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Netyaroze on 24 February 2013
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platformmaster918 said:
Netyaroze said:
kain_kusanagi said:
Sony doubled their RAM. That's expensive. Why would they do that. The only reason would be to offset some other advantage they're spies found out about the Nextbox. It's far too early and I don't like rumors, but Sony wouldn't all of a sudden decide to spend that kind of money on each PS4 unless the Nextbox has something going on under the hood that they felt they needed to respond to.


Yeah but I think the doubling of the ram has to do with non graphics related stuff Sony probably wanted to compete with the features and OS stuff MS wants. 4gb just for games is enough to feed the Gpu and Cpu. The other 4gb is probably for certain OS features and a smooth and quick overall experience plus headroom for future projects, more flexibility and as a gift for developers . This was clearly a response to the 8gb from MS. What the "spies" found out was that the Xbox had 8gb. 

I don't think they need 4gb of GDDR5 RAM for the OS.  If they were putting extra in there for the OS they would make it DDR3 since menus and apps don't take that much.   They said it's unified unlike PS3 so I think it's really for devs to go wild.  Imagine what ND and SSM can do with that if they did GoW3 and U3 with 256mb!

 

Its not just for the OS its also for the OS. Ofcourse it will help devs to do things they weren't able to do it gives them more flexibility but purely graphics speaking the Cpu and Gpu could have been easily fed with 4gb. But it would have been an obstacle and Sony+Devs would've had a harder time and more limitations. The update was a great decision It allows Sony to do everything MS could do and more, without compromising any games. Now devs might have 6gb+ without having to worry about space and Sony can use 1gb-2gb for the OS to implement everything MS could come up with, @ 4gb Sony would have gotten in to trouble to stay within 512 Mb and offer a seamless multitasking experience and game developers would have to optimize more or compromisse the quality of the games down the line  

 

@nikosx 

 

MS can't just upgrade the Gpu because the faster the gpu the more bandwith you need. 32mb esram + 8gb DDR3 is enough to feed the 1.2 Tflop Gpu that is rumored but would bottleneck a lets say 2 Tflop GPU. So MS would have to redesign the whole GPU and also go GDDR5 there is a reason why all GPUs over a certain power will not come with DDR3 and 32mb ESRAM is barely enough to cater to the current GPU.

 

I think MS best short term option to react to the PS4 would be to put in 2 APUs with 4 Cpu cores tacked on and each with 32 MB Esram (total 64 mb) or they have to take out the Esram up the GPU, change the memory controller and go for GDDR5 too. But if they haven't done that months ago they won't make it in time. They can't just upgrade the GPU without increasing Esram size or it will not be maxed out properly. A Geforce Titan with DDR3 is weaker than a 7870 with GDDR5. The Titan would have to wait 90% of the time for the RAM to deliver data because the GPU works way faster and the memory can't keep up giving the GPU work to do, so the GPU just does nothing all the time. Crysis 3 would run at 5fps on a DDR3 Geforce Titan .

MS would have to redesign alot of stuff (based on the rumors ofc) its not enough to just put in 8 additional CUs to the GPU and double ROPs without also changing how the memory works.