The Witcher 3 1080p PS4/900p XB1

[beeje13]

Intrinsic said:

beeje13 said:

It goes to system ram, takes up about 1GB. The DDR3 for the arm background processor is too small, and it would take up too much hdd bandwidth, and wear it out. I do think that GDDR5 is wasted used as that and it would have been great to have 4GB DDR3 for system stuff, then the full 8GB GDDR5 and 176GB/s for games. But costs more :(

Nope. The PS4 OS has a certain HDD OS reserve. So when you buy a new console or install in a new HDD, you notice you have considerably less HDD space available than how much space you would have had if you just put the HDD in an external case and plugged it to your computer. when plugging in a new 500GB HDD to a computer, you should expect at least 465GB of free space, on the PS4 only around 408GB is available out if the box. 

That HDD reserve is how the OS caches PSN data including the Game DVR. The arm processor is basically used as a download manager and I suspect also for the game DVR/screen shot stuff. having an entirely desperate processor that overlays/underlays whatever is happening is a way to ensure stability. 

As nice as having a desperate DDR chip just for the OS, that would have complicated the system too much. Eventually it would have been cheaper for them to have just put in an extra 4GB of gddr5. But hey, having 5GB available to devs now is plenty enough, and in the next 2 years chances are that figure can go up to as much as 6.5GB. 

I was led to believe that the cache is for game data and the reason why it is a varied amount depending on hdd size is that the ps4 physically the outside part of the hdd platter for non user storage.

  I would like to know where you found out that the hdd stored the 15 minute video stream. I think that its technically weird why they would use it for that as it would adversely and substantially affect the performance of games, which rely on the hdd exclusively for its data. A 1 megabyte per second stream to RAM is peanuts and it is much, much better at dealing with multiple tasks.