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PS4 has 8 GB OF GDDR5 RAM

please note that the spec sheets did say "specs subject to change" so dont cry too much if sony discovers they cant slap in 8GB or that its not financially viable :p

Seriously doubt that after all the praise from developers. Going back to 4 would hurt them pretty bad in this regard. The devs need to know what they are working with. Rarely do you see RAM decrease at this point in development.
 

Lord Error

Insane For Sony
Amount you can bitch about, as we discover more about how actually works a much different picture than what most expected.
To be fair, with WiiU it's probably more that the ddr3 they used is the slowest available, rather than the approach they took is inherently bad.
 

acm2000

Member
Seriously doubt that after all the praise from developers. Going back to 4 would hurt them pretty bad in this regard. The devs need to know what they are working with. Rarely do you see RAM decrease at this point in development.

nor do you see panic upgrade as seen here, devs didnt seem to know, its slap dash last minute thing to equal xbox 8GB
 
I am doing some calculations here. Lets just say. Its bad for true gamers.

Um hello, there is this thing called a HDD. This will be a non issue. Think about it, they said you can stop a game session by putting your system in Standby, then literally press a button and jump right back where you were without any load screens.
 
Just a technical question.

Would it have been cheaper, easier to implement to use more DDR3? Like 10/12/etc GB of DDR3? You lose the speed but have more total memory. Or would the fact that you have more memory take up more space and create more heat?
 

Saberus

Member
Can't believe all the BS in this thread from some, it's like you have another agenda . This 8 gigs is awesome, and I think the real big deal is you have 176 gb/s running to your CPU and GPU without the bottle neck of a normal PC setup, as in a pc, you may have the GDDR5 on the video card running at 176GB/s but the data still has to talk to the CPU and the GDDR3 and that goes through the PCIe and that is only 40GB/s so the ps4 has huge potential :)
 

kmag

Member
Just a technical question.

Would it have been cheaper, easier to implement to use more DDR3? Like 10/12/etc GB of DDR3? You lose the speed but have more total memory. Or would the fact that you have more memory take up more space and create more heat?

DDR3 is easier/cheaper to implement. Arguably for the stuff that's CPU/OS fed that much unifiedGDDR5 is a bit of overkill, and GDDR5 has reasonably high latency which might be an issue with some CPU workloads but in terms of raw bandwidth the positives far outweigh the negatives. The high bandwidth means less wasted GPU cycles waiting for memory effectively increasing the efficiency of the GPU closer to the theoretical maximums, slower memory can mean the GPU is twiddling its thumbs waiting for the memory to be ready.
 
nor do you see panic upgrade as seen here, devs didnt seem to know, its slap dash last minute thing to equal xbox 8GB


Honestly if you think about it, the reported huge overhead of the MS OS means that things were pretty much equal. I don't see this as Sony trying to equal xbox, I see it as them one upping them and seeing what they do to in response. I seriously doubt they went into this conference without weighing the benefits to cost ratio. Having devs happy is a huge part of succeeding in today's console world. Games cost way too much to develop now, so making it easy on the developer insures that your system will be supported and supported well.
 
DDR3 is easier/cheaper to implement. Arguably for the stuff that's CPU/OS fed that much unifiedGDDR5 is a bit of overkill, and GDDR5 has reasonably high latency which might be an issue with some CPU workloads but in terms of raw bandwidth the positives far outweigh the negatives. The high bandwidth means less wasted GPU cycles waiting for memory effectively increasing the efficiency of the GPU closer to the theoretical maximums, slower memory can mean the GPU is twiddling its thumbs waiting for the memory to be ready.

I'll have you know that my GTX 480 twiddles its thumbs so well that it runs at 90 degrees C while doing so.
 

Concept17

Member
Honestly if you think about it, the reported huge overhead of the MS OS means that things were pretty much equal. I don't see this as Sony trying to equal xbox, I see it as them one upping them and seeing what they do to in response. I seriously doubt they went into this conference without weighing the benefits to cost ratio. Having devs happy is a huge part of succeeding in today's console world. Games cost way too much to develop now, so making it easy on the developer insures that your system will be supported and supported well.

Yup. Chances are multiplat games will run better on the system.
 
I am actually growing more and more concern with every hour passing.

Just read that even the first party devs didn't seem to know about this which makes me think if this was a last minute counter attack on the rumors that MS builds 8GB into the new Xbox.
Also a lot of spokespersons backpedaling on the hardware not being final and the price for GDDR5 RAM being so insanely high, doesn't really give me confidence at the moment.

So I foresee that either

  • Sony is selling PS4 at a rather big loss again
  • We have to pay 599$ again
  • Sony is sizing back down to 4GB closer to release, realizing what they did.
 

Lord Error

Insane For Sony
nor do you see panic upgrade as seen here, devs didnt seem to know, its slap dash last minute thing to equal xbox 8GB
No doubt. Competition is indeed often times good.

MS did that kind of upgrade with X360 as well, it's one thing that can be done at last moment without reengineering everything.
 

Batman

Banned
I think they will be selling PS4's at a loss either way and will still be manufacturing PS3's for years to come to make up for their future PS4 losses and past PS3 losses.
 
Somebody needs to dig up all the posts by people in the past few months saying they would eat their hat or bet money that 8GB of RAM was a pipe dream. That person would be a rich man.
 
Aren't you forgetting something ? Like texture quality (size) ?

If you dont mind to have a slideshow, go with it. You need the muscle to move bigger textures. You can store both bigger and more textures with more RAM. But the GPU must have the power to be able to move them in the first place.

After going through your post history, you have some serious hate for Sony for some reason. I guess you're still bitter about the whole Dreamcast thing. Oh well, at least I know where you stand now and I can take everything you say with a grain of salt.

No, it's just Sony fans are more susceptible than any other collective. I can bitch at MS as much as I want, about that boring Durango design, with no one going nuts.

Me, as other posters, are trying to bring some reality here. Lot of people lack the tech knowledge and believe that going 8GB RAM will double graphic performance. Some CM's are just boosting this misleading info and mocking at people that doesn't share that ignorance.

Bit offtopic: MS designed a better memory setup cost wise, but invested those savings into Kinect shit. So, if I have to select, I would go for Orbis no doubts. Its better to go overkill than fell short. It's only that a beefier GPU it's more desirable that idling unused RAM.
 

acm2000

Member
Honestly if you think about it, the reported huge overhead of the MS OS means that things were pretty much equal. I don't see this as Sony trying to equal xbox, I see it as them one upping them and seeing what they do to in response. I seriously doubt they went into this conference without weighing the benefits to cost ratio. Having devs happy is a huge part of succeeding in today's console world. Games cost way too much to develop now, so making it easy on the developer insures that your system will be supported and supported well.

all this social bullshit, and the video recording etc etc, is gonna take a nice hefty chunk of ram too, might eve be why they HAD to upgrade to 8GB
 
I am actually growing more and more concern with every hour passing.

Just read that even the first party devs didn't seem to know about this which makes me think if this was a last minute counter attack on the rumors that MS builds 8GB into the new Xbox.
Also a lot of spokespersons backpedaling on the hardware not being final and the price for GDDR5 RAM being so insanely high, doesn't really give me confidence at the moment.

So I foresee that either

  • Sony is selling PS4 at a rather big loss again
  • We have to pay 599$ again
  • Sony is sizing back down to 4GB closer to release, realizing what they did.

Where are you reading this? I wouldn't worry. This isn't like multiple HDMI's and the other stuff that was cut from PS3. I think they are past the point of no return here as far as RAM goes. Developers will be fucked if they are coding for 8 GB and they drop to 4. I just don't see any business minded company doing that. Like I said in an earlier post, I'm sure they did a cost vs benefit analysis before green lighting the announcement.
 

Rourkey

Member
Honestly if you think about it, the reported huge overhead of the MS OS means that things were pretty much equal. I don't see this as Sony trying to equal xbox, I see it as them one upping them and seeing what they do to in response. I seriously doubt they went into this conference without weighing the benefits to cost ratio. Having devs happy is a huge part of succeeding in today's console world. Games cost way too much to develop now, so making it easy on the developer insures that your system will be supported and supported well.

MS continually reduced the os footprint in the 360 over the course of its lifespan giving devs more ram to play with over the generation, I'm sure they would have got the 3.5 gig rumoured down significantly quite quickly
 
MS continually reduced the os footprint in the 360 over the course of its lifespan giving devs more ram to play with over the generation, I'm sure they would have got the 3.5 gig rumoured down significantly quite quickly

So did Sony with PS3, so that point is moot. Engineers will always optimize.
 
New rumor is that the Durango's CPU as extra VMX unit(s) that ekes out extra 200GFLOPs over PS4 version.

Umm....false. It's rumored to have twice the flops of ps4's CPU. So ~100glfops more. Nonetheless, if ur including CPU flop numbers u need to add 100gflops into the 1.84tf number for ps4 too. The total would be 1.94tflops vs 1.42tflops. It closes the gap by 100flops. The bias by some to omit stuff like his is ridiculous.
 

Rourkey

Member
So did Sony with PS3, so that point is moot. Engineers will always optimize.

Yer but of you have 4gigs and an 0.5 gig os your room to shrink the os is a lot less than if you have 8gis of ram and a 3.5gig os, if they had stuck with what ram the originally went for and both halved their OS MS would have had a massive ram advantage and a miles better OS
 
Yer but of you have 4gigs and an 0.5 gig os your room to shrink the os is a lot less than if you have 8gis of ram and a 3.5gig os, if they had stuck with what ram the originally went for and both halved their OS MS would have had a massive ram advantage and a miles better OS

Bigger OS doesn't always mean its better. I see your point on the RAM, but the speed advantage of DDR5 would have made the difference much smaller than you think.
 
Bigger OS doesn't always mean its better. I see your point on the RAM, but the speed advantage of DDR5 would have made the difference much smaller than you think.

I trust that MS can beat a hardware company at making a robust, feature-filled operating system.

It's just about the only thing I trust Microsoft to do better than Sony and Nintendo.
 
I trust that MS can beat a hardware company at making a robust, feature-filled operating system.

It's just about the only thing I trust Microsoft to do better than Sony and Nintendo.

I trust them to make it feature rich, but bloated and not optimized OS. But that's just me. Kinnect does nothing for me, but I will reserve judgment until they show it off as well as its new features.
 

Rourkey

Member
Bigger OS doesn't always mean its better. I see your point on the RAM, but the speed advantage of DDR5 would have made the difference much smaller than you think.

I'd take a 1.75gig os from Microsoft over an 256mb Sony one anyway of the week, Sony are only now catching up with OS features Microsoft had in theirs in 2005!
 

LiquidMetal14

hide your water-based mammals
I'd take a 1.75gig os from Microsoft over an 256mb Sony one anyway of the week, Sony are only now catching up with OS features Microsoft had in theirs in 2005!

They surpassed the 360 OS with the Vita. A handheld of all things.

Both platforms are going to be feature rich so I wouldn't stake on Sony being incompetent as they've ironed out a lot of things over the years.
 
I think the idea is that if it ends up being 8GB GDDR5 (~1.8Tflps) vs 8GB DDR3+eSRAM (~1.4Tflps), most all multiplatform games are going to be designed for the lower common denominator.. leaving only 1st party Sony titles specifically designed for the PS4 to take advantage of the bandwidth. It still gives Sony that 1st party edge, however.. GDDR5 is not cheap, at all. DDR3 is extremely cheap.

People are assuming if this is the end scenario one of two things is going to have to happen.

1. Sony prices the console comparatively to Durango, takes a big loss. Note : Sony cannot afford to take losses in 2013.
2. PS4 is going to cost more for users, and users end up paying more for a console of which the vast majority games will not take advantage of the added memory bandwidth.

In the end, someone is paying more so that a few games can load more objects on the screen, and a bit faster.
Lowest common denominator? Then why did multi plat games on the Xbox perform and look better than the PS3 for years?
 
I'd take a 1.75gig os from Microsoft over an 256mb Sony one anyway of the week, Sony are only now catching up with OS features Microsoft had in theirs in 2005!

They are only now catching up because the PS3's RAM prevented them from doing some stuff the 360 could. It's not because they didn't want to.

And last I heard, Windows 8 is a total piece of shit OS and a lot of the think-tanks behind the Xbox and Windows have left the company, so I'm not sure why you're so easily siding with Microsoft.
 

Servbot24

Banned
Lowest common denominator? Then why did multi plat games on the Xbox perform and look better than the PS3 for years?

Because they were designed on that platform, and PS3 is complicated to port to. PS4 will be easy to port to, and it will be easier to add in extra graphical flourishes.
 
nor do you see panic upgrade as seen here, devs didnt seem to know, its slap dash last minute thing to equal xbox 8GB

Or they have intended to do this for a while but kept the information back for competitive reasons. I am not saying that is what happened, but I think it is as likely as your version of events.
 

Pyronite

Member
This is a fantastic thing. Every developer I've spoken with here at Ubisoft Red Storm has agreed. Anyone trying to spin otherwise (doing "calculations" about Blu-Ray/RAM transfer) are kidding themselves.
 
Honestly if you think about it, the reported huge overhead of the MS OS means that things were pretty much equal. I don't see this as Sony trying to equal xbox, I see it as them one upping them and seeing what they do to in response. I seriously doubt they went into this conference without weighing the benefits to cost ratio. Having devs happy is a huge part of succeeding in today's console world. Games cost way too much to develop now, so making it easy on the developer insures that your system will be supported and supported well.

This is a good point. The extra ram gives developers room to be "sloppy" which should save a lot of headaches. Very different than the old Sony's my way or the highway attitude. I think that it is a huge advantage that their Hardware Architect is also developing a game for the system. It gives him a very developer-centric perspective on the design that Sony has lacked in the past.
 

yurinka

Member
Is this dedicated video ram or just like, general ram. Does the system even have dedicated VRAM at all?
It has 8GB of GDDR5, the fastest memory type (the one used in high end GPUs) to use both as VRAM or as normal RAM (typically slower). A single shared pool. The developers will choose the amount of it to be used as VRAM os as RAM.

The devs prefer it in this way, that is the way it worked in 360 (it caused some issues specially for 3rd party to have it splitted in PS3).
 

Teletraan1

Banned
Um hello, there is this thing called a HDD. This will be a non issue. Think about it, they said you can stop a game session by putting your system in Standby, then literally press a button and jump right back where you were without any load screens.

Um Hello, there is thing called snark. I guess I was too subtle even with the true gamer part but that post was a joke based on some of the crap that has been spun in this thread in the last 2 pages. I guess I will go all angular graphics and shooting yourself in the foot to avoid any confusion in the future.
 

Darkangel

Member
I'm pretty hyped for these PS3 specs, 8GB DDR5 is pretty insane.

Sony's not playing around anymore, it's pretty obvious they upped the ram to match the next Xbox. Sony has a lot riding on the PS4 so it's cool to see them going all out.
 
Um Hello, there is thing thing called snark. I guess I was too subtle even with the true gamer part but that post was a joke based on some of the crap that has been spun in this thread in the last 2 pages. I guess I will go all angular graphics and shooting yourself in the foot to avoid any confusion in the future.


Sounds good. Sarcasm doesn't always show up in the written word like you want it too. Having said that I see where you were coming from and apologize for the chippiness. (This is not sarcasm, lol)
 
Lowest common denominator? Then why did multi plat games on the Xbox perform and look better than the PS3 for years?

Because 360 is a better gaming machine. At this point, I have no hope in Gaf admiting this ever, just because Sony as first party did wonders.

I'd take a 1.75gig os from Microsoft over an 256mb Sony one anyway of the week, Sony are only now catching up with OS features Microsoft had in theirs in 2005!

I would take a 256MB OS over a 1.75GB OS on a gaming machine any day of the week. Just saying.

Ok, I know GDDR5 is better, faster, etc, but what about power consumption? Will it run hotter and draw more power than DDR3?

Yes, but I can't care less in a desktop machine. With a proper air flow, they don't need heat spreaders.
 
Maybe it was Sony's way of keeping the leakers from leaking. & I doubt if any of the 3rd party devs was pushing the 4GB of GDDR5 to it's limits anyway.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was the case. It is smart to keep this from the competition as long as possible.
 

W Hudson

Member
I'm getting carried away over 8gb of GDDR5 and in reality I don't know what the fuck it means or does. I read the wiki article on GDDR5 but what difference does having that much ram in practice? I know its like 20 times more than the PS3 so that's pretty amazing but is the leap in graphics/performance going to be exponentially better now?
 
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