Norris2k said:
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. |
Valid objections, and time for me to be a bit clearer (and clarify)...
The main reasons why there are two OSes operating at the same time on XB1, for example, are
a) To be able to run regular apps and games at the same time with full multi-tasking, and without each system interfering with the other
b) To be able to write closer to the metal with games, with a stripped down games focused OS.
c) Having the fully fledged OS for apps, but without compromising the games performance.
So basically the XB1 is running two OSes (or somewhat very low level Virtual Machines) at the same time. This is an incredible enterprise! But the big downside is the memory requirements, and disc access.
PS4, on the other hand, initially wanted to go with much smaller and less ambitious goal in multi-tasking. The games would run in their own protected and low level environment, while the apps would be handled by the OS separately. On the other hand, the additional RAM brought a lot more possibilities to Sony. I, honestly, don't know much about their implementations at this stage, and I am sure, PS4 would be perfectly fine 5.5-6 GB of memory as of this moment, and the remaining memory seems totally unused (at the moment).However, Sony will undoubtedly utilize this in the future, some of the possibilities are...
a) Additional simultaneous apps, features...
b) VR,
c) PS Now
d) Emulation
e) PS Vita related
f) Release some of this memory back to developers
g) GPGPU related
etc...
Playstation 5 vs XBox Series Market Share Estimates
Regional Analysis (only MS and Sony Consoles)
Europe => XB1 : 23-24 % vs PS4 : 76-77%
N. America => XB1 : 49-52% vs PS4 : 48-51%
Global => XB1 : 32-34% vs PS4 : 66-68%