KBG29 said:
16x increase in RAM has been the standard between PS consoles in the past. So that would mean the PS5 should have 128GB of RAM. With diminishing returns, even the standard increase won't offer the same impact, having half the standard leap really won't even move the needle. People are going to either have to come to terms with console generations being much longer or increases being incredibly minimal, because the days of 6 years of advancement blowing people away are over. |
You keep saying this 16x thing, yet you aknowledge that having half the standard leap wouldn't really move the needle that much. Its a tsrange contradiction.
Here are the two things to consider.
We are at a time when the difference in power usually only amounts to better rez and higher framerates. Now remember that unlike PCs, consoles ever need to only get to 60fps. And regardless of what some may tell you, anything above 4k rez is just a waste of resources. In the same way how if it takes 100k polygons to make a hyper realistic car model, throwing 1M polygons at it is just being wasteful. With the PS5/XB2, we are going to see 4k across the board and most games running at 60fps. Reason being is that on the geometry standpoint, not much can be done from where we currently are at.
Secondly, you need to understand what that Ram is being used for. Keep in mind that all the great stuff you are seeing on the PS4/XB1 todayare using only around 5GB of Ram. 5GB!!! The simple question then is this? If you can do this with 5GB, what do you need 64GB for? Also remember, that in game design a lot of things don't scale with directly.
eg. A character models on the PS1 could like 500 polygons. On the PS2 it could be like 10k. On the PS3 like 40k. On the PS4 like 60K. On the PS5 it could actually remain the same or go up by just around 5k. Because you don't need more polygons to build an already well built model. Same applies for a lot of other things in a game engine. Take a game like horizon for instance. What do you think that same game will be on the PS5? All the level geometry is already there so they don't need to throw more polygons at it. Only things that would really change are higher rez textures, higher resolution, better lighting, better LOD and generally better post processing.
We are reaching a point where game performace and art direction will take centre stage over graphical fidelity because there isn't gonna be that much to differentiate games simply on how thy look anymore. And they sure as hell won't need 64GB of ram to do that.
In summary, its not that the PS5/XB2 CAN'T have 32GB/64GB of ram, its that they don't need to. They would be just fine with as little as 20GB or evn 16GB. There are lots of other areas in thehardware design that will benefit from the next gen leap. Areas people don't typically talk about. Like memory bandwidth and storage bandwidth. Those two areas will actually have a more impactful showing on next gen hardware than ram quantity or even processor power.
