Avalanche Studios exec: 'PS4 will out-power most PCs for years to come'

[Shibby]

Yeah, small SSD for OS would be ideal for their instant-on plan. If they go full SSD, we'd probably see another $599 console.

[shepard]

Didn't even think about that. That would make perfect sense. They could use the SSD for the OS and the HDD for storage. I guess we'll see. >_>

This is what I'd like to see as well. A full on SSD would make the system way too expensive. A full on HDD would generate heat, wear/tear due to friction. A combo of the two in that regard would be ideal.

[Vulgotha]

There's a reason why the PS4 has 8GB of vRAM... but it's not that clear yet. Ok the reason is because durango also had it... but what I'm talking about is that there must be something, probably EPIC is working on, to take advantage of this massive RAM even when the horse power of the consoles might not be in the same neighbourhood (Considering that, for example, a Titan features 6GB)

I'm really willing to see that working but it's probably something that wont be directly translated to PC Games. I mean, they will probably rely more on horsepower for PC games instead of massive vRAM to have things working.

If someone's gonna show what you can do with 8GB of Ram FIRST, it won't be the PS4... It will be the next Xbox.... considering games are being made from scratch thinking on that much memory. (Well probably not from scratch, but very early in development) something PS4 devs didn't enjoy and will have to catch up with later on.

I bet on EPIC being the first to show what you can do with it, just like they did with the Xbox 360. (Remember them bragging about pushing MS to feature 512MB on the Xbox 360?)

They added more memory because 1. Developers really wanted it and 2. If the 720 was going to ship with 8GB, even if it is slower, they still wanted to try and match capacity.

But the reason specifically they didn't just do an incremental upgrade (like from 4GB-->6GB) is because that'd have been really annoying on the engineering side to do. Going from 4GB to 8GB of GDDR5 was fairly trivial from an engineering standpoint. A bit more heat and power draw but no drastic revisions necessary.

If the price is right, go for it. That's just what Sony did.

I also think Epic made some obscure remark about how UE4 was only going to be "really running on one console next generation", and I think alludes to the PS4.

720 has substantially less memory to work with than the PS4 does now, according to the leaked information on the design. Dat OS overhead.

[chrisw26308]

Wonder if the hd will be 5400 or 7200. Hopefully 7200.

Why cant they just go back to cartridge based games, cost or something?

Sent from my SCH-I500 using Tapatalk 2

[Sufi]

They added more memory because 1. Developers really wanted it and 2. If the 720 was going to ship with 8GB, even if it is slower, they still wanted to try and match capacity.

But the reason specifically they didn't just do an incremental upgrade (like from 4GB-->6GB) is because that'd have been really annoying on the engineering side to do. Going from 4GB to 8GB of GDDR5 was fairly trivial from an engineering standpoint. A bit more heat and power draw but no drastic revisions necessary.

If the price is right, go for it. That's just what Sony did.

I also think Epic made some obscure remark about how UE4 was only going to be "really running on one console next generation", and I think alludes to the PS4.

720 has substantially less memory to work with than the PS4 does now, according to the leaked information on the design. Dat OS overhead.

Did Epic really say that?

Wonder if the hd will be 5400 or 7200. Hopefully 7200.

Why cant they just go back to cartridge based games, cost or something?

Sent from my SCH-I500 using Tapatalk 2

Limitations, cartridges just never received technological upgrades so as it is right now, it won't work.

[PeanutButterMunky]

Why cant they just go back to cartridge based games, cost or something?

That would be awful.

[chrisw26308]

Did Epic really say that?
Limitations, cartridges just never received technological upgrades so as it is right now, it won't work.

Didnt know that.

Sent from my SCH-I500 using Tapatalk 2

[jlippone]

Didn't even think about that. That would make perfect sense. They could use the SSD for the OS and the HDD for storage. I guess we'll see. >_>

That wouldn't give the advantages of SSD to the actual storage part.
A proper hybrid drive is invisible to the filesystem and machine running it.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5160/s...rid-hdd-review

[PeanutButterMunky]

That wouldn't give the advantages of SSD to the actual storage part.
A proper hybrid drive is invisible to the filesystem and machine running it.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5160/s...rid-hdd-review

I know how they work, I was being simplistic. I have one in my other laptop and it prioritizes the most used files/apps to go into the SSD portion of the drive without any user intervention... but Sony could very easily have the OS remain on the SSD and have other system files and whatnot be added or removed based on need, much like Apple has done with their Fusion hybrid drives. With Apple's Fusion drives the entire OS permanently remains on the SSD portion as well as the default apps... and everything else either goes from the SSD or to the HDD depending on usage, among other things. A hybrid drive would allow for all this instant on talk while also allowing for large, but cheap storage capacity.

You don't GET the advantages of the SSD for storage with a hybrid drive. You get the advantages of the SSD in certain, limited areas, such as the OS, certain apps, files, etc. That's the entire point of a hybrid.

[Rekmon]

Actually 27 mb/s, which wold take 190 second just to fill 5gb. Assuming a straight through read, which of course we all know probably wont happen.

This ^. Plus that read speed will likely only be at the outer rim of the disc (or it'll be the equivalent of a 12x-19x dvd drive depending on what section of the disk is being read)

The bottleneck for computers has always been the disc drive and the hard drive. I doubt we'll be seeing large storage options in the form of SSD for PS4... but SDD prices have been dropping a lot recently and they're supposed to drop even more by the time PS4 is launched... so we'll see.

With all the talk of "instant on" and whatnot... it does lead me to believe the PS4 will have SSD. I really hope it does... but not at the cost of driving the price up too much.

Doubtful on the SSD...that's where that extra ram is going to come into play. Precaching and suspending to ram.
(I wish they prove me wrong and put an SSD in there...but I just don't see it being feasible price wise)

[keefy]

I doubt Sony will ever put SSd in the PS4. But I hope they think of people that do.

[jlippone]

Apple uses 128GB SSD for their fusion drives.
I do agree that forcing OS to SSD part is an interesting idea, but if the SSD is small like on Seagates drive (8GB) it might cost on overall performance of the drive.

Yes, my wording wasn't best possible on SSD storage part.
Hybrid does give an advantage on all reads that are repeatable while the data is within the small SSD cache.
It shouldn't be limited to OS, files or file system in any way. (There is an advantage on working with blocks and not files.)

Thus it's quite nice for a playing a game and dying a lot in one level.

[PeanutButterMunky]

Doubtful on the SSD...that's where that extra ram is going to come into play. Precaching and suspending to ram.
(I wish they prove me wrong and put an SSD in there...but I just don't see it being feasible price wise)

How is that doubtful? I have instant on with my laptop because of the SSD. And price-wise, no it wouldn't be efficient... but the conversation has moved over to it possibly having a hybrid drive... which would make it an affordable solution. That and they aren't paying a premium for the hardware components.

If you meant doubtful that it'll have an SSD, then yeah... maybe... then the GDDR5 RAM would definitely play a more important role there.

Apple uses 128GB SSD for their fusion drives.
I do agree that forcing OS to SSD part is an interesting idea, but if the SSD is small like on Seagates drive (8GB) it might cost on overall performance of the drive.

Yes, my wording wasn't best possible on SSD storage part.
Hybrid does give an advantage on all reads that are repeatable while the date is within the small SSD cache.
It shouldn't be limited to OS, files or file system in any way.

Thus it's quite nice for a playing a game and dying a lot in one level.

I understand. These are all just guesses, of course. Preferably a huge storage SSD would be optimal... but the cost just isn't there yet. Having 480 MBps read/write speeds wouldn't be a bad thing.

[Sufi]

Didnt know that.

Sent from my SCH-I500 using Tapatalk 2

I'm guessing but last I heard of a device using it was N64. Safe to assume it's obsolete.

[jlippone]

How is that doubtful? I have instant on with my laptop because of the SSD. And price-wise, no it wouldn't be efficient... but the conversation has moved over to it possibly having a hybrid drive... which would make it an affordable solution. That and they aren't paying a premium for the hardware components.

Yes, hybrid would make sense.
Pure SSD especially when buying 50GB games from PSN, not so much. (at least in beginning.)

I hope that Sony will allow us to put our own drives again on ps4, it certainly made ps3 better experience.

I understand. These are all just guesses, of course. Preferably a huge storage SSD would be optimal... but the cost just isn't there yet. Having 480 MBps read/write speeds wouldn't be a bad thing.

Oh yes, actually I cannot wait for a proper affordable >1TB SSD drive.

[PeanutButterMunky]

Yes, hybrid would make sense.
Pure SSD especially when buying 50GB games from PSN, not so much. (at least in beginning.)

Yeah, that would fill up in about a week... lol.

I hope that Sony will allow us to put our own drives again on ps4, it certainly made ps3 better experience.

Yeah... it really did.

[mynd]

720 has substantially less memory to work with than the PS4 does now, according to the leaked information on the design. Dat OS overhead.

I wouldn't be throwing that out there to be honest.
Its guess work at best, and I suspect you are going to find similar amount of memory on each.

Oh and BTW guys, instant on only would need a tiny 8gb very fast drive to store you memory contents.

[Coconut_Crunch]

This may help people understand GDDR5 better. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDDR5

http://www.techspot.com/community/to...memory.186408/

[TDbank24]

Oh hell yeah it will. The PS4 is going to put in work. It will be a nightmarish beast when it comes to pure power.

[Vulgotha]

I wouldn't be throwing that out there to be honest.
Its guess work at best, and I suspect you are going to find similar amount of memory on each.

Oh and BTW guys, instant on only would need a tiny 8gb very fast drive to store you memory contents.

Confirmed devs at B3D have said it is basically 3GB reserved, so I feel confident on it.

Not just 'random' people but verified game devs that are well known in the community. Naturally they don't say "it is exactly x MB" but I've seen them say "It's in that ballpark" and "just about right".

As I recall two separate guys verified it, on top of the so-called 'sources' behind the (so far quite accurate) rumors.

[Sufi]

But did Epic really made that comment?

[mynd]

Confirmed devs at B3D have said it is basically 3GB reserved, so I feel confident on it.

Not just 'random' people but verified game devs that are well known in the community. Naturally they don't say "it is exactly x MB" but I've seen them say "It's in that ballpark" and "just about right".

As I recall two separate guys verified it, on top of the so-called 'sources' behind the (so far quite accurate) rumors.

Interesting, cause I've seen many reports suggesting 1.5gb-3gb
But it actually wasn't that side of it I was suggesting was wrong.

[Jabjabs]

Interesting, cause I've seen many reports suggesting 1.5gb-3gb
But it actually wasn't that side of it I was suggesting was wrong.

Could be like the Ps3, starts off at the high and then they pair it back as they figure out the requirements in real world situations.

I do agree that forcing OS to SSD part is an interesting idea, but if the SSD is small like on Seagates drive (8GB) it might cost on overall performance of the drive.

The Ps3 OS for the most part resides on Flash RAM with some of the back up data stored on the HDD. Off the top of my head I think it has 256MB reserved for this.

[Rekmon]

How is that doubtful? I have instant on with my laptop because of the SSD. And price-wise, no it wouldn't be efficient... but the conversation has moved over to it possibly having a hybrid drive... which would make it an affordable solution. That and they aren't paying a premium for the hardware components.

If you meant doubtful that it'll have an SSD, then yeah... maybe... then the GDDR5 RAM would definitely play a more important role there.



I understand. These are all just guesses, of course. Preferably a huge storage SSD would be optimal... but the cost just isn't there yet. Having 480 MBps read/write speeds wouldn't be a bad thing.

I meant doubtful it would have an SSD. I just don't see it happening, but hey I like nice surprises too so here's to hopes n dreams

[jlippone]

The Ps3 OS for the most part resides on Flash RAM with some of the back up data stored on the HDD. Off the top of my head I think it has 256MB reserved for this.

Had forgot about that, if the OS is small this certainly remains to be a good choice.