Curiously, a Digital Foundry article has appeared on the Portugese version of Eurogamer that claims – it appears – that the PS4’s operation system reserves 3.5GB of the system’s 8GB total [via] – that’s nearly half if the post is to be believed.
The article’s language means it’s difficult to translate accurately, although there’s a Google one here. It’s also difficult to pin down a source – and screenshots in the article point to the recent Killzone presentation – so at the moment take this with a pinch of salt.
Both the PS4 and Xbox One will launch with 8GB – although the PS4’s is faster – but both with significantly lower than that amounts for actual games, leveling the playing field somewhat. The Xbox One reserves 3GB, by the way, effectively giving Microsoft’s console a little more room to breath.
A difference presumably only used in first party exclusives.
Update: it’s now available in English. It also states there’s a 1GB ‘flexible memory’ section that developers (which seems to be limited to first party studios just now, it appears) can claw back “only if the background OS can spare it.”
The article cites a “a well-placed development source” so it’s presumably not based off the old Killzone slides. Chances are this is part of the current dev documentation which somebody has passed onto Eurogamer. Sony haven’t made an official comment yet.
Eternal_Bcb
I think this clearly looks like Sony are just thinking smart. With PS3 they had the 512MB of RAM split between 256MB XDR RAM and 256MB GDDR3 and went straight out of the blocks and basically said to devs, “do what you can with this…”. Then people wanted new features such as cross-game chat which they couldn’t now implement because the devs were using all available RAM. This is Sony holding back resources so that game innovation continues throughout the life cycle of the console. If they didn’t do this, because its X86 architecture which devs obviously know, they would max out the potential of the console within 2 years.
Eternal_Bcb
In 5 years we’ll see devs have 6GB to play with as the console matures and Sony know where they stand in regards to the competition and what devs want.
Starman
Surely it would be better to give them all the available ram now? Have the games be as good as they can, sooner?
Eternal_Bcb
No because that give’s Sony less flexibility in future to add new features to the core OS, and the RAM devs have in the beginning will be plenty to release stunning games.
TheShepanator
GDDR5 ram allows you to read and write to the memory in the same clock cycle, and has a much higher bandwidth. As well as that the blu ray drive in the ps4 is much faster than the ps3’s.
This means it’s feasible for developers to constantly juggle what’s stored in memory as well as reducing load times. I don’t think the os reserving 3.5Gb of ram will be a problem.