| greenmedic88 said: First, it's safe to assume most if not all will stick with a unified memory architecture like the XBO and PS4. |
Agreed, shared memory seems to be what all consoles are settling for now.
| greenmedic88 said: At 4K resolutions, current video cards generally require 4GB of DDR5 dedicated to the GPU for current games. Back in 2008, when the PS3 and XB360 were running ports of PC games, the typical aftermarket PC video card had 512MB of dedicated VRAM with most systems set at 1920x1080. System memory was typically around 4GB, but this was rarely a restriction for game engines, even with the greater system memory overhead of Windows in gaming. |
Not entirely accurate.
I game at beyond 4k (7680x1440 to be exact), while 4Gb of video memory is certainly enough for now, games are starting to become more complex thanks to the consoles increasing the hardware baseline. (Finally!)
Newer game releases are certainly giving my Quad-Radeon R9 290's with 4Gb of video memory a run for their money, almost to the point where it would actually be worth upgrading to 8Gb cards.
Also, the average PC no longer has 512Mb of Video Memory, it's 1024Mb now, with 2gb right behind it.
2gb and 4gb video memory capacities are seeing the largest growth in gaming PC's.
Go check out Steams statistics.
| JEMC said: @Pemalite : I know it's possible to squeeze that much memory on the next consoles, but will it be worth it? After all, they aren't really PCs but a mix of a console with a multimedia player, and their multitasking capabilities won't improve that much compared to what they can do right now. I don't see what they could use that much RAM, honestly, unless they load the whole game into the RAM.
As for new NAND that replaces both the need for separated HDD/SSD and RAM, that would be interesting... but will it be cost effective even whenever the next consoles launch? |
Will it be worth it? Well. It really depends on the rest of the hardware really and the cost/benefit, no point loading a system up with Ram if you can't make use of that much memory. (GPU's and CPU performance development is slowing down in the PC space, which will affect next-gen.)
If Sony/Microsoft can throw in a faster Graphics Chip at the expensive of memory capacity, they would probably do so, 8Gb of Ram is fantastic right now in regards to cost/capacity, which is why these consoles wen't with that capacity. (Amongst other things.)
The big benefit though will come with Multi-Tasking, ever used Windows when it's loaded into a RAM drive? It's freaking nuts, you feel like superman on crack.
As for NAND, TLC NAND is especially cost effective, it's not able to be competitive with Optical Discs and Hard Drives in terms of size/cost ratio's just yet, but it's been making rapid progress over the few years.
NAND can also take advantage of really low fabrication nodes, because of how simple it is to make relative to a hand-designed processor.
I remember just a few years ago, picking up an OCZ SSD, that was 64Gb in size and cost me about $150.
Today, I can get an SSD 4x as large, for less, give it a console generation and see how things stack up. :P
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