Killzone Shadow Fall Using 3 GB RAM: How Does This Affect Future PS4 Games?

"Don’t you just love it when speculation on new consoles gets technical? Anyone growing up in the nineties will firmly remember the obsession with 16 and 32 bit machines, an arbitrary measurement of power that, to this day, still doesn’t say much about what went on under the hood of these systems."

[DoomeDx]

Getting tired of all the ''PS4 RAM'' articles.

Most of the people have no clue what they are even talking about.
Dont get me wrong. 8GB of GDDR5 ram is amazing and has great potential. But the amount of people not having a clue what they are talking about is getting annoying.

This article included.

[Donnieboi]

So, please--Old wise one: Please inform us ignorant peasants on the reality of RAM. Pretty please?

[papashango]

all it means is that RAM won't be a bottleneck. People should look to the CPU/GPU to determine how powerful this system will be.

RAM utilization is meaningless if the CPU or GPU is utilizing 100% load.

[SynGamer]

The point @DoomeDx is trying to make, I believe, is that the amount of RAM being used isn't an issue. Uncharted 1, 2, and 3 maxed out the PS3's RAM (about 460-480 MB), yet each game in the series improved upon the graphics and AI/physics. So Killzone: Shadow Fall using 3GB right now means the team hasn't found better ways to optimize the game/code (yet). Even if the team maxed out the PS4's RAM (all 7GB), the next game would do the same but look and perform better.

It's simply the nature of the programming beast. During and after each project the developers learn new tricks which allows them to squeeze more performance out of the hardware.

The problem developers are going to run into is the CPU and GPU. While they are far better than the PS3's Cell, they are also middle-of-the-road currently and they have been released yet. Now, closed hardware systems like consoles allow developers to really exploit all of the power, but the RAM is only going to help with loading. Sadly, the blu-ray drive will be limited to 6x, or about 27MB/s. So to fill up 1GB of RAM, it's going to take at least 38 seconds. Now, Sony has already gone on record and stated streaming from the disc to the console/HDD is going to occur frequently, but suffice to say, the real bottleneck for the PS4 and NextBox is the blu-ray drive. Had Sony gone with a 10x drive, we would be looking at 45MB/s, or about 23 seconds to fill 1GB of RAM. Either way, CPU/GPU will still be limited by how well the game engine is optimized.

[Greyfoxdbz]

@papashango
if they would go through such lengths to remove the bottleneck presented with insufficient RAM. why would they create a bottleneck for CPU/GPU? they wouldn't spend more money sticking excess RAM in a console that couldn't utilise it.

[papashango]

@greyfox

lol really? is that how the industry works...

lol

[NewMonday]

8g of GDDR5 RAM will bring:

* much faster load times, no more long elevator scene like in ME, long loading killed of interest in the first Modnation Racers game.

* eliminate pop-ups

* make detailed textures a standard, size of textures shouldn't be a problem.

* many more objects in the environment can be interactive/more destructible, increase NPC's and their AI level.

[SynGamer]

@newmonday - one thing to note is the faster loading will ONLY be true if the game is loading off of the HDD. As I pointed out in my post above, if the game is loading off of the blu-ray drive, there WILL be a bottleneck, though it shouldn't be as drastic as once lead to believe. If a game only needs 200-300 MB to start the level, then we're looking at about 10 seconds from loading a game to playing.

[joeorc]

100% correct

AMD's current top-end APU only delivers around 700 GFLOPs of compute power from its CPU and GPU combined.

to put this in perspective

the PS4 will have 1.84 TF in the GPU alone! so already outpaces MORE THAN 700 by quite a large ammount!

to make the point further

We're told the PS4's processor delivers nearly 2 TFLOPs from its GPU alone. In other words, we're looking at 3X compute performance before we even get to the eight-core CPU.

http://www.engadget.com/201...

that's 1.84 TF just for the freaking GPU people. that with out taking into account the CPU!

and yet it has 8 GB of unified GDDR5 Ram. remember who is one of the main people heading up development and design of the PS4.

Freaking

Mark the father of "crash bandicoot" Cerny!

[JewyMcJew]

I agree with SynGamer, the 6x blu-ray drive is next-gen's Achilles heel.

Maybe because I am old enough to remember what playing Genesis / SNES was like, but long loading times is one of my greatest pet peeves and detrimental to the overall gaming experience.

The price you pay for cheap huge storage!

[NewMonday]

@SynGamer
Mark Cerny confirmed the games will load from the HDD, it will load from BlueRay only the first time as the extra chip installs the game in the background.

and if the PS4 gives us the same option of replacing the HDD like in the PS3, upgrading to an SSD will make everything almost instant.

[aquamala]

@joeorc

lol at "AMD's current top-end APU"

AMD's current APU are not very powerful at all, they go in low end laptops. can they even max out Left for Dead 2?

how about comparing to GPUs

a 7850 has 1.76 TFLOPS, these cost $160
a 7950 has 2.8 TFlops, these cost $300

they are not even high end cards, and by the end of the year 8000 series cards will be out

[bangshi]

Don't forget it was using 3GB for GPU tasks only.

In addition it was using 1.5GB for CPU tasks and 128MB for shared tasks.

So in total it was using around 4.6GB of RAM.

[BitbyDeath]

The PS4's CPU and GPU have been heavily modified to remove bottlenecks.

http://www.gamasutra.com/vi...

Guerilla Games have come out and said the PS4 has no bottlenecks.

http://www.videogamer.com/p...

[LocutusEstBorg]

It has enough RAM, but the CPU and GPU are really weak and it will won't be able to run anything at 1080p 60fps.

[imt558]

@casualkiss

Blu-ray is not next-gen Achilles heel. Look how many PS3 games use cheap tricks to bypass slow read speed of PS3's BR drive. Loading level or checkpoints in the background when cut-scene show up. 6X faster BR drive in PS4 shouldn't be a problem.

[hesido]

@Syngamer: I agree with you on Bluray speed, that said what @Newmonday said about faster load times is still valid because of more RAM (although RAM has nothing to do with HD / BluRay speed), that is because more data could be streamed to the RAM prior to you passing a certain section of the game. But that is all up to the developers.

[Tr10wn]

"Guerilla Games have come out and said the PS4 has no bottlenecks. "

then why the game is running at 30 fps only? that is the biggest BS i have heard, is either 1 they don't know how to code the game or 2 the PS4 is bottleneck at launch either way is bad, a flagship studio can't develop on their on console or the console fail to deliver the performance it was require for "NEXT 1080p@60FPS GEN".

[hesido]

@Tr10wn: A system having a bottleneck is different from a system being slow/fast. Tho technically, it is a bit of a marketing speech as any specific task can be over-emphasized to create bottlenecks on any system. So PS4 is a balanced system for what GG is doing for Killzone SF, it may indeed have bottlenecks for different scenarios. Basically, PS4 turned out to not bottleneck any specific portion of what GG did on Killzone.

[andrewer]

You can play Battlefield 3 in 2GB of RAM, so 8GB in the PS4 is just to say they have more...

[jmc8888]

Perfectly say papashango.

Also what makes a big determinent of how much ram is needed is the resolution being displayed.

1080p textures don't need as much ram as 1600p or 5760x1080 or 4k.

But again even a PC GPU that is much stronger than a PS4 can't utilize all its ram effectively at 4GB's.

Also what people forget is that the PS4 won't utilize top end GDDR5 memory. There's different speed and latency grades.

Guess which ones will be utilized in the PS4? The types that can easily be made in the millions...i.e. low end GDDR5.

[Prcko]

8gb ram is great,but what's up with gpu?

[joeorc]

"I agree with SynGamer, the 6x blu-ray drive is next-gen's Achilles heel."

What the Hell? really?

for example a 6x write once transfer speed is:

6x Blu-ray write-once media, featuring a stunning data transfer speed of 216 Mbit/sec., which is almost 30-percent faster than a 16x DVD and almost four times quicker than a 48x CD drive.

and you think that is going to be the PS4's
"Achilles heel"

you do know that the PS4's Blu-ray drive is read only of a 6x blu-ray optical drive! It does not need to write to disc!

[Gridloc]

So just buy the digital version of the game and you won't have to worry about the bluray drives speed. Then it's up to whatever HDD they put in it...

[abzdine]

"Getting tired of all the ''PS4 RAM'' articles"
then stop reading and commenting on them

KZ using 3GB is pretty scary because that means huge progress ahead! imagine next KZ using 4GB there will still be room for improvement

[Irishguy95]

It really doesn't mean huge progress though. They aren't skimping out on the GPU and CPU like they are with the RAM for Shadowfall... The next games are still limited to the GPU and CPU.

No Minato, that isn't all FPS games. Only ones that imitate cod. It's simple really, the RAM is not limiting the CPU and GPU for Shadowfall. Having extra Ram is gonna help with...loading...nothing more really, having an overabundance of RAM won't let the GPU and CPU do more than they can

[andrewer]

:facepalm: Yeah sure using more RAM means a better gaming experience. Jesus Christ it means only a few seconds less in loading times and able to render bigger maps, but no big deal when Battlefield 3 runs on 2 GB.

[jmc8888]

It's amazing at all the fanboy downvotes for the truth.

RAM DOESN'T MAKE THINGS GO FASTER.

What you are used to seeing is the lack of ram, creating a bottleneck, which slows things down.

In other words fanboys, what it means is this....if you have a car and hit the gas and brake at the same time....it doesn't accelerate as fast as it can.

If you take your foot off the brake and hit the gas...is it a faster car? Nope. You just removed what was blocking it from accelerating as it can.

The truth is there really isn't a GPU powerful enough to really use more than 3-4 GB's. A GTX 670 (stronger than what's in the PS4) with 2 GB's runs games like Crysis 3 and the like just as fast as the 4 GB version of the GTX 670. The simple fact is for 1080p games (and we have no confirmation that all games will be that) people really shouldn't expect much more usage then what Killzone uses.

Sure they could find some usage for it, but it won't be a true effective usage.

It's amazing though how the PS4 is showcasing games that have existed on PC's for years and yet what was once 'not a big difference' is suddenly a huge difference now that it has a Sony label on it.

I have a PS3, will buy a PS4 at launch. But facts are facts.

The simple fact is even though the last of us utilizes the PS3's scant power well and achieves more than previous games, the truth of the matter is the PS3 has been maxed out power wise since 2006-2007.

The sad fact is that while you can squeeze more out with little tricks, all systems are maxed out almost immediately.

That's why even if the Wii U games out haven't fully utilized what the Wii U can do, it still is maxed out....because you don't see any of these games outputting at 1080p 60 or 1080p 120 or 1600p. See my point?

Even with PC's you can see even something 8-9x more powerful than a PS4 is maxed out. Because there is something that can already push it to it's limits and there is something coming out that it can't do.

For example, are 3x GTX Titan's not maxed out if they are trying to run Crysis 3 at ultra settings @ 5760x1080 resolution? Yep.

So keep these things in mind, because while the PS4 will have power that can be manipulated to make games look better for years...it's within certain limits, and that the PS4 like all consoles or PC's are basically maxed out on day 1.

The simple truth is the PS4's GPU/CPU are not strong enough to fully and effectively utilize 8 GB's, which of course ~2 GB's will be used for OS.

[Belking]

It doesn't really mean that much. At the end of the day it will still be mostly the same game as the last one with better textures and lighting. Gameplay wise, there will be no difference. It will still be a move, point, then shoot game.

[Minato-Namikaze]

Isnt that all FPS games?

[SephirothX21]

8gb GDDR5 RAM means less and faster loading times. Though having more objects in memory does not mean more objects being rendered at the same time. That is determined by how fast the GPU is. Frame rate is mainly influenced by CPU and GPU speed. More and more is being done on the GPU due to higher throughput and multi-threading. All skinning for animation is done in the vertex shader on the GPU. In DirectX 11, particle systems are done in the compute shader on the gpu and the output is streamed back to the cpu and then into the vertex shader through the pipeline to be drawn to the screen. More physucs now is also being done on the gpu but most collision detection is still done on the cpu. AI algorithms are also performed on the cpu. GPU speed is most important and the PS4 has a decent gpu, a weak cpu and excellent RAM. It'll be a big jump over PS3 but mainly in the frame rate and graphics departments.

[IaMs12]

I agree, they are getting old and annoying that everyone thinks that since the PS4 has 8 gigs of RAM its the next coming. Theres a lot more to a system then just RAM. My laptop can have 8 gigs of RAM but it still won't run Metro Last Light. Point is, its great and all, but focus on the system as a whole and not just the RAM. RAM itself wont run the game.

[Cryptcuzz]

That is because your laptop does not have 8 GB of GDDR5 that can also be used for both VRAM and system RAM. I get your point and all, but please do not compare a heavily modified console to a laptop as that is not fair for a console like the PS4.

[Tr10wn]

@Cryptcuzz

So if he install 8GB of GDDR5 RAM on his laptop he'll be able to play Metro Last Light? RAM is RAM either way you put it, it has little to do with performance for the game, its more for loadings, multitasking, physics ect, don't try and put the PS4 on the pedestal as the heavily modified console that it isnt, the PS4 has an APU with 8Gb of unified RAM that's it, the PS3 seems more modified to me than the PS4.

oh and i can easily compare a M17x R4 laptop with the PS4 performance wise, because it is a laptop it doesnt mean it can't be faster than the "heavily modified" PS4 lol.

[SonyNGP]

3GB? Didn't they say they used half of that?

[gameseveryday]

Here you go: http://n4g.com/news/1254639...

[SonyNGP]

Ah. Apparently, the 1.5GB articles I've seen before were rumors. Thanks!

[KrisButtar]

thanks as I was thinking the same as SonyNGP about the ram being 1.5

bubble up helpful

[PLASTICA-MAN]

You seem talking about my article lol : http://n4g.com/news/1180159...

It seems it was right for only the CPU part. Even Rashid Sayed is inaccurate and incomplete: Since PS4 RAM is shared, KZ:SF is using more than 3 GB of RAM for the GPU only, more than 1.5 GB for CPU alone and around 128 MB shared between the two. So it is around 5 GB in sum.
When I posted my article I was optimistic for PS4 long future, now I am less. If a first party studio used that much power in a launch game, what will lazy unskilled devs use? They will overheat the console with even a 2D game. They really need optimizations and official Sony middlewares othersise they will presume they reached PS4 limits very quickly. Yes PS3 and CELL processor were hard to develop for, that was a threshold befor but it had its advantages too it pushed devolopers to strive themselves and find new ways of intelligent coding and efficient optimizations they even inventee nes technics like MLAA. Developer friendly console meaning easy only leads to laziness and not feeling the urge to improve since there is no challenge. I hope the PS4 won't feel the fate if cellphones, claimed to reach limits since day one hence the need for new version each year.

[NewMonday]

@PLASTICA-MAN
"If a first party studio used that much power in a launch game, what will lazy unskilled devs use? They will overheat the console with even a 2D game"

others will need their games to work on multi-platforms and PC configurations with less power than the PS4. so practicality will force them to keep the code decent.

[Ju]

I agree with the Plastica-Man somewhat. We'll see quite some differences - at least at launch - between generic engines and something tailored to the PS4 resulting quite in some sub-bar PC ports, I believe. And history will repeat itself that optimized code will most likely run circles around UE4-and-the-likes code until they figure out to reach that level.

At the same time, good that Guerilla is pushing the envelope from the start keeping the competition on their toes.

But even they said that they are nowhere near a threshold what's possible. They used a lot what they learned from the PS3 and ported that over - with great success. But it'll take time until all this is really optimized to the HW. We'll see this, too. They are on their first iteration of code and tools. And this machine is fairly more complex than the PS3. I expect this to improve quite a bit along the line.

HSA is in it's infancy, almost like when we switched from fixed pipeline to full programmable shaders. The tech is available since a year max. And the same will happen here when people can actually play with a platform which full supports it.

I don't really care if the first game will already look awesome, tbh ;)

[JewyMcJew]

Plastica-Man, I disagree.

Great programmers will always produce great work, and lazy programmers will always produce crummy work, regardless of the hardware!

Besides, why should programmers have to spend 1/2 their time optimizing rather than building new code?

[r21]

Oh hey its gamingbolt and to my surprise not a top ten list.

[AKS]

Maybe they'll make a "Top 10 Things That Have Not Been in GamingBolt's Top 10 Lists" article next.

[Codey47]

And spread over multiple pages! Lists on one page thank you.

Back on topic:
Just as the ram speed and bandwidth is important

I need to know if the Blu-Ray drive will be a BDXL drive.
I need to know if they are implementing a SATA 6GB controller.
I suppose we'll find out more in the near future...

As we enter the next gen HD era....I'm assuming the digital downloads of titles will double or even triple in precious gigabyte space..I'm not the biggest fan of digital downloads.
Therefore will be buying the disc version 99% of the time unless the option is not available.

I'd definitely bow out if a file is 20gb plus.

[imchuckbass]

8gb ram? 16gb ram? 400000000000gb ram?

It won't make much difference if you're maxing out your cpu and gpu

The increased RAM is there to help the PS4 cope with all it's social features, such as chat, video uploading, etc etc

It won't suddenly make your games look better

[Donnieboi]

Ok it won't make games look better, but what can 8 GB's of RAM do for gameplay? More npc's? Better draw distance? What exactly? (I'm serious).

[Codey47]

For better quality textures you need ram. Loading speeds improved. More npc's, Better draw distance.

According to imchuckbass' logic the 6gb of ram on the nvidia titan is wasted opportunity.

Tbh the arm processor in the PS4 could handle the social aspects..obviously they need ram.
But I can't honestly see facebook or twitter being the biggest bandwidth hog.

[unapersson]

The ram for social features/video uploading etc. will be that which is already reserved for the OS. Everything should be available for the games.

As for what the RAM can be used for:
* Higher res textures will make games look better
* Texture caching
* Larger areas, increased draw distance
* Less loading screens because of more pre-loading of resources, not just game areas but things like inventory screens, maps etc.
* More state can be kept in RAM for individual NPCs, so they can have off-screen lives, and hopefully less spawning of enemies.
* objects and bodies can stay in the environment, so they shouldn't just disappear.
* more interactive/destructible environments and less artificial barriers.
* more flexibility to do weather, day/night cycles, seasons etc. simply because more dynamic state can be maintained.
* etc.

The one thing RAM can't do is make development of these features magically cheaper, so it's always going to be a balance between what is possible and what is affordable, but hopefully a lot of this sort of thing will be absorbed into engines.

[jmc8888]

Again you need GPU/CPU power to run those npc's and draw distance, etc.

What unapersson forgot to mention though is that for all those things ram can be used for, it MUST have the power of the GPU/CPU in order to actually do it. If there is no spare cycles than the ram goes to waste as you cannot do it. Or could, but at 10 FPS instead of 60 or 30.

You need enough ram to fully realize the power of the GPU/CPU. 8 GB's is overkill for the PS4.

But it still makes sense as 4 GB's with all they want the OS to do would be too little and 6 GB's while probably the right number is awkward to implement. Thus I understand WHY 8 GB's was used.

Plus it's obvious a bunch of tech illiterate people seem to think 8 gb's makes the system faster. I'd like to sell them some derivatives that Obama and Romney take it up the butt for.

[imchuckbass]

@Codey47

The difference is, if you own a titan, you're probably gaming at 2560x1400 or above. At extreme resolutions like this, large amounts of GDDR5 is needed, which is why it has 6gb.

This 6gb is dedicated mostly to just the GAME, because the PC has RAM modules to take care of OS, and everything else

KEY POINT ****The PS4 has unified memory, so the 8gb must take care of EVERYTHING****

For the game itself, at 1080p or below (which is what the PS4 is aiming for) you don't need that much vRAM.

The PS3 didn't get cross game chat because it didn't have enough ram. Chat, upload, and the billions of other social features the PS4 has are highly dependant on the RAM to function. They need lots of it, so that it can be done in the background whilst you're still playing your game.

[Minato-Namikaze]

They already have a secondary chip and ram reserved for that.

[Ju]

KZ uses 3GB VRAM alone to an additional ~1.5GB for everything else. Part of "everything else" is about 500MB for sounds. It utilizes the VRAM quite a bit - with "only" 1080p.

Expanding on this, more than 3.5GB is just used for data.

[stragomccloud]

I don't know why console gamers don't understand that? How does more memory automatically equate to better graphics? It is true that it does to a point; however, after that point, extra ram has no effect on the game. The extra ram is definitely for keeping the OS/and background tasks such as video capture and social networking features present in real time. Also, that CPU is definitely going to be taking some heat from the video capture.

[Minato-Namikaze]

They have a secondary chip for all OS functions

[stragomccloud]

The secondary chip is for certain background tasks such as downloading and uploading. It is not for the whole os, nor is it for video capture which needs a decent amount of grunt behind it.

[thehitman]

@ strag I believe they said the secondary chip is almost exclusively for the video capturing so your wrong. All things not gaming that chip is suppose to handle. In terms of capturing anyway that is cpu intensive and not ram intensive. Also considering that the ps3 only had 512mb of shared memory alone and they got the xmb to run smoothly minus cross game chat the ps4 wont have the OS using more than 500mb. Problem with PC gamers they are comparing their PCs with the consoles structure which you cant do because its NOT a typical PC and no PC is out on the market that is designed the same so its useless comparing. The only thing anyone would be able to do is get hands on a ps4 and do a benchmark test like people do on PCs when new hardware comes out but ofc that wont be possible anyway.

[stragomccloud]

@thehitman
Actually, Sony has only stated that it is used for various background tasks such as downloading and uploading. If it was to be used for the OS/video capture, then they would have stated so directly.

You are right about not being able to compare a console to a PC; however, you are wrong if you really believe that the OS and the encoding will be part of the 500mb OS resources.

[stuna1]

I would find it kind of hard to truthfully be able to say or believe that the cpu + gpu are being maxed out this early in the game! Even unoptimize code!

Especially considering that this is one of Sony top developers! Hell they've been known to find inventive ways of showcasing hardware power when certain developers can't even showcase what's already readily available.

The Big G are still commenting on how there is still untapped potential in the PS3, if anyone could make me a believer of that being true it them.

[stragomccloud]

Developers actually always max out the CPU/GPU with every game. However, it can take years for developers to maximize the /potential/ of a CPU/GPU, and that is why optimization is so important.

[andibandit]

Maximizing the cpu/gpu is easy.....now comes the laborious task of cutting corners.......make maps smaller...dont render stuff that the player cant see, and so on

[jmc8888]

Why? It simply means you don't understand what maxing out means.

There's maxing out in terms of what it can do overall. Yes, and the PS3 was maxed out in 2006. The 360 was maxed out in 2005. PC GPU's are maxed out the same year they come out as well.

Then there's maxing out in terms of what small things can you learn to do to max out within certain settings? That's why PS3 was maxed out and far surpassed for many years, but they could within their own limits, make games that continued to get better.

1.8 TFlops is quite easy to max out.

Crysis 3 can do it with 3 GTX Titans.

If you don't know that's 13.5 TFlops. That's about 7x more powerful than a PS4, and you can max it out.

[stuna1]

For one it was just a figure of speech, two I have never claimed to know much about PC jargon, but I do understand the progression of this generation to the next! I also understand a smaller number compared to a bigger number.

What it really comes down too is, For a PC it might be pretty easy to max a large majority of them out due to the fact that optimization is not really a major factor! If anything it's a surefire way for some to build or buy a beefier rig.

Consoles on the other hand don't have that issue for the simple fact they stay the same throughout the generation, they may get software tweeks here and there, but the hardware stays the same across the board! Thereby making optimization effective and efficient! What I play on my console, I'll also be able too play on yours also, unless of course you game on different hardware.

Can the same be said about games being equal on PC's? No I think not, because all PC's aren't equal.

[joeorc]

ABOUT WILL IT BE THE BOTTLE NECK?

I think this freaking answers that question quite well!

Once again notice:

AMD's current top-end APU only delivers around 700 GFLOPs of compute power from its CPU and GPU combined.

to put this in perspective

the PS4 will have 1.84 TF in the GPU alone! so already outpaces MORE THAN 700 by quite a large ammount!

to make the point further

We're told the PS4's processor delivers nearly 2 TFLOPs from its GPU alone. In other words, we're looking at 3X compute performance before we even get to the eight-core CPU.

http://www.engadget.com/201...

Freaking

Mark the father of "crash bandicoot" Cerny!

Already stated the Bandwidth 176GByte/s bandwidth on chip so to many that question that ,think there will be major or very large bottle necks are going to be in for a shock.

There can be bottle necks in everything but to think there will be major bottleneck problems like there was for the PS3 well im doubting that very much because of 3r party developer's involvement in the PS4's development and design.

[USEYOURFIST]

Agree 100% i think alot of people are just comparing ps4 to amds current chips and forgetting/ignoring the fact that the chips being used have been heavily customised to improve performance and fit sonys needs

[stuna1]

Very good read! But did you read the comment section? Comedy gold! Those thinking there won't be a marked improve over this gens consoles, well I don't know what to tell you, but I think it's pretty telling if you ask me! For example going from 400 Giga Flop to 1.8 Tera Flops speaks volumes, even though there will be those who say it not a true guage of power.

[DJ]

The 8 GB of RAM just means that developers won't be struggling to squeeze everything into memory and wasting time doing a lot of low level optimizations. It's like having an awesome huge playground to work with. =]

The CPU and GPU are both pretty powerful, but the fact that they can communicate with each other much faster than PCIe 2.0 ports (what PCs use), helps out a lot.

[hesido]

What DJ said. Streaming is so advanced now, we have UC3, the Last of Us on less than 512MB of split RAM. However, having so much RAM will allow more creative freedom when designing levels, and time required to fine-tune streaming will be better spent on other optimizations. That's how more RAM will benefit, more than anything.

[Bladesfist]

Even though moving from PCIe 2 to 3 makes no difference to performance meaning that the port is not a bottleneck. Maybe you can max out PCIe 2 with 4 titans but I doubt it.

[hesido]

It's not a bottleneck as devs avoid it, e.g. they do not use direct compute not only because of bandwidth issues, but because of latency problems:
18th and 21st slides show this issue:
http://www.slideshare.net/z...

This will hopefully change with the next gen consoles and devs will be more likely to use those features at least on the consoles.

[HeavenlySnipes]

More stuff on screen (characters, objects etc)
Better textures (larger and better quality)
Better AI handling
Larger levels
Smaller loading times

I don't know why people are acting like the 8gb of fast ram doesn't mean much. :/

[ThatCanadianGuy514]

Certain people are working overtime on Damage control.Trying to downplay just how significant this really is.

Really, more ram is all i ever wanted for new consoles.I'm perfectly fine with where graphics are at this point.I just want more of what you listed.Especially massive, massive levels and zero loading.

Can't wait.

[windblowsagain]

Ram sandwich.

Ram is sweet, gpu is sweet and cpu is sweet.

It's pure sugar.

With what was produced on the PS3 still looks amazing.

GT5
UNCHARTED1,2,3
KILLZONE2,3

I'm sure the PS4 will be just fine.

[GABRIEL1030]

Nice job Sony. The 360 was hunted for the PS3 in sales, the PS4 is ( in theory) most powerfull that Xbox infinity and Microsoft cant upgrade the new machine because it is already in production. The Sony's surprising conference was stunning; because they revealed an innovative, powerfull and friendly system, with an amazing RAM memory and an integrated CPU/GPU.

PS3 only has 256 MB RAM DDR3 memory and games like Bioshock Infinite looks amazing and there isnt much difference with PC. The PS4 will be almost 32 times more powerfull that PS3, because uses the super-fast GDDR5. A new era of gaming graphics is waiting for us.

[ScepticTankAvenger]

Everyone is forgetting the key thing: Optimization. Let's see how the PS4 and its games work alongside the games before we say anything.

[Drainage]

well its still 30 fps so im guessing this whole 8ram shit is overrated

[one2thr]

Because its the first game to feature real time ray tracing on a console, and on top of that its a launch title...

And i also believe that they mentioned that they didnt use the full capablities of the cpu/gpu and its compute units as well...

so yeah thats something to take into consideratio...

Via Vita

[Bathyj]

No, 60 FPS is overrated. All that matters in the framerate is stable and doesnt dip. A rock solid 30fps for a shooter with heavy controls like Killzone is fine.

Think of it this way, push the button in a 60fps game, it takes 0.016 of a second to register. Push the button in a 30fps game it takes 0.032, a whole 0.016 slower. Does that amount of time even matter? A car driving 160kpm cant even travel a meter in 1/60th of a sec.

Once again, were not talking about Virtua Fighter here. The framerate suits KZ's style perfectly and 60fps is not necessary. I'm more happy about the extra clarity that 1080p and better textures will bring. Just my opinion.

[hesido]

60fps is underrated, not overrated. It's not only about tighter, more-responsive controls. It's the fluidity of action, butter smooth camera pans, something that a first person view always benefits from.

Please, do take a look at the following link and check out the video files, and see how a 60fps presentation trumps 30fps (although faked, in this instance, like the TV sets with motion interpolation - I should remind that since the intermediary frames are faked, there will be some artefacting - not on a native 60fps game tho, also disregard 15 to 60fps conversion):
http://and.intercon.ru/rele...

[banjadude]

So... wait, if RAM wasn't that much of a concern, wouldn't the developers Sony approached have mentioned a bigger emphasis on GPU/CPU then?

I mean we all know Sony went out of their way to approach as many/varied developers as possible...

PS: I'm asking a general question, no need to disagree me to oblivion.

[joeorc]

"AMD's current APU are not very powerful at all, they go in low end laptops. can they even max out Left for Dead 2?

how about comparing to GPUs"

Think you are being Cute right? Ok lets go there you really want to do this, ok we will... People really want this ok your going to get this but do not cry over these fact's because its the truth.

first you pointed out this:

a 7850 has 1.76 TFLOPS, these cost $160

HD7850: 1.76 TFLOPS, Engine Clock 860Mhz, 16 Compute Units (1024 Stream Processors), 64 Texture Units , 2 GDDR5 with 153.6GB/s memory bandwidth = $160.00

So right off the bat: JUST LOOKING AT NEW egg WHAT THIS CARD WILL COST YOU

http://www.newegg.com/Produ...

$199.99

is in line with what you stated:

it is also:

HD7850: 1.76 TFLOPS, Engine Clock 860Mhz, 16 Compute Units (1024 Stream Processors), 64 Texture Units , 2GB GDDR5 with 153.6GB/s memory bandwidth = $160.00

now let us take a look at the PS3's GPU

PS4 GPU: 1.84 TFLOPS, Engine Clock 800Mhz, 18 Compute Units (1154 Stream Processors), 72 Texture Units , 8GB GDDR5 with 176.0GB/s memory bandwidth (shared with CPU)

WHEN IS THE HELL $160.00+ GPU low end? oh when your building a gaming rig when mainly you want to push the elitism of the Hardware!

everyone knows you can get higher than a console with PC no doubt, but the fact that unlike the PC the PS4 has no PCI express port it has to go through talking to a south bridge. Has a very low OS overhead AND UNLIKE THE PC IS MAINLY DEDICATED TO GAMING!

but for people to sit there and say that the ps4's GPU that soundly beats a current priced $160.00+ dedicated GPU is low end for a Game console ALL I CAN SAY IS...wow

AND THAT CARD IS $199.00 FOR 2GB of GDDR5 while the PS4 has access to 8GB.

and people are calling the PS4's GPU a low end..what is freaking wrong with these gamer's today, what are they expecting for a game console? the fact the PS4's SOC GPU has on board all on the same die a GPU that soundly beats a over $160.00 DEDICATED GPU CARD FOR A expando card that has to go through a PCI EXPRESS AND THIS PS4's GPU DOES NOT HAVE TO IS ALL ON BOARD CHIP LEVEL. AND PEOPLE ARE SAYING THIS IS LOW END FOR A GAME CONSOLE?

Really?

[Bladesfist]

ermm, Something is low end when the hardware manafacturer says so. It is a buzzword like AAA with no real set in stone defenition.

first number is series or generation.

second number
9 - high end
8 - mid range
7- low end

last two numbers
50 - lower end
70 - mid range
80 - high end

7850 = lower mid range.

[joeorc]

stop it ..just please stop it,

does that 7850 have 18 compute unit's? that is a :no!

does that 7850 have more than : 72 Texture Units? that answer is once again a big : no!

does that 7850 have more than 176.0GB/s bandwidth that the CPU can use just as well as the GPU? that answer is once again a big fat : No!

so why the hell are you and other's trying so d@mn hard to class this like a standard 7850 when its not?

[Bladesfist]

@Joeorc I never said it was a 7850. Infact I did not mention the PS4 at all. I was talking about the 7850 because you said "when the hell is a $160 GPU low end". It's not low end, it is lower mid range. I was just trying to clear up how tiers work :/

[PCpower]

Not that any of you consolers will listen but here it goes:

1) The PCI express buss is NOT a bottleneck for PC's because the texture data sent over the buss is highly compressed. A 3 GB texture primitive is compressed to about 1.5 GB when sent over the PCI express buss that is at 8 gigabytes/sec transfer rate. Our CPU's take the raw data from the game engine and do the compressing and then send this data down the PCI express buss to where the GPU uncompresses the data to be sent to the video card's RAM buffer. That is part of what the video card driver is for that is used for our video cards.

CPU's can do this data compressing very fast with zero performance hit on the operating system use because this compression is done with SSE instructions that all X86 processors have had for over 14 years now (Pentium 3 had it in 1999). This is a SSE=Streaming SIMD Extensions type instruction which stands for "Single-Instruction-Multi -Data" and its main purpose is for digital signal processing and graphics processing. In fact, AMD came up with this concept first, called 3Dnow (introduced in 1998) and then in 1999, Intel, not wanting to be outdone, introduced SSE that even AMD had to finally use.

2) The reason why video card RAM is not some huge number is because there is only as much RAM as what the GPU can render onto a screen with all the max features turned on. Any extra RAM is just wasted money spent that the GPU would not be able to use without severe performance penalties. That is why the Nvidia Titan has 6 GB of RAM and the AMD HD7970 only has 3 GB of RAM. Titan is more powerful and therefore, can render texture data onto higher resolutions (up to 4K!!!) with little performance penalty.

3) The PS4 has 8 GB of RAM because it is a shared system that is both system RAM and and Video buffer RAM. Being a large amount of RAM does not mean more performance. What it does mean is that more of the game can be stored into the RAM without having to goes crazy on the hard drive for data every so often. I believe the really neat feature that for having this much RAM is for instant on feature. I believe the PS4 will have a feature in where a whole game level is loaded into the RAM that when you put the PS4 into sleep mode, it keeps the game data stored into RAM so that when you start the PS4 up again you get back to where you left off instantly without having to go through ridiculous load screens. This is similar to putting a PC into hibernate mode that dumps all the data into RAM so that the PC will have an instant on type feel to it.