DonFerrari said:
I believe you are the right guy to say it but why the fucking hell do they need to make OS so big on storage and ram? There isn't that much big difference from PS3 to PS4 OS imho to justify going from like 50Mb to 3.5GB that is like 70x jump while all else had less than 16x.
It infuriates me that Windows 98 was already a very competent and elegant system that we need to make Windows 10 such a hog for resources in comparison... to me it seems like even programmed obscolence. Every time you think you'll have a very fast computer because the performance of the HW is much much much better than what you had before they decide to make SW hog it for minimal improvement.
|
That's simple! Last generation the OS's were unloading and loading everything on demand... And ran the absolute minimum tasks in the background. (Usually just API/Driver stuff).
In the Xbox 360's case for instance... When you navigated the user interface the Xbox 360 would load in the next part of the menu tree and unload the old one... But in doing so, meant that things could take awhile to load in at times.
And then we have Multi-tasking which became a big thing during the 8th gen, especially for the Xbox One with it's old snap feature. - Either way, you can now suspend a game, jump over into Spotify and jump back again, that does cost RAM.
Plus the UI was rendered at a much lower resolution... For the Xbox 360 it would have probably been 1280x720... I wouldn't be surprised if it was 1024x768 to be honest.
It's one of the reasons why the Xbox One X isn't rendering it's UI at 4k, to save on Ram.
Fast forward to the 8th generation... And in the Xbox One's case it's running multiple Operating Systems. - The Windows 10 derived paired-back OS, the Xbox One OS and sometimes the Xbox 360 and OG Xbox OS and another OS that assists with the management of those OS's. It's actually a really intricate system... And of course isn't exactly light on RAM consumption.
In Sony's case, they are simply using more Ram to keep things cached and snappy... And even then need they need an additional DDR3 memory pool to handle things like background downloads.
On the flip side the consoles are simply doing more, higher quality voice-chat that runs at higher bit-rates, video streaming, social functionality, the works, it all consumes memory.
The bright side to this is that the next-gen OS's shouldn't be a catastrophic jump in DRAM requirements as they are already pretty full-featured... Plus next-gen consoles will likely use a derivative of the current console OS's anyway.
Intrinsic said:
No they are not. And I am not referring to underlying architecture..... yes XB1 is windows based and PS4 is FreeBSD based..... but they are not like a PC OS by function. Especially with regards t the PS4. We can argue that everything is "based on PC technology" and you will be right, but that is more to do with "PC technology" already having everything and less to do with specific use case scenarios.
|
Except they are like a PC OS. They use PC OS's.
They even use the exact same monolithic kernels, API's and so on.
Intrinsic said:
Hell even android can be said to be based on PC technolgy cause technically its a linux kernel. And we have PCs that run FreeBSD OS and what nt which is also where apples Mac OS is derived from.
|
Correct. Android is based on PC technology.
Same goes with MacOSX.
Intrinsic said:
Point though is that the PS4 OS is not like a windows OS r a Mac OS or even an android OS. Its more limited..... that could be by design or whatever but its not like you can just download exel or powerpoint and use it on your PS4. So if the PS4 S even has the underlying APIs to make those work then its just a waste of resources since it doesnt need any of that.
|
I never said they were carbon copies of PC OS's, but they are monolithic operating systems based on PC Operating Systems.
In the Xbox One's case, you can run allot of the same "universal apps" found on PC, including emulators.
In the Playstation 3's case it even had a full Linux OS before Sony removed it.
Intrinsic said:
Looking purely at whats capable with a PS4..... there is no concieveable reason (besides piss poor software design) as to why its OS should be taking up as much as 3GB of RAM and still be more laggy and slower than an android phone with 2GB of (slower) RAM which also happens to be capable of so much more.
|
It's because of the hard drive.
You need to remember that mobile phones tend to have NAND based storage with stupidly low access times... It's why an Android phone with a Quad-Core ARM A57+2GB Ram will feel snappier than a Core i9 PC+32GB of Ram with a 5400rpm mechanical hard drive.
In the Playstation 4's case though, we do need to keep in mind the extra Ram pool that is there to assist the OS with other background duties.
Mr Puggsly said:
I disagree HDD is causing the sluggish UI. However, I have suggested they should put a 64GB - 128GB SSD on the motherboard to handle all the OS functions and perhaps cache. In theory that should speed things up but I don't think it would much, I still blame CPU and optimization primarily.
|
I disagree that it's just the CPU.
In the PS4 Pro's case I noticed an increase in system general responsiveness with an SSD.
Granted Microsoft has done an amazing job in hiding the latency deficit with the 5400rpm drives, but at the end of the day... An SSD is still an SSD with 1-2ms response times verses a 5400rpm mechanical disks 15-20ms.
