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PlayStation 4 Console Thread

mushashi

By mushashi
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Cthulhu Steev

Cthulhu Steev

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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.

The bigger deal is are developers going to put the work in like they did for PS3, to programme Microsoft's memory set up to get the most out of it?

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

Except for the part where latency vs bandwidth has been discussed since we've known the memory specs.

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Cthulhu Steev

Cthulhu Steev

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If the method of using GDDR3 plus eSRAM is just as quick as GDDR5, then why aren't all the GFX card manufacturers doing it?

ESRAM is Microsoft's panicked last-minute bodge to make the best of a bad job, and stay competitive, like that the shitty GPU they bunged into the pS3 last minute. It will save their skin (like the Cell and GPU) for making a bad decision, but it's going to be the 'exotic' way of programming this gen, as developers have to juggle data through it.

It was obvious their primary objective was to 'out-number' on the bullet points PS4 with 8GB vs 2/4GB.

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Spacehost

Spacehost

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Microsoft's solution is hardly on the same level as the pissarse retarded Cell in terms of coding awkwardness. It's inelegant but it means they can make a smaller, cheaper, cooler machine faster (AFAIK) than Sony can with their brute-force DDR5 solution, as awesome as it is.

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MansizeRooster

MansizeRooster

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The whole point of caching is to access small amounts of frequently-read data quickly. They don't magically make the entirety of the RAM faster. For large data-throughput or highly variable data, caches can only be as fast as the slowest component in their data pipeline.

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DocG

DocG

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The PS4 isn't twice as powerful as the Xbox One; it's at most 1.5 times more powerful, in some measures, with some caveats. So to talk about 30 FPS vs 60 FPS is rather optimistic.

I could see the PS4's greater performance leading to higher and more stable frame rates, however. Same as happened this generation to (generally) favour the 360. It's where leftover performance will go if the devs don't do anything specific to use it, after all.

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Cthulhu Steev

Cthulhu Steev

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I think blows comments need to be taken with a good vat full of salt. I mean he quite famously dislikes Microsoft does he not? He must see this as a great opportunity for some vitriol.

It probably should be, and probably won't be as great a difference as 30/60, but the 50% extra GPU power is true.

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JPickford

JPickford

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It probably should be, and probably won't be as great a difference as 30/60, but the 50% extra GPU power is true.

It doesn't take much to drop from 60 to 30. Unless you want tearing. If a game is v-synced then 30 is the next notch down from 60.
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layten

layten

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If the method of using GDDR3 plus eSRAM is just as quick as GDDR5, then why aren't all the GFX card manufacturers doing it?

Because it is a stupid idea.

But having the entire memory pool being horrifically high latency DDR5 is not exactly brilliant either.

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Cthulhu Steev

Cthulhu Steev

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But having the entire memory pool being horrifically high latency DDR5 is not exactly brilliant either.

Mark Cerny makes a good case for it, and it seems to me to be more elegant than having split pools (of different RAM) between CPU and GPU.

"The 'supercharged' part, a lot of that comes from the use of the single unified pool of high-speed memory," said Cerny. The PS4 packs 8GB of GDDR5 RAM that's easily and fully addressable by both the CPU and GPU.

If you look at a PC, said Cerny, "if it had 8 gigabytes of memory on it, the CPU or GPU could only share about 1 percent of that memory on any given frame. That's simply a limit imposed by the speed of the PCIe. So, yes, there is substantial benefit to having a unified architecture on PS4, and it’s a very straightforward benefit that you get even on your first day of coding with the system. The growth in the system in later years will come more from having the enhanced PC GPU. And I guess that conversation gets into everything we did to enhance it."

The CPU and GPU are on a "very large single custom chip" created by AMD for Sony. "The eight Jaguar cores, the GPU and a large number of other units are all on the same die," said Cerny. The memory is not on the chip, however. Via a 256-bit bus, it communicates with the shared pool of ram at 176 GB per second.

"One thing we could have done is drop it down to 128-bit bus, which would drop the bandwidth to 88 gigabytes per second, and then have eDRAM on chip to bring the performance back up again," said Cerny. While that solution initially looked appealing to the team due to its ease of manufacturability, it was abandoned thanks to the complexity it would add for developers. "We did not want to create some kind of puzzle that the development community would have to solve in order to create their games. And so we stayed true to the philosophy of unified memory."

In fact, said Cerny, when he toured development studios asking what they wanted from the PlayStation 4, the "largest piece of feedback that we got is they wanted unified memory."

"A typical PC GPU has two buses," said Cerny. "There’s a bus the GPU uses to access VRAM, and there is a second bus that goes over the PCI Express that the GPU uses to access system memory. But whichever bus is used, the internal caches of the GPU become a significant barrier to CPU/GPU communication -- any time the GPU wants to read information the CPU wrote, or the GPU wants to write information so that the CPU can see it, time-consuming flushes of the GPU internal caches are required."

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MansizeRooster

MansizeRooster

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If the method of using GDDR3 plus eSRAM is just as quick as GDDR5, then why aren't all the GFX card manufacturers doing it?

It's not as quick. It's only as quick in the case that you're accessing data already stored in the cache.

The whole point of caching is to access small amounts of frequently-read data quickly. It doesn't magically make the entirety of the RAM faster. For large data-throughput or highly variable data, caches can only be as fast as the slowest component in their data pipeline.

So basically, the GDDR3 RAM is still going to be a bottleneck. The cache just makes it a bit less nasty a bottleneck.

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PaB

PaB

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It's not as quick. It's only as quick in the case that you're accessing data already stored in the cache.

The whole point of caching is to access small amounts of frequently-read data quickly. It doesn't magically make the entirety of the RAM faster. For large data-throughput or highly variable data, caches can only be as fast as the slowest component in their data pipeline.

So basically, the GDDR3 RAM is still going to be a bottleneck. The cache just makes it a bit less nasty a bottleneck.

Yes I am familiar with the concept of cacheing. It was simply a comment to respond to the article that suggests that GDDR3 + eSRAM can pull off the same effective bandwidth as GDDR5. This can surely be debunked by the simple fact that GFX card manufacturers don't do it, because if it was a viable option, they would, purely due to economics.

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Cthulhu Steev

Cthulhu Steev

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Sony Man Claims Sony Machine Is Definitely The Best. Video At Eleven.

Did you read it any of it before you sniped? He doesn't say it's 'definitely the best' he says they worked with developers to engineer the best approach to easier development, to reduce bottlenecks and to future proof the console. As I said, I posted it to show that Cerny made a good case, not that it was right.

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DocG

DocG

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Did you read it any of it before you sniped?

I read the lot back when it first appeared. I love this techie stuff (as you surely know!) But of course he made a good case -- it's his job to do so. Proof's in the pudding, here (i.e. the games) and won't be known for some time yet. There are legitimate concerns, mostly around latency, to Sony's approach.
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Cthulhu Steev

Cthulhu Steev

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I really hope Sony don't fuck this up.

They'll be grilled about second hand/loaning/DRM at E3, and other than that, if they show some exciting games it's sounding lovely.

I think they'll be grilled well before E3, people want to know their answers now, and there is no way they aren't going to be giving interviews beforehand. They can't stay silent on this and let MS take the flak - okay, they can, but memories are short and they don't have forever to ride the waft of goodwill MS have handed them.

I read the lot back when it first appeared. I love this techie stuff (as you surely know!) But of course he made a good case -- it's his job to do so. Proof's in the pudding, here (i.e. the games) and won't be known for some time yet. There are legitimate concerns, mostly around latency, to Sony's approach.

That's all I was trying to say, he makes a good case (in the reveal and all interviews) the guy primarily loves his games tech above all. He created one of my all-time favourite games (MM) and I've long been a fan so I trust what the guy says, even if I don't understand it all. I had no idea he had anything to do with PS4 until he walked on stage, but I'm bloody glad he does.

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BitterToad

BitterToad

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The thing is though if you knew your console wasn't always online and DRM free then wouldn't you just come out and say it?

I suppose it's not like they need more positivity at the moment but coming out and saying that games wont be tethered to consoles now would be a pretty big death blow to Microsoft.

That or saying that your console can skype during watching films as well...

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Spacehost

Spacehost

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The thing is though if you knew your console wasn't always online and DRM free then wouldn't you just come out and say it?

I suppose it's not like they need more positivity at the moment but coming out and saying that games wont be tethered to consoles now would be a pretty big death blow to Microsoft.

That or saying that your console can skype during watching films as well...

If they've got big MS-baiting details to reveal they'll be saving them for E3. They want to have a show that will appear in retrospect to be 2 hours of slapping their cock off the side of Ballmer's bald nut while We Are The Champions plays in the background.
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pauc

pauc

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Microsoft has said that the main reason for the lack of Xbox One backwards compatibility, is that the new console is incompatible with Xbox 360 discs, due to being based on the x86 architecture. You may be already aware that this is a similar setup to the way the Sony PS4 has been built, but Sony has already confirmed that they will be offering a workaround PS3 backwards compatibility with the PS4.

Sony has said that Gaikai will play a part in this, with users able to stream PS3 games and possibly even PS2 and PS1 games in the future.

Is this confirmed or fluff?

http://www.product-reviews.net/2013/05/23/xbox-one-vs-sony-ps4-backwards-compatibility/

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Cthulhu Steev

Cthulhu Steev

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If that comes out at launch, then one of my 'hoped for' BC games on PS3 can be left behind. I'm happy to pay money to these guys again, even it is just Super Stardust: Even More Stuff to Dodge Edition.

The' desire' to put the entire back catalogue of Playstation games via Gaikai on PS4 is confirmed, but no timescale. As long as Gaikai works properly, it will happen. I guess the first test will be local PS4 to Vita streaming, and then will go from there.

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Ferine

Ferine

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It's confirmed Sony is working on it, but they made it clear during the console announcement that it's an ambition rather than a promise. You certainly shouldn't have any expectation of it being there at launch; it's probably safest to assume it isn't happening until you're actively using it.

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