1st Course
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Naughty Dog: PS4 has 5 GB RAM/6 CPU cores available to devs, talks using them
- Thread starter Wishmaster92
- Start date
Insiders failed us once again.
Those pesky insiders!
Neff
Member
I'm wondering if it's compressed on the fly, and to what level of compression. The footage looks quite good for a stream from an encode. But still, console OSs with integrated multitasking, particularly those including internet-enabled features, coupled with the demands of modern hardware, are very resource intensive. Wii U requires 1gb for in-game Miiverse and high-speed browsing alone, so I can imagine that PS4's needs are at least double that.
Interesting. I did not know that.
Maninthemirror
Banned
Still significantly more ram than ps3 and much faster ram than Xbox one . Also if people really want to use the windows Analogy , windows uses 4-5 gigs of ram along with the rest of the programs running so a windows machine with 8 gb ram actually has less than 3 gb for the game which again is less and slower than the ps4. I don't see how 5 gb of available ram is an issue when it's higher than most PCs have and all consoles have
Didn't they say more ram would be made available *in the future*?
This is the present, not the future, so obviously he's talking about the present situation.
Also, 2 cores, 3 GB of ram for the OS is pretty standard.
Not everyone said 6gb with only 1 reserved core....
Are you trying to game while rendering 3d cad?? Otherwise your information is... Incorrect or doesn't correctly reflect how windows actually works and pages things. Try reducing your computer to 1gb and installing 8.1 for a demonstration.
1st Course
Member
He said they are games in development already using 6GB.
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=73268051&postcount=2748
Here we are 9 months later and that doesn't seems to be the case.
This article is fan boy fuel. They are taking a small part of a presentation and using it to get clicks. I thought this article was gonna give some real knowledge from ND. Instead it gives some info on multithreaded software engineering that anyone who programs already knows and stuff that anyone with access to a PS4 SDK can probably get.
I guess the concept of optimization is out of the discussion huh?
Whitechocolatekrispies
Banned
How do we still not know the clock speed on the ps4 CPU?
travisbickle
Member
Guess that explains the lack of AF in Thief.
5gb RAM in PS4 vs 5gb RAM + 32mb ESRAM would allow developers to add AF easily to XB1.
5gb RAM in PS4 vs 5gb RAM + 32mb ESRAM would allow developers to add AF easily to XB1.
Do you understand how clueless that makes you seem.
Amount of RAM has no bearing on AF at all, plus slow DDR3 plus ESRAM is still less bandwidth than the GDDR5 in the PS4 .......... in no scenario does the X1 ever have a better memory setup.
Try harder.
The fact it has been stated that it can access 1 gig of that 3 gig reserve does mean 6gb is achievable.
That plus the fact that ND only talks about 5 does not mean that is the limit.
Have to say I'm amazed with how deep these guys go to take advantage of the system to the max. I think many devs settle for "trying to divide things in multiple threads when it makes sense to do so", but ND are really embracing the multicore aspect fully. I think this will make a huge difference, cause the speed per core really is quite low in the PS4.
People really need to understand that they can give that RAM back to developers anytime. Immediately. But they can't take it away once it's allocated to games. Being overly conservative is absolutely the right thing to do at the moment. And you can be sure that there's no game in development that needs anymore than the RAM allocation they've currently got otherwise they'd have what they need.
I'm sure at least a GB of the memory reserve will be freed up for games down the line.
Interesting read anyway. Now show us the games please ND, we're ready.
I'm sure at least a GB of the memory reserve will be freed up for games down the line.
Interesting read anyway. Now show us the games please ND, we're ready.
Whitechocolatekrispies
Banned
I believe this is still speculation. There is no official number.
The few benchmarking tests they have done show interesting results compared to the 1.75 xbone CPU.
Not sure how the PS4 can allocate 6times the whole memory of the PS3 for just the operatingsystem??.
Where is the bits and bytes going?, It should be doing fine with just 1GB actually.
Even if those 1GB is used for the streaming to twitch etc.
edit : just think if Sony hade gone with the 4GB PS4.. would that mean they would have 1GB for games, and 3GB for OS still?
Where is the bits and bytes going?, It should be doing fine with just 1GB actually.
Even if those 1GB is used for the streaming to twitch etc.
edit : just think if Sony hade gone with the 4GB PS4.. would that mean they would have 1GB for games, and 3GB for OS still?
This is so disappointing, PS4 is not exactly a powerhouse to begin with, so taking 3 GB and 2 cores out of developers seems like bad priorities.
I really don't care about features, consoles are not what they used to be
No wonder ppl are moving to PC, I've played on consoles for most of my life and i consider a PC as well.
I really don't care about features, consoles are not what they used to be
No wonder ppl are moving to PC, I've played on consoles for most of my life and i consider a PC as well.
Chuck Norris
Banned
Multi tasking, game streaming, very quick, PSNow coming soonNot sure how the PS4 can allocate 6times the whole memory of the PS3 for just the operatingsystem??.
Where is the bits and bytes going?, It should be doing fine with just 1GB actually.
Even if those 1GB is used for the streaming to twitch etc.
edit : just think if Sony hade gone with the 4GB PS4.. would that mean they would have 1GB for games, and 3GB for OS still?
meanspartan
Member
5gb of RAM at least for the next couple years should be plenty. I feel like the 1.84 TFLOP GPU would bottle-neck before it needed that much RAM if the game is at least competently optimized.
This. ram allocation for ps3 os got reduced significantly over the years afaik.
Maninthemirror
Banned
1gb on a windows 8.1 will struggle, you would need at least 4 gb for it to perform the most basic idle functions
Metalingus5150
Member
Sony did say that. They said the virtual memory is managed by the OS and IS 100 percent for games. They didn't give an exact number thogh.
Sony UK said:The PS4, with a clock speed of 8 x 1.6 GHz (or 43X the PS2).
2 + 2 doesn't always = 4
https://plus.google.com/+sonyuk/posts/eiA6sDQvWwQ
EDIT: Using the same Sony Math as in this picture, the PS4 is half a a PS3.
1600Hz (PS4) * 8 Cores / 299Hz (PS2) ~ 43 PS2s
1600Hz (PS4) * 8 / 3200Hz (PS3) * 8 Cores = 0.5 PS3s
Ahaa. Thanks.
As players why would you care how much RAM is allocated to different aspects of the system?
What if some of the system allocated ram is for doing things that were considered part of the games resource budget previously, but are now unified across all games? What if the RAM is so slow you can never effectively utilize it all let alone more of it? What if etc.
I am making no statements about what's actually happening here, just pointing out how irrelevant speculation can be. When developers start complaining about RAM quantity being a bottleneck you'll know it's an issue, and that's clearly not happening right now, at worst you have people warning that high res assets and large worlds can fill up RAM very quickly so don't assume a large amount of ram means you can ignore optimizations (As stated in the article).
What if some of the system allocated ram is for doing things that were considered part of the games resource budget previously, but are now unified across all games? What if the RAM is so slow you can never effectively utilize it all let alone more of it? What if etc.
I am making no statements about what's actually happening here, just pointing out how irrelevant speculation can be. When developers start complaining about RAM quantity being a bottleneck you'll know it's an issue, and that's clearly not happening right now, at worst you have people warning that high res assets and large worlds can fill up RAM very quickly so don't assume a large amount of ram means you can ignore optimizations (As stated in the article).
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Skip to midway if you want to see the technical talk, it starts off and has a lot of talk about the culture of Naughty Dog and the versioning system which is cool, and all, but not really super interesting.
That said, it was a really decent talk, quite easy to digest. I'd forgotten all about the PPC/PPE line of IBM processors having really really crappy branch prediction. Not sure why that was notable to me except I had a vague memory of the CPU wars in Apple's early resurrection days (early 2000s when they were making a comeback).
As far as the 5GB we know it will probably grow over time as the OS gets refined and cleaned up. It may be possible to bring it up to 7GB by end of life (with the game polling the OS for more memory and saying "hey, move out the way, this is important).
That said, it was a really decent talk, quite easy to digest. I'd forgotten all about the PPC/PPE line of IBM processors having really really crappy branch prediction. Not sure why that was notable to me except I had a vague memory of the CPU wars in Apple's early resurrection days (early 2000s when they were making a comeback).
As far as the 5GB we know it will probably grow over time as the OS gets refined and cleaned up. It may be possible to bring it up to 7GB by end of life (with the game polling the OS for more memory and saying "hey, move out the way, this is important).
shikamaroooo
Member
Future proofing it too.
systemfehler
Member
I agree with the conservative "we might still need more wiggle room" approach for the PS4 OS. Down the road the development team can always free up memory and release a new SDK version stating to developers what changed. Doing the opposite might cause a lot of problems and right now I don't see the need for a drastic improvement of main memory anyways.
I think the main issue in the future will be the that the AMD Jaguar cores are simply rather weak and "plain". I doubt that Sony can free up one of the two cores reserved for the OS and developers will always have to use that extra GPU computing power for non-graphic related tasks to compensate.
I think the main issue in the future will be the that the AMD Jaguar cores are simply rather weak and "plain". I doubt that Sony can free up one of the two cores reserved for the OS and developers will always have to use that extra GPU computing power for non-graphic related tasks to compensate.
dr_rus
Member
If Sony would go for 3 GBs of slow RAM for OS they'd pay much more because of two memory pools, more complex system board, inability to free up this RAM for gaming tasks and so on.
What is the difference between a thread and a fiber?
Do you actually know any better such you could perhaps provide a more detailed breakdown of how all that memory is likely to be _necessary_ for a "modern console OS" or are you just armchair criticizing my armchair criticism? Because we have been discussing these massive new OS memory footprints in modern consoles for at least the last several months and I've never seen a compelling reason for why the footprint should have increased so dramatically. People just keep saying "future-proofing" as a catchall without any definitive roadmap that suggests what needs to be future-proofed. We're only talking the next 3-5 yrs, not decades. It shouldn't be difficult to predict and identify the services needed by device in that time. But nothing significant is ever mentioned that really justifies these kind of reservations.
I think I'm being reasonable here, even for a mere armchair critic - they can have 2GB. That should still be plenty with overhead.
My point was that, given the things they seemingly overlooked, _by their own account_, I'm not anticipating anything particularly exciting going on with the roadmap for OS updates. I haven't really been impressed with their OS roadmaps since the original PSP, where they really did do some innovative things for the time and significantly expanded the featureset with most updates.
The most disconcerting thing is that, 3 OSes later, they still have yet to establish a reliable baseline of functionality at the launch of new hardware, building on what has been established by the previous OSes rather than regressing on numerous functions.
Sony needs to light a fire under the asses of their PS4 OS programmers. Four months down the line and we've seen no major OS updates, just stability fixes and support for Sony's new PS4 headphones. We're still waiting for support for DLNA, MP3, CD, 3D Blu-Rays, a photo viewer, themes, more customization options, etc.
Sony probably reserved a large portion of the RAM to make sure the OS wouldn't run out of space like it did on the PS3. Once the feature set is complete and optimized, RAM can be given back to developers. Unfortunately the development speed of the PS4 OS is glacial compared to the early days of the PS3.
Sure, but what on earth are they going to add that needs 3GB? Assuming basic features like DLNA, background audio etc, and even having one app suspended in ram in the background, it can't be anywhere near that much. I suppose if you fully want to use an app in the foreground while leaving your game suspended, you need your foreground OS and anything you do to run in that 3GB. But still..
The biggest memory use I can imagine would be a browser with loads of tabs open, but then you could just dump those tabs if needed and refresh them when in focus.
systemfehler
Member
Doesn't have to be a feature that gets added to "waste" memory. Especially at the start of a development process your code might not be as optimized as it could be. You do things fast to have the OS ready for launch - using methods that use up more memory than necessary. Then you end up with a somehow bloated memory footprint you can reduce over the time. Since the PS4 firmware has still some hiccups and slowdowns I guess this is indeed the case and will get better down the road.
pretty done
Member
PS4 not really being able to do 1080p60fps proper makes more sense now. Shame they did this RAM allocation and cheaped out on the CPU.
thehunter01
Banned
This 5GB is shared memory?
If so, then the ram is pretty darn disappointing.
If so, then the ram is pretty darn disappointing.
Plus don't forget that Sony were originally planning 4Gb for the machine. So they would have planned an OS that took max 1GB originally. So I bet this reservation is 'just in case' and there are big amounts sitting unused rigt now.
The flip side of that is because developers were coding based on possibly only 3GB available to them, suddenly having 5GB is just gravy for these first games. So I don't think any games will be limited by the ram yet, and hopefully that amount will increase in time for devs to need it.
Edit: two cores is also a little surprising and I hope one of those gets given back. I had hoped the arm chip and dedicated memory might have helped to limit how many proper CPU cores would need to be reserved.
The flip side of that is because developers were coding based on possibly only 3GB available to them, suddenly having 5GB is just gravy for these first games. So I don't think any games will be limited by the ram yet, and hopefully that amount will increase in time for devs to need it.
Edit: two cores is also a little surprising and I hope one of those gets given back. I had hoped the arm chip and dedicated memory might have helped to limit how many proper CPU cores would need to be reserved.
travisbickle
Member
You do realise Naughty Dog contradict your point in this talk?
Obviously they should have cut the amount of memory to make room for a second APU.