How important is ram?

How important is ram?
Latest rumor mill is the switch will be at 4 GB or half that of the current competition but double the wii u. Same source that got a bunch of shit about switch right months before the reveal.

Does this mean multiplatform titles will perform worse on the switch if it ever gets popular enough for companies to consider porting titles over?
What's the significance of RAM and what can and can't be done with games?

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Not that important these days since you can just download more if you need it.

This

One thing to note is that PS4 and Xbone games can only use 4 GB of RAM.

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Yeah reading some comments it's like half the ram is used for some other shit but the other half is for gaming.

Wouldn't something similar occur with the switch? A chunk of the ram dedicated to other shit as well?

Reading through nintendolife comments about it


Is this true? Thanks to the cartridges it won't need nearly as much RAM as the PS4 or XBOX1?

That depends on how the system works. Wii U only used 1gb for it's system functions. And the other gig for games.

Given how the system appears to be, I don't believe it'll do anything more complicated than what the Wii U does. So a realistic scenario could be it uses 3gb for games.

Linus Tech Tips recently did a performance test of Battlefield one with different amounts of RAM and VRAM. It made absoultely no difference at all since games are now programmed so badly that they can't take advantage of system resources.

This was on PC, but consoles now have very similar architechture so the same principles apply.

How big levels can be without loading zones, and how much shit you can put in one area.
If you manage to listen to all of the Bayonetta commentary, Kamiya mentions spots in the game where enemy placement and level design compromises had to be made due to memory limits.

Very. For what Nintendo wants to do, though, 4 GB should be enough. It's basically a handheld anyway. The only possible power boost is that, if it's underclocked when mobile (for temperature reasons) it can be back to normal clock when docked (assuming the dock has a fan).

5GB, actually.

Less important than that in a PC given that consoles tend not to have much/any overheads.

4GB should be fine, any more is a bit of a luxury for devs and gives a bit more freedom when it comes to anything the console can or does do that isnt just playing a game.

Suppose we had disc and catridge based versions of the same game. The only reason RAM would be changed in one version vs. the other is due to changes in code the developers made in order to compensate for the slow read times of disc-based storage (or utilize the faster read times of cartridge-based storage).

Cartridges were basically the SSD at the time of the N64 when compared to disc-based media. They could be read from so fast you could essentially use them as a RAMdisk without issue. The same stuff still applies more-or-less to cartridges vs. discs nowadays, although obviously the specs on both technologies have changed quite a bit.

Nowadays? I don't think a few GB of RAM is going to make a huge difference, except for AAA nightmares that somehow manage to waste GB of RAM they don't need in their stupidity, or if Nintendo decides to make a nightmare of a kernel OS that eats up 2GB of RAM at all times while the console is running.

We'll see.

RAM usage, is what I meant.

The historical disadvantage of cartridges was that they allowed much less data (per volume) than optical discs. But with data storage advances, and unnecessarily large optical formats like Blu-ray, that disadvantage is basically gone.

Yep. Didn't mention it since I figured it was obvious.

y-you too

No, not really. Nowadays, there is a huge disparity between RAM bandwidth and HDD/SSD bandwidth. The disparity is even worse when you consider GDDR5 instead of DDR3. So unless they are using some really crazy cartridges, it won't alleviate the RAM situation.

With that said, I think the Switch might actually have 8GB of RAM in the consumer version. Why? Well, they put 128MB in the 3DS, while the handheld it is closest in performance to, the PSP, had 32MB. And they put 2GB of RAM in the Wii U, when it is basically slightly better 360/PS3-tier hardware, and those had 512MB of RAM. I think they realize that being stingy on RAM is a good way to fuck yourself over in the long run, because it heavily limits the OS features you can add on later.

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Do third-party developers avoid Nintendo out of memories of how bad they were treated in the past? Or does Nintendo still not even try to court them? It's both, isn't it.

Poor treatment/experiences working with Nintendo is almost certainly the reason. Remember that everyone in the west has to deal with Nintendo of America, not Nintendo of Japan.

Probably that mixed with the fact that Ninty makes them work on way different hardware which means it won't be as easy to port their games over. Plus they'll have to take time out (usually) to add some gimmick because Ninty will want it in, so they just dont feel the time they spend will be worth it

You mean EA, Ubisoft, Microsoft and other great companies known for their popular games on Xbox and Playstation?

very

have fun with your load times faggots.

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Has more to do with the market share than anything else.
Fucking Wii got CoD ports despite having piss poor attach rates and PS2 tier hardware.

Have fun with your laser disc media

Even N64 and DS games have loading times m8
Your cartridge R/W speed isn't going to beat a SSD.

I honestly think a lot of it was circumstance, after a certain point.

The gamecube has some support, but it was the disc size that probably kept a lot of people away. Wii not moving forward in terms of power killed any chances for serious support outside of unique titles. Wii U was a big mixture of different issues, but them releasing it too late and difficulty porting were some of the major ones.

I'm a tiny bit hopeful for the switch, since the Pro and scorpio are basically going to extend the life of this generation. Third party will still be targeting the standard consoles for development. All the switch needs to do is just meet a few requirements and it'll work itself out.

I don't trust Rodgers, I think she just compiles existing rumors and puts them into one go.

It saddens me that they don't optimize their games, but still fuck me about and demand I have 8GB of RAM, which is just fucking trashed. I swear they do it and get a cut from the hardware manufacturers.


I think she just keeps spouting shit and when something hits the mark, the rest gets deleted or forgotten, while she gets everyone giving her attention and money.

Jesus does anyone code anymore?

Nigger we are comparing cartridges and laser discs when it comes to ram usage. Are you telling me that there is no difference between loading time of cartridges and laser discs? Yeah cartridges have loading times, they are just substantially lower than discs and require less ram.

Have you been living under a rock? Games nowadays are 100GB and above. Every single game is going to be installed on a hard disc making your comparison with discs obsolete.

Which is why it was the N64 which needed a RAM expansion and not the PS1
Do you know a single thing you are talking about?

I stand by the fact that N64 had less loading times. I don't know how much of today's games installation requirements are a necessity to avoid loading times, VS how much would be needed if using physical media.

I don't know. Does the switch look like it's trying to compete with Cable and Satelite services?

Yep. Now instead of loading times during gameplay we have a 3 hour long instalation process followed by a 39 gig patch download, followed by the instalation process of that download. and then by the time it's finished the OS needs a system update.

I'm not much of a Holla Forums guy (especially compared to some of the anons in this thread), so don't hesitate to call me a retard and bully me if I sound dumb by asking, but aren't there different "types" of RAM ? Like, DDR4 and DDR5 aren't the same thing, some shit like that… if it were 4GB of "better" ram, then wouldn't that be somehow like having a lot more of the "lower quality" RAM ?
Polite sage as apology for my lack of knowledge

RAM or VRAM? Holla Forums would generally tell you that you only need 4-8GB of RAM when building a PC. In my opinion, 8-16GB is best (for wangblows).

Really it depends how lightweight the Operating System is. Many Linux distros & Android don't need much RAM. But on a console, assuming it's shared RAM with the GPU & has no dedicated VRAM, you're going to want far more than that especially with turd party devs being hopelessly shitty as they are.

Power architecture is hard to port to. That's it, nothing else.

Yes, there are different types of RAM. I don't know enough to really say any more than that, though. The only one I remember hearing about recently was EDRAM, of which the Xbox One uses a little (I think for caching).

The Xbox 360 was PowerPC, too, though.

No you don't understand. Nintendo used some kind of Power architecture, not PowerPC or whatever the Xbox 360 used. They're still different enough to make porting difficult, but not impossible. Hell, I'd bet the Wii ports of CoD were based on the 360 versions.

I've always heard that the Wii and Wii U used PowerPC chips. Do you have a link or something?

So, theoretically, even if they indeed only used 4GB, this could still in a way be actually more than the current generation ?

On PC, where they don't bother compressing audio and other things. BD disc based games for consoles are still under that since dual layer discs only hold 50 GB. I don't think any games have been made with BDXL yet.

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Microsoft and sony have bigger pockets to ween off of in the courting process. Even when that backfires spectacularly like all those Japanese 360 games that went to PS3 the moment the deal ended, it still gives them some advantage.

I don't give a shit what problems Ubisoft had wtih Nintendo. The stunt they pulled with Rayman legends that fucked over the dev team and their own consumers made them the bad guys in this.

So think of the inside of a computer like a library.

You ask the librarian (CPU) to do stuff for you, get information, sort information, do stuff with information. She has to go to the bookshelves (ROM, like a disc or cartridge) to pull books (information) off the shelf. She has to have somewhere to open and read those books though, like a nice big table (RAM). Think of her little cart as cached memory (so your core i7 with three levels of cache is like a three part-baddass cart of serious librarians).

So if her bookshelves are nice and orderly, and don't require a ladder or anything (cart vs disc), then it isn't such a big deal to clear space on the table and pull new books down. It DOES become an issue if you want to pull down more books at once than you have table space, though, so big games that need a lot of RAM (open world games, etc) will still have issues and will have to do loading/paging tricks to get around this.

TL;DR
Yes RAM is important, even for disc based games. The Big N could be shooting itself in the foot…again.

The Wii was similar, Power PC based but not outright Power PC.

Some types of RAM are more expensive than others, and this is ultimately a consumer device, so they'll probably use something tried, tested, and cheap. It's not going to be faster than a PS4, but I don't think anyone expects it to be–it's a dockable handheld, after all.


???
This doesn't indicate that the Wii or Wii U don't use PowerPC, unless I'm reading it very wrong.

We were talking about CPU architecture not power consumption, dingus

Huh. Never knew that. I guess Nintendo never published the full specs? Thanks for the information, user.

My roomate has his XB1 unplugged most of the time because of this.
This has been the most irritating generation.

Wasn't it great that Ace Combat 6 was ported to PS3?
;W;

You don't have a 360?
Don't you want to dance with the angels?

Really in my humble opinion hardware specs doesn't matter at all.
Unless it has 4.88 inch screen with 240p resolution like in 3DSXL.
Give me what games will be on this system and how is compatibility with other Nintendo consoles. Only info about hardware I need after trailer is how much it will cost.

Imagine if ASUS was a western country and how much butthurt that tweet would have caused if made today.

Glorious.

So far nintendo said they wouldn't sell the console at a sale, and usually every image/trailer/etc. they show of their games end up the same way on their console, so we can expect what gameplay they showed at E3 of Breath of the Wild to be very close to what we'd get on wii U (apparently it'll have a hard time staying at 60fps, but perhaps they'll have fixed that by the release), and potentially some of the most beautiful parts of the trailers to be from the switch version, which we can assume will look much better than the wii u's.

Namefagging belongs on >>>/cuckchan/

Also, I'm pretty sure Zelda BoTW is locked to 30fps, and is struggling to maintain that 30fps on Wii U, not 60fps

Yep. (Frame-rate display starts around 2:13)

RAM is important, but 4GB is more than enough for most things you'll try to do, though you also need to subtract the amount of memory the OS will be using.
Although I don't mean to say having more for a dedicated gaming system wouldn't be great. You'd just see most devs using it to be lazy rather than putting it to good use.

To give an idea of memory usage:
A game that manages a ton of enemies may use more memory (for handling entities) than one with far less. But that can differ wildly depending on how complex each entity and their related structures are, and thus how much memory taken up for each.
The hundred little guys following you in the tree in TTYD may use less memory than a handful of enemies in some action games, for example
If differs even more depending on what the programmer wants to make a memory problem or a computational problem. Do I want this AI companion to store the position of the player, or will I continuously pass this information to the related functions every frame?
You need to strike a balance between efficient resource usage and convenience for yourself as a programmer.

Of course most of the garbage devs these days can't be bothered to use memory efficiently or even fix their memory leaks.
And beside laziness, some have to be actively fighting against common sense to waste the memory they do.

This nigger speaks the truth. Few games use more than 2 gigs of RAM, let alone 4. The issue I see is that it's 4 gigs of SHARED RAM. Because that design decision worked out so well for the PS4/Xbone and totally didn't cause them to perform worse than equivalent PCs or anything.
DDR=/=GDDR

For an uncultured profane like me, mind explaining what this implies ?

The main difference is that GDDR is specifically designed and ergo optimised to be used with graphics processors and the operations that they perform as opposed to DDR which is general purpose. It's a similar principle as RISC vs CISC processing.

DDR can do more shit but does it slowly, GDDR is really only meant to do relatively few things, but does it really fast.

Adding onto you, most mobile devices today have 2 to 4 GBs of RAM (Apple devices even have less). What lets most of them work well is usually good RAM management by the OS (aside from a few Android builds) that keeps commonly used assets in the RAM cache while removing less used things, with varying degrees of aggressiveness. There's also the question of what the OS itself eats up and uses and with Nintendo it is usually a pretty small footprint because they tend to not have the whole system OS active at the same time as your game (think with the Wii and Wii U, you actually need to boot back into the home menu after using the home button in a game and with the Wii U you only have basic extra functions available if you press the home button that are available in the RAM). Compared with other consoles that typically keep their full OS running along with the game.

Nigger console games have 30 gigs of day 1 patches

i dont recall exactly but one of the last games i played was gobbling 5gigs, i think it was DaS3

I want to fuck that cat.

I said few games, not no games. Witcher 3 is also a memory hog since I've seen it go up to like 7 gigs.

I see… thanks a lot hun !

Kill yourself.

Ram is generally more important on Pc when you are multitasking, and considering Nintendo has their games running oblivious to the OS I can't imagine it being different now.

kill yourself namefag

If it does only have 4GB of RAM they can probably kiss must of their 3rd party support goodbye.

Windows uses anywhere between 1-2 GB of RAM for itself. Both PS4 and XBone use 3 GB of RAM for their OS.
Say the Switch only uses 1GB of RAM for the OS. 3GBs of RAM is not enough to run any modern game.

RAM bandwidth is much faster than an SSD. Orders of ten faster. The less you have to page out the better. Your storage medium would have to be on pare or better for you to not care about paging.

The games are important when considering Nintendo products.

One time, in competition with the Genesis, Nintendo tried to push the hardware envelope with SNES. Although it had 15-bit color, background scaling, and true stereophonic sound in addition to more RAM, it had a slower clock speed. It did more with each clock cycle than Genesis could, but Sega capitalized on the "megahertz myth" with their "Blast Processing" campaign.

The next generation, they had a system that was co-developed with SGI (workstation developer for ILM and Pixar), and built from the ground up for 3D graphics, with visuals rivaling that of contemporary PCs. Even though there was not a snowball's chance in hell of a game like Rogue Squadron or Banjo Tooie running on Saturn or the original PlayStation, that didn't matter, because CD-ROM was all the rage and Nintendo was nothing without jock rock soundtracks and generally shitty voice acting. It didn't matter that it had analog controls as standard, or that most PS1 games looked like they could've just as easily played on the Jaguar or 3DO, CD-ROMs were all that mattered.

Finally, they tried competing audiovisually one more time, and because some key multiplats needed their FMV cutscenes, key third parties didn't port their best Xbox and PS2 games over, and Gamecube sold a company record-worst at 22 million units. With the Wii, they stopped trying to compete with graphics and they easily sold over 100 million units. The unique controller worked where it needed to and it was marketed well to people who might have otherwise skipped computer games altogether.

They haven't tried competing since, and I don't blame them one bit. If they tried Sony and Microsoft's bogus numbers game, they'd get shit on for not competing on price.

This.
Nintendo doesn't play the numbers game with its hardware, it pushes out cheaper hardware than everyone else.
Just look at the numbers for the launch dates of previous generations of consoles.

Buying a Wii on launch day cost $250 compared to $400 for a 360 or $300 for one with no hard drive and $500 for a ps3.

There's also the last gen, where the Wii u went for $300 on launch, with a deluxe version for $350, the Xbone cost $500 launch day, and it wasn't until halfway through the year after its launch that you could get one without kinect for $400, while the ps4 somehow managed to be cheaper than the ps3 at $400 on release.

Nintendo's stuff sells because it is at the lowest price point of the major consoles each gen, and at the very least has its first-party games for exclusives.

Didn't the SNES "win" that console generation?
CD-ROM was all the rage because the cartridge were a bitch to program for since they were smaller. Kinda how the PS3 was technically the most powerful but the shitty processor was a bitch to program for. Don't make your system hard to program for.
Again the choose a shitty storage medium. And the Wii U is currently at 13M globally, making it the worst. And they certainly did play the hardware game for that one.
The Wii was Nintendo's beanie baby moment. Everyone had to get one because it was the it thing. Over half of them were used to play Wii Sports a few times, then collected dust on a shelf.

It did generate butthurt. They caved & deleted it.

Pretty stupid since that woman is literally paid to look good to hock products thus to compliment her body is to compliment her profession. Feminists are simply jealous petty cunts who are butthurt that woman with her body is worthy of a modeling paycheck & they aren't.

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They were about tied with Sega, globally. I believe they did better than Sega in North America, though.
Sage for doublepost.

The dock is going to have extra RAM streaming purposes. Calling it now. It'll be like an "expansion pack".

The Ram will be miles faster than the carts, 3GB is still plenty, WiiU games looked great witt 1GB, I think for the most part this confirms a large disparity between PS4/Xbox One and Switch, I suspected this for a while though, it's an X1, a .5 Terraflop gpu, the Xbox One is I think 1.5 or 1.3

Also the WiiU OS was shit, the Xbox 360 os ran much faster with a much flashier dashboard with 512mb of shared system memory, Nintendo hardware/system software division is just shit and needs to be dropped, fortunately Nvidia is handling the hardware and system software side of things, apparently they are doing the OS and the graphics API, more than likely forks of Linux and Vulkan.

Nintendo software devs are generally at the top of their game, Nintendo won't have any problems, it's the third parties that will have problems, if Switch sells well third parties will make do, if Switch sells poorly third parties would drop if even if it was more capable than the PS4.


Nintendo have always been good at masking load times, not worried.


We've seen the dev kit, the dock functionality is integrated into the dev kit, there is no hardware in the dev kit except pass through shit, and definitely no fucking heat sinku.

Also the specs we are getting are from the dev kits themselves.

I hope you're not directly correlating system memory with graphical quality.

I have a gut feeling someone will misunderstand this an take you for a shill so let me say, as far as I can tell you're talking about the programming prowess needed to develop performant games on the system. Not about game design
It's more than sales. It's up to Nintendo to develop a good API for third parties (as well as themselves) and to provide great documentation for it and quirks of the system.

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Well shit. So that means that docked performance is going to be identical to mobile performance. What's the point of making the docking station so big, then?

And devkit specs are never the final specs. Although I doubt the Switch will be too much different. Right now the only thing we know will be different is the Tegra chip.
The Tegra chip in the devkits is a stock X1 and the Switch is going to use a custom Tegra chip(Or so says Nvidia)

"That what has no games consumes no energy" - Socrates

A computer salesman in the mid-90s told me adding more RAM is like putting more gas in your car. You can do more, but you don't get there any faster. Another way of thinking about it is a drinking cup. RAM is like a cup that holds data that your CPU and GPU drink in the course of their work. A bigger cup might mean less refilling (loading screens) or more detailed textures on graphics.


These fucking retards. The cart doesn't act as RAM, it's just fast enough that swapping more data into active RAM doesn't necessitate a loading screen unlike optical media. It remains to be seen whether the Switch carts will be that fast, however.


Meh, who cares? If you're poor enough that $25 worries you, you shouldn't own a $400 console. Of course energy costs vary, but in most places it's not going to be substantially more expensive.

RAM isn't as important as it used to be, but 4GB is kind of an embarrassing amount by today's standards. Poor Nintendo.

For a handheld, 4GB isn't bad.

Considering the ps4 uses 3 of it's 8 gigs for bullshit streaming and facebook tier bullshit the switch should be ok with 4 as long as it all goes to gaming.

why we dont have people who actually know about informatic hardware to a professional levle on this board?

Because they have jobs, ergo they can't spend all their time shitposting on a Mongolian silent film forum.

You can't win with feminists, caving does nothing.
If computer shows had naked male models rubbing huge cocks on new notebooks feminists would cry imagerape or something.

That thing looks cumbersome, no wonder they aways have promotional shots from the front or being held. Normalfags are going to be turned off by something that thick.
New Nintendo Switch-Slim in 2 years

Senran Kagura loads slower on the Vita.

That's the devkit, you mong.

That's the devkit you fucking chromosome hoarder

I saw this video some time ago about the difference between serial (CPU) and parallel (GPU) processing that is easy to understand for non tech folk.

Shit I forgot to post video.

Right now my biggest worry is battery life. Give me something weak, but give something lasting.

Not very. It's really easy to download more

Dude, even carts have loading times. It's usually less noticeable and doesn't make your console seem like it's about to lift off, but it is still there.

Go play any 3ds monster hunter, even with digital versions, loading times are definitely shit in non-New models.

Thanks a lot hun.

Nice trips and your assumption is correct.


>When a game is running, the OS is off and does not require any system memory. This means that games software can utilize 100% of the RAM, unlike other consoles which usually reserve 5-10% of the RAM for the OS at all times.

wiiudaily.com/wii-u-operating-system/

I expect it'll be the same in the switch. I'd be more worried if it did have 8gb of ram as it would indicate a more bloated OS doing useless shit in the background.

Nintendo consoles are modelled on arcade hardware not consumer electronic tv boxes that try to do everything.

Is that why it always takes a tiny delay for the menu to come up when you press the Home button in the Gamepad?

(nice)
Possibly. If they made the home button more sensitive while giving it less tactile response when pressed I'm guessing the delay would be imperceptible but give the impression of poor hardware quality so they may have gone with a slight visible delay instead.

Offloading the OS to a separate chip also makes their lives easier as it relates to updates. I'm guessing that games on the wiiu don't suffer from requiring updates as much as on other consoles, that a game released near the end of the console's lifecycle would work on a wiiu never taken out of the box and purchased early on. Or that massive patches aren't as frequent and only necessary for online play.

Granted it had update issues at launch.

iirc top of the line tablets have no more than 3GB within the size range of the Switch and the New 3DS had 265/10 FCRAM/VRAM


Neat
I've always wondered why less people build for ready-state OS and instant on/off, it seems that performance will increase far more that way even compared to physical advancements in technology by this point.

They lost in North America and Brazil and won in Europe, Japan, and South Korea.
The cartridges loaded faster. For all CD-ROM on the original PlayStation was hyped up for, again, about 3/4 of the games looked like they were ports from 3DO or the Jaguar. Only a handful played like the disc was being used for the game and not a bunch of multimedia bullshit.

your analogy is shit and I hate you

kek