disolitude said:
First of all, laptops, computers and such are not a good comparison for system ram needed for gaming as operating systems, browser tabs and other thing things take up a good chunk of system ram by themselves before the game even boots up...Below is a screenshot of my system ram usage as I am replying to this. I am not gaming and half of my ram is taken up... https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-OmR9Jz-kc7E/TsH4W6gBvCI/AAAAAAAAAgI/hEeWqXreFI0/s567/system%252520ram.jpg Secondly, I think people will have to lower their next gen expectations. Microsoft and Sony next gen consoles are not going to pack a dual GTX 580 or 6990 video cards due to cost, power consumption and heat. Best we can hope for is something along the lines of gtx560Ti or 6950 like performance brought down to a 28 nm chip which consumes a maximum of 120W by itself. So realistically for next gen people need to expect a slight bump in detail along with 1080p gaming at 60 frames per second and true 720p per eye 3D gaming @ 30 fps as a best case scenario. HD TV's that 99% of the people who play consoles opwn do not support higher settings than that so there is no point for them to deliver something better than that. Lastly, next gen games will eat up video ram more than they eat up system ram. Something like Metro 2033 on 3 monitors maxed out already needs more video ram than system ram. Microsoft will be smart to give their video card as much ram as sytem ram. If people are expecting Avatar like graphics, be prepared for 2GB of video RAM to be used needed at least. System ram however really doesn't need to be much higher than 2 GB if there is dedicated video memory...assuming Xbox 720 doesn't run on windows vista :) |
True now, but to play safe, a good rule of thumb is that a console needs half the RAM of a mid-range PC contemporary at launch, as PC games devs consider that amount typically available for their games (MS usually tends to occupy half the average PC RAM with its latest systems). But 8GB is becoming quite common right now, and sooner or later devs will start considering 4GB free the typical amount, and the problems almost always come from multiplats, as devs don't want to spend time, money and other resources to optimise for each single architecture. So 4GB will be a play safe amount at the end of next year. When this gen consoles launched, they had just 1/4 (or even less in Wii's case) of the typical main RAM of a contemporary PC (yes XB360 potentially offers more room as UMA allows flexible allocation of memory either to central or graphics uses, but devs won't reduce the use of graphics RAM to reycle it as main one at risk of pissing off deep pocketed graphic whores, and they'll have anyway to adapt to the smallest offer, in case of multiplats, so it would be pointless), and this brought troubles in some cases, not to mention Wii, that being even more avaricious on RAM, ended up not receiving at all some ports or getting "special" (read "retarded") versions. Exclusives usually have no problems, but exclusives aren't everything. And this doesn't take into account that while this gen too little RAM crippled their chances limiting what they could run, next gen, maybe not Nintendo, but Sony and MS consoles will offer more non-gaming functions, extending their ability to be used as home theatre and general purpose computers.
