Understanding why Xbox One doesn't need GDDR5 RAM

[Pemalite]

ethomaz said:

CGI-Quality said:

I must agree here, especially when I just did a test like this. I ran my most intensive game (no need to talk about my specs) and, at most, I used 3.46GB of my total RAM, and up to the 2GB of VRAM on the card.

You will start to see games for PC using more RAM now... the low-end videoscards will have 2GB minimum... the high-end 4/6/8GB.

Low-end video cards as they are now, aren't capable of using 2Gb of Video Ram whilst sustaining any decent level of performance, might change in a few years, but next generation GPU's doesn't look like it will change that up.

disolitude said:

It all comes down to how the video card drivers manage RAM usage. Nvidia has an advantage over AMD there. A game with a 7970 will use 2.5 GB of RAM while the same game will use 1.8 GB on GTX 770 and run better.

Very true, AMD caches stuff like geometry data inside the Ram next to the graphics chip, nVidia throws it into the GPU's caches, so AMD generally has higher video memory consumption for some things.
Whether that will change though as AMD is re-writing the memory management software in the drivers remains to be seen.