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makingmusic476 on 23 February 2013
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disolitude said:
KBG29 said:
disolitude said:
This is good news for the whole futureproofing of PS4.

But before people start saying this is an immediate game changer and how Killzone would look 5X better if they had 8GB ram to work with...please ask me how much RAM a game like Battlefield 3 uses, completely maxed, and running on 3 screens on PC at 5760x1080 resolution.

Hint - its less than 4 GB.

The only reason that devs are not using 4GB of VRAM is because the market is so small. This is why Epic, Crytek, and id are so happy about this. Right now the mass market is PS3/360 with 512MB and low end PCs with 1GB. This will set the bar much higher and allow them to build games in a completly different way. In no time PC games will be pushing 4GB VRAM, and nvidia/amd will be releasing cards with 8GB, 10GB, 12GB, ect.

Games were not limited to 1.5GB or so because thats all they needed, they were that way because the market was not there. 


I agree, but video memory and GPU performance go hand in hand. More powerful GPUs will surely use 8GB down the road.

On a 1080p resolution and looking at memory bandwith and teraflops performance PS4 is promissing, it is downright technically impossible for PS4 to use 8 GB of memory at once (for VRAM). It would be like sticking 4 GB on intel HD4000 and ask the GPU to push 1080p worth of 4GB memory. 

I do understand this is a unified memory architecture and that GPU/CPU and os need to share 8 GB hence I doubt that the GPU will ever use up more than 4.

Keep in mind that the ps4's 8gb GDDR5 is the system's total ram, while I believe you're talking strictly about the video ram required for these PC games.  That video ram is also coupled with system ram.

My current build is three years old, and it wasn't exactly bleeding edge when I built it, but it has 5gb of total ram.  Granted, the OS requirements of an open platform are much higher, but you get the point.  It's not uncommon to find builds with 8gb DDR3 + 2gb GDDR5 these days.  The more extreme builds I've seen have 16gb DDR3 + 4gb GDDR5.

Also, recall that within a closed system like PS4, developers are able to get more out of the hardware that they would with the same hardware in a PC setting, given known OS restrictions, coding to the metal, and so on.  What may not be possible with the ps4's hardware and 4gb of vram running windows or something isn't necessarily impossible with the ps4 as it currently exists.