If MS switches to GDDR5 now, did Sony make a silly mistake?

[Alby_da_Wolf]

Dgc1808 said:

justinian said:
I admit that i thought it would be 4GB RAM. I remember arguing ( can't remember with who but they were a few members ) that 8GB of DDR5 RAM was never ever going to happen.

I was wrong. To be honest I am a bit glad to be wrong.

I was also one that firmly believed it would be 4GB. 8GB just sounded insane. Even with all the history posted about Ram jumps being as big as 32x the previous gen, I just didn't see 8GB happening. Especially if the ram was really going to be GDDR5.

With low and mid-range gaming PCs currently having 8GB on average, but with Windows, firewall, antivirus and other services eating quite a big chunk of it, 4GB on a console, that optimises RAM a lot more, and native max res predicted to be 1080p in most cases, while on PC it can go up without waiting for a "next gen", could have been enough for another couple of years, but later it could have brought problems when porting from platforms with more RAM available, and this could happen not only from higher specced average PCs, but also from XB720. And should Sony launch last, porting from a 8GB XB720 could have given problems not only later, but just from the start. Bigger RAM can be quite a bigger cost initially, but its price drops quite fast, and luckily the times of RAM shortages and wild price rises, like it happened in the '90s and early '00s, affecting also XBox 1, are over. It's a good investment, as too little RAM could even prevent from fully exploiting all the computing power available, or make it at least more difficult, like it happened to PS3 and XB360, that had far less than half the RAM of the average gaming PC of their times, so they were undersized even taking into account the huge amount of RAM sucked by Windows on PCs. BTW also Wii's RAM was undersized compared to PS360, as if it's true that with SD it needed a lot less video RAM, system RAM requirements couldn't be much lower than on competing consoles, that already optimised RAM usage a lot more than PCs, this made ports of multiplats originally developed on PC or "HD twins" to Wii a lot more difficult and expensive.
Last but not least a generous RAM size allows to fully tap the computing power available, but once its size is "enough" for the console's commercial life, there's no need to increase it further, so it doesn't start a potentially money bleeding spec war, like it could happen with CPU and GPU. The boldest possible increase for 8th gen could be up to 16GB and even that would mean quite a heavy initial cost increase, but it would still be far from skyrocketing.