Global Hardware July 4-10 - PS5 Sales Top 10 Million

[DonFerrari]

Alby_da_Wolf said:

curl-6 said:

The amount of RAM is less crucial on 9th gen consoles due to the SSDs being able to accommodate a lot of the stuff that used to be done in RAM on older hardware, and since XSS has the same SSD as the X, it still shouldn't really hold back the X or PS5, especially when things like textures and resolution can be easily lowered to save memory.

Don't believe SSD is a replacement for RAM, SSD is great because it's a great speed and latency improvement compared to HDD. Yes, precisely thanks to these features an advantage offered by SSD is being able to load in RAM a lot of stuff "last minute" as smoothly or even more than loading larger portions in advance from HDD, so keeping a lot more RAM available on average, but when you need the speed and latency of RAM, SSD won't be a replacement.
Also, in single player games with free roaming in large worlds managed in real time also outside of draw distance, the game engine will need to keep loaded all the non graphic world infos needed for the task (well, for this particular issue we're talking about a very small minority of very ambitious titles, but even if they are in small number, surely both Sony and MS will want them on their latest consoles).
I took into accont graphics scalability, but I'm also willing to take into account that even the entry level GPU is more powerful, and some years newer, so it offers more and more advanced functions, even limiting it to 1080p it will still require more RAM than last gen, I fear 10GB is just a couple of GB too stingy, 12GB would have made devs life easier. BTW 12GB was precisely one of the most agreed upon guesses about entry level  RAM size before PS5 and XS were fully revealed.
Anyway, I don't predict doom and gloom, I just predict that eventually the compromises required by entry level XS will force devs to not fully use XSX, and PS too in multiplats, CPU power and their larger RAM will mostly be used only for better graphics.
Anyhow, it could also happen that XSS limits become a good excuse for devs to pause the race to ever more demanding games and prevent dev costs from skyrocketing.

From Sony reveal of PS5 their explanations of the SSD and how fast it was allowing a lot of space that previously needed to be on the RAM because it needed to be recalled fast now wasn`t an issue. So we will really need to wait to be sure how much the 10Gb will affect the games. But yes in general terms I do agree that to some point Series S will hold back multiplats, even more because most third parties don`t put much on optmizing and love to cut costs and corners.