"As of today much more powerful GPUs than the 7850(which the PS4 is coming loaded with) cant really make use of more than 2Gigs of ram."

Are you really comparing a PC architechture and software, including games, made for that architechture (to fit billions of different combinations of GPU, RAM and CPU types) to a single console's? I mean haven't we passed this stage yet?

Decrypt, your resolution isn't 3x 1080p. It IS 1080p. Your width is 3x 1920, though, but that's vertical lines, not horizontal.

Lol at people disagreeing on GDDR 5 prices, specially when i have linked the differences on hardware being sold with even faster GDDR 5 than the one going to release on PS4.

People desperately want to believe GDDR 5 is something new and expensive lol.

First, we need to really clean up with the myth there are cards "much more" powerful than the 7850.

First, 1.84TF is somewhere between the 7850 and 7870.

Second, each vendor has one (!) series of cards which is faster than this. AMDs 79xx series (7950/7970/7990 they are all the same but vary in frequency and number of cores) and NVidia with everything above the GT660 (Titan is a 680?).

So, please, the 78xx family is a quite capable GPU. Not the final product in the line, but it doesn't need a nuclear reactor as a power supply either.

Second, the amount RAM does not only define resolution. E.g. See KZ Shadow Fall uses vertex/texture instancing to model that scene. A GPU still needs to render those vertices; but instancing is used to actually save memory. It does not make the GPU faster (still needs to transform each array for each pass). Now, with more memory you could actually give each build its own vertices. Make them more individual. Same with textures.

Would it increase resolution? Probably not. But this world in KZ Shadow Fall could contain way more unique buildings and it would not impact performance.

Third: This is shared memory. This is a picture book architecture to use the CPU and GPU in combination. Nothing like this has been done on a PC. The impact this could have cannot be used as a baseline what current PC games can do. It opens up new possibility which you can never do on PC (not with 6GB GDDR - since this is hardly accessible from the CPU on a PC). But e.g. share vertex buffers between GPU and CPU; use the CPU to do animations while the GPU does physics. Things like that. We just don't know what's feasible just yet.

The only bottleneck (Do you know what that actually is?) is that, all those compute units have to share this enormous bandwidth. It might stall one unit if another one allocates the bus for too long. But other than that, there is no bottleneck in this machine; it certainly isn't the amount of RAM.

The article is useless, because it certainly doesn't analyze anything but uses simple math with theoretical numbers and the outcome is a trivial multiplier. I guess we all know that. I'd be curious to see the GDDR impact on the CPU, for example. A little be more in depth. This article is really shallow. But then, it gives a nice overview.

@decrypt

Either you did not read the article or you do not understand its contents. They compared the bit rates between cpu, gpu and memory on the ps3 to the theoretical bit rates on the ps4. These are the "bottleneck" speeds you are referring to and quite frankly look pretty beast even by PC standards.

10 years from now, we will be looking back at this and think "How did we make it all work with such limited resources?". Technology is amazing but it really does evolve at a pace that makes longevity of a single device seem trivial to the LTE of technology as a whole.

@Ju

Take your common sense elsewhere, I want to lauch at internet wannabe experts! /sarcasm

Seriously now, very good point, the main thing people are missing here is that all this memory is for the APU (i.e. shared by CPU and GPU), completelly diferent from the way PC games are developed.

And I would also add to the point those "no load" functions and all that instant connectivity, those things are going to be memory hogs needing a lot of alocation.

And what about Gaikai, we don't know if, on PS4, it will remain the pure stream service we already know on PCs that's usually unreliable (because ISPs are unreliable) or if they'll try a stream to memory and play it from there approach... So it can also be a huge reason to have more memory.

Everything about those 8GB of faster RAM points not at a marketing stunt, but at making more memory availlable so devs can use it in new ways.

sony fans take everything sony does as gospel and brand new news...

people clamoring over GDDR5 memory when they know nothing about it.... which ever comments have the most disagrees = the un-deluded truth.

@fatstarr

Well if you know so much about the matter why don't you make an in dept analysis including the differences, advantages and disadvantages of both types of memory as well as real world examples of situations were each may come in to play and how could those hurdles can be overcome by the developers?

@bishop-br
The video card's GGDR5 memory is used when a PC is rendering the video game while the system memory is resevered for background applications and OS.

Say for example you are playing a game that uses about 1.5gb of ram and you have a video card that has 2gb of GDDR5 RAM. Any game-related data transfered between the video card, CPU, and Hard Drive will be handled by the much high-bandwidth GDDR5 RAM while the system memory still retains the background programs.

If you don't believe me then launch a game from a PC with high-end video card (assuming that you have one), then start task manager. You should see the amount memory the game is taking up, but not see a difference in amount physical memory being used. That's because task manager only measures your system memory.

Furthermore, APUs are nothing new to begin with. AMD has released their Llano and Trinity APU along with the coexisting FM1 and FM2 socket for these chipsets back in 2011 and 2012. The PS4 has a beefier version of the A-10 Trinity from the sound of things, quite possibly AMD's FX Processor with intergrated 7000 graphics.

@Morpheuzpr why waste my time? ive done things like that in the past dissecting why a pc with a gtx 260, 4gb of ram and a dual core Pentium could beat a ps3 in terms of graphics capability.

I even did an in-depth analysis, backed with logic and evidence. only to get 100s of disagrees to something proven. its like that for every pro Sony article when you shed some truth in.

in all honesty, I rather not waste my time explaining things in detail. people are gonna be ignorant so I let them be ignorant, until their favorite company feeds them some shit that they then take as the word of the land.

ps4's specs wont be put to use until 2014/2015. no dev can maximize those specs and claim this project "pushes the graphical boundaries," the project would need at least 2 years of dev time. and even if it did, it could then be optimized, remade and rebuilt to be better than it is. but devs... meh thats not gonna happen.

people were in a land of delusion thinking ps3 graphics look like a godsend and the wiius are trash... then at the flick of a switch ps3 looks ugly because ps4 is here.

I could literally write a thesis from my 6 years spent on n4g observing the behavior of the users and the comments.

you can put an ssd in the ps3 now. I doubt they will offer a model with ssd included, not until the prices get closer per gig to spinning disks

When they say 8GB - they mean 8192MB

you can never have enough ram, 8gb in 2013 is the equivalent to 1gb back in 2005.

everything changes but nothing changes.

"640K ought to be enough for anybody."- billgates 1981.

The next Xbox issaid to have 36 GB of memory so the price short from ram should not be as apocalyptic as a 64 GB kit. With the PS6 coming in with 30 GB, the RAM should not be what makes the Xbox cost so much more. Of course without Microsoft subsidizing the console the actual MSRPs may diverge wildly.

32GB of DDR5 still costs in the neighborhood of $250-300 for the super cheap stuff, $450 for the name brand. That's what entire consoles used to cost. That eats up a huge chunk of the budget that was supposed to be paying for the CPU and GPU, which means that the cost of this system will be driven farther north than previously anticipated, and it was already expected to be above $1k. Releasing a console in the middle of an industry-wide RAM shortage is stupid. Even GPU makers are scaling back production because of it, and focusing their remaining stock and production towards selling to datacenters. Some memory manufacturers have dropped consumer products entirely and now only make chips for datacenters. Nvidia is scaling back its consumer GPUs, no longer offering the super series of some GPUs, for instance.

For MS to pull the trigger now means releasing at a very risky price point against a PS5 that is simply on fire, even outselling the Switch 2 in many cases. It's coming at a time where the Xbox brand is at its weakest ever, and consumer confidence in the brand is at absolute rock bottom. Nobody wants to drop $1500 on an Xbox when they can play the same games on their PS5 Pro for half the price already, or even cheaper if using a base PS5. Only a select few enthusiasts will bother to fork out that kind of money... by the time this product reaches a price point where it can have mass-market appeal, the PS6 will be dropping... but by that time, RAM prices will be dropping, so PS6 will now be able to, assuming it does delay until 2029, invest more into upgrading its architecture over the previously released spec, invest in more RAM than the new Xbox will have, a better CPU & GPU, etc.

As for nobody saying PS6 will launch in 2029, nobody said it would come sooner either, not officially, at least. As of now all we have to go by are rumors based on internal information that could easily change at a moment's notice. Even the design of the chip itself could change as it has not yet entered into production. They could easily opt to include a few more CUs, more RAM, more CPU cores, etc. between now and when it does officially enter production. So, MS could drop a new Xbox now, but it wouldn't be wise, at all, for them to do so if they plan on even holding a candle agains the juggernaut that will be PS6. PS5 will most likely mop the floor with it due to its price point alone.

And that's assuming MS even gives the green light to start manufacturing the console to begin with. We'll see in the coming months if production even happens. Microsoft's shareholders damn sure aren't going to be willing to subsidize anything at all after they just dumped $100b into buying game publishers, expecting to see a ROI, and not seeing it anywhere near as fast as they'd hoped, which is why we're now playing Xbox games on PS5.

As for MS sitting on RAM, they are sitting on some, but Xbox is sitting on none. Microsoft knows good and well they will make far more money putting that RAM into datacenters than they ever would putting it into a console that is already at a huge disadvantage before it even launches, and has little hope of generating a lot of sales.