freedquaker said:
Given that the OS is still the same, then what happened? They were able to increase the RAM to 8 GB, and knowing that most developers & games do not need that amount of memory, they decided to RESERVE some amount of RAM to make the console a) Future proof with upcoming features b) They can always release some of the reserved RAM in the future with a software update, but once you release it, it's gone, you can't take it back, in order to add more multi-tasking features etc...
So if anything, the 3 GB reserved for the OS proves that games DO NOT NEED 8 GB. This is clear from the PC games today, there isn't a single game that uses more than 4-5 GB! The vast majority of games do not even use more than 2 GB (system), being limited to 32 bit, and only recently are we seeing a trend away from this, with the advent of the next-gen consoles. In the past, however, this was never the case. The PC had always used more RAM than was available on the consoles. Most PC games in 2006 were already using way more than 256-512 MB RAM, which comes with 360 and PS3. So you clearly see a relative abundance of memory here, which means the next gen will not have this kind of jump. The large reserve for the OS does not mean the OSs are that hungry, on the contrary, it means Sony can afford to reserve that much RAM from the games as they simply don't need as much today. Mark my words here, and remember how ridiculous your original claims will look by then. Things do not get just scaled up, there is always a technical REASON behind them. With your projections, there is NONE. |
...........Technically speaking, you are mostly right, but you are contradicting yourself.
You finish with "Things do not get just scaled up, there is always a technical REASON behind them. With your projections, there is NONE.".
But you are saying yourself that currently the vast amount of memory on the PS4 has no use. You remove 3 Gb from game and it's not really big deal, most game using 2-4 Gb. You add it on the OS, but you don't really have any use for it. There is no "technical REASON" for currently scaling up the OS memory... just a vague future proof intuition that it could have some use in the future. Most OS are not heavy memory consumer at core. In fact, strictly speaking, even the graphical environment that makes most of the memory footprint is not mandatory for BSD, it's a dispensable feature. So just add an other dispensable feature like a browser in background and you have your OS reserve a lot more memory. Feature could really rise in memory use especially because in a few year the decade old limitation from the 32 bits (and limited console) period will be forgotten.
