Yea I have 16 gb of ram.  there is so much wasted ram sitting around doing nothing no matter how much shit i'm doing.

Hi guys, this is my first post on these forums and I just wanted to clarify some things.

First, You can't take a cosole's specifications and compare them directly to the PC counterparts. It doesn't work that way. Today's PCs are exponentially faster than PS360 but yet the games don't look a whole lot different. That's because the PC has a lot of OS overhead and API problems they have to deal with. With consoles you have a single unified specification that you can directly code for so the results will look much better than anything we have seen before (probably mid-late cycle). Reports are saying that Sony is encouraging developers to code down to the metal with low level access to the GPU libGCM style, this means games in the future are going to blow away what the PC is producing today. The PC will always more powerful than a console but the console will always make more efficient use of the components.

Second, the 8GB of GDDR5 RAM is a potential game changer. Sony's OS most likely will not take up more than 1GB and that's being really generous because they really went with minimalistic design and tried not to block the developers to harness the power of the system. That leaves 7GB for the games, this will not all be utilized right out of the gate and there is a couple of reasons for that. It's more of a future proofing method because they expect this console to be the focus for the next 7 years but also because as games start to unlock the true power of the consoles it's going to start eating up that RAM rather quickly. If you played The Witcher 2 with Ubersampling or Crysis 3 with the DX 11 patch you can see that once the  high resolution textures are introduced the VRAM starts to become a bottleneck. I think both Sony and Microsoft understand this well enough to equip their systems with ample RAM for the future.

So basically, as PC gamer these things are amazing to see from consoles. Sony (and Microsoft based on rumors) have empraced the PC architecture which will mean better games for everyone. The processing power is nothing groundbreaking but in consoles it's going to really work well and even though we might not see the benefits of having 8GB of GDDR5 right away it was definitely the right call to make. Better to be safe then to be sorry later down the line.

Developers are happy, gamers are happy, now the ball is in Microsoft's court hopefully they will have a console that is equally as exciting.

The chance of MS allowing Sony to destroy them graphically this generation now that Microsoft has equalled and almost beat them is doubtful.  I can see MS having several footprints of console and stepping up in order to copy or beat Sony.   I just don't see MS going "here, take back all that market we ganked off you last generation by having a superior machine".

Yeah but remember, Windows is designed as a desktop operating system that utilises page memory. In other words, managing slower ddr3 memory in Windows is completely different to having 8gb of GDDR5 in a custom system with little O/S overhead and unified for one never changing hardware spec.

I remember when I had my Amiga (still do actually). There was no MMU management in the 68k Motorola and even when this was added in I think with the 68030, there was still no MMU (mem man unit) support in the Ami O/S, but one thing the Ami did have was the RAM disc. You could shift the entire game from the FDD or HDD (if supported by the game dev) into complete RAM by dragging it into the RAM disc. No disc access at all. a very simple yet fast solution for back then. But remember, the Amiga was first envisaged as a game console by its designer, Jay Miner, and Commodore made it into a PC type device. But at its heart, it was for games. 

At their heart, the 720 and PS4 are for games but now with diversification to do the whole loungeroom activity crap as well :). I don't think Sony went from 4gb to 8gb if there was no benefit. One thing for sure, it will allow all that multitasking they were referring to like background downloading, sharing on the fly and so forth.

I totally agree with what you're saying. My comments were tied to this thread specifically and the idea that Killzone would have looked much better if they were designing it with 8 GB of RAM available.

I can see the frame rate being 60 fps maybe, but other than that I don't see how 4 to 8 GB of ram jump would have made a drastic difference for a game running at 1080p with a GPU like 7850 that PS3 has.

Something like the Nvidia Titan has 6 GB and is a total beast when it comes to raw power. For a GPU like that, this would have been a valid argument, but not for a 7850...

Funny you should mention how PC's have many other things going on versus consoles that are for PURE gaming only thust they use the Ram perfectly

Then you go on to mention on ps4 (as with other current consoles these days) are now doing more things besides gaming in the background.

They are becoming more and more like PC's.  

What I'm confused about is why people are going so gaga over this 8 GB of ram.  Weren't the developers working with 4GB of ram already?  Isn't 4GB of ram being used for games, adn 4gb of ram being used for other things on the console?  Thus it should be no change to developers, they still only have 4GB to work with.  Or did I understand the whole partisioning of the ram for the PS4 wrong?

"Less than that. Most kits until pretty recently had only 1.5 GB usable for graphics"

http://beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1712366&postcount=111

"Phil is a developer, so I would say he speaks the truth."

http://beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1712622&postcount=67

Take with a grain of salt, of course.