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Forums - Gaming Discussion - PS4 appears to have only 4.5GB available for games use

walsufnir on 03 April 2014
Xenostar said:
walsufnir said:
Xenostar said:

Do we really need to explain this again, there is 4.5gb of GDDR5 and another 1gb which is split as 512mb GDDR5 and 512mb HDD Page file, so yes you do get 5GB of full GDDR5, for your game, but you need to manage that last 512 a bit more carefully because it can page with the HDD if you over fill it, this is not a design floor its a good thing PC's have done it for decades.


Swapping has *never* been a good thing on PC, seriously. Especially not with performance-critical applications.

Directly from the link: "I/O (input/output) speed was a big problem, even from the hard drive. Input/Output speed is the communication speed between the drive and the CPU." Swapping is the worst case.


Of course you dont use it for critical things, but as long as you know what your doing and manage it with none critical data it can be extremley usefull. You can misuse most systems in a computer that doesnt make them shit, just cos you dont have a clue what your doing.


The question is how much you can do on your own to influence what data is paged and which is not. This is mostly up to the os and not directly done by the programmer. Of course you can code your code to work in the way the os decides to put data on the pagefile but also this is complicated. Programmers have to consider caches which is also not that easy to cope with.



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SubiyaCryolite on 03 April 2014

Sony was wise to bump up its RAM from 4 to 8GB. AS the OS gets optimized RAM should be freed up.



I predict that the Wii U will sell a total of 18 million units in its lifetime. 

The NX will be a 900p machine

DerNebel on 03 April 2014

I assume that more ram can be made available for games as time goes on if it proves necessary, if so then I can only look at games like Killzone or Infamous and say awesome that there still is so much room upwards.

But I guess this will turn in a shitflinging contest anyway or has already turned into one, I don't know I didn't read the thread, so carry on.



Talal on 03 April 2014

Wasn't this confirmed a long time ago?



walsufnir on 03 April 2014
Talal said:
Wasn't this confirmed a long time ago?


It has/was. And is by now from a dev. I remember the pages of pages of discussion about it because older rumours said PS4 would give 7gb of ram to devs and Xbone only 5gb so this automatically ended in a war.



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VXIII on 03 April 2014
-CraZed- said:
VXIII said:
3.5 Gb is sure a lot for a premature OS that dosen't support DLNA and can't play mp3 audio files.


SOny learned from the mistake that was the PS3 OS RAM limitations.

For the PS3 Sony gave over most of the RAM to the developers and had little headroom to enhance the PS3 OS in doing so. After all they couldn't very well "take back" RAM as it would cause poor performance in games that relied on the extra memory.

This time around they have reserved a significant amount to allow for room to grow so to speak. Once the OS has reached a level of maturity (after adding DLNA .mp3 support and any other features) well into the console cycle and Sony feels like they have reached a point where there is little more to add then they can relenquish whatever RAM is left over to games and developers can take advantage of it. 

 

Besides 4.5 GB is plenty for any game today or even tomorrow. RAM is not a bottleneck in either of these new consoles.

Great explanation. I still think  3 GB ( confirmed by naughty dogs ) for the OS is exaggeration considering the ps3 had 512MB for everything. 

Here is what Naughty Dogs lead programmer Jason Gregory has to say about the ram "Even in the PlayStation 4 you have 5 gigs, which seems like a lot but you’ll be amazed by how quickly it fills up"



DonFerrari on 03 April 2014

If 32Mb of ESRAM make X1 bandwidth faster than ps4 with this extra 500Mb advantage you will see how X1 is more powerfull than ps4, I can't wait for the truth to come out.

About OS footprint, if they made it 1Gb and reserved another 2,5 for any number of aditional features it will be easy to free up space. Now if they have made a blooted 3Gb OS with just 500Mb reservation it will be a figth between new featurrs and shrink footprint. I just can't understand the rise in OS from like 50Mb to 1Gb+ in one gen.
But we do have a dev or expert that showed that for 1080p60fps you wouldn't have use for more than 6Gb on ps4 bandwidth, so we will get there when needed? And going from 4Gb planned (3,5Gb for games and 500Gb for OS) to 8Gb delivered (4,5-5GB for games 3,5-3Gb for OS) we may think alot of it is unused and perhaps not all is reserved, but since devkits and sdk worked with 3,5Gb cap for games the first gen of games couldn't be made with more than 4,5-5Gb at the time but we may start to see higher usage soon with newer sdk and devkits for devs  with enough window for release.



duduspace11 "Well, since we are estimating costs, Pokemon Red/Blue did cost Nintendo about $50m to make back in 1996"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=8808363

Mr Puggsly: "Hehe, I said good profit. You said big profit. Frankly, not losing money is what I meant by good. Don't get hung up on semantics"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=9008994

Azzanation: "PS5 wouldn't sold out at launch without scalpers."

walsufnir on 03 April 2014
DonFerrari said:
If 32Mb of ESRAM make X1 bandwidth faster than ps4 with this extra 500Mb advantage you will see how X1 is more powerfull than ps4, I can't wait for the truth to come out.


What is this crap good for?



Xenostar on 03 April 2014
walsufnir said:
Xenostar said:
walsufnir said:
Xenostar said:

Do we really need to explain this again, there is 4.5gb of GDDR5 and another 1gb which is split as 512mb GDDR5 and 512mb HDD Page file, so yes you do get 5GB of full GDDR5, for your game, but you need to manage that last 512 a bit more carefully because it can page with the HDD if you over fill it, this is not a design floor its a good thing PC's have done it for decades.


Swapping has *never* been a good thing on PC, seriously. Especially not with performance-critical applications.

Directly from the link: "I/O (input/output) speed was a big problem, even from the hard drive. Input/Output speed is the communication speed between the drive and the CPU." Swapping is the worst case.


Of course you dont use it for critical things, but as long as you know what your doing and manage it with none critical data it can be extremley usefull. You can misuse most systems in a computer that doesnt make them shit, just cos you dont have a clue what your doing.


The question is how much you can do on your own to influence what data is paged and which is not. This is mostly up to the os and not directly done by the programmer. Of course you can code your code to work in the way the os decides to put data on the pagefile but also this is complicated. Programmers have to consider caches which is also not that easy to cope with.

This is why they have restricted it to the last 512mb, the first 4.5gb will never page.

If you never want it to page dont use more than 512mb in the last area of memory. 



the2real4mafol on 03 April 2014

That's still 9x as much as before, so they can't complain



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