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SvennoJ on 18 May 2014
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mutantsushi said:
SvennoJ said:
When you check how much memory a game uses in windows it doesn't include the video ram, and probably also not the disk cache that windows is using to help your game run smoothly. My laptop has 3.1GB in use while just browsing vgchartz. 

Disk cache? PS#Bone have disk cache in addition to 8GB as well, if you really think it's productive to go there.
Memory usage of a web browser on top of general purpose operating system is nearly irrelevant to console gaming.
OK maybe not to unoptimized Crytek games.

SvennoJ said:
I hope this gen will bring more variety to the worlds, procedural generation for geometry, trees, clouds etc. You need a lot of memory for that.

Seems to me like procedural generation would reduce memory usage, one texture/geometry can be transformed into 1000. 
PS4's 10x GPGPU advantage may be as much about decoupling from memory bandwidth needs as augmenting the CPU.
Obviously that doesn't really apply when discussing the XBone.

It will reduce the size of the game on disk. You need to store all those unique trees, geometry and texture variations in memory first before rendering. It is too inefficient to generate them on the fly for each draw operation.

What kind of additional disk cache do consoles have? My task manager informs me that (next to 3.1GB in use) Windows is using 3.2GB standby memory, containing cached data and code that is not actively in use, plus another 148MB of modified memory that hasn't been written to disk yet. Start the same program a second time, it starts a lot faster, not so on consoles.
It's a lot more work to get your code to load efficiently on consoles without a big fat bloated memory manager backing you up.