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Intrinsic on 06 August 2016
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walsufnir said:

What does the console really do with that 2.5-3GB of reserved RAM?

1. Caching and playing safe. After the last gen, at least Sony wanted to play safe for obvious reasons.

Why is it that we have operating systems that are leaps and bounds more functional than what we have in consoles which run on significantly less memory. (we can have >an entire windows operating system on as little as 2GB of ram.

2. Yes, but which games do you play on a system with 2 gb of ram? They grant devs up to 5 gb and it seems totally sufficient. If this changes in the future, they will be able to easily change that but for now, it's sufficient.
I think this is the first time, consoles have "enough" ram.


Why can my android phone keep my game state saved in the background for any number of apps or games I'm playing yet my console can do this for only one game at a time?

3. Because games on a console require more ram and resources than apps on a phone.

Why are features so hard to implement and take forever to come along when everyone that owns the console is using the exact same OS and running it on the exact same >hardware?

4. How do you know they are hard to implement? It's more of a choice than not being able to. Also both companies are probably trying to not put leaking software in their systems so that hackers don't get opportunities to hack the system.

Why can we not use the consoles we have to build "small" apps for the console?

5. I don't understand that question.


Android and Ios started life with less than 128MB or RAM. Console operating systems proper started life with the PS3/360 with approximately 56 and 32MB or Ram >respectively. Yet both consoles were able to do quite a lot.

6. Android has 1 gb of ram nowadays easily in almost every phone. Again, it's choice, not being able to. Many people are even happy that their console concentrates on gaming and not apps.

And all these OSs have their roots in Linux on some level.

7. This is completely wrong.

Yet we can't even have a decently functioning browser.

8. This is something that of course is ridiculous. But I think that Sony using a webkit browser has to do custom modifications as they don't use common rendering tehchniques.

So how in God's name is it possible for my browser to crash when it has access to at least 5GB of Ram just for itself?

9. Because crashing has nothing to do with the amount of ram that a computer has (at least not necessarily). But: It could be that Sony is using something like ulimit so that single apps are only allowed to use a dedicated pool of resources and if this limit is exceeded, than the app will crash. 

  1. I get the playing it safe part. Or even the caching..... but that's a LOT of space. 

  2. What I meant was this. 3GB of ram is reserved for the OS. I'm not talking about the App reserve (5GB). What I want to know is how we can have whole operating systems that exist on 2GB or ram for everything including playing whatever games they can play with that allotment. Yet wit a whole 3GB reserve we have something that can't even have a decent download manager or that loads up nearly everything when you move around the OS (UI). 

  3. I can understand this. thanks for that. 

  4. I don't know if they are hard to implement. But I do know that we go a whole year and get paltry additions to the OSes functionality compared to what others are doing. I also know that even with what little they do add sometimes they still break something and requires patches to fix them. And if it's about choice, so they are filling the functionality of their Consoles on purpose? Why should a $70 Android ox with as little as 1GB of ram have more media features, app support and a better browser than something that cost $300-$400 and has waaaaaay more power than it?

  5. I mean to use the consoles like an SDK. So users can build smaller apps that maybe aren't allowed to use more than 1GB of ram, 4 CPU cores and half the GPU CUs. 

  6. I want them to concemtrate on games and not apps. But it doesn't hurt to have both if the tech allows it.

    Let's take me for instance. I have a PS4. And then I got a $600+ skull canyon NUC (yes I know I could have gone for a much cheaper device) which I use as nothing more than a HTPC and a proper web browser on the big screen. I wouldn't have needed that if my PS4 had native support for Plex/kodi. And the PS4 has the power to be able to do all that in one tidy box. This very event is actually what led to the creation of this thread. 

  7. Yh sorry. that was an over simplification. But my point is that these operating systems have a lot in common in how they function. So basically, not much reason why one can do things that they other simply just can't given the same hardware ball park. 

  8. Ok. so why not just have Chrome, Firefox, opera, dolphin..... anyone else make a browser for the PS4. Lock it out to run like a game, so it's allowed no more than 5GB or Ram. I don't know, but the browsers on cell phones with 1GB of ram are better than what we have in consoles. 

  9. Most crashes I've seen on a PS4 browser are tied to a insufficient memory error. I mean the cosole has even froze on me and required a reset once. Come on!!! this is 2016.