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Kynes on 22 July 2011
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zarx said:
Cypher1980 said:
zarx said:
Darc Requiem said:

I thought the reason the 360 has 512MB instead of 256MB was because of Epic Games. Didn't Cliffy B say the begged MS to up the RAM to 512 when they developing the first Gears of War?


It wasn't just Epic, a lot of developers were asking for more RAM including Bethesda and Lionhead. But Epic with the most popular engine on the market was probably the loudest voice especially with the famous 2 screens of gears one using 256MB and one 512MB.


Its a lovely story with all the Developers asking for something and Microsoft relenting. It doesnt seem likely though. The memory would have to have been committed to way before production so we are talking mid 2005 at the latest. Gears was released Xmas 2006.

It sort of fits but I honestly believe more likely is MS getting cold feet and asking key developers for their input on the final decision.


Gears of war development began before Epic even had early dev kits, and according to the Oblivion anniversary podcast it was mentioned that the 360 dev kitts had 256MB right up to a few months before production started, and the programers threw a party when they got the news that the RAM had been doubled. Aparently it's the happiest the producer had ever seen some of them lol.

And we have to take into consideration that the debugging tools take 50-60 MB of space, so they only had ~200MB of RAM to work with. MS only provided 1GB RAM dev kits recently, so the newest games can be debugged up to the real 512MB of RAM, instead of the ~450MB that they could use before.