the PS4 with 8GB DDR5, in a couple of years people will be clamoring for a RAM expansion pack lol !!!

 

[Qassim]

It just stuns me that there are people here that are arrogant enough to think that they know better than Sony how much RAM to allocate to the PS4 OS.

Whilst I get your point, these large companies aren't infallible. They can and often do make mistakes, i think there are people that could make a reasonable argument against design decisions Sony made.

 

[Kinyou]

Have we heard any complaints about the ram allocation yet? No, so why are gamers so interested about how much ram each part of the console uses, there is no need for you to get disappointed if people that actually make games aren't disappointed.

The OS footprint will shrink over time just like the PS3 OS going down from 120MB to 50MB while adding bunch of features. This is just future proofing as usual.

For some time 8GB DDR5 ram was kind of a selling point that people got hyped over. Makes sense to me that people are then confused/mad when it only uses 4,5 of those.

 

[Lord Error]

Cool presentation. In the end, SP made the best looking open world game there is, at the moment. Would not expect that from them, looking at their PS3 output, but they sure turned that ship around.

Unsurprisingly, they couldn't even use all the available RAM. Games today rely a lot on streaming, no one's ever going to make you wait 3 minutes for an upfront 5B data load or something like that.

They are wasting tons of memory with those buffers. They do not need to be as big as they are. Check Ryse or Crysis 3 presentations.

They are not wasting anything if this allows them better visual quality and/or performance. They'd be wasting if they had to pinch something else, but they didn't even need to fill up all the usable RAM. Ryse is going to use 40% less of main buffers by simple nature of its lower resolution to start with.

 

[Neuromancer]

It means there are too many rams allocated in the os.

Thank ewe for the explanation.

 

[systemfehler]

What would have happend if the PS4 ended up with 4GB like originally planned? The OS and most features should have been done before the switch to 8GB (assuming the surprise of most developers was true) and I doubt that any last minute stuff has been added to the OS right after the switch to 8GB. Curious if there isn't some missinformation in all that.

 

[Goodacre0081]

Maybe the big OS RAM reservation is due to the suspend/resume feature that should be hitting PS4 soon? I can see that taking up a lot of RAM for the OS.

Hopefully it will get smaller as time goes on.

can someone give us a crashcourse in the area of hibernation states? I thought the idea was that the PS4 would save the data on it's RAM to the HDD. I'm confused as to why that process would eat up much.

Just one idea off the top of my head: video editing. Being able to edit your video before sharing would be much better if you don't have to kill your game to do so. Having more RAM available outside of games allows such advanced applications to run without killing your game session.

i don't like the idea of editing footage mid-game anyway. the last thing I want to do in the middle of an MP session is edit video while respawning. that's actually what I do now, hit the share button, then go right back to the game by hitting cancel. it saves the footage and starts a new record point, so later when I'm done playing for the night I can go edit all the saved video at once in the dashboard when I'm not busy.

 

[MutonCommander]

It just stuns me that there are people here that are arrogant enough to think that they know better than Sony how much RAM to allocate to the PS4 OS.

That isn't the issue with the PS4's RAM. This is:

For some time 8GB DDR5 ram was kind of a selling point that people got hyped over. Makes sense to me that people are then confused/mad when it only uses 4,5 of those.

The 8 GBs of GDDR5 were often touted as the console's superweapon, the one thing (along with huma) that would ensure the console would stay competitive with gaming PCs for years to come. As silly as it is, some people actually believed it.

 

[ultratruman]

That isn't the issue with the PS4's RAM. This is:



The 8 GBs of GDDR5 were often touted as the console's superweapon, the one thing (along with huma) that would ensure the console would stay competitive with gaming PCs for years to come. As silly as it is, some people actually believed it.

How much VRAM does the average Pc GPU have?

 

[MutonCommander]

How much VRAM does the average Pc GPU have?

Mine has 2GBs!

 

[Razgreez]

For some time 8GB DDR5 ram was kind of a selling point that people got hyped over. Makes sense to me that people are then confused/mad when it only uses 4,5 of those.

The 8 GBs of GDDR5 were often touted as the console's superweapon, the one thing (along with huma) that would ensure the console would stay competitive with gaming PCs for years to come. As silly as it is, some people actually believed it.

This is what one would call compounded ignorance. It's responses and threads like these that really tarnish the reputation of gaf. Such absolute statements conjured from so little understanding

 

[Kinthalis]

How much VRAM does the average Pc GPU have?

You'll have to define the "Average" PC GPU.

Modern PC GPU's are usually north of 2 Gigs, but a lot of people have older or lower end GPU's.

However, due to the split memory architecture, the GPU on a PC only needs to store things relevant to the rendering process. Everythign else stays in system RAM. On consoles the 5 Gigs needs to hold everything - which means that in effect the GPU relevant bits will have less than 5 Gigs, probably closer to 2-3 gigs to work with. Of course this can be changed dynamically by the devs, which is a boon, IMHO.

 

[Qassim]

How much VRAM does the average Pc GPU have?

Why just the GPU? Is this 4.5GB just for GPU tasks? It's pretty hard to define 'average' for PC in this context. Because the average PC probably doesn't even have any dedicated VRAM.

The average PC gaming enthusiast card sold today (mid to top end) is 2-3GB VRAM. But last year it was probably 2GB.

 

[Kinthalis]

This is what one would call compounded ignorance. It's responses and threads like these that really tarnish the reputation of gaf. Such absolute statements conjured from so little understanding

It doesn't sound like you are offering any more of an elucidating answer yourself...

 

[MutonCommander]

This is what one would call compounded ignorance. It's responses and threads like these that really tarnish the reputation of gaf. Such absolute statements conjured from so little understanding

Jeez, tough crowd.

 

[Concept17]

Kudos to SP for creating an amazing game, and the best looking game I've ever played. It makes the whole Watch Dogs dilemma laughable by comparison.

 

[Freedom = $1.05]

Listen to this guy, he's a ram expert. 4.5 gigs should be enough for any developer. Forever.

Right now it's more than enough. In a few years, yeah, it'll be a pittance, just like 1/2 gig of ram was more than enough for most of the last-gen but became an issue near the end of it.

There aren't really any current games pushing at that 4-5 gig ceiling in a meaningful way. There's a reason people thought that the 3 gig of Vram requirement for Titanfall's max settings on PC was pretty shitty because it isn't doing anything that suggests that using that much memory is justified.

 

[Dragon]

It just stuns me that there are people here that are arrogant enough to think that they know better than Sony how much RAM to allocate to the PS4 OS.

I'd say Sony didn't do a very good job with its PS3 OS last generation, so being cynical or doubting them on this isn't a stretch. It's like being cynical about Microsoft's hardware based on their history. It's perfectly reasonable.

 

[RoboPlato]

The compute stuff is fascinating. SP really went all in with it. Cool to see that becoming such a focus so early in the gen.

Also confirms what I've been saying about the CPU for a while. It's decent, not great but also not pitiful like some are saying, and will get the job done.

 

[ultratruman]

Why just the GPU? Is this 4.5GB just for GPU tasks? It's pretty hard to define 'average' for PC in this context. Because the average PC probably doesn't even have any dedicated VRAM.

The average PC gaming enthusiast card sold today (mid to top end) is 3GB VRAM. But last year it was probably 2GB.

You'll have to define the "Average" PC GPU.

Modern PC GPU's are usually north of 2 Gigs, but a lot of people have older or lower end GPU's.

However, due to the split memory architecture, the GPU on a PC only needs to store things relevant to the rendering process. Everythign else stays in system RAM. On consoles the 5 Gigs needs to hold everything - which means that in effect the GPU relevant bits will have less than 5 Gigs, probably closer to 2-3 gigs to work with. Of course this can be changed dynamically by the devs, which is a boon, IMHO.

Thank you, I guess for my question to have relevance we'd have to know how much of the PS4's 4.5 - 5gb are used only by the GPU since it has a unified memory pool. I was just curious about how much is normal for a gaming GPU these days.

 

[belmonkey]

Is that "loaded data: 2.5GB" pretty much the same thing as PC VRAM, or can that not really be compared?

 

[SwiftDeath]

Wow interesting read. I'll look into it more later when I'm not so busy at work

4.5GB of RAM and 6 cores available to devs confirmed though.

I think that highly suggests PS4's CPU is clocked higher than the XB1 based on what Matt said or that the XB1 is suffering performance losses from virtualization

 

[kyser73]

Weren't there two issue with PS3 RAM? The first was the under-allocation which meant they couldn't add persistent party chat and suchlike, but also there was some weird-ass architecture that meant you couldn't address it all in one go, and couldn't move data around easily? Or something. Technical stuff.

 

[belmonkey]

How much VRAM does the average Pc GPU have?

Talking about dedicated GPUs, 2GB is about average for the moment. If Steam hardware surveys are representative of Steam as a whole, that's probably at least 8-10 million people with 2GB VRAM or more (only counting GTX 660 / 7870 and up). Still, that's not the majority. Plenty of us are stuck on laptops, for some reason or another, with Intel HD 4000 and other cruddy parts.

 

[iseedeadpeople]

I feel like I need to go back to school (I have no idea what I just read).

 

[Canis lupus]

For some time 8GB DDR5 ram was kind of a selling point that people got hyped over. Makes sense to me that people are then confused/mad when it only uses 4,5 of those.

People only need to blame themselves if they thought the OS would come free and 8GB would be used for games. If people are that ignorant, they shouldn't discuss this topic.

i think the PS3 footprint shrank due to necessity. to stay relevant the Sony engineers really needed to dig around and make the OS as efficient as possible. with such a huge reserve now they're not being pushed to streamline.

also, i don't really know what I'm talking about.

. The goal is always to make it more streamlined and efficient, they aren't gonna sit on their ass and let the OS footprint stay the same for an entire gen. They'll free up the reserved ram for 2 reasons. The first is efficiency, the OS will have more features while taking less space. (The PS3 OS shrank while still adding many new features.). 2nd being, and this was not the case with PS3, is that they have now enough ram to cover an unexpected system feature they could add mid-gen. If the new features will not be taking as many resources as anticipated, the allocation for the OS will shrink again on top of the already streamlined and shrunk OS. I think they'll be able to free 1.5-2GB from the system in the end.

 

[Razgreez]

It doesn't sound like you are offering any more of an elucidating answer yourself...

That would be inefficient since very few would read it and even less would take note but let's elaborate a bit

For some time 8GB DDR5 ram was kind of a selling point that people got hyped over. Makes sense to me that people are then confused/mad when it only uses 4,5 of those.

From the statement above one would assume the PS4 only uses 4.5GB (to 5GB) of RAM and the rest just sits there idly. In reality though the other 3 (to 3.5GB) is being ring-fenced by the PS4 OS and more of it may or may not be utilized, by games, now or in future. Contrary to much of the uneducated furore this is actually a positive since it means the console could potentially have more RAM allocated to games in future (you can always give back since it's only taking away that would break compatibility). A more factual statement would have been "The PS4 only allocates 4.5-5GB of RAM to games at present" which, considering the console was originally planned to only launch with 4GB in total, is not disappointing at all.

The 8 GBs of GDDR5 were often touted as the console's superweapon, the one thing (along with huma) that would ensure the console would stay competitive with gaming PCs for years to come. As silly as it is, some people actually believed it.

Then we have statements as above. The allocation of 8GB of RAM, it's actually 8448mb if one includes the DDR3 allocated to the companion chip, was never touted by any person of relative computer engineering understanding to be a "superweapon" so one would be hard-pressed to quote any significant individual stating as much. Once again the total RAM allocation is and was a luxury and a stroke of luck on sony's part. "One can never have too much ram but one can certainly have too little" - is a lesson sony learned the hard way with the PS3. The real "super/secret-weapon" touted by Cerny himself is the GPU compute capability combined with the heterogeneous memory architecture and it will likely be some time before we are able to see whether that pans out as Cerny expected

 

[BradleyLove]

can someone give us a crashcourse in the area of hibernation states? I thought the idea was that the PS4 would save the data on it's RAM to the HDD. I'm confused as to why that process would eat up much.



i don't like the idea of editing footage mid-game anyway. the last thing I want to do in the middle of an MP session is edit video while respawning. that's actually what I do now, hit the share button, then go right back to the game by hitting cancel. it saves the footage and starts a new record point, so later when I'm done playing for the night I can go edit all the saved video at once in the dashboard when I'm not busy.

True, but not everyone plays MP or wants to share MP videos. Besides, it was an example of what might be possible. I'm sure everybody has their own idea of what apps they'd like available without having to kill their game session.

I for one love being able to flick to the store, something not possible on PS3.

 

[Gestault]

Ryse uses a 900p buffer... 1080p buffer almost doubles the size of a 900p buffer...

You'll want to double-check your math on that point.

 

[Gestault]

Nah, we don't need to hear that they were memory constrained in some things they wanted to do. More memory to work with is simply a good thing for developers, and the OS should cede as much of it to games while remaining stable and responsive. Its win-win for gamers.

With respect, we have every indication that the criteria you're describing has been met. There is a point at which more memory isn't useful (or at the very least, necessary), particularly when the ram available is higher speed.

 

[Rainy Dog]

I'd say Sony didn't do a very good job with its PS3 OS last generation, so being cynical or doubting them on this isn't a stretch. It's like being cynical about Microsoft's hardware based on their history. It's perfectly reasonable.

Well, it's such a different set of heads that designed and conceived the PS4 than did the PS3 so it probably is a bit of a stretch. Same with regards to Microsoft as far as I know.

Not that the average person should know that, though.

 

[Dragon]

You'll want to double-check your math on that point.

To be precise, unless my calculator is wrong.

1600x900 = 1,440,000
1920x1080 = 2,073,600

 

[kyser73]

Nah, we don't need to hear that they were memory constrained in some things they wanted to do. More memory to work with is simply a good thing for developers, and the OS should cede as much of it to games while remaining stable and responsive. Its win-win for gamers.

Which is why Windows & Office are the highly optimised, streamlined, non-bloaty pieces of code they are today.

Or not.

Sometimes having a hard technical constraint to work at isn't a bad thing. In any given situation, being able to throw more of X key resource at a problem will generally bring about a solution even if it's a messy one; real innovation and creativity can flourish when there are limitations in resource.

 

[Gestault]

To be precise, unless my calculator is wrong.

1600x900 = 1,440,000
1920x1080 = 2,073,600

My guess is they were thinking of 1080p being about double the buffer-size of 720p (roughly 1 million vs 2 million pixels). In itself that doesn't undermine their point, it's just an observation.

 

[kaching]

It just stuns me that there are people here that are arrogant enough to think that they know better than Sony how much RAM to allocate to the PS4 OS.

This amount of RAM allocated to OS (more precisely, unavailable to game software) is completely unprecedented. It's not a matter of arrogance to express some skepticism at the sudden dramatic change in requirements. Last gen's console OSes got by with about 10% of total RAM allocated and, by most accounts, they already achieved most of what people want from a game OS. Keep the percent allocation the same moving from last gen to this gen and you'd be giving game OSes about 1 gig to work with, which seems perfectly reasonable given how well other modern OSes like iOS and Android seem to work with that allocation.

Instead we've jumped to a nearly 40-50% reservation and the best explanation for that remains "future-proofing", with no explicit explanation of what actually needs that much RAM. It's rather credulous to simply take that at face value.

 

[belmonkey]

Since the PS4 will come to use more memory, is it possible / probable that a 4GB 7850 might come to see some use?

 

[LookAtMeGo]

The way I look at it is that if games are looking as good as they are this early in the PS4s life and it is only using 4.5GB of the RAM and this number will increase over time, add in the fact that the tools will get better and they will be able to get more out of it and that it is just going to get better from here on out? This is awesome.

 

[unapersson]

From the statement above one would assume the PS4 only uses 4.5GB (to 5GB) of RAM and the rest just sits there idly. In reality though the other 3 (to 3.5GB) is being ring-fenced by the PS4 OS and more of it may or may not be utilized, by games, now or in future. Contrary to much of the uneducated furore this is actually a positive since it means the console could potentially have more RAM allocated to games in future (you can always give back since it's only taking away that would break compatibility). A more factual statement would have been "The PS4 only allocates 4.5-5GB of RAM to games at present" which, considering the console was originally planned to only launch with 4GB in total, is not disappointing at all.

Yes, and it's not just that, games will be requesting resources from the OS through its APIs all the time. There will all kinds of crossover areas where there is infrastructure code which will be in the OS instead of the game, so the game doesn't implement chunks of functionality and just requests it through the OS. Trophy support, sharing, save file management, notifications, updates etc. It all has to appear transparent between the two. From what's been said there's also an API to request a chunk of RAM but currently limited to 512MB. It's better that stuff is in the OS segment than custom to each game.

The OS is also Unix based, and Unix based OSs will make use of all the RAM available and manage it effectively. A lot of it will be used for disk caching, to avoid hitting the disk with every read, i.e. on my PC at the moment I've only got 768MB "free", but 3.3GB RAM is used for caching, which is released to apps as they request memory.

It would nice if they could do a tech dive into this stuff one day.

 

[RayMaker]

Why are Devs only using 4.5?


It has not be confirmed by sony the actual figure so I would not be surprised if 4.5 was the actual figure.

 

[seattle6418]

Finding out that the PS4 has only 6 cores and 4.5gb of memory is one of the worst news in a while, that was my impressions a few months back when this was confirmed.

If you´re all about games, reserving 3.5 gigs and 2 whole cores is just absurd. Everything you criticized about Microsoft was exactly this, not having enough focus on Games.

I guess the memory footprint will go down, but my expected target of 7.5gb seems out of reach. And two cores?

After playing some next gen games and some cross gen games, they need every bit of power they can get. Screw the OS features, it´s one of the reasons why i passed up on the Xbone. Just give me PS3 funcionality + cross chat and call it a day.

 

[MemoryHumanity]

How is a game using up all RAM a good thing in any way? It's not a fantastically beautiful game, it's not an incredibly big or detailed world, character models are good but not great and there is no AI to speak of so that would mean that it's just poorly optimized?
Why brag about yourself being bad at your job?

Here we go...

 

[EatinOlives]

I'd say Sony didn't do a very good job with its PS3 OS last generation, so being cynical or doubting them on this isn't a stretch. It's like being cynical about Microsoft's hardware based on their history. It's perfectly reasonable.

Their biggest mistake was not reserving enough RAM for the OS to support cross-game chat, and it bit them in the ass the entire generation. It'd be prudent to at the very least launch with a generous amount of RAM allocated to the OS level to see if they ever need a last-minute change that would require this, no?

The golden rule of console memory allocation is, you can always give more RAM to games in the future, but you can never take away. It's actually more logical that they would lay out their RAM like this.

 

[LegendofDragoonLives]

3.5/8 not being used is pretty fucking unforgivable.

"We are all about gaming" - Sony

 

[LookAtMeGo]

Could some of the OS reserve be for Morpheus? Could that be why they put aside 3.5?