why not just spill the damn beans already on memory allocation. hirai was on twitter right?
i don't think it will be a big deal regardless of how many gigs is reserved for OS. so why withhold this info

Saw this post on gaf. Someone quoted someone else so I don't know who originally posted it, but:

I told myself I wasn't going to post in this thread because people are foaming at the mouth and not thinking.... but here I am, which makes me an idiot.


First off, I know all you guys want are hard numbers and I don't have them. But I do know the philosophies in place currently. If you would like to use your brain and think critically about things... keep reading. If you want to get into a 5>4.5 OMG IM CANCELLING MY PREORDER conversation - this thread won't help you, in either direction.


I was told by a couple of Devs in the lead up to E3 that the OS footprint was "bigger than expected" but not a single one of them complained about it. No one is in danger of running out of ram. As some people have mentioned in this thread - games like the The Last of Us are happening with 512mb of ram. Launch titles, of all things, are not going to be pushing the hardware in any sort of way... and that includes ram.

So why is the ram footprint bigger than expected? It's fairly simple - Sony is hedging their bets. They were absolutely caught with their pants down with their OS this gen. Not having the memory overhead to do things like Party Chat gave Microsoft a huge advantage when it came to online gaming, which is obviously a growing sector. So much like $399 as a target price was a reaction to $599 being a disaster... "big OS footprint" is a reaction to "small OS footprint" being a disaster.

But the thing that I'm hearing and I believe there was even a line dedicated to this in the eurogamer article is that these numbers aren't set in stone. The fact of the matter is that high end PC games use around 3gb of ram and use higher res textures (art tends to take up the largest chunks of ram) than the ps4/x1 do. The idea that launch games need 7gb of ram is absolutely ludicrous. 4gbs is fine. Anything more, at this point, is overkill. It won't be overkill forever... but it's overkill for now.

So Sony gets to sit on this chunk of ram, be in 1gb or 3gb - again, I don't know the numbers. I don't know if eurogamer is right (I do know at E3 that some thought more ram would be freed up when the final dev kits shipped... but I don't know anyone working with a final dev kit). But Sony is coming at this from a position of power. They don't need the ram currently so they get to take a wait and see approach before saying "ok, devs, you guys get this." The systems will launch and they will look at what people are doing with their own OS, they will see what features people are asking for, they will see if microsoft or Nintendo (or even steam) come out with some surprise feature that catches fire - and if it does they will have the memory there to be able to do it also. If it doesn't that chunk of ram gets freed up for developers.


This thread is looking at this entire thing like the endgame is the day it launches. That's day one, guys. This is a long term strategic move and, imo, a smart one. They are putting themselves in a position to be able to adapt... something they couldn't do with the ps3. I know as gamers all we want to hear is higher numbers. But find me one developer that thinks the ram available to them on either system isn't enough (and this goes for the x1 as well guys... all this 5gb hurr hurrr stuff is fanboyish nonsense that you can go through my post history and see I never took part in once).


I feel like this post is far to philosophical for this thread of LARGE NUMBER > SMALL NUMBER, but hopefully this info is useful to some of you. Sony have created a nimble system and this is part of that philosophy.

not 100% sure, but i think that was famousmortimer

I wouldn't know, but it sounds like he knows what he's talking about. (EDIT: Yes it was famousmortimer)

I still think the rumor is crap anyways, but people are overreacting.

Seems nobody even understood what I said because nobody has deep knowledge on operating systems but really guys.
Yes, it's a megaton. The size of ram is crucial but it won't make a difference in next 2 years. Having more ram is always better than fast ram but still there is enough memory available on both consoles.
I still see Sony struggeling with getting freebsd running like they want and the poor os-devs are happy now to build up a framework for enabling 3rd-party-apps while making sure the os and all the stuff Sony wants with more available memory. Actually, this news *is* good.

He's an insider on gaf.  Him, thuway, gopherD, and another I can't remember are the legit Sony insiders who have a great track record for leaks.

With these two systems, as long as you can feed the processors (CPU/GPU) fast enough, then you're absolutely correct.  The amount of memory and not the speed of it is important.  However, if you can't and you don't have enough, then both are extremely important.

I have this feeling at GamesCon Microsoft is going to announce that it's officially increasing the amount of memory to 16GB.  Since DDR3 is so cheap, they can afford to effectively double it giving themselves and developers breathing room in the future.

Thanks for the info and yes, it was him that posted that. There's so much I don't know about Neogaf.

That guy especially as well as few other so called insiders were banned for spreading misinformation.

As I said last night, I could see the PS4 Camera with its twin 1080p cameras doing 3D imaging needing a good solid chunk of memory to function.