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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - More leaks; Nintendo Switch to use costum Tegra X2, 1.5Tflops, architecture unveiled

haqqaton said:
setsunatenshi said:

wow what a nice hypothetical you have there mate...

if the cartridge memory would be as fast as RAM, it would be called RAM.

if my mom had balls she would be my dad

if my gramma had wheels she would be a skateboard

etc...

So again, to sum it up, no, the game being on CD, DVD, Bluray, Cartridge, digital download, HDD, SSD, cloud or whatever else you can come up with, it will have literally no impact on the RAM usage during the game itself.

The fact that you even try to muddle the waters with the reply you did is simply disingenuous and will keep leading some people to confusion.

English is not my first language but I'll try to explain one more time. I hope to be more clear this time.

The RAM is just a cache for a slower memory. As the primary memory gets faster (CD, DVD, HDD, etc.), you will need less RAM to be used as a cache.

For example, the main reason some games installs on PS4 and XONE is to use the console HDD as a "cache". They move some data to a faster memory. 

What I tried with my last sentence was to show that the importance of the size of the RAM is dependent of the speed of your main memory source. In this way, having a faster media to read on (cartridges) means less importance of the RAM as a cache.

I'm not saying that in NS the size of the RAM is not important but that it is less important than in an optical disc-ed console.

You said that the RAM has nothing to do with the media used. It has. That's is my only point.

                               

http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/r/ram.htm

"Because information is accessed randomly instead of sequentially like it is on a CD or hard drive, the computer can access the data much faster. However, unlike ROM or the hard drive, RAM is a volatile memory and requires power to keep the data accessible. If the computer is turned off, all data contained in RAM is lost."

Now, english is not my first language either, but what I was correcting here was not your english, only your conflation of storage media with RAM.

To the point in question, it matters 0% what type of cards the media is stored in relation to the RAM needed. The only thing a faster SD Card or SSD will do is lower (possibly) load times in games and other aplications. To put it in other words, the RAM usage in my computer when I'm playing Battlefield 1 will be the same, regardless if the game is installed on my HDD or SSD, only the game will lauch much faster if I'm playing from the SSD.



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Pretty sure game cartridges tend to have an upcompressed bootstrap loader and then much of the cartridge data is heavily compressed to save on cartridge costs. Optical discs have fixed storage capacities which enables more wasted space especially if its a game that easily fits on the disc. It can have optimised loading to help speed up loading. It's easy for optical discs to be faster than cartridges if heavy compression is used on the cartridge.

I don't think its realistic to think of cartridges as an extension to main memory because while the boot strap loader may not be in main memory there is probably uncompressing routines added because of being a cartridge. I'm not expecting to see much difference between cartridges and downloaded games plus also if the same game is sold digitally it will have to fit within 4GB of main memory anyway so there can be no advantage to the cartridge game.



Qwark said:
CosmicSex said:

No.  the console's GPU has to support it.  Xbox one is still 1.3 and PS4 is still 1.84.  Only Pro is confirmed to support up to 8.4

It''s a worthless function for games to begin with, since almost every task requires FP32 in a game 

Perhaps most developers didn't bother with it because the system didn't support it until now?   I think calling is worthless is really quite arrogant lol. 



CosmicSex said:
Qwark said:

It''s a worthless function for games to begin with, since almost every task requires FP32 in a game 

Perhaps most developers didn't bother with it because the system didn't support it until now?   I think calling is worthless is really quite arrogant lol. 

There wasn't any need to support it for gaming before, not even on PC. If anything is arrogant than it is boasting a stay that isn't proven meaningful to begin with. The PS4 pro isn't boasting with this stat for a reason. 



Please excuse my (probally) poor grammar

Seriously, if this thing is going to be 2-3x the power of the Wii U I'm perfectly happy. A decent price and robust software output is more important than specs.

Also, why do we need ports of third party games? You can already play those games on PS4 / XBone. I'd much rather get exclusive titles from third party developers. People always bitch about the Wii but it had many great third party games during its first few years on the market. Third parties don't need to support the Switch 100%, it just needs great Japanese support (which it'll definitely get) and decent support from some western third parties. Nintendo will take care of the rest and release a large number of games on the system.

So yeah, for me cheap price > power.



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setsunatenshi said:                              

http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/r/ram.htm

"Because information is accessed randomly instead of sequentially like it is on a CD or hard drive, the computer can access the data much faster. However, unlike ROM or the hard drive, RAM is a volatile memory and requires power to keep the data accessible. If the computer is turned off, all data contained in RAM is lost."

Now, english is not my first language either, but what I was correcting here was not your english, only your conflation of storage media with RAM.

To the point in question, it matters 0% what type of cards the media is stored in relation to the RAM needed. The only thing a faster SD Card or SSD will do is lower (possibly) load times in games and other aplications. To put it in other words, the RAM usage in my computer when I'm playing Battlefield 1 will be the same, regardless if the game is installed on my HDD or SSD, only the game will lauch much faster if I'm playing from the SSD.

I know the difference between primary (RAM) and secondary (HDD, SSD, etc.) memories. 

What I'm trying to tell you is that is possible to build a computer with only a SSD, for example. I mean, without RAM or any other memory. A Turing Machine is just that, actually. The memory hierarchy in a computer is there only because of speed's differences. Your HDD can be used as RAM and.. it is! That is called swap area: when you're low on RAM it is used to store the least used pages (paging). So yeah, you can build a custom computer (or console, it's the same) that has no RAM at all.

So.. The RAM is only necessary because disks are too slow. The RAM memory is, roughly speaking, a cache for the slow disk.

"Terms for data being missing from a higher level and needing to be fetched from a lower level are, respectively: register spilling (due to register pressure: register to cache), cache miss (cache to main memory), and (hard) page fault (main memory to disk)."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hierarchy

By the way, your Battlefield 1 example can't be used here because it's a "generic" built to run on any PC. It's not like a game built to run only on console X or Y. Consoles have fixed hardware.

-------

From now on, MB = Mebabyte and Mb = Megabit

MB/s = 8 x 10^6 bytes per second

Mb/s or Mbps = 10^6 bytes per second

-------

Backing to our main point, I'll use a very simple example this time: Let's say I'm a game developer and I want to make a very neat pause menu screen for my game but I want to play an animation everytime it is called. To make things harder, I want to choose the animation out of other six different possible animations (random) to be played every time the player pushes START. So, I have six animations in total and every anymation is S megabytes in size.

For this example, let's compare a console using discs (D) with another using cartridges (C). 

D uses a Blu-Ray in 2x and can read up to 72Mbps, which is 'good'.  But let's not forget that it can take a LOT (a LOT LOT, really) of time to move the laser to the right position of reading (sequential memory - slow)

C uses cartridges and can read up to 70 MB/s.

OK, so C can read the same data 10 times faster than D from the media (considering the time for moving the laser).

Let's say that it takes 0.001 second to load the S megabytes for my animation from the RAM instead of  1 second from the Blu-Ray. Now, in D I would pre-load all my animations (8 * S) on the RAM to use it when the player calls the menu as I don't know yet which animation will be used in the next pause screen. If I try to load it on demand from the Blu-Ray, my pause screen would take too long to load and my game would receive bad reviews for it. Look, I'm using RAM as a cache!!

Now, let's say that it takes 0.1 second to C to load my animation from the cartridge (it's 10x times faster anyway). I don't really need - but I could if I wanted - to use the RAM as a cache anymore. I can load my animation on demand from the cartridge because it is fast enough to not get bad reviews for my sluggish pause screen. Now my game is using less RAM while executing the same game.

Can you understand what I'm trying to say? The speed of the media takes to different usages of the RAM. When using a slow speed media, I must use more RAM as a cache than when using a faster media. In that case, I would need to pre-load thing more often.

So, again... The RAM has to do with the media. =) 

p.s: I really like that Dumb and Dumber scene. It's motivational.



Qwark said:
CosmicSex said:

Perhaps most developers didn't bother with it because the system didn't support it until now?   I think calling is worthless is really quite arrogant lol. 

There wasn't any need to support it for gaming before, not even on PC. If anything is arrogant than it is boasting a stay that isn't proven meaningful to begin with. The PS4 pro isn't boasting with this stat for a reason. 

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-hands-on-with-mantis-burn-racing-on-ps4-pro

This dev found a good use for it.  So I say you are being a tad arrogant saying what a dev will and will not use and what the need and don't need. 

Also two your second point Mark Cerny - the guy who designed the machine is boasting about it:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/283611/Inside_the_PlayStation_4_Pro_with_Mark_Cerny.php#tophead

He wouldn't have included it if he didn't think devs would take advantage of it.



Louie said:
Seriously, if this thing is going to be 2-3x the power of the Wii U I'm perfectly happy. A decent price and robust software output is more important than specs.

Also, why do we need ports of third party games? You can already play those games on PS4 / XBone. I'd much rather get exclusive titles from third party developers. People always bitch about the Wii but it had many great third party games during its first few years on the market. Third parties don't need to support the Switch 100%, it just needs great Japanese support (which it'll definitely get) and decent support from some western third parties. Nintendo will take care of the rest and release a large number of games on the system.

So yeah, for me cheap price > power.

Well, I have to agree.  If people are okay with Xbox One, you have to be satisfied with the Switch being as though its roumored to be more powerful.  



haqqaton said:
setsunatenshi said:                              

http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/r/ram.htm

"Because information is accessed randomly instead of sequentially like it is on a CD or hard drive, the computer can access the data much faster. However, unlike ROM or the hard drive, RAM is a volatile memory and requires power to keep the data accessible. If the computer is turned off, all data contained in RAM is lost."

Now, english is not my first language either, but what I was correcting here was not your english, only your conflation of storage media with RAM.

To the point in question, it matters 0% what type of cards the media is stored in relation to the RAM needed. The only thing a faster SD Card or SSD will do is lower (possibly) load times in games and other aplications. To put it in other words, the RAM usage in my computer when I'm playing Battlefield 1 will be the same, regardless if the game is installed on my HDD or SSD, only the game will lauch much faster if I'm playing from the SSD.

I know the difference between primary (RAM) and secondary (HDD, SSD, etc.) memories. 

What I'm trying to tell you is that is possible to build a computer with only a SSD, for example. I mean, without RAM or any other memory. A Turing Machine is just that, actually. The memory hierarchy in a computer is there only because of speed's differences. Your HDD can be used as RAM and.. it is! That is called swap area: when you're low on RAM it is used to store the least used pages (paging). So yeah, you can build a custom computer (or console, it's the same) that has no RAM at all.

So.. The RAM is only necessary because disks are too slow. The RAM memory is, roughly speaking, a cache for the slow disk.

"Terms for data being missing from a higher level and needing to be fetched from a lower level are, respectively: register spilling (due to register pressure: register to cache), cache miss (cache to main memory), and (hard) page fault (main memory to disk)."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hierarchy

By the way, your Battlefield 1 example can't be used here because it's a "generic" built to run on any PC. It's not like a game built to run only on console X or Y. Consoles have fixed hardware.

-------

From now on, MB = Mebabyte and Mb = Megabit

MB/s = 8 x 10^6 bytes per second

Mb/s or Mbps = 10^6 bytes per second

-------

Backing to our main point, I'll use a very simple example this time: Let's say I'm a game developer and I want to make a very neat pause menu screen for my game but I want to play an animation everytime it is called. To make things harder, I want to choose the animation out of other six different possible animations (random) to be played every time the player pushes START. So, I have six animations in total and every anymation is S megabytes in size.

For this example, let's compare a console using discs (D) with another using cartridges (C). 

D uses a Blu-Ray in 2x and can read up to 72Mbps, which is 'good'.  But let's not forget that it can take a LOT (a LOT LOT, really) of time to move the laser to the right position of reading (sequential memory - slow)

C uses cartridges and can read up to 70 MB/s.

OK, so C can read the same data 10 times faster than D from the media (considering the time for moving the laser).

Let's say that it takes 0.001 second to load the S megabytes for my animation from the RAM instead of  1 second from the Blu-Ray. Now, in D I would pre-load all my animations (8 * S) on the RAM to use it when the player calls the menu as I don't know yet which animation will be used in the next pause screen. If I try to load it on demand from the Blu-Ray, my pause screen would take too long to load and my game would receive bad reviews for it. Look, I'm using RAM as a cache!!

Now, let's say that it takes 0.1 second to C to load my animation from the cartridge (it's 10x times faster anyway). I don't really need - but I could if I wanted - to use the RAM as a cache anymore. I can load my animation on demand from the cartridge because it is fast enough to not get bad reviews for my sluggish pause screen. Now my game is using less RAM while executing the same game.

Can you understand what I'm trying to say? The speed of the media takes to different usages of the RAM. When using a slow speed media, I must use more RAM as a cache than when using a faster media. In that case, I would need to pre-load thing more often.

So, again... The RAM has to do with the media. =) 

p.s: I really like that Dumb and Dumber scene. It's motivational.

This is kind of a no shit sherlock... yes, in theory you can build a machine without RAM, it just won't be a gaming machine. 

So why exactly bring it up when we are discussing something as specific as a console?

It would be too long of a post to go through every minutia, so let's just get the short version...

 

Your example of the media being loaded off the cd is pretty much invalid as every modern console will install the game into the drive for quick access to the game assets. That goes exactly into my previous point of having a faster hard drive having a benefit on LOADING TIMES. That is it and that is all.

 

If any game developer is reading this, please feel free to correct me in case I'm saying something wrong, but the RAM needs to hold the most immediate resources for what current level of the game is being played are. If the game needs to go back to the storage (hard drive, sd card, bluray, etc) to pick up new resources the game either will stop to load those same resources into the RAM or just simply glitch out.

There is simply no way in hell you can give the tasks of the RAM to the storage media unless you ran out of RAM. The developer would simply program the game around the RAM limitation and make sure they will only load exactly as many resources as they are absolutely needed in order for the game to play. This can simply mean lower resolution textures, fewer objects, etc.

 

So please let's stop with theoretical scenarios and just look at things realistically. And that means, no, having a faster ssd/sd card, will not compensate for some lack of RAM while running a modern game. 



RAM is not like Cache. A CPU can read from cache and if there is a cache miss it looks for data on ram. But a CPU doesnt reed directly from HDs. Thats why there are memory management units since 1985 on the 80386 chip. These units make the conversion between logical adresses and phisical ram adresses and bring pages from virtual memory (disk) to RAM. Then the CPU can read the data. CPU reads DATA from RAM, not from HDs, so RAM IS NOT CACHE.