Vita RAM Specs Confirmed

Dan Lee 26 Comments

The specs for Vita have been known for quite some time, but recently there were reports floating around that RAM had been halved to cut costs.

Well now it has been confirmed by President of Worldwide Studios, Sony Computer Entertainment, Shuhei Yoshida (and translated by Digital Foundry) that Vita will have 512MB of main memory and 128MB of VRAM.

By comparison the PS3 has 256 MB system and 256 MB video.

Other specs include two 640 x 480 cameras, six-axis motion sensing, GPS on the 3G model and the ability to play back MP4 video, as expected.

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26 Comments

  1. Hmm.. does that mean my phone has got more RAM? But I suppose the Vita’s GPU will make the difference.

    • You probably expect your smartphone to be doing/running many more applications concurrently (you may not realise just how many it is running) than the PS Vita will need to do.

      Your smartphone, like a PC, is a general purpose computing device. Would you buy a modern PC and expect it to run well with the 512MB of RAM that the 360 and PS3 have available? No, you wouldn’t.

    • Yes but your phone will be using a lot more ram for the Baseband, signal, SMS etc

      Like the iPhone 4 has 512MB RAM but most of the time it only shows 100MB free or even less.

  2. Odd that it has more than the PS3.

    • Not really, the PS3 is 5 years old after all. Technology moves on.

  3. Cool, i believe iPad 2 has 512Mb shared Ram although i don’t know how much of that it uses for video -and of course it’s different architecture – but it looks like the Vita will be a very capable machine.

  4. Technical gubbins go straight over my head. Especially at this time in the morning. Is this article good news? lol

    • It’s got more memory than the PS3, easy enough?
      More = better.

      • cheers buddy!

      • Well PS3 had some super-duper RAM, didn’t it? Are there any actual specs besides the Mb amount?

    • Yes, Deathbrin, the ps3 had special dedicated better-and-more-expencive-than-whats-in-your-pc ram. And the ram’s speed makes a fairly big difference I belive.

  5. That’s…a surprisingly large amount for a handheld device, this is going to be one poweful little package. Seems like Sony are getting everything right with the Vita so far, usually they balls at least one thing up. I hope it gets the sale figures it deserves.

    • Not really, no. Not in 5 years or so when it’ll actually get up and running.

      • I doubt it will still be doing well in 5yrs. Support will have died off by then and it will be a very expensive dusty paper weight.

  6. Should be capable of wonderful things with the specs it has. I wonder the new budget PSP for €99 without Wi-Fi that’s been announced has anything to do with cutting specs/memory of the Vita to subsidise the manufacturing of the new cheapy PSP.

    • Subsidise the low price that they are asking that is!

  7. Does Sony have a pile of crappy VGA cameras it wants to use up or something? Why the terrible cameras?
    I can understand a VGA camera in the front, that one will just be for silly “reaction” captures and video calls (they must have video calls, right?) but such a low quality camera in the back is really bizarre. Makes it useless for anything other than capturing grainy backdrops for AR games.
    I can only imagine that they didn’t want to use a useful camera because they’re scared it will take custom away from their bloggie camcorders and their point and shoot camera range?
    Nice RAM figures though, hopefully they use it to fix the stop-motion framerate of Resistance 3 :-/

    • Can’t be any worse than the Super-Special-Blurry 3DS cam.

    • While it does mean the cameras are no good for using the Vita as a digital camera, that’s OK we have phones for that job. Should be fine for AR, video chat etc.

      • also, good quality imaging sensors and the related encoding tech (i.e. camera) are not the cheapest components, I run a vehicle camera company and the most expensive components for me are the CPU, GPS, modem and ‘camera’.

    • Yeah, I’m disappointed at the camera resolution too, apart from that though I think they are using a ccd which performs better in low light situations… We’ll see.

    • That is a very poor resolution. But I couldn’t care much less for the camera to be honest, it won’t be used much anyway.

  8. Is it just me or is 128VRAM pretty low. I would have expected between 256 and 512. I would honestly love someone with much more knowledge of this type of thing to explain why though!

    • Don’t forget to take into account that the screen resolution that the Vita is pushing is around half that of a 720p game on PS3, and with much lower physical screen space to play with, texture resolution, post processing etc. etc. is MUCH cheaper to run in terms of VRAM.

      Then there’s the fact that developers are less likely to be playing with quite as many layers of post processing and FSAA, at least initially, and that some of these things could surely be put onto the quad-core CPU, as they are on the PS3’s Cell, and the whole thing becomes a bit more flexible.

      It may come back and haunt a few years down the line, but for right now, 128MB will do very nicely, and will give the Vita a bit of an edge over smart phones graphically for a while, as they don’t have a dedicated pool of extra speedy VRAM.

  9. That’s a very decent amount of RAM, and that oh-so-sweet VRAM will help produce some sweet visuals.
    Makes me wonder what RAM figures we’ll see on the PS4…

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