Digital Foundry Video: Hands-On With Xbox Series X + Impressions + Xbox One X Size Comparisons + Official Specs + Ray Tracing

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SvennoJ said:

Nu-13 said:

Amount of RAM has already reached diminishing returns. We'll only see arithmetical increases instead of exponential ones. Also, 13gb of gddr6 for games is like 5x more than 5gb of gddr5 that the ps4 had.

Lol nice math there...

Compressed textures have been used for over a decade. PS4 and XBox One have freed up system memory to share for games as well. PS4 has up to 5.5 GB available for games with all the same tricks to reduce memory load. And that was cramped for 1080p. Native 4K requires 4 times the memory for most processing in the rendering pipeline. Is a 2.3x increase enough. My laptop is constrained by 14GB of use-able video ram at 1080p (6 + 8 shared from 16 total system ram) :/

Consoles have always been memory constrained, seems it will continue as usual.

PS1 -> 3MB ram (1MB video ram)
PS2 -> 36MB ram (4MB video ram)
PS3 -> 512MB ram (256MB video ram)
PS4 -> 8GB ram (4.5 + 1 GB on request video ram)
PS5 -> ?

Through the generations the increase in memory has actually been speeding up (12x, 14x, 16x) while launch games developers for ps4 already stated the memory was tight. So you see why a drop to doubling the memory raises questions. All the other things like better handling of textures, compression, faster memory is all the same.

Exactly.

Also, when the PS4 and XBO hit the market, even high-end gaming PCs mostly were still using 8GB RAM, with cheaper builds even just relying on 4GB (or 6 with triple channel).

Today, mainstream Laptops are increasingly using 16GB, with the Gaming PCs moving on to 32GB or even 64GB. At the same time, VRAM exploded, having gone from 2-3GB for high-end cards at the release of the PS/XBO to mid-range cards already coming with 8GB, and 6GB cards already finding their amount of VRAM becoming a limiting factor in 1440p.

While I didn't expect nearly such a huge leap as with the previous generations, I was hoping that the consoles were moving to 32GB, or at least 24GB (or, as a minimal option, 16GB with 4GB Memory on the side for the OS, leaving all 16GB for the games), but this is simply not enough going forward.

Sure, they were talking about virtual memory to alleviate the blow, but the SSD is way too slow compared to the RAM; the bandwidth is just 1/100 of what the memory achieves (to give you some context, 2.4 GB/s is what DDR memory achieved in 1998), seriously bottlenecking the system if that's needed to be used. Also, Virtual memory had been used in PCs for decades, with this exact outcome; one of the reasons why the size of the RAM rose very fast between 1995 and 2010 was to avoid the slowdowns that Virtual Memory entailed.