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Forums - Sony - I'm scared about the PS4 price.

drkohler on 20 February 2013
archer9234 said:
I really don't want the starting cost to be above 400$. If it is. I'm not buying it for a while. Just like I did with the PS3, Might as well wait for the PS4 slim then.

Under $400 is pure wishful thinking. The first batch of PS4s/XBox720s probably have product costs in the $700-$800 range, and manufacturing costs in the $400-$450 range. That stuff in the new consoles is expensive currently. $529 full PS4, $449 "light" version is my guess.



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richardhutnik on 20 February 2013
Sal.Paradise said:

For these past few months on gaf, everyone seemed happy with the oft-rumoured 4gb GDDR5 figure. It's fast, expensive RAM used on pc video cards.

A rumour popped up a few weeks ago that Sony had bumped it up to 8GB, but everyone dismissed that as crazy talk, that it would cost too much and 4gb was plenty. Now....we have 8. We also saw a camera device that may or may not be packed in with the console.

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy they've done it, it really is a generational leap in tech. But how does Sony plan to sell this thing for anywhere near acceptable price? 

I am expecting $499.  There may be a nerfed version at $399 released.  Of course Sony may decide to push $399 for it, but I would say $500 most likely.  And, given the economy that may be a hard sell.



Weedlab on 20 February 2013

I am too. I'm hoping people won't have to break the bank to get one. I want it to sell well and build a nice install base early. I already have $500 for it and I plan to save some more between now and then for games (PS3, PSV, 3DS and PS4). But that's just me. Hopefully it is in the $400 range. I think people will be more comfortable with that.



 

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JWeinCom on 20 February 2013
Sensei said:
Those are my thoughts as well.

That's 16 times the RAM of PS360, 4 times Wii U... and faster RAM!

I am excited and worried.


Keep in mind, we need to know what the ratio is for game ram to OS Ram.  The Wii U is 1:1 so it's only twice the RAM as a 360 in gaming.  The PS4's OS does seem likely to take more RAM especially with its sharing features, but I still can't imagine the OS taking more than like 2 GB of Ram.  If that leaves 6 GB of RAM for actual gaming... damn...  Course, I don't really know that much about computers.  Could be wrong.  Maybe OS takes up 4 GB or something. 



firelink on 21 February 2013
Wlakiz said:
firelink said:
Sad thing is all of that RAM will go to waste.

GDDR RAM is designed to transfer large chunks of data like textures, frames, shaders, etc. This is why they are commonly used in video cards.

The thing no one tells you is that GDDR is awful when it comes to sequential R/W. This is why gaming PCs are built with GDDR for video cards and DDR for system memory. Your system memory has to swap around millions of variables constantly while running.

Go buy a cheap flash drive. It will do great transferring large files. Try transferring a large number of smaller files - the thread will lock up/slow down.

Nintendo and MS made the right choice with DDR3/eDRAM. You get the benefits of sequential R/W while getting a part of the benefit of high bandwidth. Using the right system RAM is essential today, when the way the OS works is just as important as the games.


... define 'awful' please.


Awful was the wrong word to use.

 

Let's look at this more in-depth. The PS4 comes with 8GB GDDR5. This RAM is unified, which means the entire system has to use it. That means RAM for the GPU and CPU functions must be split.

First we'll take away 2GB for the OS. That's an estimate, it might be a lot lower than that. That leaves us with a pool of 6GB of RAM. If we just divide it in half, that's 3GB for GPU and 3GB for CPU. I'd more than likely guess it will be 2GB for GPU and 4GB for CPU. That makes more sense from someone coming from a PC background.

That 2GB of RAM for the GPU is going to run fantastically. That much RAM allows for an enourmous framebuffer to be passed. However, the 4GB of RAM for the CPU is what has me worried.

GDDR has a lot of latency. Considering the PS4 is using a massive 8GB, there is no way that these chips are fitting on the SoC. Because of that, even more latency is going to be introduced.

It's not going to make or break the system, but things that rely on the transfer of large amounts of smaller data (like a million 1KB transfers or something), it is going to struggle more than DDR3 would.

Video game code has millions of lines of code, swapping different variables in an out of memory and pointing to and deleting pointers to different parts of memory.

Sony is trying to use RAM dedicated to graphics use (transferring few, larger chunks of data) for system use (transferring plenty, smaller chunks of data).

 

Here are some references:

http://www.overclock.net/t/855871/why-arent-there-sticks-of-ddr5-ram

http://www.techspot.com/community/topics/whats-the-difference-between-ddr3-memory-and-gddr5-memory.186408/ (post #3)



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sales2099 on 21 February 2013

Hey guys is the kinect shaped Eyetoy included with the PS4 or is it separate?



Xbox: Best hardware, Game Pass best value, best BC, more 1st party genres and multiplayer titles. 

 

Wlakiz on 22 February 2013
firelink said:
Wlakiz said:
firelink said:
Sad thing is all of that RAM will go to waste.

GDDR RAM is designed to transfer large chunks of data like textures, frames, shaders, etc. This is why they are commonly used in video cards.

The thing no one tells you is that GDDR is awful when it comes to sequential R/W. This is why gaming PCs are built with GDDR for video cards and DDR for system memory. Your system memory has to swap around millions of variables constantly while running.

Go buy a cheap flash drive. It will do great transferring large files. Try transferring a large number of smaller files - the thread will lock up/slow down.

Nintendo and MS made the right choice with DDR3/eDRAM. You get the benefits of sequential R/W while getting a part of the benefit of high bandwidth. Using the right system RAM is essential today, when the way the OS works is just as important as the games.


... define 'awful' please.


Awful was the wrong word to use.

 

Let's look at this more in-depth. The PS4 comes with 8GB GDDR5. This RAM is unified, which means the entire system has to use it. That means RAM for the GPU and CPU functions must be split.

First we'll take away 2GB for the OS. That's an estimate, it might be a lot lower than that. That leaves us with a pool of 6GB of RAM. If we just divide it in half, that's 3GB for GPU and 3GB for CPU. I'd more than likely guess it will be 2GB for GPU and 4GB for CPU. That makes more sense from someone coming from a PC background.

That 2GB of RAM for the GPU is going to run fantastically. That much RAM allows for an enourmous framebuffer to be passed. However, the 4GB of RAM for the CPU is what has me worried.

GDDR has a lot of latency. Considering the PS4 is using a massive 8GB, there is no way that these chips are fitting on the SoC. Because of that, even more latency is going to be introduced.

It's not going to make or break the system, but things that rely on the transfer of large amounts of smaller data (like a million 1KB transfers or something), it is going to struggle more than DDR3 would.

Video game code has millions of lines of code, swapping different variables in an out of memory and pointing to and deleting pointers to different parts of memory.

Sony is trying to use RAM dedicated to graphics use (transferring few, larger chunks of data) for system use (transferring plenty, smaller chunks of data).

 

Here are some references:

http://www.overclock.net/t/855871/why-arent-there-sticks-of-ddr5-ram

http://www.techspot.com/community/topics/whats-the-difference-between-ddr3-memory-and-gddr5-memory.186408/ (post #3)

Well first your estimate... 2gb for OS? Thats allocating 25% phyiscal memory. They are not putting windows vista into the system. At worse, I would assume it takes 256mb for OS (thats more than double the amount they reserved for the PS3).

Next we look at the purpose of the PS4. It is a video game console.. what kind of data does it handle? Graphics, physics and game logic. GDDR5 excels at graphics and physics computation. Would having 'slower' memory access affect game logic? No. Unless someone plan to host a sql server or run sorting algorithims, you're not even going to notice the so called 'higher' latency.

This generation, Sony made sure memory won't be a bottle neck for the system.



BluGamer23 on 22 February 2013
leo-j said:
$399 won't mean a big loss at launch..

they are launching late 2013..


.. Im laughing too much to post all tha ha-has



 

 

BluGamer23 on 22 February 2013

Maybe sony will adjust this 8Gb bs.. depending on what MS does.. if MS comes out with a console 4GB and $100-$150 less than the PS4... yeh party time!



 

 

HesAPooka on 22 February 2013

450-500 sounds reasonable for launch.



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