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

[Vulgotha]

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.

I know, you believe that the PS4 OS will be significantly bigger than the 512MB quoted up until this point. Which I believe is possible, but I sincerely doubt it will exceed 1GB.

[Vulgotha]

But did Epic really made that comment?

I remember reading somewhere Rein or some other Epic guy making some similar remark. I'm trying to dig it up, but it wasn't like this was said at some major press release as I recall. Just an off the cuff remark.

If I can't produce anything, just consider it me misreading something.

[Rekmon]

I know, you believe that the PS4 OS will be significantly bigger than the 512MB quoted up until this point. Which I believe is possible, but I sincerely doubt it will exceed 1GB.

After the PS3's OS I could see them reserving a fair chunk of ram "just in case"...for random things they might not have thought of: Like in-game music: Ooops, not enough memory...gotta shrink the OS to make room for it.
Or in-game XMB.
Or x-game chat.

Could be wrong...but hopefully they give themselves a little leeway. There's enough memory to spare, and they can always shrink it later.

[Bigdoggy]

1.5 to 3GB of ram for the OS? this isn't Windows . o.O

[Jabjabs]

1.5 to 3GB of ram for the OS? this isn't Windows . o.O

I'm guessing all the video encoding/uploading is where the memory usage would be at.

[Bigdoggy]

it's still to much for the OS, highly doubt it will be even slightly over 1GB. Also, the stuff running in the background is running on a separat custom CPU and not the APU from what I understood.

[Jabjabs]

Practically nothing is known of the custom processor at this moment. That said it could be addressing the same pool of memory thus it would still impact the overall RAM available.

I was just throwing some speculation out there, I agree 3gb is far to much for what we have seen of the OS and because of that I would assume it is just Sony being precautions about how much memory they will require.

Mind you if Wii U can use 1GB for its OS you never know how inefficient these things can be built.

[Sufi]

After the PS3's OS I could see them reserving a fair chunk of ram "just in case"...for random things they might not have thought of: Like in-game music: Ooops, not enough memory...gotta shrink the OS to make room for it.
Or in-game XMB.
Or x-game chat.

Could be wrong...but hopefully they give themselves a little leeway. There's enough memory to spare, and they can always shrink it later.

I don't think they even cared about x-game chat. By the time they realized its importance, it was probably too late.

Practically nothing is known of the custom processor at this moment. That said it could be addressing the same pool of memory thus it would still impact the overall RAM available.

I was just throwing some speculation out there, I agree 3gb is far to much for what we have seen of the OS and because of that I would assume it is just Sony being precautions about how much memory they will require.

Mind you if Wii U can use 1GB for its OS you never know how inefficient these things can be built.

Good point but I'm hoping Nintendo is just newbs lol.

[jlippone]

I'm guessing all the video encoding/uploading is where the memory usage would be at.

It doesn't take that much memory, at least when using a hardware encoder.
http://e2e.ti.com/support/embedded/m...6/t/90264.aspx

Of course if you keep a lot of compressed data as a buffer the memory requirement does increase, but still the needed memory even with 60fps 60 second buffer in very high quality (40Mbs) is around ~300MB.
I also doubt that they keep buffers that long in memory, most likely a couple of seconds, 10sec max..
http://www.dr-lex.be/info-stuff/videocalc.html

[Vulgotha]

Practically nothing is known of the custom processor at this moment. That said it could be addressing the same pool of memory thus it would still impact the overall RAM available.

I was just throwing some speculation out there, I agree 3gb is far to much for what we have seen of the OS and because of that I would assume it is just Sony being precautions about how much memory they will require.

Mind you if Wii U can use 1GB for its OS you never know how inefficient these things can be built.

The 3GB quote was in relation to the 720/Durango, not PS4. The PS4 has been placed at 512MB up until this point.

[mynd]

So, where does your recorded video to upload get stored? Back on the hard rive, because that would make a HUGE impact on performance. I am starting to wonder if a fair chunk will be reserved just to cache this.
Either that or Sony aren't going to use the HDD but BR only as game input.

[Vulgotha]

Well given that Sony demonstrated the upload during gameplay at the reveal event (their gameplay vids were posted on FB) during the demonstration using non-final devkits I would imagine (given they had only just announced 8GB of RAM) that they've already figured out a way to slot that into the 512MB of memory reserved for the OS already.

I mean 512MB is a decent sized chunk of memory for an embedded OS. I don't think this is as resource intensive as you make it out to be.

[mynd]

Well given that Sony demonstrated the upload during gameplay at the reveal event (their gameplay vids were posted on FB) during the demonstration using non-final devkits I would imagine (given they had only just announced 8GB of RAM) that they've already figured out a way to slot that into the 512MB of memory reserved for the OS already.

I mean 512MB is a decent sized chunk of memory for an embedded OS. I don't think this is as resource intensive as you make it out to be.

Encoding on the fly is pretty intensive, without a dedicated real time chip (which clearly they have),but I missed some of the presentation, how much could you upload, just bits of it? Was there a time limit (eg last 5 mins etc?)

[Vulgotha]

Encoding on the fly is pretty intensive, without a dedicated real time chip (which clearly they have),but I missed some of the presentation, how much could you upload, just bits of it? Was there a time limit (eg last 5 mins etc?)

They have dedicated hardware to handle all of it. The cut off I think is 15min.

[mynd]

They have dedicated hardware to handle all of it. The cut off I think is 15min.

Just re-watching the presentation, and he says "last few minutes" either way a cut of limit like that would indicated that this is encoded and stored in ram. Only a few mb at most if you encoding it. (depends on res I guess), however.

[Chille]

Just re-watching the presentation, and he says "last few minutes" either way a cut of limit like that would indicated that this is encoded and stored in ram. Only a few mb at most if you encoding it. (depends on res I guess), however.

Well it has a seperate chip for streaming so my guess the same chip also handles the recording

[Vulgotha]

Well it has a seperate chip for streaming so my guess the same chip also handles the recording

Correct.

[Jabjabs]

The 3GB quote was in relation to the 720/Durango, not PS4. The PS4 has been placed at 512MB up until this point.

Oh I see my mistake. Now I am really puzzled as to what they are don't with that memory, it had better not be Windows 8 on top of everything. J/k

Secondly if Sony can do all that in 512Mb, Nintendo should fire their OS team for the bloat ware Wii U is running.

[mynd]

The thing that cracks me up about all of the o/s bs is, no one can marry up anything they are reading in terms of vgleaks, and the supposed need for 3gb/windows 8 os.

No way in hell any of these systems require 3gb for o/s. do there reserve 3gb? Maybe, what will they use it
For? Probably everything but o/s.

Game recording, hard drive cache, Kinect o/s, sure maybe.....

In ya dreams ya all gone crazy if you believe half of this frankly.

There is a lot that is required for caches, something 512mb is going to get close to doing, on the other hand 3gb seems excessive

[chrisw26308]

I always thought that number seemed absurd but never questioned it.

Just cant see what 3gb will be used for. Maybe if your running a kinect game and the box is recording it could use up to 3 but not a constant.

Sent from my SCH-I500 using Tapatalk 2

[claud3]

i can not see this happening unless they have pulled something out of the air with unique power that can equal a P.C

i guess it wont take long until consoles are equal to p.c POWER

[Sufi]

Oh I see my mistake. Now I am really puzzled as to what they are don't with that memory, it had better not be Windows 8 on top of everything. J/k

Secondly if Sony can do all that in 512Mb, Nintendo should fire their OS team for the bloat ware Wii U is running.

Well it's kinda like Sony this generation, their OS had less features than the 360's and yet required more RAM.

[Vulgotha]

The thing that cracks me up about all of the o/s bs is, no one can marry up anything they are reading in terms of vgleaks, and the supposed need for 3gb/windows 8 os.

No way in hell any of these systems require 3gb for o/s. do there reserve 3gb? Maybe, what will they use it
For? Probably everything but o/s.

Game recording, hard drive cache, Kinect o/s, sure maybe.....

In ya dreams ya all gone crazy if you believe half of this frankly.

There is a lot that is required for caches, something 512mb is going to get close to doing, on the other hand 3gb seems excessive

Again, except that people with some clout have said "yes, this is on the level". No offense and this is the first time I've said this, but you're coming across like you just really don't want it to be true.

Stupid shit happens. Again, look at the WiiU OS and the original PS3 OS.

You were going bananas earlier, saying that the leaks for the PS4 and Durango were pointless and there was absolutely zero credibility to them- then the PS4 announcement happened and everything the leaks said were true, just with twice the memory and it took everyone (devs included) by surprise.

Same leaks have spelled out the hardware for the Durango as well, and you really have just not been receptive to what they have had to say. Yes, as a gamer I don't like the direction the Durango is going either but I don't get your attitude here.

You balked at the specs using 8GB of DDR3, you refuse to believe the OS is this bloated, and you are clinging to the hope it's using some kind of weird dual GPU\APU set up and overpower Orbis.

Some reasons I have heard for why the size is so big:
Kinect 2.0,
Skype stuff,
DVR recording,
in-game video chat (?),


I'm at a loss as to why it's so enormous too, I'm with you there. But the leaks and the credible members at B3D have placed it at roughly this number. But if they are all saying "X" then I'm going to have to concede that "X" is likely.

[RedOrb_Collector]

Question, the 720 or whatever its even going to be called, has yet to be even officially announced. So how is it that these developers seem to be able to talk about the specs of it on other forums and such? They aren't bound to some NDA to tip toe around the existence of these dev kits in their apparent possessions?

[Vulgotha]

Question, the 720 or whatever its even going to be called, has yet to be even officially announced. So how is it that these developers seem to be able to talk about the specs of it on other forums and such? They aren't bound to some NDA to tip toe around the existence of these dev kits in their apparent possessions?

By not dolling out specifics or really commenting concretely.

The leaks were all done by anonymous sources that are vetted by DigitalFoundry and VGleaks and have been very, very accurate so far. So the other devs are just saying stuff like "sounds about right" (etc) in place of giving exact details and risking being fired.