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Forums - Gaming - Crytek: 8GB RAM Can Be Easily Filled Up, Will Surely Be Limiting Factor on PS4/Xbox One

AnthonyW86 on 19 May 2014
walsufnir said:
Gnac said:
walsufnir said:
AnthonyW86 said:

And sadly Microsoft nor Sony equipped their consoles with an expansion slot... again. Adding 4gb or even 8gb of memory would be very cheap in 2-3 years time when it is needed.

And who knows what other functionality could be added in the future.

But then you had to make every customer buy the upgrade. Not very smart and consumer friendly.

Makes you wonder how the PC market lasted this long. Thank mammon for hardware tiers!


But we are not discussing PC here. Devs are happy that they can work with fixed hardware. What shall they do if an expansion is released? Build two versions of the game like on PC? On PC you let "magic" do the work for you (drivers, apis) so you don't have to care for every cache-miss. On consoles it is especially wanted that there is only one known configuration so you can optimize with the given limits. If it's multiplat you have to optimize at least two times. But to optimize twice on each console? Especially by, let's say, twice the ram. You would have two different design goals. This would do more harm than be beneficial.

If it only costs $5-$10 i don't think anyone would might, they could even bundle it for free with 1st party games.



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SvennoJ on 19 May 2014
VanceIX said:

Just loading an asset requires capturing it from the hard drive, which is another background process that is happening. In massive open world games, it is very hard to pinpoint exactly what the user will do, you can't just preload the next room and hope it's enough. Like I said, it may be a viable strategy in linear games, but with any games that give you a choice it is a poor use of resources, as calling in the 5gb of information still requires sorting through the hard drive to find it and load it to the ram for fast use later.

You can store a bigger area in memory, it can read ahead in the direction you're going, leave the stuff behind you in memory so it doesn't have to reload when you look back etc. The mess you make in GTA doesn't have to disappear 2 city blocks behind you, or you can keep unique textures for roads so all tire marks stay. Sure that requires a bit more adressing than simply draw the same few textures, not a problem with 64bit adressing.

You can also load things more efficiently. It's faster to load fewer big chunks from hdd, instead of getting all the bits you need separately. It's far, far faster to pick and choose from memory than from hdd. The advantage of consoles is that they have a unified memory pool. The gpu can draw from anywhere, you don't have to sort through it and send some stuff to video ram first.

We already used to preload assets when I was working on GPS systems. Load a big area in memory, let the hdd sleep for a while, saves wear and tear. Load it during the time left over between other work until the memory is full. The bigger the memory cache is, the more you can even out performance. Just in time loading is a big factor in judder.



zarx on 19 May 2014
VanceIX said:

Just loading an asset requires capturing it from the hard drive, which is another background process that is happening. In massive open world games, it is very hard to pinpoint exactly what the user will do, you can't just preload the next room and hope it's enough. Like I said, it may be a viable strategy in linear games, but with any games that give you a choice it is a poor use of resources, as calling in the 5gb of information still requires sorting through the hard drive to find it and load it to the ram for fast use later.

As SvennoJ said it's even more useful in open world games than liniar ones. When you can't predict where the player will go it's better to pre-load every possible direction as far as possible than wait until they make the decision to load the data from the HDD which causes stutter and or massive popin issues. It's always better to load more into RAM which is why developers will always prefer to have more available.



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VanceIX on 19 May 2014
zarx said:
VanceIX said:

Just loading an asset requires capturing it from the hard drive, which is another background process that is happening. In massive open world games, it is very hard to pinpoint exactly what the user will do, you can't just preload the next room and hope it's enough. Like I said, it may be a viable strategy in linear games, but with any games that give you a choice it is a poor use of resources, as calling in the 5gb of information still requires sorting through the hard drive to find it and load it to the ram for fast use later.

As SvennoJ said it's even more useful in open world games than liniar ones. When you can't predict where the player will go it's better to pre-load every possible direction as far as possible than wait until they make the decision to load the data from the HDD which causes stutter and or massive popin issues. It's always better to load more into RAM which is why developers will always prefer to have more available.

I'll concede you this one. I really did learn a lot from out conversation, good to know now :)



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Mummelmann on 20 May 2014
Chasesdaddy84 said:
Mummelmann said:

Given how much Crytek sucks at optimization; I'll take someone else's word for it... Besides that though, of course console hardware will be a limiting factor for game development, that has always been the case.


this was kinda my first reaction after reading the OP and then i scroll down a few comments and see that someone took the words right out of my mouth! Touche (: 


Didn't mean to steal your thunder brah!



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mutantsushi on 20 May 2014
PigPen said:
 I'm wondering if Sony knew that with 8GB of RAM that the PS4 won't last ten years.

I'm pretty sure that Sony execs have acknowledged they don't plan for this gen to last as long,
which is fine with less upfront subsidization to recoup and backwards compatabililty being obvious for nextgen.