Previously sources indicated that the PS4 would most likely have 7GB of RAM available with only 1 core locked, but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. Eurogamer is reporting that sources from within the industry have gotten confirmation of the amount of RAM used for games in the PS4.
According to their sources the PS4 will have 4.5GB of RAM for developers to use and the potential to use another 1GB if needed. This means 4.5GB will be available by default, but the devs can possibly request up to 5.5GB of RAM if needed. Furthermore, the PS4 will have 6 of its 8 cores available to game developers.
So, 3.5GB of the PS4s 8GB of GDDR5 will be reserved for the OS. The Xbox One, at this point in time, supposedly will have around 5GB of RAM available to Game developers as well. It seems that the main difference between the two consoles is the GPU power and the type of RAM they are using.
The PS4 still has a more powerful AMD GPU integrated into the APU with 1152 stream processors compared to the 768 in the Xbox One. Additionally, the PS4 will use GDDR5 graphics memory that has higher latency, but more bandwidth, while the Xbox One will use lower latency DDR3 RAM and a small 32MB pool of ESRAM to make up for bandwidth differences.
While this is disappointing news for PS fans, at the end of the day the PS4 is still a bit ahead in terms of power with the GPU. Furthermore, games like Killzone: Shadow Fall only used 3-4GB of RAM during their E3 demo. Therefore, existing titles in development most likely wont suffer too bad with less RAM to use. Eurogamer leaves off with the possibility that the PS4 OS could be optimized in a similar fashion to the PS3 to use less RAM in the future.
Update:
It seems Eurogamer’s sources goofed up here and game developers are actually reporting that 6GB of RAM will be available.
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It has to. So much ram for the OS is a joke.
When you look at all the stuff they’re doing it’s not unexpected. They want to put in a ton of multitasking along with constant video recording and stuff set aside for uploading or streaming. It needs to do all of that without hurting the framerate of games being played or creating insane load times. As someone who has more than a little experience streaming and recording stuff, doing both at once is very resource intensive and the RAM in the PS4 isn’t designed for standard desktop operations.
Indeed it’s not. It’s only gddr too, something we haven’t seen before. I am just not excited to see, what we consider low end ram amount, nowadays to be what the consoles of tomorrow will have available to their games.
Then again I did say the same about ps3 but it did manage to be more impressive than the xbox so, I could be wrong and 4 free gigs will be more than enough for future games. We’ll see I suppose.
I thought all those functions would be done in the game and not through the OS btw, so if a game didn’t want to support them, it would be fine.
The entire rumor is false: http://gematsu.com/2013/07/rumor-update-ps4-5gb-ram-games
Thanks for the info, I updated the post to reflect that information, and we will post a new follow up article. Man Eurogamer’s sources really dropped the ball here.