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[AllIsOneIsNone]

Are we waiting until 2015 now?

Who knows, but it seems most people are thinking 2 years at the very least.

 

[avaya]

Prove it or die

Even if so, we are talking about an energy consumption of about what, ~16W for 4 chips of GDDR3? How much can you optimize off of that before the gains just ain't worth it?

EDIT: checked using Wikipedia. GDDR3 operates at 1,5V while XDR operates at 1,8V. I'd say that's about equal, if you consider the bandwidth that is ultimately provided (22,4GB/s vs 25,6GB/s).

I don't have the numbers for XDR but XDR II is on the site.

http://www.rambus.com/in/technology/solutions/xdr2/xdr2_vs_gddr5.html

XDR is just better than GDDR5 on power, pin efficiency and bandwidth. Ultimately the pin efficiency wins out, since they want to have a smaller bus widths.

Everyone would be using XDR if it weren't for Rambus being the litigation fiends they are. I don't expect Sony to drop XDR since, IIRC they own 10% of Rambus

 

[Sqrt_minus_one]

Prove it or die

Even if so, we are talking about an energy consumption of about what, ~16W for 4 chips of GDDR3? How much can you optimize off of that before the gains just ain't worth it?

EDIT: checked using Wikipedia. GDDR3 operates at 1,5V while XDR operates at 1,8V. I'd say that's about equal, if you consider the bandwidth that is ultimately provided (22,4GB/s vs 25,6GB/s).

Sony's thing with XDR was to do with bandwidth per pin being a priority, roughly equivalent bandwidth for a reduced number of pins I believe in XDR's case.

 

[Zaptruder]

At some point any discussion about Ram in some console or handheld has to mention Smart-phones. Fuck I have the perfect solution, 16 GB of Smart-phone memory. Brain_strew, try all you want, but you cannot poke holes in the logic of using massive amounts of Ram. The flexibility would be stupendous and it'll barely generate any heat because its from Smart-phones.

It's not an apple to apple comparison I'll give you that much. But a pretty decent heuristic is that smaller form factor devices typically lag behind larger form factor devices in whatever given quantity of the same year of release.

Because when mobile computing devices start exceeding consoles in processing power and capacity, can you have a guess as to what will happen to consoles? They'll be dead.

 

[Clott]

Looking back it wasn't a really a command line, as it was tweaking the exe using CFF, I wasn't techsavy enough to really understand what you needed to do. I used this program: http://www.ntcore.com/4gb_patch.php. It essentially patches x86 applications to use 4GB ram instead of 2GB with an easy to use GUI.

That ended up crashin my game anytime I tried to run it. I had to quit DA:O for the memory leak in Denerim, never did I have to stop playing a game because of the amount of bugs that plagued it.

 

[Sqrt_minus_one]

I never said the phone networks paid a lower price just that the reason smartphones cost so much is due to smartphone makers inflating the price to such high levels. It's a widely known fact by the way, I didn't just make this up.

I am not accusing you of making it up, I have heard it before. Just wondering where the info is coming from. The only source I have for it is anecdotal - price of tablets being roughly comparable, chinese manufacturers making similar speced products for a third of the market price.

 

[Mr_Brit]

It's not an apple to apple comparison I'll give you that much. But a pretty decent heuristic is that smaller form factor devices typically lag behind larger form factor devices in whatever given quantity of the same year of release.

Because when mobile computing devices start exceeding consoles in processing power and capacity, can you have a guess as to what will happen to consoles? They'll be dead.

That will never happen as in consoles you have much greater heat and power draw tolerances compared to mobiles. Just look at the difference between the strongest mobile chips and desktop processors, the desktop parts are dozens of times faster and that gap is widening not shortening.

 

[Zaptruder]

That will never happen as in consoles you have much greater heat and power draw tolerances compared to mobiles. Just look at the difference between the strongest mobile chips and desktop processors, the desktop parts are dozens of times faster and that gap is widening not shortening.

Actually, it'll happen when we start to hit limits of utility.

Local processing power is always best, but there'll be a point where we'll find that the immediate processing power available to a mobile device coupled with the off device power available from the cloud, will fufill our needs satisfactorily; better than a more powerful system that is immobile.

When that happens, larger more powerful systems will not die, but they'll become more specialized and may be eliminated altogether from the consumer field.

Software advances, coupled with exponential increases of computing power required for perceptible differences will mean that, this will occur sooner than you think.

 

[Mr_Brit]

Actually, it'll happen when we start to hit limits of utility.

Local processing power is always best, but there'll be a point where we'll find that the immediate processing power available to a mobile device coupled with the off device power available from the cloud, will fufill our needs satisfactorily; better than a more powerful system that is immobile.

When that happens, larger more powerful systems will not die, but they'll become more specialized and may be eliminated altogether from the consumer field.

Software advances, coupled with exponential increases of computing power required for perceptible differences will mean that, this will occur sooner than you think.

I think most gaffers forget that not everyone has a 1000mb internet connection or a 4G phone, as long as those two things aren't widely available then the cloud will see limited use. No one is going to opt to play a macroblocked 1mbps game streamed to their smartphone when they can play a glorious 1080p game on their console/PC.

Also do you realise how long it will take phones to reach the pinnacle of 2010 tech, never mind future tech? Phones won't be able to match a GTX 580/Intel Sandy Bridge system for at least 10 years(could be ever depending if someone makes a new battery technology).

Also desktop technology is moving at a very brisk pace, in 10 years time we'll have graphite CPUs which will be thousands of times faster than today's technology.

 

[Zaptruder]

I think most gaffers forget that not everyone has a 1000mb internet connection or a 4G phone, as long as those two things aren't widely available then the cloud will see limited use. No one is going to opt to play a macroblocked 1mbps game streamed to their smartphone when they can play a glorious 1080p game on their console/PC.

Also do you realise how long it will take phones to reach the pinnacle of 2010 tech? Phones won't be able to match a GTX 580/Intel Sandy Bridge system for at least 10 years(could be ever depending if someone makes a new battery technology).

Would you say a 2011 smart phone is more powerful than a... 2001 computer?

I think most would. And by a fair margin.

Thing most people forget when discussing technology is that they discuss progress in a vacuum, failing to account for progress in other fields of technology that positively impact or change the way things can be or will be.

 

[Mr_Brit]

Would you say a 2011 smart phone is more powerful than a... 2001 computer?

Pointless comparison, technology is advancing more now than it was then and in 10 years time we'll have graphite transistors which won't be available for phones for a long time so desktops will be getting hundreds of times faster whilst smartphones are left in the dust.

 

[erick]

XDR is just better than GDDR5 on power, pin efficiency and bandwidth. Ultimately the pin efficiency wins out, since they want to have a smaller bus widths.

I don't know, it sounds awfully fishy. I cannot find any solution where XDR2 is used to compare actual bandwidth.

All that "per pin bandwidth" and "per chip MHz" counts for exactly nothing unless you demonstrate an actual, whole memory subsystem, which indludes things like memory controllers and memory channels, resulting in real bandwidth.

But as for individual chips, Hynix produced 7GHz GDDR5 chips already in 2008, and 8 of those together provide exactly ten times the bandwidth of X360 - 224GB/s.

 

[wit3tyg3r]

Don't forget that they're not using DDR3 RAM sticks. They're using super fast RAM soldered onto the board.

Oh, I know. I was only giving a comparison to something that consumers can get their hands on. Also, your statement would suggest that the price would only be higher for console RAM.

While I do think that Consoles need more RAM, the exact amount is debatable. The real question is how long does the manufacturer want their console to last? If it's only going through a 5-year cycle (which is not the case with this generation), then 8GB may be too expensive to justify. But if there is a plan for at least a 10-year cycle, then 8GB would be just about right. But it's very difficult to justify expenses for technology because of the rate at which technology improves. Yeah, 8GB is fantastic for a gaming PC now, but a few years from now, 8GB will come standard in low-end consumer laptops. My current rig (which I built jut a few weeks ago) has an NVIDIA GeForce GTX-570 with 1.3GB of GDDR5 VRAM and 8GB of DDR3 RAM. As far as memory goes, this alone is MORE than enough to run the latest games at full 100% settings and I can still maintain 50+ FPS on graphically intense games.

A Console (today) wouldn't need to even match those specs because they don't have to deal with a resource-intensive OS and other major background processes. But again, as time goes on, console specs will definitely need to improve.

Edit: I slightly forgot that RAM in consoles is shared between the GPU and CPU...so, again, there definitely needs to be an upgrade, but cost is a huge factor

 

[2San]

That ended up crashin my game anytime I tried to run it. I had to quit DA:O for the memory leak in Denerim, never did I have to stop playing a game because of the amount of bugs that plagued it.

By "that" you mean the pink/purple cloud crashes or that program I posted?

But yeah it's ridiculous how big developers/publishers ignore PC gamers. Though we still buy it, since someone somewhere will fix the major problems. I feel like a 2nd class citizen in gamersville.

 

[erick]

As far as memory goes, this alone is MORE than enough to run the latest games at full 100% settings and I can still maintain 50+ FPS on graphically intense games.

A Console (today) wouldn't need to even match those specs because they don't have to deal with a resource-intensive OS and other major background processes. But again, as time goes on, console specs will definitely need to improve.

RAM has very little effect on framerate on consoles. You either have enough and your game is bottlenecked by available GPU power, or don't, in which case ... well, here's Valve's take on it:

On a PC you won't crash if you run out of RAM, but the slowdown will make the game unplayable.

And again, Windows 7 x64 takes about 700MB from cold start, ~1GB if you have Steam, MSN, etc automatically start up. This is nothing if you have 8-16GB of RAM. You still have 7-15GB of RAM left over for games, while the X360 has a measly 480MB (512MB-32MB for OS).

 

[Clott]

By "that" you mean the pink/purple cloud crashes or that program I posted?

But yeah it's ridiculous how big developers/publishers ignore PC gamers. Though we still buy it, since someone somewhere will fix the major problems. I feel like a 2nd class citizen in gamersville.

The program didn't fix the ram issues for me.

 

[Mithos]

This is nothing if you have 8-16GB of RAM. You still have 7-15GB of RAM left over for games, while the X360 has a measly 480MB (512MB-32MB for OS).

Can a 32bit game address and use that though?

 

[gblues]

What the heck do they need 8 gigs for?

I'm struggling to imagine a game that will actually need 8000 megs of memory to run, and fit in with acceptable game budget limitations. Maybe some massively spanning sandbox game, but FPS or 3rd person games?

Perhaps I don't have the required imagination.

Easy. Caching.

8GB is almost enough to hold an entire DVD9 image. Now given that few games actually fill a DVD9, you can cache all your assets in RAM and still have enough left over for the actual game to use. Plus, all that extra memory means you can do other things with it, like save a state snapshot to make reloading a save file nearly instantaneous instead of waiting 30+ seconds for everything to load.

 

[2San]

The program didn't fix the ram issues for me.

Ah too bad, it did for me(I have the steam version). :S You did patch the DAOrigins.exe in the bin_ship folder right? It doesn't work if you patch the DAOriginsLauncher.exe.

 

[Zaptruder]

Easy. Caching.

8GB is almost enough to hold an entire DVD9 image. Now given that few games actually fill a DVD9, you can cache all your assets in RAM and still have enough left over for the actual game to use. Plus, all that extra memory means you can do other things with it, like save a state snapshot to make reloading a save file nearly instantaneous instead of waiting 30+ seconds for everything to load.

It's always nice to have more. But that kinda use falls well into the: Nice, but not necessary category.

 

[Clott]

Ah too bad, it did for me(I have the steam version). :S You did patch the DAOrigins.exe in the bin_ship folder right? It doesn't work if you patch the DAOriginsLauncher.exe.

I don't remember, but the second half of the story is Wardens Keep disappeared from my map, and to get it back I had to enable the Console, I tried and I tried to get the console to work, but it would never activate. (steam version)

 

[2San]

I don't remember, but the second half of the story is Wardens Keep disappeared from my map, and to get it back I had to enable the Console, I tried and I tried to get the console to work, but it would never activate. (steam version)

Yeah, DA:O has plenty of other bugs to drive you insane. :|

 

[abracadaver]

Easy. Caching.

8GB is almost enough to hold an entire DVD9 image. Now given that few games actually fill a DVD9, you can cache all your assets in RAM and still have enough left over for the actual game to use. Plus, all that extra memory means you can do other things with it, like save a state snapshot to make reloading a save file nearly instantaneous instead of waiting 30+ seconds for everything to load.

this wasnt the case when XBLA games had a 50MB limit. couldnt they have loaded the entire game into the ram ? why were there still load times then ?

 

[wit3tyg3r]

RAM has very little effect on framerate on consoles. You either have enough and your game is bottlenecked by available GPU power, or don't, in which case ... well, here's Valve's take on it:

Ah, OK I see. I didn't know that memory didn't have that much of an effect on framerate on consoles. I assumed it functioned similarly to a PC, in which swapping data from RAM to HDD and back again due to lack of memory can affect framerate on PC games.

 

[derder]

Nope, he's right, you're wrong. The only reason the iphone and other smartphones are $600+ is so that they don't disincentivise contract purchasers as that is where the real money is made.

No.

The reason a smartphone costs $500 off-contract is that it costs that much in production costs, R&D, and distribution.

The sole reason a cell phone costs $200 is because carrier companies "incentivise" the cost. The iphone is a particularly bad example, on your part, as it follows apple's pricing.

 

[Raistlin]

Wouldn't 8GB in a game-centric machine be equivalent to WAY more than 8GB in a PC?

yes, and it seems silly.



I could see them wanting as much VRAM as possible ... maybe even more than what's the norm for PC GPU's at the time (to give it some legs) ... but that much main RAM seems like crazy talk.

 

[Brimstone]

If either Sony or Microsoft use Rambus it will be technology based off the Terabyte Bandwidth Initative (TBI). Rambus has been working on this for many years now.

http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2007/11/rambuss-terabyte-bandwidth-initiative-looks-to-2010-many-core-era.ars

 

[Trunchisholm]

8GB is overkill on a console. Load times would have to be massive to fill that out given the read speeds of current optical drives. 4GB is a far more reasonable goal. Even then, the major problems this generation are, by far, jaggies, screen tearing, lack of proper texture filtering and subhd resolutions, none of which are mostly due to the amount of available RAM.

 

[Zombie James]

8GB is overkill on a console. Load times would have to be massive to fill that out given the read speeds of current optical drives.

I don't think the next Xbox is going to have a 16x DVD drive or the PS4 will have a 2x Blu-ray drive.

 

[charsace]

I don't understand how anyone can think there won't be at least 4gigs of fast ram in the next gen consoles if they come out at tne end of 2012 or 2013. If you believe in Moore's Law then the next xbox/ps will have at least 4gigs of ram.

After thinking about when the xbox 360 released I wouldn't be surprised if the systems had 6gigs of ram.

 

[NeoandGeo]

No.

The reason a smartphone costs $500 off-contract is that it costs that much in production costs, R&D, and distribution.

The sole reason a cell phone costs $200 is because carrier companies "incentivise" the cost. The iphone is a particularly bad example, on your part, as it follows apple's pricing.

That doesn't mean the price should be set at nearly 4x the cost of production. A 100% profit would be great, and consumers wouldn't get screwed by having to lock into contracts without taking out a second mortgage for the family to have communication. ;p

 

[TheExodu5]

I don't understand how anyone can think there won't be at least 4gigs of fast ram in the next gen consoles if they come out at tne end of 2012 or 2013. If you believe in Moore's Law then the next xbox/ps will have at least 4gigs of ram.

After thinking about when the xbox 360 released I wouldn't be surprised if the systems had 6gigs of ram.

Moore's law is breaking down at this point.

And that being said, a lot of us believe these new consoles will be less powerful than their predecessors, in terms of relative power compared to the technology available at the time.

 

[Death Dealer]

And that being said, a lot of us believe these new consoles will be less powerful than their predecessors, in terms of relative power compared to the technology available at the time.

I believe it will have been so long since a new console generation, they'll be able to get as equally an impressive leap in results as previous next gen launches, without necessitating as cutting edge hw, relative to what is state of the art at the time of the console's release. When last gen launched, the 360 GPU was contemporary, and PS3's was based on a year old PC design.

The next gen is probably still 2-3 years away, but even if they only used GPUs based off today's DX11 GPUs, I think the graphics would be a huge leap over what we're used to now. I don't think today's best PC games are that indicative of what the latest chips are capable of in a console, who could have imagined a game like Uncharted 2 on a Geforce 7 ? Today's GPUs in a console could eventually produce games that put Crysis to shame.

 

[Trunchisholm]

I don't think the next Xbox is going to have a 16x DVD drive or the PS4 will have a 2x Blu-ray drive.

Those are outdated, not current in the least bit. Not even a 12x Blu-Ray drive (54MB/s transfer rate) would be able to fill that amount of RAM without having long-ass load times.

 

[FoxSpirit]

Those are outdated, not current in the least bit. Not even a 12x Blu-Ray drive (54MB/s transfer rate) would be able to fill that amount of RAM without having long-ass load times.

Well, we are using streaming nowadays, so you could just start stream huge amounts of data into that memory without big initial load times.

But 8GB of unified GDDR5 seems far fetched, I'd guess 4 shoud me more than ample. Especially on a console.

 

[Lucius86]

After recently purchasing 8GB RAM for my desktop a few months back for only £55, I fail to see why people are laughing at the suggestion. In 2-3 years time 8GB will likely be dirt cheap.

I know this is DDR3 rather than specific unified RAM architecture, but you can see what I am getting at.

 

[mysteriousmage09]

After recently purchasing 8GB RAM for my desktop a few months back for only £55, I fail to see why people are laughing at the suggestion. In 2-3 years time 8GB will likely be dirt cheap.

I know this is DDR3 rather than specific unified RAM architecture, but you can see what I am getting at.

consoles do not use ram sticks

 

[MultiCore]

consoles do not use ram sticks

So you're saying that it should be even cheaper since they can solder the chips directly to the motherboard? Awesome!

 

[Emitan]

So you're saying that it should be even cheaper since they can solder the chips directly to the motherboard? Awesome!

...what

 

[MultiCore]

...what

What's there to not understand?

He said that 'consoles don't use ram sticks'.
This is true. Instead, they have their ram chips soldered directly to their motherboards.

This, aside from being good electrically, is also cheaper.
(Not to mention the massive discount you get from have large-scale bulk orders.)

Did I leave something out?

 

[Lucius86]

consoles do not use ram sticks

The stick is there as a means to offer an interface of easy installation and upgradability? It's the chips themselves on the RAM that costs money....

 

[ionicbluebird]

IMO it's not about the amount of ram but the speed of getting information in and out of the ram... streaming. Now obviously a decent sized chunk of ram is needed for buffering but with the way engines are headed like for example the RAGE engine (which isn't even filling up the PS3's 256 MB VRAM) it would seem that something on the order of 1-2 GB would be better as long as they concentrate on increasing the speed of access vis a vie optical media or hard drives.

 

[Dennis]

Round and round in circles....

 

[charsace]

Moore's law is breaking down at this point.

And that being said, a lot of us believe these new consoles will be less powerful than their predecessors, in terms of relative power compared to the technology available at the time.

Some of it though is people bullshitting to make money. They can still get more out of silicon as long as they find ways to shrink the chips. And companies have been researching other materials for a long time. Companies have to keep the money rolling in so they will be prepared.

I've seen your post or a variation of it since I've been using the web.

 

[wit3tyg3r]

What's there to not understand?

He said that 'consoles don't use ram sticks'.
This is true. Instead, they have their ram chips soldered directly to their motherboards.

This, aside from being good electrically, is also cheaper.
(Not to mention the massive discount you get from have large-scale bulk orders.)

Did I leave something out?

You left out the fact that RAM for Consoles is much faster than DDR3 RAM than we use in our PCs. Therefore, they are much more expensive.

But 8GB of unified GDDR5 seems far fetched, I'd guess 4 shoud me more than ample. Especially on a console.

I don't think consoles have dedicated memory for the GPU. All the RAM on board is shared between the CPU and GPU, so it's kinda iffy to call it 8GB of GDDR RAM. So a high number like 8 makes sense since both the GPU and CPU need to store data on it, but price is the issue. How much does it cost to make 8GB of RAM at whatever speed consoles use? That's something I'm interested in knowing.

 

[Special J]

Err XDR is leagues better on performance per watt.

ya but thats assuming its peak bandwidth is being utilized all the time memory bandwidth isnt the bottleneck anyways.

edit: quoted without thinking

 

[Raistlin]

I don't think the next Xbox is going to have a 16x DVD drive or the PS4 will have a 2x Blu-ray drive.

Certainly not, but how fast will they be? Let's say we go with the fastest drive available right now. Even 'limiting' ourselves to 4GB RAM would mean we'll actually have slower load times in terms of filling it all up.

Obviously that really isn't how a dev would design a game (unless they're stupid). You'd have some sort of background loading/streaming ... but you get the point. Yes, faster optical drives are available, but they certainly have not kept pace with RAM sizing. I just wouldn't expect we'll see dramatically faster load times.

 

[Raistlin]

After recently purchasing 8GB RAM for my desktop a few months back for only £55, I fail to see why people are laughing at the suggestion. In 2-3 years time 8GB will likely be dirt cheap.

I know this is DDR3 rather than specific unified RAM architecture, but you can see what I am getting at.

First, consoles are not typically using said dirt cheap RAM. They generally use smaller amounts of high bandwidth RAM, since the alternative typicallys mean worse overall performance.

Second, this isn't a PC - it's a console. PC's have a much larger OS footprint and are designed with high levels of multi-tasking in mind. While I expect the level of multi-tasking to go up even more next gen, it still won't be like a PC. When you combine that with the design philosophy of a console - make the best overall system at the best price - it seems like a non-starter.

 

[Trunchisholm]

Well, we are using streaming nowadays, so you could just start stream huge amounts of data into that memory without big initial load times.

But 8GB of unified GDDR5 seems far fetched, I'd guess 4 shoud me more than ample. Especially on a console.

What's the point of having so much memory then if you're basically streaming new content all the time? I would also imagine we would have to put up with tons of unskippable cutscenes.

The major bottleneck we have now on consoles is not memory. Yes, more memory means the possibility to have larger levels, but that means absolutely nothing if you don't have enough fillrate, bandwidth and shader throughput. Sense tells us that those things are not going to scale comparatively as much as they did last gen, so having far more memory than is required by top PC games (large-ass texture mods aside) doesn't seem like a very plausible thing.

 

[spwolf]

Easy. Caching.

8GB is almost enough to hold an entire DVD9 image. Now given that few games actually fill a DVD9, you can cache all your assets in RAM and still have enough left over for the actual game to use. Plus, all that extra memory means you can do other things with it, like save a state snapshot to make reloading a save file nearly instantaneous instead of waiting 30+ seconds for everything to load.

what are you going to do while game caches this 8 GB into the memory?

You are going to have one game "snapshot" in the memory?

once again, very much doubt anything more than 1 GB.