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Forums - Sony Discussion - BREAKING NEWS: PS4 devkits 1.5GB RAM!!!! [UPDATE]

Subie_Greg on 22 February 2013

I think a lot of people on this site and others have missed the reason why this is so incredible.

Developers wanted it. Developers got it. Win!!!

The Game Creators... the people/companies that make the games we want to play, got what they wanted to create said games. How could that ever be a bad thing? Why would you try to downplay that? You can see the positive reaction of both 1st and 3rd party Developers. That they are excited and wowed by the specs. Why are some of you acting like this is meh?

And the "my PC would smoke that" comments are ultra stupid. If you are comparing Console and PC specs... you fail.



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forevercloud3000 on 23 February 2013
Chark said:
forevercloud3000 said:
Roar_Of_War said:

Which means Sony just kissed goodbye the chances of this being a console under $400. Most likely $450-$500.

IDK, Sony has something bigger in the works here that we cannot see. We don't yet have an accurate reading of how much these components cost overall. It SOUNDS pretty pricey tho.

I am thinking they either are getting some level of rediculous deal on thos part or they plan on subsidizing the cost of the console somehow.

A) Maybe they came to some agreement with whichever company is making them in the form of putting this ram in various Sony based products. In an effort to popularize it's use.

B) Sony will allow Gamers to buy PS4 at a discounted price, similar to the Phone plans. We agree to pay some kind of installment for several months to a yr, we get the console for $199. This rumor has been swirling around for a while, MS has already kind of initiated something like this...


http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=155627&page=1#58

$320-$401 is NeoGafs guess

Meaning $500 maybe for Sony from factory to retail. So $400 sound just right.

if it is within 399 range I think it would be perfect. but what do I know? I bought a Launch PS3 :P lol

Sony's whole strategy for the consoles since PS1 has been to sell at a loss, or break even...as the tech needed for such devices needed to be within "Mass Market" to be successful. Nintendo has been the only company to ever continuously sell their consoles at a profit. Sony will get their money back from the sold games and services(which I personally expect PS++ to be unveiled at E3).



      

      

      

Greatness Awaits

PSN:Forevercloud (looking for Soul Sacrifice Partners!!!)

disolitude on 23 February 2013
Superman4 said:
disolitude said:
Sharu said:
disolitude said:
This is good news for the whole futureproofing of PS4.

But before people start saying this is an immediate game changer and how Killzone would look 5X better if they had 8GB ram to work with...please ask me how much RAM a game like Battlefield 3 uses, completely maxed, and running on 3 screens on PC at 5760x1080 resolution.

Hint - its less than 4 GB.


Yeah, I thought the same... Now my PC is 4Gb of RAM... If I'll change it to 8 the games will not be 2x prettier, just a little bit faster loading... Only software on my PC which uses a lot of RAM are big soundbanks which should be in the memory while I'm working with them... So all the hype about extra RAM looks very strange to me from the gaming point of view...

Yeah excatly...

More GPU RAM (VRAM) and you may be able to get deliver more frames per second (if you have the GPU power to push those frames out). 

But PS4 is going to hit the CPU and GPU bottleneck waay before it can utilize more than 2 GB of VRAM.

However good news here is that Killzone is supposed to be 1080p@30 fps...So this may be able to give them 60fps if VRAM and not GPU/CPU were the bottlenecks..

The CPU and GPU are on the same dye. What bottleneck are you talking about?  8GB of GDDR5 unified with basically an AMD 8 core Socket FM2 CPU.  Having the GPU and CPU share the sam dye, basically eliminates the bottlneck between CPU and GPU. The only limitation is with how powerfull the GPU is, and how much of the ram the OS and background apps are going to require.

I've been talking about a lot of bottlenecks lately, but here I am talking about the bottleneck of GPU power itself.

To push 4GB of video data on a 1080p screen PS4 GPU would have to be pushing almost insane lighting, physics, particle effects...etc. No amount of high res textures will need 4GB of VRAM at 1080p.

You see these low end cards like the Geforce GT 630 and Radeon 6670 with 2GB of VRAM and you laugh. These cards will hit the performance and bandwith wall before they can even utilize 1 GB of VRAM for modern games, let alone 2. PS4 GPU is obviously more powerful, and pretty capable at utilizing 2 to 3GB of VRAM. But anything over that and you are running in to a GPU bottleneck before you run in to a lack of VRAM memory bottleneck.

I imagine devs like flexibility, but 4GB of VRAM is as much the GPU will ever use at one point and time. The other 4GB of RAM can obviously be used for other things on the backend which is also a plus...



nnodley on 23 February 2013
JoeTheBro said:
nnodley said:

I don't think anybody ever really thought it would be under $400, but yeah the upped amount of ram could easily add $50 to the price. 


gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=155705

 

One of our forum members is betting years of sig control that it's $350.

Wow, how could he possibly think that.  They would take a big loss if they did that. Unless they did some voodoo shit and are getting alot of these components a lot cheaper than people think, which I highly doubt.



makingmusic476 on 23 February 2013
disolitude said:
KBG29 said:
disolitude said:
This is good news for the whole futureproofing of PS4.

But before people start saying this is an immediate game changer and how Killzone would look 5X better if they had 8GB ram to work with...please ask me how much RAM a game like Battlefield 3 uses, completely maxed, and running on 3 screens on PC at 5760x1080 resolution.

Hint - its less than 4 GB.

The only reason that devs are not using 4GB of VRAM is because the market is so small. This is why Epic, Crytek, and id are so happy about this. Right now the mass market is PS3/360 with 512MB and low end PCs with 1GB. This will set the bar much higher and allow them to build games in a completly different way. In no time PC games will be pushing 4GB VRAM, and nvidia/amd will be releasing cards with 8GB, 10GB, 12GB, ect.

Games were not limited to 1.5GB or so because thats all they needed, they were that way because the market was not there. 


I agree, but video memory and GPU performance go hand in hand. More powerful GPUs will surely use 8GB down the road.

On a 1080p resolution and looking at memory bandwith and teraflops performance PS4 is promissing, it is downright technically impossible for PS4 to use 8 GB of memory at once (for VRAM). It would be like sticking 4 GB on intel HD4000 and ask the GPU to push 1080p worth of 4GB memory. 

I do understand this is a unified memory architecture and that GPU/CPU and os need to share 8 GB hence I doubt that the GPU will ever use up more than 4.

Keep in mind that the ps4's 8gb GDDR5 is the system's total ram, while I believe you're talking strictly about the video ram required for these PC games.  That video ram is also coupled with system ram.

My current build is three years old, and it wasn't exactly bleeding edge when I built it, but it has 5gb of total ram.  Granted, the OS requirements of an open platform are much higher, but you get the point.  It's not uncommon to find builds with 8gb DDR3 + 2gb GDDR5 these days.  The more extreme builds I've seen have 16gb DDR3 + 4gb GDDR5.

Also, recall that within a closed system like PS4, developers are able to get more out of the hardware that they would with the same hardware in a PC setting, given known OS restrictions, coding to the metal, and so on.  What may not be possible with the ps4's hardware and 4gb of vram running windows or something isn't necessarily impossible with the ps4 as it currently exists.



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disolitude on 23 February 2013
makingmusic476 said:
disolitude said:
KBG29 said:
disolitude said:
This is good news for the whole futureproofing of PS4.

But before people start saying this is an immediate game changer and how Killzone would look 5X better if they had 8GB ram to work with...please ask me how much RAM a game like Battlefield 3 uses, completely maxed, and running on 3 screens on PC at 5760x1080 resolution.

Hint - its less than 4 GB.

The only reason that devs are not using 4GB of VRAM is because the market is so small. This is why Epic, Crytek, and id are so happy about this. Right now the mass market is PS3/360 with 512MB and low end PCs with 1GB. This will set the bar much higher and allow them to build games in a completly different way. In no time PC games will be pushing 4GB VRAM, and nvidia/amd will be releasing cards with 8GB, 10GB, 12GB, ect.

Games were not limited to 1.5GB or so because thats all they needed, they were that way because the market was not there. 


I agree, but video memory and GPU performance go hand in hand. More powerful GPUs will surely use 8GB down the road.

On a 1080p resolution and looking at memory bandwith and teraflops performance PS4 is promissing, it is downright technically impossible for PS4 to use 8 GB of memory at once (for VRAM). It would be like sticking 4 GB on intel HD4000 and ask the GPU to push 1080p worth of 4GB memory. 

I do understand this is a unified memory architecture and that GPU/CPU and os need to share 8 GB hence I doubt that the GPU will ever use up more than 4.

Keep in mind that the ps4's 8gb GDDR5 is the system's total ram, while I believe you're talking strictly about the video ram required for these PC games.  That video ram is also coupled with system ram.

My current build is three years old, and it wasn't exactly bleeding edge when I built it, but it has 5gb of total ram.  Granted, the OS requirements of an open platform are much higher, but you get the point.  It's not uncommon to find builds with 8gb DDR3 + 2gb GDDR5 these days.  The more extreme builds I've seen have 16gb DDR3 + 4gb GDDR5.

Also, recall that within a closed system like PS4, developers are able to get more out of the hardware that they would with the same hardware in a PC setting, given known OS restrictions, coding to the metal, and so on.  What may not be possible with the ps4's hardware and 4gb of vram running windows or something isn't necessarily impossible with the ps4 as it currently exists.

I totally agree with what you're saying. My comments were tied to this thread specifically and the idea that Killzone would have looked much better if they were designing it with 8 GB of RAM available.

I can see the frame rate being 60 fps maybe, but other than that I don't see how 4 to 8 GB of ram jump would have made a drastic difference for a game running at 1080p with a GPU like 7850 that PS3 has.

Something like the Nvidia Titan has 6 GB and is a total beast when it comes to raw power. For a GPU like that, this would have been a valid argument, but not for a 7850...



walsufnir on 23 February 2013
forevercloud3000 said:
Doesn't a ridiculous amount of Fast RAM such as this mean that Load times will be a thing of the past? I would imagine that every game will always run buttery smooth, no load times, no frame drops.


You forgot that it can prevent apocalypse and heal cancer... Really: No, loading times will still be there because data has to be transferred to RAM. This will be HDD (slow!) and BD (even worse!). You could load things into RAM before they are going to be used, but the current secenery will take also a lot of RAM, so the free space should be quite small. And frame-drops will also not be prevented: if GPU is at limit no RAM will help.



Wh1pL4shL1ve_007 on 23 February 2013

Even sweeter



Yay!!!

forevercloud3000 on 23 February 2013
walsufnir said:
forevercloud3000 said:
Doesn't a ridiculous amount of Fast RAM such as this mean that Load times will be a thing of the past? I would imagine that every game will always run buttery smooth, no load times, no frame drops.


You forgot that it can prevent apocalypse and heal cancer... Really: No, loading times will still be there because data has to be transferred to RAM. This will be HDD (slow!) and BD (even worse!). You could load things into RAM before they are going to be used, but the current secenery will take also a lot of RAM, so the free space should be quite small. And frame-drops will also not be prevented: if GPU is at limit no RAM will help.


.......

why must you shit on my dreams like that :(



      

      

      

Greatness Awaits

PSN:Forevercloud (looking for Soul Sacrifice Partners!!!)

Subie_Greg on 23 February 2013

Also worth noting that the PS4 will read a blu ray disc 3 times faster than the PS3.

Exciting times ahead indeed