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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Why the Xbox 720 and PS4 will have a RAM of 4 GB

reasonable enough educated guess. 4-6 Gb is my own expectation. I'm giving a bit larger of a multiple gen over gen for 1 reason: this was the longest gen ever by a couple years. had new hardware been released at the typical release schedule your 4 Gb would have been perfect. as it stands i think they'll beat that by a bit.


as cobretti mentioned...nintendo dedicated 1 full Gb to their OS which is gigantic. Right now the ps3 OS takes 50 Mb and i guarantee it gets larger but 1 full gig is beyond my expectations. ~0.5 a gig?

so by my expectations we're talking wiiU's 1 Gb to MSony's 3.5 to 5.5Gb for games. now get announcing hardware MSony.



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4GB makes sense. But I believe one of the next gen console will have 6GB RAM:
4GB ram
2GB vram



I think 4GB fits. There isn't much point in going to 8. Most third parties go multiplat now, so if you overkill on your machine vs your competitors, few games will take advantage of it. 4GB would provide a nice advantage vs WiiU and jump vs last gen, but 8 would probably be more than is needed for a dedicated games machine. Your trend analysis is good not because it tells us what games companies are thinking, but because it follows the advancement and cost reduction of memory technology.



The way I see it the most graphic intense games on the PC recommends 4GB and have a basic minimum of 2GB.
GPU RAM is 512MB.

The latest Crysis, Battlefield etc., all recommend 4GB RAM (2GB RAM for 32bit Windows).

Considering the way a console is "architectured" compared to a PC, 8GB seems like overkill.

Traditionally both Sony and MS also use more expensive and faster RAM than found in normal PCs.

8GB of that would probably cost more than the wii u.



4GB is the absolute minimum. I think it will be higher.



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I think it will be very fast 4GB of RAM for the Orbis and maybe Durango, but according to some rumors it looks like MS could opt for the Nintendo route and have 8GB of slow RAM plus embedded DRAM...



 

 

 

 

 

If they are planing for 'full hd' games only I think 4gb is more than enough ...
currently I have 5gb ram (4gb system 1gb gpu) and its more than enough to play all games on full hd ...

even if the os is taking 1gb out of the 4gb there is still 3gb for system+gpu left (say 512-1024mb for gpu to have full hd) there is still 2-2.5gb system memory left for games which should be enough ...



Based on the graph, I think they will have 8gb of RAM.



Cobretti2 said:
well can you really count the 2GB ram on Wii?

As 1GB is dedicated to OS. Perhaps this will change in the future? Dont know lol.

My guess is somewhere between 2g-4gb. Anything more I don't think is required ATM for a dedicated gaming machine.

Sorry, but that is a rather silly question. Every console on there has some part of its RAM reserved for the OS. Its VERY likely PS4/neXtBox will have a significant portion of their RAM reserved as well as these OSs become more full fledged operating systems vs simple control panels.



Salnax said:
Generation Nintendo Sega Sony Microsoft Average
3 4.5 KB 24 KB N/A N/A 14 KB
4 256 KB 136 KB N/A N/A 196 KB
5 4 MB 5 MB 3.5 MB N/A 4.2 MB
6 43 MB 26 MB 38 MB 64 MB 43 MB
7 91 MB N/A 512 MB 522 MB 375 MB
8 2 GB N/A N/A N/A N/A


The pattern is simplier than you suggest and the Wii to WiiU jump is just as modest as it was previously.

Its roughly a 10x jump in each iteration with the exception of Nintendo, which has moved to a 2x jump. Since both MSony were near .5GB then they will be around 5GB as a best case argument. But i don't think its as linear as this suggests; PS2 to PS3 was larger than 10x.

While I contend the systems will use 4GB as that makes the most logical sense, the rumors currently suggest closer to 6GB as the dev kits have had 8GB reportedly.