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Forums - Gaming - Anybody think 8 gb of GDDR5 is a mistake for PS4

Kynes on 12 March 2013
Chark said:
I want to point out that some customization to the CPU can improve latency issues, or am I wrong?

Also any chance that the secondary CPU will utilize its own RAM? It's the CPU that will be doing the background downloading task and I'd guess that video buffering too, maybe? They could throw in some small amount of DDR3 for that couldn't they? Unless its best to keep it customized and part of the unified pool.

It can. Some things like a big fat chunk of edram. The best way to improve latency is not having to access RAM, having it on cache.



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superchunk on 12 March 2013

I do think its unbalanced. But I think they went this route more for the non-gaming centric services such as always on video recording and video chat, etc.

I think all these 8GBRAM!!!!! screamers will be a bit tiffed when they realize how much of it is actually going to be available for games. (hint its not 8GB)



dahuman on 12 March 2013

more RAM always helps, what worries me is the heat dissipation part since GDDR5 runs hotter because it requires more power, I hope they can make them reasonably small while having efficient and quiet cooling.



Rafux on 12 March 2013

RAM is cheap nowadays and with off the shelf parts PS4 will probably be 450$



dahuman on 12 March 2013
Chark said:
I want to point out that some customization to the CPU can improve latency issues, or am I wrong?

Also any chance that the secondary CPU will utilize its own RAM? It's the CPU that will be doing the background downloading task and I'd guess that video buffering too, maybe? They could throw in some small amount of DDR3 for that couldn't they? Unless its best to keep it customized and part of the unified pool.


It depends on how close everything is and how the PCB will be designed and built, you can't do much about latency improvement otherwise since RAM are built with certain standards, basically, if the PS4 will be as efficiently built as the Wii U, then it'd be very  very good.



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ethomaz on 12 March 2013

Duplicated.



ethomaz on 12 March 2013
walsufnir said:


Oh, didn't read that. But the slide offers no news. Can you show me your initial post again?

The main talk is about 2.

ethomaz said:
1. Games in PC alredy uses 4GB RAM today (it is System RAM and VRAM... not only the 2GB of the video card)... What make yo thing PCs will not use 8GB in games in 4-5 years... PS4 needs to live all these years without modifications.

2. The PS4 GPU is suppose to have close 100% efficiency of the raw power... PC have avg. 50% efficiency of the raw power... this close 2TFLOPS on PS4 will peeform like 3TFLOPS GPUs on PC.

3. Devs are not idiots... they asked for 8GB RAM... thd fact didn't use that today is because there is no graphical leap in PC since the first Crysis in 2007... now with PS4 the PC games will have again a big graphical leap in the next years.

4. I'm the only impressed in how AMD and Sony put a HD 7870 equivalent GPU into a APU with a 8-core CPU? An APU with low parts is easy to make but with high parts like that is really impressive... put a even bigger GPU could be near impossible in a business perspective.

Conclusion: 4GB was a big mistake from Sony... I'm glad they fixed that bootleneck early.

Seems like only this guy agree with me .



VGKing on 12 March 2013
ninjablade said:

i'm not really sure but i keep hearing how expensive the ultra fast ram is, so i started thinking wouldn't it be cheaper if had they gone with a 2.5 gflops GPU and 4gb gddr5, wouldn't that make the system cheaper and give it better graphics, i just don't see how they could use the 8gb or even 4gb, the budget for the game would be insane.

No offense but you are very misinformed. Utilizing more RAM doesn't magically increase the budget. If anything, it reduces it. The more RAM a console has, the less man hours they have to spend trying to fit game assets into memory.

Another thing....Sony is buying RAM in bulk. For them to to upgrade from 4 to 8GB of GDDR5 it probably means they got a really good deal. They couldn't have upgraded the graphics card or the CPU since the PS4 is running on an APU. GPU/CPU were decided a long time ago and its impossible to change now without massive delalys. The only thing they can do this late is over/underclock these things.



nnodley on 12 March 2013
hinch said:

Might a bit overkill, but it'll pay off in the long run. Most devs working on the system seem happy about the RAM.

Some Tweets:

Tiago Sousa ‏@CRYTEK_TIAGO R&D Principal Graphics Programmer at Crytek. Worked on Far Cry, Crysis 1, 2 and 3 + all CryENGINE iterations. "8 GB unified mem as baseline for next tech iterations makes me very, very happy. Fun times coming ^_^"

Johan Andersson ‏@repi Rendering Architect at DICE working on Frostbite and future DICE/EA games. These are my personal views. @Lt_Kernel "we really do like the PS4! that is all I can say :) lots of memory is essential for both the CPU & GPU to create large & alive game worlds"

John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack: "I can’t speak freely about PS4, but now that some specs have been made public, I can say that Sony made wise engineering choices." 

HUH.  I wonder who I will believe.  Random forum members who really don't know much(some do) or the actual people in the game industry who are prasing Sony for going for 8GB.   



VGKing on 12 March 2013
superchunk said:
I do think its unbalanced. But I think they went this route more for the non-gaming centric services such as always on video recording and video chat, etc.

I think all these 8GBRAM!!!!! screamers will be a bit tiffed when they realize how much of it is actually going to be available for games. (hint its not 8GB)

Well back when it was using 4GB, only 512MB were allocated to the OS according to rumors. So if we assume everything doubled then right now 7GB are for games and 1GB for OS. Compare that to the next XBox with points to 3GB being used for OS and only 5GB for games. Then there's the fact that it's only using DDR3 while PS4 is using GDDR5. No matter how you look at it, PS4 has the RAM advantage.