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[Boss Man]

This has been such an interesting dynamic.

On the one hand, you have a ton of threads that center on a discussion of RAM while hardly anyone knows what the exact effects might be. I don't think it helps that RAM is capitalized. Maybe we should just call it by its full name lol?

On the other, you have some people who you can tell are real salty about it and imply that it doesn't mean anything and isn't really even worth discussing.

 

[James Sawyer Ford]

I will make this short and sweet. A long time ago, Sony only had plans for 2 GB of RAM (total). Dev's bitched. Sony upped it to 4 GB of RAM. Dev's bitched. Sony has now upped it to 8 GB of RAM.

Guerilla apparently, has been using the very first kits this entire time, which is shocking if true.

The second dev kits you're talking about didn't get shipped until January (4GB).

SO it's not really surprising.

 

[thuway]

For the love of God can someone reply seriously to the question what way more RAM actually improves? No unfunny jokes please, I want an actual answer.

The answer is a little complicated. This allows you to have:


1. Better textures
2. More textures
3. More animations
4. More NPC's
5. More randomness
6. Larger worlds
7. More techniques (better types of lighting, DOF, AA)

In short, games will be made to accommodate less constraints. However, it's not black and white. Those damn particle effects that were missing in that Elemental Demo on PS4 will magically come back .

 

[THE:MILKMAN]

So this is how the dev kits evolved according to VGleaks:

First dev kit:


Second dev kit:


Latest January 2013 dev kit:


The first two dev kits had 2.2GB VRAM to which Phil from B3D says 1.5GB was available.

The latest dev kit is, IMO, the one we saw in the DS4 controller leak picture. This is the dev kit that was probably used at the PlayStation Meeting. I also think a lot of third party devs still have one of the older dev kits.

Hopefully, this reduces the dev kit confusion.

 

[DR2K]

Cool can more ram give us 60fps?

 

[Flatline]

The answer is a little complicated. This allows you to have:


1. Better textures
2. More textures
3. More animations
4. More NPC's
5. More randomness
6. Larger worlds
7. More techniques (better types of lighting, DOF, AA)

In short, games will be made to accommodate less constraints. However, it's not black and white. Those damn particle effects that were missing in that Elemental Demo on PS4 will magically come back .

Thank you, very interesting.

 

[Dennis]

Could you point me to them because all I could find was fps jokes.

#41 and #170

 

[CLEEK]

For the love of God can someone reply seriously to the question what way more RAM actually improves? No unfunny jokes please, I want an actual answer.

Pretty much everything. It's not just the size of RAM in the PS4 that's great, but the speed of it. Even when the PS4 was rumoured to have 4GB of GDDR5 and the next Xbox to have 8GB DDR3 RAM, the general consensus was the PS4 set up was better, but having more RAM would allow the Xbox to be better suited for certain game types. Now, if the Xbox rumours are true, the PS4 is better across the board.

So what does a lot of fast RAM actually improve?

Textures
Transparencies
Particles
Lighting
Animation
Resolution
Frame rate
Open world games (see Skyrim on the PS3 for details on why RAM is so important)
Loading times
Persistent gameplay
Number of enemies
AI

 

[TedNindo]

Cool can more ram give us 60fps?

It means devs won't know what to do with all the fps's!!!

 

[i-Lo]

A - I don't know Shayan.
B- There are some extremely credible sources on the board that can echo what I've said earlier about the kit history (2, 4, 8). BG, Liquid, Gopher I am looking right at you -_-.
C- No idea about OS use, Gopher would know more than me, my sources have tightened up worse than Hannah Montana's career.

Nice analogy. And thanks.

 

[beast786]

Chill. See sticky. It's a legit rumor, and meaningful in some capacity if true, so there's no reason to shit on the thread.

.

 

[Corto]

If the decision to go from 4GB to 8GB was indeed not so long ago, I expect the demoed games to look even more impressive in the final state. Killzone will look amazing!

 

[Wishmaster92]

PS4 was only using 18% of it's maximum power.

 

[Dennis]

Pretty much everything. It's not just the size of RAM in the PS4 that's great, but the speed of it. Even when the PS4 was rumoured to have 4GB of GDDR5 and the next Xbox to have 8GB DDR3 RAM, the general consensus was the PS4 set up was better, but having more RAM would allow the Xbox to be better suited for certain game types.

Now, if the Xbox rumours are true, the PS4 is better across the board.

So what does a lot of fast RAM actually improve?

Textures
Transparencies
Particles
Lighting
Animation
Resolution
Frame rate
Open world games (see Skyrim on the PS3 for details on why RAM is so important)

The RAM does not by itself increase framerate. However, if the needed VRAM is exceeded it drastically lowers the framerate. But at a fixed VRAM usage, having an excess will not increase framerate.

Cool can more ram give us 60fps?

Essentially no. The GPU is the main determinant of framerate and developers will rather push the GPU to display more onscreen goodness at 30 fps rather than less at 60 fps.

 

[USC-fan]

wow can we stop with the ram meme, its not funny anymore and just shitting up the threads.

September is when kits started shipping with 4 GB, but this is the first I'm hearing its January. Shit must be real cray for dev's if it's 8 GB from 1.5...

We are talking about vram, not system ram.

Available January 2013
CPU: 8-core Jaguar
GPU: Liverpool GPU
RAM: unified 8 GB for devkit (4 GB for the retail console)

Before this kit they only had 2.2 vram and looks like only access to 1.5GB doing by this report. System ram does not matter since the gpu does not have access to this ram..

 

[toastyToast]

Cool can more ram give us 60fps?

Nope

Console games don't ever cross the RAM threshold (except maybe PS3 Skyrim), their design is just inhibited by it in certain ways

 

[benny_a]

Pretty much everything. It's not just the size of RAM in the PS4 that's great, but the speed of it. Even when the PS4 was rumoured to have 4GB of GDDR5 and the next Xbox to have 8GB DDR3 RAM, the general consensus was the PS4 set up was better, but having more RAM would allow the Xbox to be better suited for certain game types. Now, if the Xbox rumours are true, the PS4 is better across the board.

So what does a lot of fast RAM actually improve?

Textures
Transparencies
Particles
Lighting
Animation
Resolution
Frame rate
Open world games (see Skyrim on the PS3 for details on why RAM is so important)

Is this something that could change this particular game or is it too late to change from a 30fps to a 60fps game?

I heard from developers that the decision to go with one of the other is usually done early in the project and with only 9 months left how big are the chances of this changing?

And if 30-locked is more reasonable, what graphical changes can we realistically expect for a project this far along?

 

[Salvadora]

Pretty much everything. It's not just the size of RAM in the PS4 that's great, but the speed of it. Even when the PS4 was rumoured to have 4GB of GDDR5 and the next Xbox to have 8GB DDR3 RAM, the general consensus was the PS4 set up was better, but having more RAM would allow the Xbox to be better suited for certain game types. Now, if the Xbox rumours are true, the PS4 is better across the board.

So what does a lot of fast RAM actually improve?

Textures
Transparencies
Particles
Lighting
Animation
Resolution
Frame rate
Open world games (see Skyrim on the PS3 for details on why RAM is so important)
Loading times
Persistent gameplay
Number of enemies
AI

Will it be held back by the GPU and CPU?

 

[FreedomFries]

So this is how the dev kits evolved according to VGleaks:

First dev kit:


Second dev kit:


Latest January 2013 dev kit:



The first two dev kits had 2.2GB VRAM to which Phil from B3D says 1.5GB was available.

The latest dev kit is, IMO, the one we saw in the DS4 controller leak picture. This is the dev kit that was probably used at the PlayStation Meeting. I also think a lot of third party devs still have one of the older dev kits.

Hopefully, this reduces the dev kit confusion.

You sir, are a gentleman and a scholar. Thanks for searching and posting.

 

[CLEEK]

The RAM does not by itself increase framerate. However, if the needed VRAM is exceeded it drastically lowers the framerate. But at a fixed VRAM usage, having an excess will not increase framerate.

Having a stable frame rate due to eliminating a VRAM bottleneck is an improvement. Which is what I meant.

It can also lead to having more freedom to aim for 60fps and keep all the expensive effects. With fast RAM, you can access more RAM per frame, so can use more RAM intensive effects. This is why all the games with the prettiest effects have been 30fps (or lower) this gen.

 

[Pimpbaa]

I guess that would explain the low resolution shadows in the footage they shown.

Before this kit they only had 2.2 vram and looks like only access to 1.5GB doing my this report. System ram does not matter since the gpu does not have access to this ram..

PS4 has unified ram, there is no vram or system ram.

 

[Boss Man]

Is RAM not a big factor in draw distances? That seems like it would be an obvious thing tied to RAM since it's a constraint on how much is being displayed at a time. Yes/No?

I would assume this would allow for more 'open' games overall, but it's totally just an assumption so correct me don't quote me.

 

[Caio]

Can't wait to see Naughty Dog to take advantage of PS4, PC's zealots will cry a lot

 

[USC-fan]

PS4 has unified ram, there is no vram or system ram.

that is correct but what we are talking about is dev kits. Only the latest dev kit has unified ram.

 

[Maninthemirror]

2000 generation consoles - Online

2005 generation consoles - HD

2013 generation consoles - RAM

 

[Log4Girlz]

Has any system ever released been so generous with ram for its time? It seems that devs would always have issues with RAM starved consoles...

 

[nib95]

Mentioned this in one of the other threads. Could be a problem for Sony with respect to initial opinions and mind set.

So for the initial reveal games, it will be games that have been made using 8GB DDR3 (Durango dev kits) vs games that had been made using 1.5GB GDDR5 for the PS4 (Orbis initial dev kits). Pretty interesting. Theoretically then, the Nextbox games should have more graphical flair.

 

[injurai]

PS4 was only using 18% of it's maximum power.

PS4 = human brain

Confirmed:

 

[Zoramon089]

Having a stable frame rate due to eliminating a VRAM bottleneck is an improvement. Which is what I meant.

It can also lead to having more freedom to aim for 60fps and keep all the expensive effects. With fast RAM, you can access more RAM per frame, so can use more RAM intensive effects. This is why all the games with the prettiest effects have been 30fps (or lower) this gen.

I think the point was RAM wasn't a bottleneck before, the CPU's ability to generate a new frame and everything that entailed was. At most more faster RAM will allow more effects and objects to be persistent but speed up loading but framerate won't really benefit much from it

 

[CLEEK]

Is RAM not a big factor in draw distances? That seems like it would be an obvious thing tied to RAM since it's a constraint on how much is being displayed at a time. Yes/No?

Yes, it's a factor, along with CPU and GPU grunt.

 

[beast786]

PS4 has unified ram, there is no vram or system ram.

Dev kit does have VRAM and System RAM

 

[RiverBed]

What is the source of this 'Sony 1st party not knowing about the RAM pump'? Sony is working with devs along with hardware engineers to build PS4- just like they did with Vita and Move. I find it hard to believe someone as GG didn't know about such a huge leap.

 

[darkistheway]

For the love of God can someone reply seriously to the question what way more RAM actually improves? No unfunny jokes please, I want an actual answer.

You can double the number of skyboxes and the corridor can be three times as long.

Spoiler

hopefully not unfunny

 

[spwolf]

Forgivez me sirz, for I know not the ways of a programmer .

you dont write/clear all of your ram every frame . You need to cache things in RAM... like actual game engine... game assets and everything else possibly needed. For instance, now big game worlds are possible as a lot more data can stay in memory... we talk about persistence... thats in RAM, writing it to HDD cache would slow things down considerably, you want that in memory so game engine can read it easily.

Generally for any application, reason you load things in ram is for them to stay there for a bit so you dont have to access them from slow hard drive. Otherwise how do you think they would load all that RAM per frame, from where? .

so you cant use that as some kind of benchmark as to how much RAM will OS use.

as to guerilla's 2GB, i would guess that they were told that to develop their game with 2 GB RAM in mind, 512 MB of which would be used for OSs, 1.5 GB for the game. As someone else already said, they worked on OS for 5 years, I cant imagine they decided to quadruple the size last minute.

 

[Flatline]

PS4 has unified ram, there is no vram or system ram.

From my understanding he means dev kits system RAM.

Also thanks for all the replies guys. Could you also reply to this question?

Will it be held back by the GPU and CPU?

 

[CLEEK]

I think the point was RAM wasn't a bottleneck before, the CPU's ability to generate a new frame and everything that entailed was. At most more faster RAM will allow more effects and objects to be persistent but speed up loading but framerate won't really benefit much from it

RAM is probably the major bottleneck in PS3 and 360 games. All performance is tied into RAM access and wasted cycles.

 

[Log4Girlz]

The CPU looks like the weakest link

 

[Respawn]

Explain.

On our PC's we use these days two types of ram mainly. DDR2 or 3 for system ram. Then we have a our video cards with GDDR.
Wanting to add FR to your game wont help in this setup since the architecture is different and your PC games is very dependent on your cpu power and gpu power. Boosting your DDR speed and amount can help in certain instances but the beef is in those two main parts.
On PS4 those concerns are not how you thing they are. The machine's APU has a direct contact with 8gigs of this insane ram. This a closed box system with a video card architecture between a 7850 and a 7870 [and special tweaks from Sony engineers of course]. These AMD cards can do 1080p at 60fps with two gigs of GDDR5.
The CPU on the PS4 is not something you can just put side by side with a laptop or desktop processor and say its the same. Look at games like GOW for example that are 720 native that reach to 45fps on 256 megs of GDDR? Look at Halo 4. PS4 architecture will give it a lead for quite a few months. The Titan might see its true potential because of PS4.

I'm not an expert Muse. Just having a chat with you guys. Quite obvious they didn't build this machine to run their first party graphical showpieces at 30fps like last gen.

The CPU looks like the weakest link

IF you're doing a comparison to an exact PC counterpart. In this case rejoice to know its not.

 

[Dennis]

The CPU looks like the weakest link

Isn't the Nextbox and PS4 rumored to have the exact same CPU?

 

[BlueTsunami]

Has it been speculated (probably has) how much the 'Share' function for holding the past couple of minutes of play takes as far as RAM goes?

 

[Zarx]

I imagine the 1.8TFlop GPU will become a bottleneck for devs using huge amounts of RAM for graphics, most of the RAM will be used as cache to prevent having to load from disc (or hard drive) as often. For the first couple of years I imagine that ~2GB of RAM being used as active VRAM will be typical for most games.

 

[i-Lo]

The CPU looks like the weakest link

Isn't that why the 18CUs of the GPU are being customized to aid (if necessary) the CPU in general purpose processing?

 

[flippedb]

Isn't the Nextbox and PS4 rumored to have the exact same CPU?

Wasn't there a rumour that put Durango's Jaguar cores above vanilla cores? I remember reading they produced several times the FLOPs a vanilla core does. Or something like that.

 

[CLEEK]

Isn't the Nextbox and PS4 rumored to have the exact same CPU?

The PS4 rumours (and now official specs) stated it would have an 8 core 1.6GHz Jaguar CPU. The Xbox rumours just say it will have an 8 core 1.6GHz CPU. It doesn't mention Jaguar, which has led some (fervent Xbox fans, maybe) from suggesting the CPU in the Xbox will have twice the FLOPs over the Jaguar derived CPU in the PS4. Even though they're both AMD CPUs with the same number of cores, running at the same frequency.

 

[USC-fan]

Has it been speculated (probably has) how much the 'Share' function for holding the past couple of minutes of play takes as far as RAM goes?

I would be very surprise if they store that in ram when you can store it to the HDD.

The CPU looks like the weakest link

Games are so gpu compute bound that CPU will always be weakest link.

 

[Woo-Fu]

I wonder when GDDR5 is going to cure cancer.

It has already caused a number of cases of brain cancer around here.

 

[sykoex]

Have Square Enix and Epic mentioned what specs their tech demos were intended for?

 

[Zoramon089]

RAM is probably the major bottleneck in PS3 and 360 games. All performance is tied into RAM access and wasted cycles.

The way I see it (massively simplified) goes "Okay, let's see how many effects we can add and objects we can simulate" and that keeps increasing until the framerate drops below an acceptable rate.

Then it becomes a question of if that drop is caused by cache misses from the RAM being completely filled and having to load more data in or if it's simply the limit of the CPUs computation speed. IMO, it's the CPU. It certainly didn't help that they were in order processors either

 

[Punkster_NY]

scratch that old info.

 

[i-Lo]

Have Square Enix and Epic mentioned what specs their tech demos were intended for?

I do not about SE but the way Mark Rein spoke to Geoff about the increase, it felt like it was new information to them as well.