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FRIDAYTON MK II: 5.5 million bears and salmon create unholy allliance to sack SONY HQ

Freki

Member
Sony - we'll give you 3.5 gbs out of 4.

Devs - we really want 8

Sony - sure, we'll put in 8. You can use 4.5 now.

That just doesn't add up.

I don't get it either...
Is there an official Sony comment avaliable yet? I thought Eurogamer waited for clarification yesterday.
 

RurouniZel

Asks questions so Ezalc doesn't have to
4.5GB is still a lot of RAM. It's faster than MS's RAM and shames Nintendo's 1GB.

Gamers need to calm down. Your sweetums is still bringing the goods guys.
 

Vestal

Gold Member
This does indeed kinda suck, but if Sony want to go toe to toe with MS on multitasking features, they really have no choice. It would be cool to be able to bounce around games and apps seamlessly. They can always reduce the OS footprint over time, I hope they do.

Are you talking about OS footprint or memory reserved for the OS side of things? Its 2 different things. 1 is a lot harder to change the further down the road you get.

What I mean is, the OS Footprint can always be lowered, but it is probably a negligible amount in the grand scheme of things.(I truly do not believe the OS takes more than 1GB to run). The amount reserved is a totally different beast. If you are telling App developers for your system this is how much you got, and turn around a year down the road and say NOPE I cut you by 20% it will cause serious issues.
 
Here's something that makes it not matter:

The Last of Us - 512mb split up over CPU/GPU
Naughty Dog game on PS4 - 4.5GB+

It's got at least x4 the RAM of PS3.
 

kevm3

Member
The article sounds like nonsense. There is no way that the OS is going to reserve that much memory for itself. They added the RAM at the behest of a developer making a comment about needing more RAM, so they aren't going to essentially give the developers that same amount of RAM, but maybe a gig or a gig and a half more to play with and take up the rest with the OS. Sony has never had an elaborate OS and their OS has been in development for a long-time with 4 GB in mind... so how is it over the course of a few months that they magically reimagined their OS to triple in size if it was originally using 1 GB? That doesn't sound feasible in any manner.
 

LiquidMetal14

hide your water-based mammals
The Vita has 512 of main memory and 256 of video memory. It multitasks similar to a cell phone using suspended states. When you press the home button while running a game it reduces its memory footprint. This happens very fast as it should when you dont have to worry about accessing data from a disk drive.

Regardless of how much memory is being used at launch it will be reduced overtime. The ps4 and the xbox one are running basicly cell phone apps when it comes to media. Cant see how the memory imprint would be any larger then it is on a cell phone at most 200 megs

Probably has more to do with programming the aps to run on much beefier HW and running in tandem at higher resolution. I'm keeping it basic but running an OS with aps in the BG is probably a little different on a phone than it is on a console.
 
I have a hard time believing this. It just seems completely strange to go from 4GB with 512MB reserved for the OS to 8GB and 3.5GB reserved. I'm not taking is as fact until Sony comments.
 
time to choose, 7GB for games and a slow-ass stuttering interface or 4.5GB for games and a fast, responsive always snappy interface.

PS3 needed 50 MB for its interface. It wasn't particulary fast, true, but surely you could do more than well enough with 1 GB (20 times as much!) and still have room for a lot of extra functionality. Reserving 3.5+ GB of RAM for non-gaming purposes is really disappointing.
 

Odrion

Banned
On the negative side do I really have to say "POINT FIVE" in regards to RAM now? Ugh.

And it's flexible, which means Sony fans can flaunt that they have POINT FIVE more RAM than the Xbone. And Xbox fans can flaunt that the PS4 has POINT FIVE less.
 

harSon

Banned
Yes because what matters is to have a PC in your living room. This multi tasking bs is seriously going to extremes.

Some people, such as myself, are actually looking forward to said features. I'm obviously a bit biased considering I'm heavily into HTPCs, but I'm loving the direction that these platform holders are taking their consoles.
 

iammeiam

Member
3.5 OSs now or Eurogamer pulling tales out of their asses.
The one GB of wiggle room has to be for the 15 minutes of recording cache, doesn't it? So 2.5GB OS, and the. One for either the game to use or recording the game if the developers don't run the game in 'big' memory mode?
 

Stoof

Member
basically, before upgrading the RAM to 8Gb, the devs were only using .5Gb for their games? clearly, this article is a joke.

if Killzone:SF was using 3.5Gb of RAM before the upgrade, clearly the OS is not using much more than 1Gb of RAM.

...Or with more RAM Sony decided to make the OS use more of said RAM?
 

Kyoufu

Member
Wow, that just confirms my PC upgrades for next year instead of a PS4. You have 8 gigs of memory to use and you blow 3.5 of it on a UI? Just how incompetent is Sony at OS design? Does anyone know how much full fledged operating systems like Windows reserve?

If you think about it, it also means Jonathan Blow was lying.

Please tell me everything you know about OS design.
 

i-Lo

Member
So much for "8GB GDDR5".

It was good knowing you PS4.

Kind of feel disappointed given how Sony keeps on touting this to be a "GAME" machine and yet provides similar footprint to xbone which is clearly designed to be a multi-media machine.

It boggles my mind knowing that the OS in PS4 isn't even 3 pronged and not to mention, it doesn't even have kinect to allocate memory resources to.
 

GodofWine

Member
If true they might just be giving room to the OS crew to really have at it while they know that they won't be affecting any games at this point in the launch cycle, and they do already have a 1gb flex, which if available
To one game has to technically be there for all.

So they have more and faster ram for games, more and faster RAM for OS, than MS. Doesn't shift the playing field no matter what they say.
 

daveo42

Banned
le fake

This is very odd news if true. Should be easy enough to prove/disprove at least if a dev wants to comment on it.

That would be nice. Waiting for either Twitter backlash from devs or an official statement from Sony about it. I expect Sony to post something relatively soon about it too.

Sitting on this would not be a good idea for Sony. Either confirm and detail reasons why you need that much or debunk it outright.
 
The Vita has 512 of main memory and 256 of video memory. It multitasks similar to a cell phone using suspended states. When you press the home button while running a game it reduces its memory footprint. This happens very fast as it should when you dont have to worry about accessing data from a disk drive.

Regardless of how much memory is being used at launch it will be reduced overtime. The ps4 and the xbox one are running basicly cell phone apps when it comes to media. Cant see how the memory imprint would be any larger then it is on a cell phone at most 200 megs

Vita is 512 + 128.
 

Takuya

Banned
The one GB of wiggle room has to be for the 15 minutes of recording cache, doesn't it? So 2.5GB OS, and the. One for either the game to use or recording the game if the developers don't run the game in 'big' memory mode?

It's always recording 15 minutes, I don't believe it can be disabled. I doubt this is even remotely why DF is thinking this.
 

Frodo

Member
Guys, guys, guys... We are missing something here:

4.5 GB of RAM for the games
3.5 GB of RAM fot the OS

5 - 4 = 1
5 - 3 = 2

1 + 2 = 3

HALF LIFE 3 CONFIRMED!
 
Hopefully Sony will respond.

It's weird to think in every interview Cerny made a very deliberate comment about the 8GBs of memory for developers if 4.5GBs was for OS.
 
Truth is i was expecting more than 1GB for the OS was thinking it would be around 2GB.
But 3.5 for the OS and if you want 1Gb more you have to work hard is crazy and stupid as hell .
 

Anpanman

Banned
so..uhh...good thing they doubled the amount of ram, otherwise we'd be looking at a console with 0.5 GB of ram for games and 3,5 GB for OS !!!! :p

Did you even read the article? The increase in RAM gave Sony the opportunity to improve the speed and features of the OS. "The console's leap from 4GB to 8GB has seemingly opened the door for Sony to be much more ambitious about what tasks the PlayStation 4 performs in the background and in parallel with gameplay."
 

TwistedMind

Neo Member
It makes sense actually since most of the games on the PS4 are multiplatform and most developers are already working with the xbone ram limitation and it future proof your machine .
 
Microsoft's RAM is relatively very inexpensive. Adding 4GB of GDDR5 and then reserving 2-3GB of that for OS function isn't prudent, it seems incredibly excessively wasteful.

They did increase the available amount to developers by a huge margin, matching what Ms was giving to xbox one developers, and at the same time allowed then to be well positioned to fight Ms on the non games field.

I'd say, even as it is the ram upgrade was justified. Otherwise they would have a system with less ram available for games that couldn't match the non gaming features of the competition.
 
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