• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

[Eurogamer\DF] Orbis Unmasked: what to expect from the next-gen PlayStation.

I asked earlier but I don't think anyone answered, coming from someone who doesn't know what is the difference between XDR in the PS3 and GDDR5 that will apparently be in the PS4 that emulation would need the XDR along with a Cell?

GDDR5 is much faster and probably has a different latency than XDR. They would probably need additional software emulation to achieve compatibility, and I guess it would be much easier/yield better results to just stick with XDR. They would also have to make it possible for Cell to access the GDDR5 RAM, which would add complexity. But I'm not an expert regarding these things.
 

onQ123

Member
Has anyone figured out what the 4GB of flash in the Vita is used for?

I ask because the PS4 is rumored to have 16GB of flash memory, just like the 4GB in the PS Vita, it's said to be for the OS as FW updates but I doubt if the OS will be big enough to need 16GB of flash.
 

RoboPlato

I'd be in the dick
Has anyone figured out what the 4GB of flash in the Vita is used for?

I ask because the PS4 is rumored to have 16GB of flash memory, just like the 4GB in the PS Vita, it's said to be for the OS as FW updates but I doubt if the OS will be big enough to need 16GB of flash.

It could be used for quick caching.
 

Ricky_R

Member
It makes 0 sense,that has never happened before either,if Sony wants it's console announcement to make an impact it has to show games at the unveiling.

It would make sense to reveal the console and its specs as a teaser first to get the excitement going and leave the games for E3. If the specs are good, people will go nuts talking about the system and speculate about how games will look thus making people very excited and desperate for E3.

Or they could show hints, or logos of the companies that will be revealing games, etc. It would actually be great.
 

James Sawyer Ford

Gold Member
It could be used for quick caching.

Which would mitigate the problems of PS4 not having 8GB of RAM.

16GB of Flash + 3.5 GB of super fast GDDR5 would be able to work wonders....Orbis will be in no way RAM starved if they go this route.

Which is why I think the flash rumor is absolutely true. PS3 devs used the standard hard drive all the time.
 

Sid

Member

RoboPlato

I'd be in the dick
Which would mitigate the problems of PS4 not having 8GB of RAM.

16GB of Flash + 3.5 GB of super fast GDDR5 would be able to work wonders....Orbis will be in no way RAM starved if they go this route.

This is my hope as well. It would be an awesome solution, especially if it's coupled with a blu ray drive that can stream data quickly.
 

ZaCH3000

Member
Which would mitigate the problems of PS4 not having 8GB of RAM.

16GB of Flash + 3.5 GB of super fast GDDR5 would be able to work wonders....Orbis will be in no way RAM starved if they go this route.

Which is why I think the flash rumor is absolutely true. PS3 devs used the standard hard drive all the time.

If 16GB of Flash is used, why would 512MB of GDDR5 be used for the OS?
 

CorrisD

badchoiceboobies
Gemüsepizza;46674806 said:
GDDR5 is much faster and probably has a different latency than XDR. They would probably need additional software emulation to achieve compatibility, and I guess it would be much easier/yield better results to just stick with XDR. They would also have to make it possible for Cell to access the GDDR5 RAM, which would add complexity. But I'm not an expert regarding these things.

Cheers, I did some quick googling and it seemed like GDDR5 was faster and had more bandwidth than XDR, so I figured I would ask as people had been posting a PS4 would need a Cell and XDR.

Which would mitigate the problems of PS4 not having 8GB of RAM.

16GB of Flash + 3.5 GB of super fast GDDR5 would be able to work wonders....Orbis will be in no way RAM starved if they go this route.

Which is why I think the flash rumor is absolutely true. PS3 devs used the standard hard drive all the time.

Sounds awesome if it comes true.
 
Wait, are people really saying that Sony are going to show PS4 without a montage!?!?

500x_kbguitar.jpg
 

Ponn

Banned
Why do a lot of people think MS are the only one's capable of making decent OS's and not Sony?

What?! Loved XMB, was hesitant at first glance of Vita bubbles but after only a couple minutes of using it found it to be really good, quick and smooth. Nothing wrong with Sony OS or design....

Have you seen the new Store design?

...oh yea...that. To be totally fair, it seems to be a ripoff from Windows Metro/8.
 
Why do a lot of people think MS are the only one's capable of making decent OS's and not Sony?

it's not about whether Sony can make a decent OS; it's about whether they can make one that can compare to one made by the biggest, most influential OS developer of our time.

and the answer is no, they can't. The question will be how far behind their OS will be. Or, how many more features the Xbox will have that the PS4 does not. There are still a number of features the PS3 hasn't been able to match that the 360 has, now several years later.

The Vitas OS is the best of any of the consoles. It's so good I expect Sony to have something pretty special with Orbis.

lol.
 
it's not about whether Sony can make a decent OS; it's about whether they can make one that can compare to one made by the biggest, most influential OS developer of our time.

and the answer is no, they can't. The question will be how far behind their OS will be. Or, how many more features the Xbox will have that the PS4 does not. There are still a number of features the PS3 hasn't been able to match that the 360 has, now several years later.



lol.

You don't like the Vita OS?
 

Bojanglez

The Amiga Brotherhood
The Vitas OS is the best of any of the consoles. It's so good I expect Sony to have something pretty special with Orbis.

It is pretty great, although last night I was playing whilst a bit drunk and tried to scroll between Persona 4 and the Browser window and accidentally pulled the corner tab of Persona 4 (with an hour of unsaved gameplay). I hope Sony's RnD department test the PS4 whilst drunk to avoid these kind of interface issues :)
 

ZaCH3000

Member
it's not about whether Sony can make a decent OS; it's about whether they can make one that can compare to one made by the biggest, most influential OS developer of our time.

and the answer is no, they can't. The question will be how far behind their OS will be. Or, how many more features the Xbox will have that the PS4 does not. There are still a number of features the PS3 hasn't been able to match that the 360 has, now several years later.



lol.

What features are you referring to that are relevant to gaming?
 

James Sawyer Ford

Gold Member
Looks like Solid State Drives are around 600 MB/s transfer rate, quite a bit below DDR3, but may be enough for important streaming capabilities because that's about 5X as fast as a typical hard drive.

In comparison, an 8X Blu-Ray drive would be 288Mbps.
 
it's not about whether Sony can make a decent OS; it's about whether they can make one that can compare to one made by the biggest, most influential OS developer of our time.

and the answer is no, they can't. The question will be how far behind their OS will be. Or, how many more features the Xbox will have that the PS4 does not. There are still a number of features the PS3 hasn't been able to match that the 360 has, now several years later.



lol.

I kinda wanna hear why that's an lol statement.
 

magawolaz

Member
it's not about whether Sony can make a decent OS; it's about whether they can make one that can compare to one made by the biggest, most influential OS developer of our time.

and the answer is no, they can't. The question will be how far behind their OS will be. Or, how many more features the Xbox will have that the PS4 does not. There are still a number of features the PS3 hasn't been able to match that the 360 has, now several years later.



lol.
lol what?
 

Ponn

Banned
It is pretty great, although last night I was playing whilst a bit drunk and tried to scroll between Persona 4 and the Browser window and accidentally pulled the corner tab of Persona 4 (with an hour of unsaved gameplay). I hope Sony's RnD department test the PS4 whilst drunk to avoid these kind of interface issues :)

PS4 Beer Bundle?
 

spats

Member
Wait, are people really saying that Sony are going to show PS4 without a montage!?!?

Press event starts in a pitch black room, PlayStation logo lights up behind the stage and Ken KutaragiAndrew House slowly walks up. PS logo turns into a giant screen and Ken Andrew starts to play The Last Guardian with a flat, tablet-like controller he pulls out of his breast pocket.

No opening montage, just somber electronic music.

Maybe they'll have one at the end though, showing WipEout 4D, Killzone 4 and Media Molecule's revolutionary new first person adventure game making full use of the new controller's biometric sensor.
 
The Vitas OS is the best of any of the consoles. It's so good I expect Sony to have something pretty special with Orbis.

I agree it's good, very good in fact but it's still very fragmented. they need a more cohesive OS, one that seamlessly melds things like trophy sync and messaging into one and not individual apps or settings. this is where microsoft leads and rightly so, but sony need to realise how important cohesiveness is in an OS.
 

patsu

Member
Has anyone figured out what the 4GB of flash in the Vita is used for?

I ask because the PS4 is rumored to have 16GB of flash memory, just like the 4GB in the PS Vita, it's said to be for the OS as FW updates but I doubt if the OS will be big enough to need 16GB of flash.

Where is the source ?
 
The 192GB/s is most definitely wrong.

PS4 will do all last years tech demos at 1080p 60fps. GTX680 running them with minimal optimization means a 7850 can run them at half FPS without optimization. With some optimization you will have 99% of the quality at 1080p 60fps.

These specs are better than the needed specs for 60fps at 1080p for current generation games. Next generation games should be able to target much better image quality at 60fps at 1080p or AMAZING graphics at 30fps 1080p.
 
I agree it's good, very good in fact but it's still very fragmented. they need a more cohesive OS, one that seamlessly melds things like trophy sync and messaging into one and not individual apps or settings. this is where microsoft leads and rightly so, but sony need to realise how important cohesiveness is in an OS.

That's a good point.
 

RoboPlato

I'd be in the dick
The 192GB/s is most definitely wrong.

PS4 will do all last years tech demos at 1080p 60fps. GTX680 running them with minimal optimization means a 7850 can run them at half FPS without optimization. With some optimization you will have 99% of the quality at 1080p 60fps.

These specs are better than the needed specs for 60fps at 1080p for current generation games. Next generation games should be able to target much better image quality at 60fps at 1080p or AMAZING graphics at 30fps 1080p.
That's on the lower end of GDDR5 bandwidth.
 

Mr.Green

Member
Looks like Solid State Drives are around 600 MB/s transfer rate, quite a bit below DDR3, but may be enough for important streaming capabilities because that's about 5X as fast as a typical hard drive.

In comparison, an 8X Blu-Ray drive would be 288Mbps.

That's read speed. No, this can't be used as RAM. That was a cute attempt at downplaying the supposed advantage of the nextbox on that front, though. ;-)
 

RoboPlato

I'd be in the dick
That's read speed. No, this can't be used as RAM. That was a cute attempt at downplaying the supposed advantage of the nextbox on that front, though. ;-)

No one was downplaying anything, just trying to figure out if it could be used to counter the scenarios where Orbis would have a disadvantage because of a lower RAM number.
 

James Sawyer Ford

Gold Member
That's read speed. No, this can't be used as RAM. That was a cute attempt at downplaying the supposed advantage of the nextbox on that front, though. ;-)

It can be used for STREAMING. Which is what plenty of PS3 exclusive developers have been using the standard hard drive in the PS3 for.

It acts as a very large pool of very slow RAM.
 

i-Lo

Member
Which would mitigate the problems of PS4 not having 8GB of RAM.

16GB of Flash + 3.5 GB of super fast GDDR5 would be able to work wonders....Orbis will be in no way RAM starved if they go this route.

Which is why I think the flash rumor is absolutely true. PS3 devs used the standard hard drive all the time.

I read something about flash memory may suffer from reliability issues from "over" usage. I am not certain how accurate that assessment would be with it being created in 2013.

However, a part 16GB could be a boon for streaming assets from. HDD -> X GB of 16GB flash -> 3.5GB GDDR5 RAM.

well, it's a little more interesting than just FLOPS. rumours suggest durango will house 32MB of eDRAM which would roughly translates to 100 GB/S of bandwidth. this would mean each frame can contain a maximum of 3.3GBs of data at 30FPS or half that at 60FPS.

while modern high end GPUs can push 300 GB/s, it's rumoured that the orbis is capable of 192 GB/S, facilitated by its plentiful fast ram and wide bus. what does this mean? it means that combined with the greater render grunt that a 1.8TFLOP GPU provides over a 1.2TFLOP GPU based on the same architecture, theoretically the same amount of data can be carried nearly twice as fast (higher framerates), or twice the data can be carried in one trip (higher resolutions/image complexity).

i like you. Also, I have always wanted to ask you about the creature in your avatar.

I imagine the rollout would go something like:
  • Reveal hardware design, some specs - maybe vague, show new UI. Final name PS4, because anything else is a poor choice really.
  • Possibly show some sort of tech demo/game teasers.
  • Reveal a bit about network and other services.
  • Have Yosp/first-party devs talk up the hardware potential in interviews etc. in the interim leading into E3.
  • E3 games blowout; announce price, release date.

I have passionately come to hate them. They barely provide any real world goods. In development game teasers are a much better choice.
 
Top Bottom