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Sony - GDDR5 8GB RAM - View Post

nightsurge on 21 February 2013
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Tachikoma said:
Consider the following.
Assume the rumors of the final retail units for the next xbox are true and it uses 8GB DDR3, to 1-up Sony they switch it to 12GB, or 16GB, it's still a problem, because:

- DDR3 < GDDR5 in speed, by a huge margin
- Enjoy your $500+ console for 12gb, $550-$599 for 16gb
- Increase in memory from 8GB to anything higher won't actually make much of a difference at all for 1080p because the amount of resources you can cram in to a single scene is limited, hence why modern day graphics cards use a hell of a lot more ram the higher you bump your resolution, but the general normal is that about 2gb is enough for 1080p - on top of that though you have the issue of the bandwidth limiting the next xbox's performance.

I'll give you an idea of what Microsoft are probably thinking right now:
"Damn, our industry spies were right, it has a crazy amount of ram, we can't afford to bump up ours without taking a significant loss on each console, lets just stick with the plan and hope our broader approach to putting a game playing windows 8 media center in every home has wings for both our gaming sector and our OS sector.

The one thing you can take away from this is basically that there is virtually no possibility in hell now, if leaked durango specs are to be believed (given the closeness of the ps4 specs we can assume the durango ones are more or less accurate too), that the durango will be able to outperform the orbis in any area.

8GB of GDDR5 ram probably costs about 4-5x as much as 8GB of DDR3 ram. In fact, I can buy 8GB of standard DDR3 desktop ram for about $30-40. So adding an extra 4-8GB wouldn't affect the price much in DDR3 terms.

Doubling the GDDR5 amount from 4GB to 8GB, though... I imagine that was likely a $100 or more cost change for the console.

Btw, did Sony specifically announce GDDR5 Ram in the conference, or just say 8GB of Ram? I just want to be sure that Sony themselves specified which type of RAM they were using as that makes a huge difference here.