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[Thunder Monkey]

Personally I never thought they'd have any more than 12 chips on there. At lower capacity than it ended up being.

16 chips is a damn busy board.

 

[Manmademan]

That's not what they're saying. They're saying that a certain amount of the 8 GB will always be reserved for the OS. The full OS will always reside in that memory, so taking advantage of certain features (custom soundtracks, video streaming, etc) won't affect the amount of memory available to the game (which it did on the PS3, if my understanding is correct). I would guess it's logically divided into two separate memory partitions, with devs not having to pay any attention at all to the OS memory part.

Anyway, devs will still have access to something like 7 GB, and that's still a pretty amazing amount of GDDR5. That "missing" 1 GB isn't gonna make or break anything.

Ps3 also did this. so what's the difference between the system memory the PS3 reserved for itself, and the system memory the PS4 reserved for itself?

 

[Osiris]

Personally I never thought they'd have any more than 12 chips on there. At lower capacity than it ended up being.

16 chips is a damn busy board.

Not really, using them in clamshell configuration means that there will only be 8 chips on the top of the motherboard, with the other 8 chips mirrored underneath on the other side of the board.

 

[zomgbbqftw]

Not really, using them in clamshell configuration means that there will only be 8 chips on the top of the motherboard, with the other 8 chips mirrored underneath on the other side of the board.

Yup, two banks of four clamshells. Not a big deal at all tbh.

 

[SirIgbyCeaser]

Ps3 also did this. so what's the difference between the system memory the PS3 reserved for itself, and the system memory the PS4 reserved for itself?

When the PS3 launched, its OS reserved up to 80mb or more... Making it pretty poor at launch compared to the 360. It was never walled in because sony promised to reduce the footprint. And it eventually reduced to 35ish mb if I recall.

But when they made that final cut. They never managed to fit in cross game voice chat. Which was a poor mistake. But they did manage to create ingame xmb, which was always in dev kits, but at times it seemed like it wasn't coming to retail consoles.

 

[alexandros]

Article became retarded right there. More RAM does not double your frame rate, for fuck's sake.

Exactly. The guy who wrote this didn't even bother to do the bare minimum of research.

 

[mrgreen]

So Microsoft wouldn't find out is the likely reason. Sony were probably thinking that it would be too late for them to combat it if they found out that late.

Could it mean that Microsoft will actually put back the release of the nextbox as a result of the PS4 being quite a lot more powerful than they thought? I hope so, I'd rather wait and have a better console.

 

[Risk Breaker]

Jeez. People do care about about RAM and use it WHEN COMPARING TWO PRODUCTS.

If you "average joe" is looking at two different laptops with the same price you can bet your ass that they WILL use the amount of memory (they wouldn't even call it RAM) to decide which one to buy.

Also, they're not JUST talking about the ram being different between devkits, so those "lolololo double the ram double the framerate XD" posts are kinda missing the point. But I know that RAM jokes are the latest

 

[ascii42]

Jeez. People do care about about RAM and use it WHEN COMPARING TWO PRODUCTS.

If you "average joe" is looking at two different laptops with the same price you can bet your ass that they WILL use the amount of memory (they wouldn't even call it RAM) to decide which one to buy.

Right, but laptops run the same OS, software, and games. Specs are the main differentiating factor. On consoles, it's the games that are most important.

 

[Risk Breaker]

Right, but laptops run the same OS, software, and games. Specs are the main differentiating factor. On consoles, it's the games that are most important.

Sure, but that doesn't make it the only important thing. With laptops, the build quality, screen quality, cooling and other factors are very important too and a lot of people don't care about it much

When your average (wealthy) people go shopping this Christmas and see the PS4 and 720 for (let's say, for the sake of the argument) almost the same price, with the same third-party launches and just FPS vs FPS and Racing game vs Racing game in respect to first-party (oversimplifying here), and they simply want a console, they will look at the specs sheet.

And even the amount of GB in the hard drive can help them make up their minds, really, even if it's 320GB vs 400GB.

 

[Pepto]

Right, but laptops run the same OS, software, and games. Specs are the main differentiating factor. On consoles, it's the games that are most important.

I think deep down we all know that 8(!) gigs of GDDR5 is pretty important.

 

[toff74]

Sure, but that doesn't make it the only important thing. With laptops, the build quality, screen quality, cooling and other factors are very important too and a lot of people don't care about it much

When your average (wealthy) people go shopping this Christmas and see the PS4 and 720 for (let's say, for the sake of the argument) almost the same price, with the same third-party launches and just FPS vs FPS and Racing game vs Racing game in respect to first-party (oversimplifying here), and they simply want a console, they will look at the specs sheet.

And even the amount of GB in the hard drive can help them make up their minds, really, even if it's 320GB vs 400GB.

i really don't believe the average person will look at specs.
theyll look for familiar names and what they know. That's why launch titles are so important!

 

[ascii42]

Sure, but that doesn't make it the only important thing. With laptops, the build quality, screen quality, cooling and other factors are very important too and a lot of people don't care about it much

When your average (wealthy) people go shopping this Christmas and see the PS4 and 720 for (let's say, for the sake of the argument) almost the same price, with the same third-party launches and just FPS vs FPS and Racing game vs Racing game in respect to first-party (oversimplifying here), and they simply want a console, they will look at the specs sheet.

And even the amount of GB in the hard drive can help them make up their minds, really, even if it's 320GB vs 400GB.

I'd say the amount of GB in the hard drive is more likely to make a difference, since it'll almost certainly be on the box. If the amount of RAM in the system is on the box, it'll be on a tiny spec list on the bottom or something.

 

[Kung Fu Grip]

Sure, but that doesn't make it the only important thing. With laptops, the build quality, screen quality, cooling and other factors are very important too and a lot of people don't care about it much

When your average (wealthy) people go shopping this Christmas and see the PS4 and 720 for (let's say, for the sake of the argument) almost the same price, with the same third-party launches and just FPS vs FPS and Racing game vs Racing game in respect to first-party (oversimplifying here), and they simply want a console, they will look at the specs sheet.

And even the amount of GB in the hard drive can help them make up their minds, really, even if it's 320GB vs 400GB.

And this is the main reason IMO that Sony changed the RAM to 8GB. Like i've been saying, there was no way Sony was going to let MS have a 4GB advantage. Yes, PS4's RAM was still better than Durango's at 4GB. But perception is everything and people seeing that Durango has 8GB would of ment it was better than PS4.

 

[Eclectic Jabber Monkey]

And nobody believed it. Was amazing to see the shock.

Doubling the RAM unbelievable? Not really, it's probably the easiest piece of hardware to change out this late in the hardware development cycle. Switching CPU vendors from AMD to Intel, that would've been a surprise. When I saw the announcement I was glad to see they bumped it up as the decision will makes devs lives easier and future proof the console.

Are you serious? No one outside forums even cares about these things.

Developers developers developers! They were the probably pushing very hard for 8.

 

[RoboPlato]

Could it mean that Microsoft will actually put back the release of the nextbox as a result of the PS4 being quite a lot more powerful than they thought? I hope so, I'd rather wait and have a better console.

Too many important games coming this fall for them to want to push it back. If they were going to do a major spec overhaul, the console would be delayed until at least mid-2014.

And this is the main reason IMO that Sony changed the RAM to 8GB. Like i've been saying, there was no way Sony was going to let MS have a 4GB advantage. Yes, PS4's RAM was still better than Durango's at 4GB. But perception is everything and people seeing that Durango has 8GB would of ment it was better than PS4.

The RAM upgrade was not based solely on the perception versus Durango, if it was at all. Even with 4gb of GDDR5, there was potential for a bottleneck. 8gb freed up a ton of space and possibilities.

 

[Binabik15]

Hey Thuway is a liar!

You were still hoping for 2,4 Tflops+ consoles for a long time. Sony had to crush our dreams, MS might take a dump on them.

 

[Kung Fu Grip]

The RAM upgrade was not based solely on the perception versus Durango, if it was at all. Even with 4gb of GDDR5, there was potential for a bottleneck. 8gb freed up a ton of space and possibilities.

I assure you it was one of the reasons for the upgrade. Even the Edge rumor mentioned Sony telling developers the RAM is going to match MS's 8GB.

A 4GB gap is too large of a number advantage.

 

[Truespeed]

Okay.

"Hmm, I was gonna buy the PS4 because I liked the games and apps on it, but it only has half the RAM of the Durango! Guess I'll get the Durango!"

Said no one ever.

Okay. Let's go buy a computer. I don't care how much memory it has. Said no intelligent person ever.

 

[Thunder Monkey]

Not really, using them in clamshell configuration means that there will only be 8 chips on the top of the motherboard, with the other 8 chips mirrored underneath on the other side of the board.

Yup, two banks of four clamshells. Not a big deal at all tbh.

Well again, those were my initial thoughts. No idea they'd use a clamshell design, and reasonably certain they wouldn't go for higher density. Amounting to fewer, lower density chips.

Glad to be wrong though. This machine even with meager parts inside should be a monster for a time.

 

[nhlducks35]

Okay. Let's go buy a computer. I don't care how much memory it has. Said no intelligent person ever.

Why are we comparing a laptop to a console?

People buy consoles based on the games and features they have, not the amount of RAM.

By your logic, wouldn't the Xbox have outsold the PS2 since it had more RAM?