I'm talking about video RAM here, which is obviously shared with the system.

So 2GB max for video use and 2GB max for game use would be plenty = 4GB total.

PC games may well use 3GB+ but at least 2GB of that is used for the OS.

Obviously having 8GB is a good thing, and it leaves headroom for developers to not spend as long optimizing and for additional features in the OS and I'm very happy about it. Don't kid yourself that this is going to make graphics any better though.

RAM quanity is about allowing a platform to be used as intended = not about speeding it up.

RAM speed can make things faster though of course and GDDR5 is top speed stuff.

I haven't got the will to provide graphs etc to prove my point. I know what I know from being into computers and graphics cards and stuff for 15 years or so.

The information is freely out there with a quick google if you want to get educated on the ins and outs of it.

I'm not arguing here at all, not trying to prove a point or any "I'm right hahahaha" thing. It's just factually correct.

The fact Sony have put 8GB in there is a good thing, see my previous post. I'm not slagging off Sony here or trying to downplay their choice - please don't assume this is what it's about - quite the opposite. Can't wait for the PS4 and having 8GB of shared RAM is the best thing I heard at the PS4 announcement a month or so ago and one of the reasons I'll be getting one.

I'm just saying that 8GB isn't going to make the graphics better in games, this is not opinion it's straight up how it is :)

More RAM does not make games run better and the PS4 has so much that even 4GB is enough for the power of the GPU.

Seriously, I could rant on all night but best you google something like "2GB Vs 1GB graphics card performance"...have a little dig around and you will see it's been documented for nigh on 10 years that manufacturers add additional RAM as a selling point - but with no actual speed benefit. In some cases it can even run SLOWER because it might not be the same type of RAM used as the 1GB model of a certain graphics card etc.

I'm really not against Sony here so please don't read what I'm saying with a suspcious eye! ;)

See the bolded, graphics not better - but easier to develop for, not as much time needed optimizing for developers.

Not disputing any of that mate, I'm purely talking about "will 8GB shared RAM increase graphics performance vs X GB"

Answer = NO!

It will allow developers freedom to make games easier and cheaper (and possibly better) with less time needed to optimize game code, and less tricks needed to allow large game worlds to appear seamless. It will also allow Sony to add on extra features as time goes by to the main OS and not have it slow to a craw like say with the XMB currently where it's clearly bogged down.

The only time RAM quanity affects performance in a game is when you haven't got enough of it, at which point you get stuttering. Having enough simply allows the game to run as it should, having more simply allows you to do others things, it doesn't improve performance of said game.

@fillet

Gamer developers are paused in the time since Crysis... so they not moved forward in terms of use of the PC resources.

Now witth the next-gen you will see a big leap in graphcis on PC and then the video cards will became to be standard 4GB VRAM or more... the games in PC will start to use a lot more than 2GB VRAM.

PC developers are waiting that... now some games in the PC will be showed in the next two year to became the techinical benchmark until the next-generation of consoles arrive and PC again up to the next level (like Crysis did in 2007).

Consoles hold the PC game developement.

And more. It's a 6x CAV drive which is better for seek times but read times are 2.4x slower when reading the inside of the disc.

6x CAV ps4 = 216 mbps / 27 MBs at the outer edge to 90 mbps / 11.25 MBs at the inner edge
2x CLV ps3 = 72 mbps / 9 MBs anywhere on the disk, seek times are much worse as the rotational speed has to change.

Don't worry too much about a loud drive, it doesn't spin that much faster then the ps3 drive at full speed (~4900 rpm vs ~3900 rpm). However it will always spin at that speed.

HDD install will be even more essential next gen to feed all that ram efficiently. The blu-ray drive will be better able to help this time with the lower seek times and the much faster outer track. 1st party games will benefit by using both hdd and optical drive. Use 1 layer for a fast initial install at 27MBs, use the other layer for fast data access while playing, and use the slower parts of the disc for fmv and background loading.
The question is whether 3rd party devs are going to bother since the next xbox is rumored to always do a full hdd install. Why optimize for disk plus hdd use if it's easier to have 1 version for both disc and digital distribution?

The 6x CAV kinda puts my hopes down for a 4K disc format to run on ps4. 90 mbps is not fast enough for disc quality 4K. Maybe in a couple years a ps4 slim will feature a 12x CAV drive for 4K disc playback. (max speed is about 10,000 rpm) (And it will need to be able to read 8 layer 200 GB discs ofcourse...)

I think no game will have HDD install in next gen for PS4... well the only first party game to use install is GT5.

And the PS3 uses a slow 5400 HDD that performs worst than a 5400 HDD in PC... It really get me crazy to install a 1GB game.

The problem with the PS3 is the terribly slow file system, it took my ps3 over an hour to delete Resistence 3 game data. Pressing info to find out what size a game occupies can take a full minute on certain games. Some installs and deletes are fast, some put tons of little files on the hdd and are horribly slow. Hopefully they'll fix that.

And yes it might make more sense to use a couple of GB of ram for 'disk' cache instead of using the HDD. Use all 3, virtual ram drive for cache, hdd install, bd streaming. Probably need all 3 to keep load times down.

Only recently have graphics cards been released that can do Crysis justice.

I agree with your sentiment in terms of the future prediction being a good thing and the ideal way forward.

There's no evidence whatsoever to support your claim though other than possibly a comment or two from a developer. But that means nothing because it will take all areas of the industry to have those same feelings both from a sentimental and business postion for it to be true.

So no, I'm sorry your comment doesn't actually amount to anything. The PS4 having 8GB GDDR5 is possibly going to indirectly help move things along in the PC area and thus in all areas but to say that as fact is way premature and nothing short of an optimistic assumption.

The real problem is that all data on the PS3 is encrypted on the disk, so you have many thousands of files like with Resistance 3 (lol we've all been there trying to delete that game data!) ;) an antiquated file system not suited to massive numbers of small files, and stupid developers who didn't see fit to pack the small files into containers.

This is largely a problem that the developers can resolve and there is no excuse in the case of Resistance 3 as there are common formats available for PS3 developers to pack files into (not compressed, simply used to store the files in bundles, sorry very layman talk but I know this to be true).

The file system drive is also very badly coded and not optimized, for example it's impossible to get more than 10-12MBs over the USB2.0 connection on the PS3.

The parts that Sony are responsible for all stem from the extreme modular protection on the PS3 itself. The PS3 has some amazingly crazy obsfucation protections in place compared to say the Xbox 360, on the PS3 there's countless keys and a mad capped chain of trust that beggers belief in it's complexity, but more so inefficiency. However these protections come at a cost in some areas and Sony aren't as good at coding efficiency as they are formulating the protections (certainly not as efficient as Microsoft).

Obviously it's preferential to have a system that isn't hacked (as the PS3 wasn't for a long time sure everyone is aware) Vs a low over head protection, but the PS3 has both complexity and inefficiency for it's operating system.

Take for example the Microsoft "Games on Demand", those games are packed into 160MB chunks which are placed on your hard drive, so no game will ever have more than 50 files and entries in the file system. The encryption/protection is done on the file level and the whole hard drive isn't encrypted. On the PS3 the actual files are encrypted as well as the file system itself.

If you FTP into a PS3 to view the files on the flash/hard drive it's immediately obvious even to someone who can't code that it's a scattered mess, on the Xbox 360 it is clean and sorted.

It goes without saying that Sony will have learned from this though since the OS was designed more than 5 years ago and obviously they will be all to aware of file system inefficiency from feedback from developers and so forth.

Actually, you don't really have any Ram that is reserved for the OS, in PC land it's all Dynamic.
For example, you have 4Gb of ram, the core part of windows itself might chug along with about 368-512mb of Ram for itself, but it can also cache gigabytes of frequently used data into the systems ram to speed up the operation of frequent tasks that you perform on the PC.
So that 4gb of ram in your PC might all be used up by windows if you are merely sitting at the desktop.

However, when you do start to run out of Ram when you say... Launch a game, windows will throw all that cached data out the window to allow the game to use as much as it can, within reason of course.
Once you hit a limit of what windows can free up and what the game needs, then Windows will then start shoving data into the Pagefile, which is slow. But better than a crash. :)

It's also why having Windows 7 or Windows 8 on a PC with 512Mb/1Gb of ram is generally fine, there will simply be just less stuff cached in the systems Ram and would be fine for just word processing and web browsing.
Right now though, with my 32Gb of Ram, Windows is using about 20Gb for just caching, granted I haven't turned off or restarted my PC in about 3 months.

Also, one thing I have worked out on this website is that people are willing to throw logic and common sense out the window in the name of their favorite console, pretending they're more powerful than they actually are, that they are more flexible than they actually are, when it simply isn't true.
The PS4 is a mash of Mid-Range and Low-End PC hardware, you need to be realistic on it's capabilities, not pretending it's at super computing levels like what Sony has claimed all it's prior consoles were.