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VAMatt on 21 March 2020
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Pemalite said:

BraLoD said:
I still can't believe both stuck with those RAMs.
MS got fast and slow mixed, Sony got unified average. Both only 16Gb.
This seriously sucks.

Me and CGI called it years ago.

Our original predictions were... 16GB of Ram... Yet we still had people thinking 128GB or more. Was pretty funny at the time!

JRPGfan said:

ram was used to "store" data you needed quick access too, you couldnt affoard to wait on your slow mechanical hard drive to get.

Ram is still used to "store" data that is needed for quick access... Because we still cannot afford to wait on a slow SSD for data.

Ram is 500GB/s or more. SSD's are 1/10th of that.

JRPGfan said:

Thats no longer a issue, with how quick (esp sony's) SSD is.
This drastically reduces the amount of actual ram needed, when you run games.

It's still an issue, it's just much less of an issue.
You are right it should reduce the need for more RAM, but it doesn't remove the need for it entirely.

We will be RAM starved this generation, especially later on in the console cycle.

JRPGfan said:


It might even effect sizes of games, where they might have duplicates of data,
thats mixed in with differnt parts, so they "could" be loaded like this into ram.
Stuff like that will be gone with next gen.

They didn't duplicate data on a mechanical disk, that occurred with optical disks due to their much lower seek times.

JRPGfan said:


These SSD are almost like virtual ram in themselves, you just go directly to the SSD to load stuff, isntead of first loading it into your ram.

^ atleast I think thats what cerny was saying.

Not really. It's just "Virtual Memory". - Which is a technology that has existed for the last 30 years in various forms. Fuck. Even the Original Xbox used it!

Unfortunately, the relative cost of RAM is higher now than it was up until a few years ago.  Taking these systems up to 24gb would make a noticeable difference in production costs.  So, they've had to figure out how to make do with less (than we might prefer).