Shao Kahn Brewing a Stew
Banned
Yep. This is only an issue when a game is not properly optimized and the devs just tossed everything to it and forget about it.
RAM thread of Next Generation
- Thread starter thuway
- Start date
Yep. This is only an issue when a game is not properly optimized and the devs just tossed everything to it and forget about it.
Kun Aguero
Member
NemesisPrime
Banned
Saves... settings... temp files. Nothing really awesome, so don't worry too much about it performance wise.
Shao Kahn Brewing a Stew
Banned
No. Flash drive has nothing to do with RAM. It will help in a way to not dedicate hard drive space to OS, it will help in booting the console faster, it'll prevent losing all the firmware updates if your hard drive bricks on you, it will help in swapping your hard drive out without formatting and reinstalling OS, and it MAY help load OS faster if it uses Virtual memory.
4GB of RAM will be used for all applications running, including OS (Unless there is some DDR3 RAM dedicated to OS, which would be so ideal!).
I couldn't agree more. The game design aspect is configuration agnostic. It's the method to achieve a specific goal that'll be different. Reminds of the days when people kept talking about how Cell means better physics & AI and Xenos meant better gfx. It was wrong then and it's wrong now.
Fragamemnon
Member
Not really. Windows 8 is actually pretty easy on the RAM. It would use even less on a dedicated device.
The thing is, when you have an excess of RAM, you can move the goalposts on what "proper optimization" has to be. If you can provide enough buffer so that the painful last 10% of the work doesn't have to be done, you are making the quality of life for developers on your platform much better.
Kun Aguero
Member
Thank you, that makes it much clearer.
Are you reading the thread?
As for bandwidth... it doesn't have anything to do with it, that is why I said more capacity would be better for open world games, not bandwidth.
Not even sure you read my post, but even if they stream the world, you could have a more similar quality to linear design, because you can fit that same level of quality into a much grander scale... IE having more RAM.
BloodMoney
Banned
In most cases current PC games do not use more than 1GB of VRAM (all settings maxed) when running at 1920x1080. The only real need for 2GB or more of VRAM is if you are running games at 2560x1440 or higher. Larger amounts of RAM are needed to cache incredibly high res textures. However, at those resolutions (2560x1440+), even dual GPU's (with RAM sufficient to handle the textures) are unable to achieve fps that i find playable (60+).
So the design questions/considerations really become:
Q: what resolution
A: next gen consoles are being designed around 1920x1080 (1080p HD TV's)
Q: what fps are we trying to achieve
A: 60 FPS (assumed)
Q: how much ram is needed to accomplish questions 1 & 2
A: more often than not, 1GB is sufficient to run current high fidelity PC games
Q: how much ram is needed to absolutely run games at 1920x1080
A: 2 GB is a safe number
Q: how can we future proof our console
A: lets thrown in 4GB of DDR5.
I've got a 2GB of DDR5 on my N670 and only Max Payne 3, Skyrim, and Crysis 2 cache more than 1GB of VRAM. And thats with full tessellation, texture res, and so on.
I really don't see a need for the PS4 to have more than 4GB of ram unless it turns out a significant chunk of it is taken by the OS. At launch, if the system allows 75% (3 GB) usage by games and 25% (1 GB) usage by the OS, that will equate to a very powerful console. As the years go by, Sony may be able to streamline the OS and reduce its RAM requirement.
So the design questions/considerations really become:
Q: what resolution
A: next gen consoles are being designed around 1920x1080 (1080p HD TV's)
Q: what fps are we trying to achieve
A: 60 FPS (assumed)
Q: how much ram is needed to accomplish questions 1 & 2
A: more often than not, 1GB is sufficient to run current high fidelity PC games
Q: how much ram is needed to absolutely run games at 1920x1080
A: 2 GB is a safe number
Q: how can we future proof our console
A: lets thrown in 4GB of DDR5.
I've got a 2GB of DDR5 on my N670 and only Max Payne 3, Skyrim, and Crysis 2 cache more than 1GB of VRAM. And thats with full tessellation, texture res, and so on.
I really don't see a need for the PS4 to have more than 4GB of ram unless it turns out a significant chunk of it is taken by the OS. At launch, if the system allows 75% (3 GB) usage by games and 25% (1 GB) usage by the OS, that will equate to a very powerful console. As the years go by, Sony may be able to streamline the OS and reduce its RAM requirement.
REMEMBER CITADEL
Banned
It's hard to discuss anything when all we have are incomplete rumors. Let's talk about this again when the specs are known.
It's like everyone collectively forgets GTA San Andreas was running on a console with 32MB of RAM.
Streaming, yo.
AstroNut325
Member
I'm getting flashbacks of a Steven Segal movie where he is trying to take back a hijacked train. Some computer nerd in the movie said something along the lines of "
Let's give it 8 gigs of RAM to break through the firewall!"
Can't remember the name of the movie.
Let's give it 8 gigs of RAM to break through the firewall!"
Can't remember the name of the movie.
Wtf at people putting 32 gigs in their gaming pc thinking it is a beast. It's no benefit to gaming at all and a gaming pc can't even find a way to use half that. That much ram is only useful for very specialized tasks like vm's and video editing. You are much better off buying 8 gigs of faster ram.
Shao Kahn Brewing a Stew
Banned
Precisely, this! People do forget that PC games require a higher "minimum requirement" because the OS and other softwares running consume a lot of RAM. Take an example of Battlefield 3. Minimum RAM requirement is 2GB, with GPU RAM at 512MB. This is a very absurd amount considering that Windows 7 uses 1 GB of RAM when idle, with additional RAM dedicated to softwares like Origin and Firefox. How often have you played a game on PC with no additional softwares like Steam, FRAPS, Youtube, GAF and other stuff running in the back? 512MB GPU RAM is the one that matters the most.
People playing 60fps in PC games are always aiming for resolution higher than 1080p, with 8xAA or higher. Durango/Orbis will be able to handle this with no problem.
phosphor112
Banned
Nah bro. 8 gigs.
well this board would cease to exist if we only talked about things that we are 100% sure about... and be incredibly boring
BloodMoney
Banned
I realize the screen cap below is Crysis 1... but i still consider it to be the pinnacle of image quality. The image represents a custom ULTRA config (higher settings than allowed by the ingame gfx settings) running at 1920x1200.
Check out the numbers in the upper right corner. Notably "Mem=749MB"
Soooooo, how much RAM does the PS4 need?....
Check out the numbers in the upper right corner. Notably "Mem=749MB"
Soooooo, how much RAM does the PS4 need?....
I think the target is mostly 30fps, but I agree on the rest. The size of the OS while playing a game could be even less if it has a "game mode" as suggested earlier in this thread.
Also, if I read that right, the texture size for Agni's Philosophy is something between 800MB and 1.5GB, and if I remember correctly they also said that it was with unoptimized assets.
BloodMoney
Banned
Simple math:
Bandwidth is GB/s
Now if you target 60FPS, divide your bandwidth with 60 and you get the amount of data you are able to stream in for every frame. If this amount is high enough you can load a lot of extra stuff for your current frame. Benefit : More objects visible and higher resolution assets and LOD also for stuff that's far away --> less pop in and more lively world.
Even at 6GB(assuming MS reserves 2GB for the OS), devs can dump an entire DVD's worth of assets into RAM at one time. Basically the entirety of Halo 3 loaded into memory. Obviously no one would be that inefficient, but hard drive caching will be a thing of the past and disk streaming will only be used to load very large chunks of data, a small number of times. Good times for console devs.
phosphor112
Banned
I laughed much harder than I probably should have.
I really really hope they will put into next gen consoles fast controller to read those monster SSD.
I mean 500 MB/s is almost 8 times faster in constant read and xx and sometimes xxx faster in small packages read/write. That's like going from Voodoo2 to 7900GTX, from P2 400Mhz to Core2duo.
That is in my opinion biggest leap what game designers may use for creating words. When i changed from HDD to SSD sata3 it was like going into future. System boot in seconds, game loadings are counted in single seconds sometimes more than 10 seconds. And with Sims3 (which use toooon of assets directly from HDD/SDD) it was just mindblowing how whole city loaded in just fractions of second.
It's either a or b:
a) old rehashed to infinity engine which never was meant to work with so many items to count
b) shitty coding.
I personally this it is both at the same time. 1st because probelem was known for ages (oblivion,F3,F:NV) 2nd because one of modders created a mod that threw scripts from game into compilator and this get 20+ increase of FPS (they later patched it in 1.5 i think) also delated a lot of scripts that just worked but did nothing.
512 was rather big in 2005, medium spec GPU had mostly 256. So this situation is comparable. With better hardware developers will increase amount of ram used so 4GB can be big now but in 2015-2016 probably will be rather low (considering now that high resolution textures now exceeds 1GB).
Also you must consider that Vram is not only used in PC. Crysis 2 DX11 after patches needs 8GB of RAM beside Vram to work well on max settings.
4GB of Vram is small if it is whole ram. I personally thought they will go with 2GB VRAM and 6-8 GB of RAM.
And this is why fast Ram matter Thanks to help of small eDram in PS2 console was capable of doing something impossible.
I mean 500 MB/s is almost 8 times faster in constant read and xx and sometimes xxx faster in small packages read/write. That's like going from Voodoo2 to 7900GTX, from P2 400Mhz to Core2duo.
That is in my opinion biggest leap what game designers may use for creating words. When i changed from HDD to SSD sata3 it was like going into future. System boot in seconds, game loadings are counted in single seconds sometimes more than 10 seconds. And with Sims3 (which use toooon of assets directly from HDD/SDD) it was just mindblowing how whole city loaded in just fractions of second.
It's either a or b:
a) old rehashed to infinity engine which never was meant to work with so many items to count
b) shitty coding.
I personally this it is both at the same time. 1st because probelem was known for ages (oblivion,F3,F:NV) 2nd because one of modders created a mod that threw scripts from game into compilator and this get 20+ increase of FPS (they later patched it in 1.5 i think) also delated a lot of scripts that just worked but did nothing.
512 was rather big in 2005, medium spec GPU had mostly 256. So this situation is comparable. With better hardware developers will increase amount of ram used so 4GB can be big now but in 2015-2016 probably will be rather low (considering now that high resolution textures now exceeds 1GB).
Also you must consider that Vram is not only used in PC. Crysis 2 DX11 after patches needs 8GB of RAM beside Vram to work well on max settings.
4GB of Vram is small if it is whole ram. I personally thought they will go with 2GB VRAM and 6-8 GB of RAM.
And this is why fast Ram matter Thanks to help of small eDram in PS2 console was capable of doing something impossible.
1st Course
Member
I realize the screen cap below is Crysis 1... but i still consider it to be the pinnacle of image quality. The image represents a custom ULTRA config (higher settings than allowed by the ingame gfx settings) running at 1920x1200.
Check out the numbers in the upper right corner. Notably "Mem=749MB"
Soooooo, how much RAM does the PS4 need?....
I think the number represent the amount of Vram being used not the actual regular system ram actually.
And speaking of vram btw plenty of games already goes beyond a one gig of vram at 1080p these days when some strong AA is applied:
Shao Kahn Brewing a Stew
Banned
And speaking of vram btw plenty of games already goes beyond a one gig of vram at 1080p these days when some strong AA is applied:
There's no way in hell will we see all that MSAA, FXAA, ultra high quality in next-gen. High is feasible, but ultra-high will be limited to a few well optimized games. Oh and 120fps? HNNNGGGGG.
I'll gladly take 60fps 1080p at high settings with minimum 4xAA. Current-gen barely has any AA attached to it so that would be a nice change for once.
Do we know how much VRAM is available in Orbis/Durango?
1st Course
Member
Without MSAA:
Rumors suggest unified ram.
2XAA + High quality FXAA is much less taxing and visually appealing.
No FXAA - MSAA should be possible to some degree without performance loss if there really is this blitter thing inside the GPU.
liquidspeed
Member
I don't think it has been mentioned, so I want to bring it up - Many posters here seem to hold the opinion that more, slower ram is better than less, faster ram. Compared to many on this board, I consider myself somewhat of a "layman", but given past console experiences, I tend to hold this view as well.
What are the draw backs and game design concessions that more, slow ram brings about?
If more ram really is better, even if it provides just ~ 1/3 of the bandwidth of smaller amount of faster ram, then why would Sony go this rout with Orbis/PS4?
What are the draw backs and game design concessions that more, slow ram brings about?
If more ram really is better, even if it provides just ~ 1/3 of the bandwidth of smaller amount of faster ram, then why would Sony go this rout with Orbis/PS4?
Shao Kahn Brewing a Stew
Banned
So the 4GB/8GB RAM for Orbis/Durango includes VRAM? Damn... It's going to be interesting to see how it'll work.
liquidspeed
Member
Good to see you around again Shagg (remembers OT Laplace thread)
On topic - Yeah I really hope that RAM doesn't gimp these consoles again, but I have a somewhat negative feeling that it will.
Either way, I am really glad that there seems to be a much much bigger jump than many people were indicating last year. * Remembers the all manufacturers will go the WII route stuff*
Given console games will be designated to run at either 30fps or 60fps, with that kind of specificity, the RAM requirements would be significantly lower and add in what Thuway said about AA, and there is a lot more that can be done within the limited space. Plus let's not forget how far streaming technology has come. Look at the visual fidelity achieved by 360 and PS3 with comparatively measly 512MB of RAM (256MB if you take PS3).
The 4GB is rumoured to be GDDR5 which in essence is a video ram and Sony are trying to increase that pool for non video related tasks as well. I say increase not from 4GB but rather 2GB which was previously rumoured. The 360 did the same with one 512MB GDDR3 pool for both video and non video function. For Durango, I am not so sure. From what I understand that they are going to use DDR3 and very fast ES/EDRAM frame buffer for final rendering. I may be wrong though.
Shao Kahn Brewing a Stew
Banned
liquidspeed
Member
Oh god! :lol
How's it going?!
Pretty Well. Are you on PS3? If so, send me an add. PSN is same as here: Liquidspeed.On topic, can someone who knowledgeable look back at one of my previous posts in this thread with RAM questions?
Insane Metal
Member
I'm not an expert at all, but I don't see why people shouldn't be unsatisfied with 4GB on Orbis versus 8GB on Durango. 4GB may be more than enough today, but if the console is planned to deal with games properly for more than 5 years as it usually is, I can't see 4GB being enough in 2018. Just get the PS3 and the 360 as examples, 512MB of total system RAM, if you compare them to medium to high end PCs running the latest games, they get in trouble.
SneakyStephan
Banned
For starters dual gpus doesn't mean twice the ram... They just each render a frame in turns, the ram contents are cloned , both gpus have the exact same content in their vram.
And have you played any pc games after 2011?
Just listing a few off the top of my head that require more than 1GB vram @ 1080p WITHOUT AA.
-crysis 2 with maldo
-natural selection 2 ultra texture quality
-bf3 for the highest texture quality setting
-skyrim with mods @ 1080p with no AA
-gta 4
-arma 2
-recent total war games
-world of tanks
Those are just the ones I played where my 1GB 6870 got bottlenecked. In each of these when I set the texture quality to the highest setting I get horrible freezing and stutter because my pc runs out of vram.
If you use msaa there are wayyyyyyyyyyyyyy more.
Half of these are current gen console ports with higher res textures bolted on + on pc games are designed to run on lower spec machines
.. when games aren't designed to run on 2005 hardware and 512MB vram anymore then this will be a lot more common.
BloodMoney
Banned
Yea,
read my entire post.
I indicate Max Payne 3, Crysis 2, and Skyrim are a few examples that exceed 1GB.
phosphor112
Banned
So, 60fps, 1080p, no MSAA but still sub 1gig. I'm ok with this.
Planetside 2 also uses regularly more than 2GB
Shogun 2 Total War also does
Skyrim modded exceeds 3GB. I would expect the next gen elder scrolls to use more than 4GB.
BloodMoney
Banned
I must be confused but it seems a number of you expect the next consoles to out perform current PC's....?
While all of this is rumors, i can lay down a fact. PS4 and Xbox720 won't be faster high end components on the shelf at Newegg right now. Dreams of consoles running extreme tessellation, high levels of MSAA, or wastefully large textures (cough, Skyrim modded, cough) arn't going to come to fruition.
While all of this is rumors, i can lay down a fact. PS4 and Xbox720 won't be faster high end components on the shelf at Newegg right now. Dreams of consoles running extreme tessellation, high levels of MSAA, or wastefully large textures (cough, Skyrim modded, cough) arn't going to come to fruition.
Devkit had 12 GB of RAM and there is no rule that the debugging overhead is twice the RAM of the Final box.
phosphor112
Banned
Planetside 2 has a whole continent loaded, and Skyrim is an unoptimized sack of dildos.
BloodMoney
Banned
Cool.
Sorry I don't amount to much in this virtual world or rumor and speculation where a false sense of empowerment helps to brighten your day.
Insane Metal
Member
They will be more powerful than today's high end pcs. Even having less powerful hardware. That's the way it's always been. Maybe because they are dedicated machines, I don't know. But eventually the PCs will catch up and leave the consoles eating dirt.
Given that Skyrim PC requires at least 2.5GB total it might be a small marvel they squeezed it down onto a 0.5GB console...but that's the benefit of a closed box.
Food for thought too when thinking about next-gen consoles & RAM & PCs.
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