PlayStation 4 GPU Vs Xbox One GPU Vs PC – The Ultimate Benchmark Comparison

[VanceIX]

Intrinsic said:

VanceIX said:

Fixed it in an edit myself right after posting, sorry.

And your example is off. The CPU will in almost all cases be needing just as much RAM as the GPU, especially if you are playing a high-end game with a lot happening on the screen. In that case, the GPU suffers because the CPU will be using 3-4GB of RAM, leaving little for the GPU, or vice-versa, so the dev has to choose between optomizing for the CPU or the GPU with RAM. When you have dedicated graphics, the GPU can use all the memory given to it with 2-3GB DDR5, and then the CPU can use all 8GB available to it, without running into problems.

Now, if the PS4 had 12GB of RAM, with 9GB available for devs, this wouldn't be a problem, as both the CPU and GPU would have plenty of room to work with, but that isn't the case. 5.5GB for both gives little breathing room if needed.

Was trying to not butt in Vance but I couldn't resist here. Dedicated Ram doesnt work that way. Of the 5.5GB of Ram available one the PS4/XO, devs can really decide how much Ram to give anything. If you look at the KZ:SF dev papers, for the demo postmortem they showed that they were used 1.5GB for CPU, 128MB shared between the cpu and gpu and 3GB gor the GPU. Here.

Back in the PS3/360 gen devs also complained about this a lot too saying that on the PS3 they were stuck with a fixed amount of Ram for either the cpu/gpu. And even on PC you can run most games with as little as 1-2Gb of Ram. The problem on PCs is that a PC will always keep certain parts of the OS in system memory. Thats why you always need more Ram than you well...need. Another thing about games on PC is that they kinda act funny. If you have 4GB of Ram the game will find a way of using most of it even if its as a cache. If you have 16GB it will do the same thing. 

It's all good, lol

But yes, the RAM can be shared, and that is good, and I'm not contesting that. The problem is the amount of RAM available. While PCs do have to handle the OS in RAM, there will still be plenty of DDR3 RAM left over for gaming with the PC. With the PS4, there will usually be ~2 GB available for graphics and ~2-3GB available for the system on a fairly intensive game (Killzone was more of a graphical showpiecce, which is why it put so much memory into graphics. Infamous SS may be a better example, and it only had 1.5GB memory dedicated for graphics). On a gaming PC, you can have 2-3GB for graphics and then ~5GB for the game.

And using the RAM as a cache is actually useful, speeds up loading in many games.