it's so they can run the new HOME,see you there :)

8Gb is just the minimum I was expecting. All PS consoles had their memory increased by 16 times each gen, so it was expected another jump of 16 times.

PS1 = 2MB RAM
PS2 = 2 x 16 = 32MB RAM
PS3 = 32 x 16 = 512MB RAM
PS4 = 512 x 16 = 8GB RAM

Yes. Though, it kind of depends on the mood of third parties. If the 8 gig to 2 gig difference between PS4 and WiiU is a factor in discouraging 3rd party WiiU development, then it may be worth it to have that extra 4 gig. But outside of that factor, I think it was probably a poor - though not terrrible - decision. If I were in charge of Sony, I would have gone with a cheaper spec'd system. Sell it at a good price, near cost and get the price down asap. It's always been the most successful strategy in this industry. PS1&2 were both underpowered and dominated. Sony should have made their system games-focused and cheap. If MS is using half of their RAM to operate Windows anyway, 4 gig would have been more than enough for PS4. If Sony launched PS4 at 399 this fall and had it to 299 by next year, they could potentially dominate the industry. As it stands they will struggle to hit those prices without massive losses. Most people don't care about specs, only price and games. If it's called PS4 most people will think it's good regardless of what's under the hood.

PS4 has an OS. It uses a driver, and a graphics API. You don't program to the metal. The biggest problem with DirectX is the draw calls overhead, but there are ways to hide that overhead. Those efficiency numbers are due to the nature of the graphic chips, the graphics chips ATI had when they developed X360 and the 5way instructions, but since GCN they don't use VLIW architectures, and nVidia since several years ago. You are mixing things, Ethomaz.

PS: Do you know the routing nightmare that 32 chips mean? You want your motherboard simple, with as a low number of layers as possible.

They can use whatever type of memory they want, they only have to change the memory controller. In PCS the APUs have only one type of memory because they are low performance cheap system chips, you don't want to use more than one type of memory, and you don't want to use a high cost type of memory as GDDR, that's why they don't use it, but one of the last rumors about next generation AMD APUs say that it's possible to have a low capacity pool of GDDR5 soldered on the motherboard to improve the graphics performance, and the usual DDR3 memory.

ethomaz said: curl-6 said: Dear God I hope not, the 7th gen was so long it was agony, I wanted Wii U in 2011 and PS3/Nextbox last November. I wanted the Wii U in 2006 .

I wanted PS Move in 2006. :p

What benefices the 8GB RAM can give us in games:

- 2048x2048 environmental textures or higher (not the output the texture used in the GPU to make the final image... the games today uses poor texture models due RAM limitations in consoles)... 2k texture will look shaper in 1080p
- Really big open worlds games with a lot of details
- Developer can use the extra RAM for cache... so less loading times in the games
- Ray-Tracing uses a lot of RAM (but I can't see they using Ray-Tracing with PS4... maybe only few objects)
- Voxel cone tracing for GI and shadows
- Real time world-space indirect lighting and reflections with acurate occlusion (with screenspace aproximations reserved only for local high frequency detail) and potentially hundreds of shadowed lights (stole from B3D)
- More dinamic scenes
- Use of SVO GI (Epic dropped that from Elemental demo)

I can find more things that developers can use more RAM.

Most of it (the technical stuff is subject to change as engines evolve, of course) is what we want from nextgen and what we will get. Besides Raytracing is still off and won't be present nextgen as well as it doesn't happen because of more ram. It is especially hard to compute!

I wish people would stop praying the "latency mantra". IT IS FALSE.

We are living in the days of high performance, cache driven memory accesses. Long gone are the days when the CPUs grabbed data from main memory one variable/one code line at a time, and long gone are the days when programmers coded their source with pointer arithmetics and local variables. Nowadays, "ugly" programming is what is called for (large fixed-size arrays for variables, global variables and routines grouped according to access probhabilities, etc). What this means that programmers no longer have the cpu in mind, they "program for the memory controller" for the optimum case.

Why? Good memory controllers use longest possible burst modes whenever possible - this means that your cpu/gpu has close to 100% cache hits for code and very high percentages for hitting data in the data cache. Hence memory latencies of the main memory are almost irrelevant (provided you program "ugly"), but memory throughput becomes decisive. And the gddr5 n the PS4 wins hands down against any other solution.