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richardhutnik on 12 April 2013
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BuckStud said:
richardhutnik said:

The Wii U is said to have 1GB RAM available for games (if not even less).  The PS4 is going to have 7 GB (of the 8) available for games.  My question is this.  How the heck does the Wii U have the techical capabilities to do games that the PS4 has, if the PS4 is going to have 7 times  more available RAM?  I can understand some current games we have now, in transition, and the likes of fighting games being doable, but what about stuff like open world games, where a lot of the RAM will be used?  How does the Wii U be able to keep up with this?


I'm not sure what you mean by "(if not even less)" as Nintendo made that full 1GB available to developers and that wont change.  If it was to change at all, Nintendo would most likely open up some of the 2nd GB once they have their OS optimized and are pretty sure they would never need the extra space (after building in an extra buffer to begin with).

As for your question about a game built for 7GB being used on a system with 1GB.  First, your going to find that extremely few games during the life of the PS4 will have to use all 7GB of memory.  The ones that do would be more difficult, but not impossible to port to the Wii U.  A couple of sacrifices that would be made is less of the game in memory so there would be a more frequent need to load and the second thing I would image is lower quality textures.

Sony themselves have stated that not all games are going to be huge productions which is going to be true because the developers just don't have the resources to give every game a $100mil budget.  I would guess that 90% of the PS4 games released would be fairly easily ported to the Wii U .  I believe that most of the rest could be, but with a hit to the overall quality.

I'm finding that both of my sons and their friends seem to be into the more retro indie games lately, if that trend was to continue, all three 8th gen systems would have no problems.

Word was that developers were given less than 800 MBs to work with.  That is why I happened to end up saying (or less).