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

[VanceIX]

Intrinsic said:

VanceIX said:

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.

You are also wrong about the Infamous thing. Of the 4.5GB of Ram used for that game and even as the image you posted showed, You can clearly see "loaded data" taking up 2.5GB. Loaded data (textures) is all GPU based memory. There are a few other stuff too, at the end of the day they are using around 1.3GB for CPU.  And if you look at this article on The Order. You will see another case of the GPU using over 3GB of the available memory.

The simple truth of it is tht unless you are running a game like WoW most games can run with very little CPU memeory. In the CPU what even takes up the most memory in most cases are render targets. But you are right on one thing, PC having more memory is always a good thing. 

Loaded data is not being used by the GPU at all times, it is more like a cache, and it includes not only textures but also things like audio, animations, lighting effects, physics, etc all which are handeled by the CPU. The GPU is not using that memory to render at any given point, so it is a system resource, which is then fed to the GPU to render. Texture atlases were only 200MB in size overall, and that was the major textures. 

And yes, most PC games can run with little memory, but I'll put that blame on the old consoles, which only had 512MB of memory, meaning PC games were held back in memory usage as well. With the newer consoles, you'll see a lot more of the memory being used efficiently.