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[camaropilot]

You'll have to explain to me why it's alright to use back-of-napkin speculation to justify these OS allocations, but when someone speculates to the contrary, they suddenly need to meet the rigor of being an OS designer or system architect and seemingly need to produce a full-blown technical design specification as evidence.

My point was that none of us know why the OS has 3.5 GB of RAM reserved and it's pretty stupid to speculate what is a "reasonable" amount of RAM.

 

[FranXico]

According to a eurogamer article:

"Flexible Memory" is memory managed by the PS4 OS on the game's behalf, and allows games to use some very nice FreeBSD virtual memory functionality. However this memory is 100 per cent the game's memory, and is never used by the OS, and as it is the game's memory it should be easy for every developer to use it.

Makes sense that it's listed as part of the 4.5 gb.

No it doesn't.

From the same article:

A new source familiar with the matter has provided additional information to Digital Foundry that confirms only 4.5GB of the PS4's 8GB GDDR5 memory pool is guaranteed to game developers right now, while also clarifying how the PS4's "flexible memory" works in practice.

In real terms, an additional 512MB of physical RAM may be available in addition to the 4.5GB mentioned in the SDK. Flexible memory consists of physical and virtual spaces, and the latter introduces paging issues which impact performance. In our original story we combined them together.

[...]

Based on this information, plus the new source coming forward to explain the properties of flexible memory, our take on this right now is that there is 4.5GB of conventional RAM available to developers, along with the OS-controlled flexible memory Sony describes, in addition to that.

We understand that this is a 1GB virtual address space, split into two areas - 512MB of on-chip RAM is used (the physical area) and another 512MB is "paged", perhaps like a Windows swap file. But to be clear, of the 8GB of GDDR5 on PS4, our contention is that 5GB of it is available to developers.

4.5GB of physical memory which is directly accessible, and in addition to that another 512MB of memory used to manage a virtual memory space. I am under the impression from the slides, that SP did not use paging.

 

[kaching]

The point is that saying, "double the old amount, that should be good," with no considering for what tasks are being carried out is not how designing this sort of architecture works.

Neither is generically referencing "future-proofing" or saying, "game X on my PC rig only uses XY RAM, so it's fine"

I'm sorry that the particularly statement you quoted didn't expressly lay out the full extent to which I've considered what tasks are being carried out, but that was an assumption on your part that I hadn't.

Your assertion for how much/little "should" be used is at odds with most solutions for this set of challenges in the industry.

Such as? The closest example seems to be the X1 but it's approaching these challenges using a fundamentally different OS architecture which renders a direct comparison difficult.

My point was that none of us know why the OS has 3.5 GB of RAM reserved and it's pretty stupid to speculate what is a "reasonable" amount of RAM.

Defending the current allocation as reasonable is equally speculative.

 

[Lord Error]

Yes, they are. They are wasting memory and bandwidth with higher precision buffer when they dont need them.
With Ryse setup Infamous would use 25mb [Ryse uses 17mb] without stencil+depth, which is probably around 8mb for rendering framebuffer, so less than 40mb instead of over 80mb.

But maybe that setup wouldn't let them do something that they otherwise can do. I'd be very surprised if these guys were not aware of the years old Crysis 3 buffer breakdown. Also that saving seems like a drop in the ocean considering that they are using 290MB for render targets so the bottleneck might be somewhere else entirely anyway.

 

[PlayStationboy]

a whole slew of GAF insiders, their parrots, and mods owe Leadbetter an apology

Wow, that thread is pure entertainment!

DF are no longer the trustworthy source they used to be.

 

[Wishmaster92]

Lol i remember that.

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

anyone know?

 

[Triple U]

Yes, they are. They are wasting memory and bandwidth with higher precision buffer when they dont need them.
With Ryse setup Infamous would use 25mb [Ryse uses 17mb] without stencil+depth, which is probably around 8mb for rendering framebuffer, so less than 40mb instead of over 80mb.
With Crysis 3 setup they would use just 25mb with depth+stencil

-------


Resolution is irrelevant here.

You're trying way to hard to critique engine design decisions when you have zero knowledge of the games graphical pipeline and haven't seen one lick of code. I'm pretty sure sucker punch's team deliberated over every design decision and collectively agreed on targets in response to their game design requirements. You simply pointing at cryteks path and repeating hey just do what they did is as flawed a concept I've ever seen.

 

[Backfoggen]

a whole slew of GAF insiders, their parrots, and mods owe Leadbetter an apology

What a weird cuddle sesh that thread was.

 

[aY227]

You're trying way to hard to critique engine design decisions when you have zero knowledge of the games graphical pipeline and haven't seen one lick of code. I'm pretty sure sucker punch's team deliberated over every design decision and collectively agreed on targets in response to their game design requirements. You simply pointing at cryteks path and repeating hey just do what they did is as flawed a concept I've ever seen.

First of all check my first post in this thread.
Second of all if Crytek is doing same render target in lower precision without losing quality that means that they spend less bandwidth with the same effect, so their solution is more efficient by definition.
And finally The Order is using 4xRGBA8 not sure about one, we have only one inconclusive slide about that [in material properties section].
I dont know about Killzone SF, because in post-mortem demo slides they were still finding out what is the best precision setup, but they used 5x buffers + 32b stencil/depth, but even this unoptimized setup is smaller than Infamous one.

I'm using Crytek data, because they gave the most inside into development from both Crysis 3 and Ryse and they actually researched g-buffer packing methods and their efficiency and quality in the past.

In short, there is more gain to be had even at this point in time.

Yes, exactly. Maybe not for Infamous SS, because maybe they are not BW bound in any situation, so changing framebuffer setup would not change much, but in future sure.

But maybe that setup wouldn't let them do something that they otherwise can do. I'd be very surprised if these guys were not aware of the years old Crysis 3 buffer breakdown. Also that saving seems like a drop in the ocean considering that they are using 290MB for render targets so the bottleneck might be somewhere else entirely anyway.

As i said in this post, they could not be BW bound currently so the buffer setup is not bottlenecking them, but it is inefficient.

 

[i-Lo]

First of all check my first post in this thread.
Second of all if Crytek is doing same render target in lower precision without losing quality that means that they spend less bandwidth with the same effect, so their solution is more efficient.
And finally The Order is using 4xRGBA8 not sure about one, we have only inconclusive slide about that.
I dont know about Killzone SF, because in post-mortem demo slides they were still finding out what is the best precision setup, but they used 5x buffers + 32b stencil/depth, but even this unoptimized setup is smaller than Infamous one.

In short, there is more gain to be had even at this point in time.

 

[TalonJH]

I remember well how, after it became known MS is reserving 3 GB on Xbox One, we had here most people complaining about "bloated OS", "stupid MS", "totally non-gaming console", etc. etc.

And now it comes out Sony is reserving even more on their "totally gaming oriented" console.

Oh, the irony.

To be fair, we knew this since last year. This isn't really new. Eurogamer had the original article and every one complained about it. You may have missed it, it honestly feels like it was so long ago.

 

[aY227]

Lol i remember that.



anyone know?

Nope, render targets and buffers should be in VRAM. Loaded data seems like everything from streaming textures, for loaded textures and audio. Definitely it shouldnt be in VRAM on PC as a whole.

 

[RayMaker]

I mean that 3.5GB figure will go down over time. It's not unrealistic to think that eventually devs will be able to access 5.5GB+.

Well the 5.5 figure is from an unconfirmed source, I think actual devs telling us how much ram there using/have on the PS4 is a more solid source.

When people use unconfirmed source over more official sources, it shows more what they would like to happen.

 

[UltraGunner]

a whole slew of GAF insiders, their parrots, and mods owe Leadbetter an apology

That whole thread was one of the worst circlejerks I've seen since r/atheism

 

[Storm Chamber]

 

[jonabbey]

360 reserved 32MB for OS while the PS3 reserved 96MB IIRC. There's efficiency to be considered. X1 OS is obviously doing a lot and makes sense to take up 3GB, but at the same time, if you look at what MS was able to do with 32MB, it's clear that they can do more with less. Maybe that explains why PS4 needs so much, and hopefully means they can tune it and bring that figure down in the future.

Part of the reason for the high reserve on PS3 was the split memory pool between Cell and RSX. On the 360, the OS could use the same bit of memory (at different times, obviously) for CPU code and for GPU buffers, according to its moment by moment needs. The PS3 memory system was just less flexible, and the OS had to be guaranteed to have enough of both types at all times.

 

[Lord Error]

First of all check my first post in this thread.
Second of all if Crytek is doing same render target in lower precision without losing quality that means that they spend less bandwidth with the same effect, so their solution is more efficient by definition.
....
As i said in this post, they could not be BW bound currently so the buffer setup is not bottlenecking them, but it is inefficient.

Yeah, but you don't know if they are not losing any quality, so if they have memory and BW to spare they are not doing anything wrong by getting even a bit more quality output out of their setup.

 

[FourMyle]

it's happening

 

[aY227]

Yeah, but you don't know if they are not losing any quality, so if they have memory and BW to spare they are not doing anything wrong by getting even a bit more quality output out of their setup.

They wouldnt lose quality, if they did Crytek and Ready at Dawn would also lose quality. Have You seen any lost quality in those games on materials, lighting or reflections for example?

And i havent said they made fatal mistake and they are terrible, just that its unoptimized and my discussion started because of this post:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=106774094&postcount=21
I just explained why its not correct, by saying that they do not need as big buffers as they used and citing some sources.

 

[Gestault]

Neither is generically referencing "future-proofing" or saying, "game X on my PC rig only uses XY RAM, so it's fine"

I'm sorry that the particularly statement you quoted didn't expressly lay out the full extent to which I've considered what tasks are being carried out, but that was an assumption on your part that I hadn't.
...
Defending the current allocation as reasonable is equally speculative.

As I didn't say or imply either of those quotes, I don't understand what bearing it has on this conversation. And no, in a conversation, it's very much expected for you to outwardly convey ideas you've come up with if you expect people to react to them. No one here is psychic, and you still choose not to lay out your reasoning. And the current allocation is reasonable in the sense that it was designed by dedicated staff. That the ram and processing allocation between two major platforms is very similar shows there's merit to that.

 

[NullPointer]

That's a whole lots of words and images to say black magic sorcery of awesome.

The IQ in this game is almost illegally good.

 

[cyberheater]

I can't be the only one who can't believe that these platform providers steal nearly half the memory for useless OS shite.

Whatever these companies think they need that pool of memory for. It's not worth it. Give the memory back to the game devs where it belongs damn it.

 

[perineumlick]

I can't be the only one who can't believe that these platform providers steal nearly half the memory for useless OS shite.

Whatever these companies think they need that pool of memory for. It's not worth it. Give the memory back to the game devs where it belongs damn it.

That's all fine and good, until a feature comes along that people long for, but the PS4 can't implement because of a lack of RAM, then we're back to square one, and people are crying about Sony not future proofing enough. You can't satisfy everyone, and developers seem to be happy with the direction Sony went with the hardware so far.

 

[chrislowe]

My mobilephone is doing facebook, twitter, messanger, instagram, chrome, gmail calender, psn.. and its not even using 1.5GB so 2GB more on a console seems to be atleast 1.5GB too much

 

[cyberheater]

That's all fine and good, until a feature comes along that people long for, but the PS4 can't implement because of a lack of RAM, then we're back to square one, and people are crying about Sony not future proofing enough. You can't satisfy everyone, and developers seem to be happy with the direction Sony went with the hardware so far.

There's no feature they could implement that takes precedent over games. I can understand that devs are currently happy after being constrained by the yoke of developing for PS360 but in time that 4.5Gb is going to start to feel pretty tight.

 

[Biker19]

Wow, I mean...wow. inFamous: Second Son looks beautiful enough going by those graphs, & that was just after only using 4.5 GB's of RAM?

Just imagine if 6 or even 7 GB's of GDDR5 RAM were to be used instead...

 

[NullPointer]

There's no feature they could implement that takes precedent over games. I can understand that devs are currently happy after being constrained by the yoke of developing for PS360 but in time that 4.5Gb is going to start to feel pretty tight.

Wasn't cross-game party chat not an option on the PS3 because of RAM constraints? I coulda sworn it was RAM constraints.

And OS features play into the overall experience - even the experience of playing games. Cross-game/party chat does. So does custom soundtrack support. So does stuff like suspend/resume, streaming to Twitch/Uplay, messaging, etc.

 

[RoboPlato]

Tweeted SP's tech lead about how much I liked their AA solution and he told me it was pretty similar to ACIV's and linked me to this blog post about it.

http://bartwronski.com/2014/03/15/temporal-supersampling-and-antialiasing/

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

Just imagine if 6 or even 7 GB's of GDDR5 RAM were used instead...

4.5gb is already a 10x increase over last gen. Significantly increasing that figure might not help too much if the gpu isn't getting beefed up too.

 

[SwiftDeath]

Tweeted SP's tech lead about how much I liked their AA solution and he told me it was pretty similar to ACIV's and linked me to this blog post about it.

http://bartwronski.com/2014/03/15/temporal-supersampling-and-antialiasing/

Hopefully it's a often used AA solution for Sony 1st party games going forward

 

[RoboPlato]

EDIT: Removed since I was wrong. Don't want to spread misinformation.

 

[TalonJH]

There's no feature they could implement that takes precedent over games. I can understand that devs are currently happy after being constrained by the yoke of developing for PS360 but in time that 4.5Gb is going to start to feel pretty tight.

I think that's the point of starting with a higher reserve instead of a lower reserve for OS and moving the bar. They can always optimize or simply give back unused ram and provide more memory to developers over the platforms life cycle as they demand more ram, but they can never say, "oh, we want to add "this" so we'll need to take ram from the games reserve" because it would make older games inoperable.

They are basically future proofing.

Maybe they decide they what to say, "we can snap apps too" one day.

 

[kaching]

As I didn't say or imply either of those quotes, I don't understand what bearing it has on this conversation.

I didn't say you had, but you are reacting distinctly more contentiously to my argument than to those. The burden of proof really shouldn't be any different.

No one here is psychic,

Yes, and it works both ways. I can't be expected to account for every possible assumption you or anyone else is going to make about my position. If you want to understand my position better, ask rather than infer.

and you still choose not to lay out your reasoning. And the current allocation is reasonable in the sense that it was designed by dedicated staff. That the ram and processing allocation between two major platforms is very similar shows there's merit to that.

I've offered some of my reasoning in piecemeal fashion over the course of addressing yours and other posters' points. Basically I start with last gen's OSes and where they left off, asserting that they probably already accomplish 75% of what most people are interested in a console OS doing for them. From there I look to the modern mobile OSes for capabilities that fill in the remaining requirements (lightweight, performance, multitasking, realtime, social/sharing, etc.) and see those work very well in a 1-2 GB allotment. That seems to dovetail well with the PS4's particular situation given that most of the primary planning for OS implementation had to have happened before they knew they would have access to anything more than 4 GB total. Those are the broad strokes of my reasoning.

As I said already, the XBO's similar allocation doesn't provide a particularly analogous scenario since part of that allotment involves managing 3 separate OS partitions. If anything, Sony allotting as much if not more memory to their single OS solution as MS does for their 3 OS solution only exacerbates the case against Sony's allocation, rather than bolster it.

 

[Biker19]

Those pictures indeed do not impress me that much compared to PC gaming. But if you are used to inferior graphics then this is the cream of the crop.

Really? Show me an open world game that looks as good & detailed as inFamous: Second Son, PC or console. Without mods.

 

[TalonJH]

Really? Show me an open world game that looks as good & detailed as inFamous: Second Son, PC or console.

You need to add, "Without mods"(Vanilla), Because GTA IV with mods is pretty amazing.

 

[Lord Error]

They wouldnt lose quality, if they did Crytek and Ready at Dawn would also lose quality. Have You seen any lost quality in those games on materials, lighting or reflections for example?

And i havent said they made fatal mistake and they are terrible, just that its unoptimized and my discussion started because of this post:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=106774094&postcount=21
I just explained why its not correct, by saying that they do not need as big buffers as they used and citing some sources.

I see. Reading that post you quoted and what you wrote earlier, I guess even if they shaved off some 40MB, they'd still be left with hefty 250MB of render targets.

 

[aY227]

A lot of it has to do with bandwidth available per frame. IIRC PS4 can make use of up to about 5.5GB of RAM per frame in a 30fps game so there is still some benefit to opening up more RAM. 60fps games won't benefit all that much. You can still cache data into more RAM than available per frame but it has much less of a benefit than what's readily accessible.

Actually there is ton of stuff that does not need to be accessible every frame. Like for example ton of objects in open world or something like Radiant AI. You can also store accumulated buffers for lighting or shadows that You can use in parts depending where came is in the world.
You can store advanced and long animations for complex objects etc.
You dont need them every frame, but streaming them from HDD would be painful
Look at all those strategy games that uses tons of memory, but they do not need them every frame or how tons of mods for Skyrim can bloat a memory.

I see. Reading that post you quoted and what you wrote earlier, I guess even if they shaved off some 40MB, they'd still be left with hefty 250MB of render targets.

I meant G-buffer. Render targets means also additional buffers for AA or post processing or shadow maps etc. Those on Xbone can be accessed from DDR3 without an issue.

 

[RoboPlato]

Actually there is ton of stuff that does not need to be accessible every frame. Like for example ton of objects in open world or something like Radiant AI. You can also store accumulated buffers for lighting or shadows that You can use in parts depending where came is in the world.
You can store advanced and long animations for complex objects etc.
You dont need them every frame, but streaming them from HDD would be painful
Look at all those strategy games that uses tons of memory, but they do not need them every frame or how tons of mods for Skyrim can bloat a memory.

Good point. Thanks for that.

 

[entremet]

a whole slew of GAF insiders, their parrots, and mods owe Leadbetter an apology

Insiders really dropping the ball of late. Badly too.

 

[Pestilence11]

There's no feature they could implement that takes precedent over games. I can understand that devs are currently happy after being constrained by the yoke of developing for PS360 but in time that 4.5Gb is going to start to feel pretty tight.

Being able to implement new features in the future is a good thing. Cross game chat was impossible last gen because there wasn't enough ram. Look at how sluggish the XMB got when trying to do something simple like check a message while in game. Nobody knows what is going to be the next big OS feature of a console, so I think it's a smart move.

 

[dr_rus]

A lot of it has to do with bandwidth available per frame. IIRC PS4 can make use of up to about 5.5GB of RAM per frame in a 30fps game so there is still some benefit to opening up more RAM. 60fps games won't benefit all that much. You can still cache data into more RAM than available per frame but it has much less of a benefit than what's readily accessible.

Nobody uses all the available RAM in each frame. Amount of RAM has nothing to do with how much data you can load each frame from it. There are caches, shaders, buffers and other stuff happening each frame. Prefetching/preloading from HDD also takes up RAM. It just doesn't work this way.

 

[Graphics Horse]

290MB of render targets?!

Edit: oh I was forgetting that'll include shadow maps and stuff. Seen the breakdown of gbuffer now, about 44MB bytes per pixel.

 

[RoboPlato]

Nobody uses all the available RAM in each frame. Amount of RAM has nothing to do with how much data you can load each frame from it. There are caches, shaders, buffers and other stuff happening each frame. Prefetching/preloading from HDD also takes up RAM. It just doesn't work this way.

Thanks for explaining. I was going off some calculations someone did a while back and I probably misunderstood their conclusion.

 

[Lord Error]

Tweeted SP's tech lead about how much I liked their AA solution and he told me it was pretty similar to ACIV's and linked me to this blog post about it.

http://bartwronski.com/2014/03/15/temporal-supersampling-and-antialiasing/

Reading that makes me realize just how pointless is to start any kind of armchair developer discussion, and how case-by-case things really are, even for something I thought was mostly figured out, as a well documented SMAA technique.

 

[Chumpion]

I...don't know what's sarcasm on this forum anymore =/

I'm SERIOUS as FUCK. Who do you think is paying for that unused 3.5 GB of RAM and 2 cores? Sony? NO - it's the customers! WE have to PAY for that shit so that some "VISIONARY" executive at Sony can maintain "strategic reserves" as he MASTURBATES at his desk!

We want FREEDOM! OPPRESSION of resources must END!

 

[ThirtyPlus]

Whoa, this thread delivered.

 

[charsace]

I can't be the only one who can't believe that these platform providers steal nearly half the memory for useless OS shite.

Whatever these companies think they need that pool of memory for. It's not worth it. Give the memory back to the game devs where it belongs damn it.

These consoles are cheap media PC's. I wish someone had the balls to go full on Amiga.

 

[travisbickle]

I can't be the only one who can't believe that these platform providers steal nearly half the memory for useless OS shite.

Whatever these companies think they need that pool of memory for. It's not worth it. Give the memory back to the game devs where it belongs damn it.

Looks like you're the first person to mention it, not only in this thread but possibly ever, maybe you should make a thread about it quick before someone else does.

 

[kyser73]

I'm SERIOUS as FUCK. Who do you think is paying for that unused 3.5 GB of RAM and 2 cores? Sony? NO - it's the customers! WE have to PAY for that shit so that some "VISIONARY" executive at Sony can maintain "strategic reserves" as he MASTURBATES at his desk!

We want FREEDOM! OPPRESSION of resources must END!

I read that in the voice of your avatar.

 

[vpance]

4.5gb is already a 10x increase over last gen. Significantly increasing that figure might not help too much if the gpu isn't getting beefed up too.

And bandwidth. No use to have 7GB available if you couldn't really access it all at once.