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[Concept17]

So both systems are a 5/3 split. One still has better memory.

Nothing's changed?

 

[MagicWithEarvin]

Cerny was quite clear in his interviews that the machine is primarily a video games console when he was asked what, if any, multimedia features planned for the machine influenced the hardware design. Microsoft, however, have approached it with a different philosophy by building both a games console and a multimedia device. The indications given to us were that the vast majority of resources would go to gaming

Sony themselves alluded at E3 that they would continue to add in multimedia services for PS4 throughout its life time, but didn't go into any specifics. With the RAM split of 5/3 or 5/1.5+1.5 or whatever, I think it's their way of playing it safe.

Still, I'm going to wait and see how Sony allocates the 8GB GDDR5 - it's an exciting aspect.

 

[Nightengale]

I think this still doesn't go against what he said. He could argue, multitasking, video recording and sharing, sleep, quick resume, and etc are all part of a system dedicated to gamers.

This.

There's somehow this mistaken assumption that gaming-focused excludes all of the above.

 

[Respawn]

Possibly, hard to say without knowing more.

The optimum ram allocation for the console would be 5.86GB physical and then whatever is left for the OS.

So, 8192mb - 5.86GB = 2332mb left, - 512mb flex swap space (should they want it) = 1820mb. Which I guess would be a more optimal amount to be reserved for the OS. But at the least (minus the flex swap space) they only need to have the OS reserve 2.33GB of ram to allow the console to use up memory at full efficiency (based on 176GB/s), unless of course they plan to target running games at lower than 30fps lol, which I doubt they will.

That's not to say more ram (than 5.86GB) can't or won't help, but I'm just talking in terms of maximum efficiency.

Also, quoting for new page since it's important.

Thanks for the chart analysis Nib.

 

[Guymelef]

IT WAS NEVER PUBLICLY REVEALED WHAT RAM FIGURES WERE BEFORE THE RAM UPGRADE.

WHY DO YOU KEEP ASSUMING FIGURES THAT YOU ARE PULLING OUT FROM A HAT?

This is either trolling or ignorance at the finest level. There are too many people in this thread trying to explain this logically, but you are somehow missing these posts and continue spreading a fable.

You'are trying to explain this to people that think that Sony downgraded the console while still has 8GB GDDR5.

 

[Crisco]

This jives with what a lot of more reasonable posters deduced yesterday. 4.5GB available to developers on current dev kits, but shipping consoles will have 5.5GB available to games. Hence the 1GB of "flex" memory.

 

[Rebel Leader]

So both systems are a 5/3 split. One still has better memory.

Nothing's changed?

That's a debatable part. But the X1 DDR is better for the OS IIRC

EDIT: Forgot the ESRAM. Can't remember how that figures into the X1

 

[Jarmel]

How so?

They are wasting GDDR5 compared to Microsoft and DDR3. It's a much bigger waste.

 

[KaiserBecks]

How so?

Probably because they're wasting GDDR5 for something that DDR3 could do.

edit: beaten

 

[bishoptl]

IT WAS NEVER PUBLICLY REVEALED WHAT RAM FIGURES WERE BEFORE THE RAM UPGRADE.

WHY DO YOU KEEP ASSUMING FIGURES THAT YOU ARE PULLING OUT FROM A HAT?

This is either trolling or ignorance at the finest level. There are too many people in this thread trying to explain this logically, but you are somehow missing these posts and continue spreading a fable.

It's trolling. I haven't had breakfast yet. Back in a while.

I've exhausted about all I had to say. If this thread is going to be a regurgitation of the last 2 then this thread doesn't need to exist. Not when all the info isn't valid and HW/SW is still coming together.

It's quite useful, actually.

 

[AlphaDump]

No, it's there so that you can address an extra 512 MB in case you go over 5GB. Your performance will substantially degrade when hitting paged memory. However, it's much better than out of memory error and program crash.

makes sense, thanks.

now i'll just sit back and watch everyone slug it out.

 

[Loofy]

IT WAS NEVER PUBLICLY REVEALED WHAT RAM FIGURES WERE BEFORE THE RAM UPGRADE.

WHY DO YOU KEEP ASSUMING FIGURES THAT YOU ARE PULLING OUT FROM A HAT?

Sure they never publicly stated it, but staying silent about the whole thing this entire time is just as misleading. For months these are the type of articles that game sites ran with.

He said that the game’s demo only used 3gb of the console’s GDDR5 RAM on video resources, with a further 1.5gb dedicated to system resources. This leaves just under 4gb worth of RAM spare

Sony: Nope. Thats all you got. *snicker

 

[iNvid02]

if they can lie about this they can lie about DDR5

i feel so betrayed

 

[evilalien]

Dude, you're starting to sound really defensive now.

No, he's starting to sound frustrated with somebody who refuses to accept logic.

 

[Satchel]

That's a debatable part. But the X1 DDR is better for the OS IIRC

That's the part that's strange.

DDR3 is actually better for OS related stuff, so if anything, its MS over allocating with 3GB. Not Sony given their RAM doesn't lend as well to OS functions.

 

[dragonelite]

Wonder how much performance the ps4 OS will take from the GPU and CPU right now.
We know microsofts figures from the tech panel.

 

[unchained]

Another slow news day.

Colin Moriarty IGN's biggest PS3 shill again continues to passively agressively defend his beloved Sony. LoL

 

[Sweep14]

My man, we were led to believe that Sony would not be going the multi media route that MS is going. Therefore they wouldnt need as much memory for their OS.

These rumors show, they were going to fight head to head with multi media the whole time.

So when you say who told us. Sony did.

y

Really ? What i heard from Sony was that they wanted to focus on gamers. This has nothing to do with ram usage.

Remember Cerny's presentation in february ? One of the topics covered by the conference was the 'immediacy" (sorry, not sure of this word) of the system.

Features like suspend on Ram, Fast boot etc...need to use RAM. And those features are gamer centric.

IMHO, We have to fight against features that are not gamer centric but there are Multimedia features that can serve our purpose (ie choosing your own music in games etc...) and we should support them

 

[PlanetSmasher]

IT WAS NEVER PUBLICLY REVEALED WHAT RAM FIGURES WERE BEFORE THE RAM UPGRADE.

WHY DO YOU KEEP ASSUMING FIGURES THAT YOU ARE PULLING OUT FROM A HAT?

This is either trolling or ignorance at the finest level. There are too many people in this thread trying to explain this logically, but you are somehow missing these posts and continue spreading a fable.

Fine. Sorry. I'm done talking about this, since it's only making people angry. I had thought the system had more RAM available for gamers given the statements Sony made. That's the long and short of it. I was mistaken. Not trying to start a war here.

 

[LiquidMetal14]

Dude, you're starting to sound really defensive now.

You should also quote the bevvy of stupid and baseless remarks going the other route.

I don't find it surprising for you to not be doing that. For as much sense and information as people like him or famousmortimer/bruce have, you would at least have a little more perspective as to why reading a thread like this is frustrating.

If you can't find the idiotic ignorant responses in this thread then it's best to not have discussion and try to be a whistle blower in telling him why he is acting the way he is.

There are devs reading this that are frustrated. CALM DOWN DEVS, IT'S GOING TO BE ALRIGHT. One can play that card as well.

Why in God's green earth do you not take the person he quoted to court? Can you muster an answer to that? The ignorance of the person Thuway quoted runs as thick as you for not at least calling him out but you chose to tell thuway to calm down.

You want to talk it out? I will tell it to you this way on mumble or Steam chat. Let's grow up here a little.

 

[Vestal]

People who understand these things, what are they talking about? And what are the advantages/disadvantages?

I am extremely curious about this. Why do it this way unless there are some undocumented limitations on the game side in regards to memory??

I mean the only reason memory allocation would be limited from a design stand point is having a 32bit OS to address said memory I assume we are sure it is not the case. In the 32bit scenario the max addressable would be about 4gb

 

[Sid]

Legit question: What are people complaining about?

3.5 GB reserved for the OS.

 

[EagleEyes]

You are indeed correct, based on bandwidth figures, the amount of ram available to each console is as follows.

---

Xbox One | 8GB DDR3 at 68GB/s (5GB available to devs)

At 60fps the maximum memory available per frame is 1.133GB
At 30fps the maximum memory available per frame is 2.266GB


PS4 | 8GB GDDR5 at 176GB/s (5.5GB available to devs) 512mb of that swap space, paged to the HDD.

At 60fps the maximum memory available per frame is 2.933GB
At 30fps the maximum memory available per frame is 5.866GB

---

This is the actual maximum amount of memory available to each console irrespective of what amount the OS uses up.


If people are wondering why the figures at they are, the bandwidth amounts dictate the maximum amount of ram available per second. So 68GB/s means 68GB maximum memory access per second. If a game is 30fps it means there are 30 frames rendered per one second. So you just divide 68 (the amount of ram bandwidth and thus available ram per second) by 30 (in this example the number of frames being rendered in per second).

That is some good math and would be accurate on the Xbox One specs except you forgot the other part of the equation, the ESRAM. Here, read this:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-xbox-one-memory-better-in-production-hardware

 

[Evolution_1ne]

and here comes the lawn mower

 

[Lion Heart]

That's a debatable part. But the X1 DDR is better for the OS IIRC

EDIT: Forgot the ESRAM. Can't remember how that figures into the X1

Whats debatable exactly?

 

[AyaisMUsikWhore]

It's actually kind of hard to dispute that XB1 will be better in multimedia.

TV is no-brainer, for the US market at least.
MS will naturally have more 'apps' for XB1, by virtue of the Windows partition and their own expertise/ownership of various softwares.

Those 2 alone means that XB1 will have a lead in terms of multimedia, because multimedia through consoles are pretty much an 'apps' game.

See here's the thing. In the US this sort of thing is kind of adopted but most people won't use it because it's still obtrusive. Having the function available is what makes it cool. But people still go out and buy cheaper products that do the same thing. At the same time, while MS is trying to innovate in this sense, so are tv manufacturer such as Samsung and LG that are trying to cut having an extra box. Google just updated Bable Fish which is on the verge of being the best language translation software. Now combine that with Google great voice services and Google TV (which now has a cheaper version called Chromecast), we are looking at a product that's going to be pretty amazing. Then at that point spending $500 on the same functions that you can do for cheap isn't going to be that preferred.


At the end of the day, the X1 multimedia section by far is the coolest one out there but it is an area that won't be such an advantage when someone offers bigger and better for cheap.. I see that most likely being Apple or Google.

 

[MagicWithEarvin]

They are wasting GDDR5 compared to Microsoft and DDR3. It's a much bigger waste.

That may be the case, but we really don't know what's truly going on behind the scenes of the PS4's OS to require 3GB. There are still a lot of variables to this, I think.

 

[IncandescentPrecept]

3.5 GB reserved for the OS.

Why are they complaining about that?

 

[Meus Renaissance]

I think this still doesn't go against what he said. He could argue, multitasking, video recording and sharing, sleep, quick resume, and etc are all part of a system dedicated to gamers.

Sony themselves alluded at E3 that they would continue to add in multimedia services for PS4 throughout its life time, but didn't go into any specifics. With the RAM split of 5/3 or 5/1.5+1.5 or whatever, I think it's their way of playing it safe.

Still, I'm going to wait and see how Sony allocates the 8GB GDDR5 - it's an exciting aspect.

That's all well and good, I have no problem with that. Just don't talk to me about 8GB for a games console when you'll reserve almost 40% of it for something else.

 

[Into]

Colin Moriarty IGN's biggest PS3 shill again continues to passively agressively defend his beloved Sony. LoL

Is this really necessary?

 

[Sethos]

That's the part that's strange.

DDR3 is actually better for OS related stuff

No it isn't.

 

[Psycho_Mantis]

Dude, you're starting to sound really defensive now.

He raises a valid point. Your dismissal of it is not surprising though.

 

[Jarmel]

IT WAS NEVER PUBLICLY REVEALED WHAT RAM FIGURES WERE BEFORE THE RAM UPGRADE.

WHY DO YOU KEEP ASSUMING FIGURES THAT YOU ARE PULLING OUT FROM A HAT?

This is either trolling or ignorance at the finest level. There are too many people in this thread trying to explain this logically, but you are somehow missing these posts and continue spreading a fable.

Then let's assume that the numbers were higher than .5 before the upgrade. So the OS was taking up 1 to 1.5 before the ram upgrade? Thank god somebody protested then.

 

[Nightengale]

Sure they never publicly stated it, but staying silent about the whole thing this entire time is just as misleading.

You know what? It's not Sony's job to correct presumptions, especially when 'correcting' them would force them to reveal information they want to keep secret.

Why do you think they didn't say anything in regards to 'how much their devkits cost', when news of the $2500 popped up? Because saying anything would reveal things they wanted to keep quiet, stuff that is under NDA.

Same with this. It's clear they don't want to officially reveal the RAM allocation for PS4, so they will not. It's that simple.

 

[Sweep14]

if they can lie about this they can lie about DDR5

i feel so betrayed

Correction : You lied to yourself...

 

[Cthulhu_Steev]

Making only about 50% of the memory available for games sounds a bit stubid.

"sounds a bit 'stubid'"

 

[dragonelite]

That is some good math and would be accurate on the Xbox One specs except you forgot the other part of the equation, the ESRAM. Here, read this:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-xbox-one-memory-better-in-production-hardware

Didn't you know Richard is an X1 fanboy.
That can't be true like the OS recording time and memory.

 

[Ricerocket]

It will be interesting to see what Sony offers for their OS by reserving the same amount as X1, but I doubt it is anywhere in the scope of what X1 will offer.

 

[Yawnier]

It's trolling. I haven't had breakfast yet. Back in a while.

It's quite useful, actually.

Oh snap, son.

 

[LabouredSubterfuge]

It's trolling. I haven't had breakfast yet. Back in a while.


It's quite useful, actually.

Ruh roh.

 

[Thorgal]

If we are still seaching for a title change how about :


GIANT ENEMY CRABS STORMING THE FRONT GATES OF SONY HQ EN MASSE !!!

 

[i-Lo]

The prime reason why people are pissed, regardless of how well the system functions is that when Cerny revealed that the RAM figures had been doubled (for the people who closely followed VGleaks) in Feb, most of us thought it was to aid gaming side of things (given how the machine has been marketed so far). However, now we find out that the upgrade was mostly for the sake of non-gaming related multimedia functionalities.

So, in essence, it's all about perception and its supposed violation.

Given I've cooled my jets, I do understand that the OS still incomplete and much like it was with PS3, with time, the footprint of PS4 will change and only for better (on gaming side of things).

Time is the best healer and perhaps by launch, all we'll ever care about are the games (and their visuals, etc).

 

[Sweep14]

THE BIG SATURDAY BET :

I'm ready to bet that Sony's OS will be faster than X1's OS

Who wants to challenge ?

 

[Jarmel]

That may be the case, but we really don't know what's truly going on behind the scenes of the PS4's OS to require 3GB. There are still a lot of variables to this, I think.

That's something for both Microsoft and Sony. I'm not seeing things that justify the OS taking up this much space. There might be reasons but not things I want as a gamer, especially when it comes at the cost of better looking games.

 

[Sid]

Why are they complaining about that?

People believed the initial speculation about Sony using only 1GB GDDR5 for the OS and 7GB GDDR5 for games.

 

[jmls1121]

Remember when gaming was about awesome video games and not tesselated toads and RAM? You guys need to chill out. The graphics will be fine for you guys.

 

[TheCloser]

It's trolling. I haven't had breakfast yet. Back in a while.


It's quite useful, actually.

Oh boy. We know what's coming next.

 

[starrdrum17]

Blah blah. Either buy a PC or console. I personally just paid off my ps4 preorder an hour ago. Dear Sony gods announce a new socom. K thnx

 

[onQ123]

uuuh wasn't it more 176GB/s?

when it was 4GB it was 192GB/s

 

[Sweep14]

Why are they complaining about that?

That's the problem...Nobody have a clue...