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PlayStation 4 Console Thread

mushashi

By mushashi
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Ferine

Ferine

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DigitalFoundry have a decent comparison of the next generation consoles. It explains how a difference in approach has ostensibly led to the PS4 being outright superior to its competitor:

Now, bearing in mind that we fully expect PlayStation 4 and Xbox One to launch at similar price-points, how did this disparity come about?

The answer to that comes down to a specific gamble Sony made that Microsoft could not - the utilisation of a unified pool of GDDR5 memory. In the early days of PS4 development, only 2GB of this type of memory looked viable for a consumer-level device. As higher density modules became available, this was duly upgraded to 4GB. By the time of the reveal back in February, Sony had confidence that it could secure volume of 512MB modules and surprised everyone (even developers) by announcing that PS4 would ship with 8GB of unified GDDR5 RAM. The design of its surrounding architecture would not need to change throughout this process - one set of 16 GDDR5 chips would simply be swapped out for another.

Microsoft never had the luxury of this moving target. With multimedia such a core focus for its hardware, it set out to support 8GB of RAM from day one (at the time giving it a huge advantage over the early PS4 target RAM spec) and with serious volume of next-gen DDR4 unattainable in the time window, it zeroed in on supporting DDR3 and doing whatever was necessary to make that work on a console. The result is a complex architecture - 32MB of ESRAM is added to the processor die, along with "data move engines" to courier information around the system as quickly as possible with bespoke encode/decode hardware to alleviate common bottlenecks. Bottom line: if you're wondering why Xbox One has a weaker GPU than PlayStation 4, it's because both platform holders have similar silicon budgets for the main processor - Sony has used the die-space for additional compute units and ROPs (32 vs. 16 in One), while Microsoft has budgeted for ESRAM and data move engines instead. From the Xbox perspective, it's just unfortunate for Microsoft that Sony's gamble paid off - right up until the wire, it was confident of shipping with twice the amount of RAM as PlayStation 4.

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squirtle

squirtle

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If you've got a smaller amount of slower RAM you're going to hit bottlenecks in your data transfer that could result in framerate drops I reckon. And the Xbox has a lot less RAM and it's a fair bit slower.Everyone sounds very happy about the programmability of the PS4 and also the Xbox, so it'll come down to power I reckon.

What about those small pools of extra ram or whatever it's called on the 360 chip? Will they make a difference?

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Cthulhu Steev

Cthulhu Steev

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What about those small pools of extra ram or whatever it's called on the 360 chip? Will they make a difference?

The Move Engines and 32MB SRAM are Microsoft's way of avoiding a bottleneck, and making up for the lower bandwidth memory they've used. Without them it would be a lot worse, so yes they will make a difference by helping shift more data around than would be possible using just the DDR3 memory's bandwidth. Something like that anyway, it boggles my head a bit.

The four move engines all have a common baseline ability to move memory in any combination of the following ways:

From main RAM or from ESRAM

To main RAM or to ESRAM

[..]

The advantage of the move engines lies in the fact that they can operate in parallel with computation. During times when the GPU is compute bound, move engine operations are effectively free. Even while the GPU is bandwidth bound, move engine operations may still be free if they use different pathways. For example, a move engine copy from RAM to RAM would not be impacted by a shader that only accesses ESRAM.

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Fireproofradiator

Fireproofradiator

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I dug up the report about Sony potentially blocking used games, seems a bit more promising at least:

I will be amazed if PS4 is any different from Xbox's 'pay an unlock fee to play the second hand game you bought' and the careful use of words from Yoshida supports this. It'd be a neat differentiator if they didn't implement anything like this but presumably Sony have seen the figures.

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Ferine

Ferine

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I don't think it will prove to be. Not to say the difference in technical capability won't be that pronounced — it could well be — but most developers will stick to 30fps and just lather on some additional graphical effects.

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Cthulhu Steev

Cthulhu Steev

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I don't think it will prove to be. Not to say the difference in technical capability won't be that pronounced — it could well be — but most developers will stick to 30fps and just lather on some additional graphical effects.

They'll just do what they've been doing most of this gen, and drop the resolution to make up for it, and help match the framerates.

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angel

angel

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No chance, The difference isn't that big.

MS were super cagey on their specs, slower DDR3 ram, and a huge os footprint i think...theyre running 3 os's at once. Im suspecting 2gb held over for those.
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squirtle

squirtle

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It's 3Gb for the other OSs. The machine has 5Gb of ram for games, IIRC with that 32meg of super fast s-ram taking up some of the slack...and then there is the power of the cloud....!!!! OOOOOO!!!! Or something.


Seriously though, I don't think it'll matter that much. Though the visuals will be better this gen than last gen, the difference will be markedly smaller than from the xbox/ps2/gc to 360/ps3. With that in mind, the difference between the One and the PS4 will probably come down to some better textures in Sony's games and some nicer shaders and that'll be about it for multiplatform stuff. It'll be down to Naughty Dog and the like to really show what it can do, but even then, with things like Gears and Halo 4 impressing on the 360, there won't be that much difference between first party stuff either. IMO, obviously.

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angel

angel

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It's 3Gb for the other OSs. The machine has 5Gb of ram for games, IIRC with that 32meg of super fast s-ram taking up some of the slack...and then there is the power of the cloud....!!!! OOOOOO!!!! Or something.

Seriously though, I don't think it'll matter that much. Though the visuals will be better this gen than last gen, the difference will be markedly smaller than from the xbox/ps2/gc to 360/ps3. With that in mind, the difference between the One and the PS4 will probably come down to some better textures in Sony's games and some nicer shaders and that'll be about it for multiplatform stuff. It'll be down to Naughty Dog and the like to really show what it can do, but even then, with things like Gears and Halo 4 impressing on the 360, there won't be that much difference between first party stuff either. IMO, obviously.

only 5gb on games, wow..the ps3 is 7gb of faster ram. I read about the gamble sony made on the gddr ram prices up to the last minute, and it's taken MS by suprise. Honestly, Sony are gona kick their arse on this one, their machine is far better.
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Tailfly

Tailfly

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Pockets hopefully there will also be less risk choosing titles downloaded from the PS4 Store due to being able to get in a playthrough of the full title before purchase, I believe all PS4 titles will be available for this feature too.

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NecroMorrius

NecroMorrius

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Anandtech reckon if the Xbone is using the ESRAM as a pure cache it should hide pretty much most of the bandwidth hole. With the added benefit of being much much faster to access.

Was that before or after it transpired that 3GB of the 8GB is reserved for the OS?

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layten

layten

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It was the article at the top of the page at lunchtime.

If it’s used as a cache, the embedded SRAM should significantly cut down on GPU memory bandwidth requests which will give the GPU much more bandwidth than the 256-bit DDR3-2133 memory interface would otherwise imply. Depending on how the eSRAM is managed, it’s very possible that the Xbox One could have comparable effective memory bandwidth to the PlayStation 4. If the eSRAM isn’t managed as a cache however, this all gets much more complicated.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6972/xbox-one-hardware-compared-to-playstation-4/3

It's interesting that all the talk is about bandwidth, and nothing about latency.

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Yoshimax

Yoshimax

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only 5gb on games, wow..the ps3 is 7gb of faster ram. I read about the gamble sony made on the gddr ram prices up to the last minute, and it's taken MS by suprise. Honestly, Sony are gona kick their arse on this one, their machine is far better.

Where was it stated the ps4 o/s overhead was 1gb? I missed that.

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