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Zero999 on 16 April 2013
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zarx said:
Zero999 said:

bolded part: speaks for itself about you. If PC's use 3-4 GB then video games would require less than that to do more, so no console game will really need those 3 or 4GB for a good while. and even then it's totaly portable to wii u.

Now I don't want to get into a argument over whether the Wii U is a "next gen console" or some other fanboy crap, so I will just say I do consider Wii U an 8th generation console on account of it's release date and being a successor to the Wii. So you can stow that crap. I just used next gen games as an easy descriptor for future games built around currently unreleased hardware as a baseline. Clearly considering the topic on hand is about whether games designed around 7GB of available RAM is going to fit on the Wii U a game designed around current hardware including the Wii U would be irrelevent as it would already be designed to fit on such a platform. Sorry about using such a fanboy charged phrase. 


Console games don't use less RAM to do more, they just load less stuff into RAM because there is less available. If a game is designed to function with a minimum of 512MB of RAM but you have access to more RAM then it's a simple matter to more aggressively cache assets and also use higher fedality effects and larger frambuffers which use more RAM. Because that is the point of RAM to temporarily store data for fast access by the CPU and GPU, it's easy to scale up. Now a game designed around having 7GB of RAM available will obviously utilize a lot more RAM than one that is designed around 512MB and scaled up. So looking at the RAM usage of PC versions of current console games is not a very good indicator of what RAM usage will be like in future generations of games (as in future games to be clear, nothing to do with hardware settle down)  because their fundamental design at an engine level will likely be very different.

Now many if not most games will likely not be designed in a way that requires more than 1-2GB of RAM for it's gameplay and level design. But it is very possible to create one that does require far more, and if the RAM is there devs would be foolish not to use the extra RAM to insure a smoother experiance by caching more data to avoid unneccessary loading. Streaming bassed engines will of course be more scalable as a rule and most modern engines use a lot of data streaming these days so that could potentially help the Wii U's case but even then if the game is designed around having GBs of data available at any one time even with streaming the experiance would likely be poor if the game is constantly loading from disc as seen in Skyrim PS3 at launch (and that was caused by saves getting a few MBs to big if a certain Obsidian programmer is to be believed).


I am not discussing how mach RAM a game can end up using. My point is that most of the games won't require anything that can't be ported decently to wii u, be it RAM, shaders, gigaflops or whatever else.