What if developers had access to 100% of the power in the consoles?

[VanceIX]

torok said:

Intrinsic said:
Game DVR is not the reason the PS4/XB1 reserves cpu cores or reserve 3GB of the 8GB of on board ram.

And some of that 3GB reserved ram will be given back to developers at some point.

All that aside, the reserved resources for the OS wouldn't result in any respectable performance benefits.

Exactly that. Both consoles use separate processors and H264 hardware encoders to allow it. It wouldn't be possible without that, if you record and encode your screen on a PC you actually get a punch in performance. Using dedicated hardware to do it was the smart way to do it.

I'm not saying we need to change it now, that's obviously not ever going to happen.

I'm saying in retrospect, it would have been nice to have the extra 2 cores dedicated for gaming instead of being reserved soley for the OS.

And 3GB of unified RAM has nothing to do with hardware encoders. 3GB could make a big difference in a lot of games. 

Edit: changed some of the wording in the OP to reflect that this is in theory.