How will the Wii U fit games on the PS4, if the PS4 will have 7GB RAM available?

[zarx]

Pemalite said:

Michael-5 said:

This is a good point. Like I said RAM =/= graphics, but since it boosts load times, it will = larger landscapes and drawdistances. If games like Elder Scrolls push the PS4, they will look significantly crappier on the Wii U if downgraded, it's just not going to happen.

This is a common argument most say about more ram, that it will provide larger landscapes.
But people forget we have had games with sprawling landscapes for decades, take morrowind, it's game world is just as big as Oblivion and Skyrim, but did so with 1/8th of the ram.
Granted with techniques such as impostering, developers got around the need for large draw distances chewing up Ram.

The main grunt that's going to be driving next generation isn't going to be the Ram, that's just a cache, the processing is still all done on the CPU and GPU and is what will *really* drive next generation graphics and physics to new levels. (Although, I'm skepticle on the Physics part if developers use CPU based physics on the PS4's anemic processor.)

However, I beleive from a gameplay standpoint, nothing will change, in-fact they will probably get more linear and simple, it's a quest that developers have been on for years and is a plague in console games.

I agree

The issue with larger lanscapes is the cost of actually designing and creating the content to fill it rather than a system problem. Current open world games like Skyrim and Just Cause 2 already have massiv draw distances with massive lanscapes, making bigger worlds unless you go into procedural generation that has it's own set of huge problems is just too cost prohibitive. And for linear games making a huge area is not even necessarily desirable let alone viable. 

And even if we ignore the content creation problem no one component can be taken in isolation, a lot of people have become fixated on the whole 8GB GDDR5 RAM thing for PS4. And I see a lot of people going around talking like just having 8GB of RAM suddenly means that everything will suddenly be bigger and better. Forgetting that having 6GB of HD textures loaded into RAM doesn't really matter if your GPU can only proccess 2GB each frame. It does however allow developers a lot more room to push certain features further than they otherwise could, desgin and budget permitting.

On the topic of physics the Knack and Havok stuff that was showed off looks promising on that front. It remains to be seen how it actually translates into actual gameplay tho. The lots of weak CPU cores plus GPGPU (now that GPU accelerated rigid body physics is starting to take off it should start to be less of a useless visual gimmick as it has been in the past) actually hold some promise on that front, especially as unlike the PS3 devs shouldn't be offloading a lot of graphics stuff to the CPU next gen.