*** The Official Playstation 4 (PS4) Thread ***

Anyone understand what they mean by flexible memory then? Sounds like RAM cache between a game and a HDD page file to me. But why would a game need to use more than 4.5Gb+512Mb in RAM? Sounds quite over-engineered to me...

ps3ud0 :cool:
 
I personally cannot see how you can complain about having over 4GB for games. They will only be splitting it to make sure everything is silky smooth.

I will probably end up with a PS4 around the launch, with the PS3 becoming the living room blu-ray player. :p
 
Ryan-3 said:
I personally cannot see how you can complain about having over 4GB for games. They will only be splitting it to make sure everything is silky smooth.
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I'd be inclined to agree, makes sense to reserve some additioanl RAM for future features and OS updates & use if that's what they have in mind. I can't see any reason why if in 5 years time it's still not being used they couldn't release another GB or so back to games as a mid life resource boost.

The only thing that concerns me a little is the talk of "virtual memory" which in FreeBSD (as well as Windows generally) tends to refer to paging memory out to disk. http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/design-44bsd/overview-memory-management.html

Not a bad thing in itself but it might indicate the OS will actually take up the full 3-4GB allocated to it from the start. Again, not necessarily a bad thing if the memory is used well. Much like Windows, non used memory doesn't help anything, much better it's used to increase response, caching etc. Perhaps something like the constant live recording hits the memory hard? It could be to allow for fast switching to apps though i guess much like Xbox One looks lie it will do?
 
Macro said:
I'd be inclined to agree, makes sense to reserve some additioanl RAM for future features and OS updates & use if that's what they have in mind. I can't see any reason why if in 5 years time it's still not being used they couldn't release another GB or so back to games as a mid life resource boost.
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That actually sounds pretty plausible.
 
I assume that some memory will probably be reserved for the OS, IO, PS4 Eye, Remote Play, the Share functionality and live streaming and maybe download caching and sleep/hibernation/suspend play etc.

All that functionality will eat into the RAM.
 
Macro said:
I'd be inclined to agree, makes sense to reserve some additioanl RAM for future features and OS updates & use if that's what they have in mind. I can't see any reason why if in 5 years time it's still not being used they couldn't release another GB or so back to games as a mid life resource boost.
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Why not do that from the start though, why limit devs like that? "Hey valued customers, great news! We've been keeping back some of the resources we could have used for five years!" :confused:
 
Shamikebab said:
Why not do that from the start though, why limit devs like that? "Hey valued customers, great news! We've been keeping back some of the resources we could have used for five years!" :confused:
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True, I was only thinking in the case that they think they might use it for future extra features and it turns out the don't have to.
 
Shamikebab said:
Why not do that from the start though, why limit devs like that? "Hey valued customers, great news! We've been keeping back some of the resources we could have used for five years!" :confused:
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pretty much this

rather than have RAM sitting there doing nothing allocate it to the OS or split it between OS and games.

therefore in the future they can do a firmware update which reduces the RAM usage of the OS and free up more for games if they feel too much is being used by the OS or if developers feel they need more.
 
But then remember that the left over ram gets split again into GPU and CPU based functions, both saturating the same bandwith and using the same amount of 4gb available.

Seriously, if the PS3 os is 50mb im sure they could have made a good enough PS4 OS for 100mb and left the rest, but then im always left thinking they should have split out the gpu and cpu ram from the beginning with separate ram.
 
The 8GB ram is removable, similar to how the hard drive can be upgraded - it can be upgraded to 16gb in the future.

Thats from a sauce - be Eurogamers top news tomorrow. They wont tell you what sauce tho.
 
current summary of the sitch(frm gaf thread)for those who cant be arsed going through pages(like me)

Originally Posted by Aquamarine

1) Digital Foundry / Eurogamer claims in an article that 4.5 GB is available for development at launch, with 512 MB / 1 GB as flexible memory

2) Various, unbanned GAF insiders have said "That article is incorrect"

3) Thuway, Famousmortimer, BruceLeeRoy, and Verendus (all unbanned) have all heard "The memory situation on PS4 is ideal and has exceeded expectations in every way." That should mean that games at launch won't be affected by any kind of restrictions in place.

4) Thuway stated that some games currently in development are using 6 GB of RAM, but also implied some form of RAM restrictions at launch is not completely out of the equation

5) Kagari (has connections to Square-Enix) also agreed with the 6 GB claim

6) VBlank Entertainment (Retro City Rampage) has denied that Sony is reserving 3.5 GB of RAM for the OS

7) NOTHING is confirmed until either Sony states something or launch RAM allocations are revealed in some way
 
Sony only figured out that they could put 8gb in their machine a few months back why would they suddenly had it over to developers who have been happily putting games together with half of that when their OS writers haven't had chance to see what can be done with it?
 
kitch9 said:
Sony only figured out that they could put 8gb in their machine a few months back why would they suddenly had it over to developers who have been happily putting games together with half of that when their OS writers haven't had chance to see what can be done with it?
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It's not hard to send a communication out to the developers saying they have more RAM to play with, it's not going to make any launch game particularly better by using it, but may allow developers to be a little bit less strict with how much is being used.

In regards to the OS, I guess Sony have a vision of what they want to accomplish with their OS and have made the decision that they do not need to extra RAM to be able to provide the user experience they want.

Or I may be completely wrong, who knows! :p I just want a new console, roll on November!
 
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